“Why Can’t You Talk to Me the Way You Text Me?” Couples Therapy in the Age of AI

Announcement

Welcome to Therapist Confidential, a psychotherapy dot net podcast. And now here’s your host, Travis Heath.

T Heath

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Therapist Confidential podcast. I’m your host, Travis Heath. And today I am riding solo with you and I’m going to share a story and then some thoughts about some recent work I’ve been doing with a couple that they’ve given me permission to share. Of course, I’ll make sure to anonymize all the details, but I’ve also seen this happen more than once. What I’m going to share with you today. So I’ll tell you the story. I’ll share some thoughts, and then maybe you’ll have some thoughts or maybe you’re encountering something similar.

So I’ve been working with this couple, right? And when I have the two of them together, I guess I should say that in the past tense because I’ve seen some shifts recently, but when I had the two of them together in the room, they really struggled with conversations. You know, there was conflict. They’d get stuck, You know, they had difficulty hearing one another defensiveness was in the room. Uh, you know, if you’ve worked with couples or or maybe if you’ve been in a romantic relationship, you, you kind of know how that can go sometimes.

So that wasn’t anything that was odd or out of place. Right. But I kept, through our conversations, a lot of the quote unquote, small talk at the beginning of sessions, for example, they’d be talking about how well they did these conversations at home. And so I’d be curious about them. You know, they’d say it sort of jokingly, but they just sounded remarkably different. They seemed thoughtful. They were responding to one another. There wasn’t so much defensiveness. They were actually it seemed like working through disagreements.

And again, they were saying this in a joking way. But I was genuinely curious about like, okay, what’s happening here? Because this hadn’t been my experience, in the room with them. So I was just perplexed, like, why is it so difficult for you to talk to each other here when you seem to be doing this very differently outside of here? And it almost made me think like, well, why are you here? I mean, maybe I’m actively making it worse, or there’s something about how I’m going about this.

So that actually was my first instinct is I sort of reflected, sort of turned it back towards me. Maybe the way I was working with them wasn’t all that useful. Maybe I needed to shift my approach. Maybe there was something I wasn’t seeing. Maybe. Maybe therapy itself was somehow making things worse. I mean, we don’t talk about that, right? You know, we talk about that with psychiatric drugs, side effects, you know, and sometimes not so good side effects. And maybe therapy was causing their relationship, some not so good side effects.

And so, you know, this happened over two or three sessions. I continued to be curious about it. And at one point, you know, they told me they were just telling me about a disagreement they had earlier in the week. And they’re just recounting it. And of course, boy, this says something because I would say these two are I wouldn’t say they’re definitely younger than me. I don’t remember their exact ages, but like young thirties, low thirties, something like that. Right. And I’m forty six.

So we’re definitely of a different generation. And so as they’re describing this, I have an image in my head of the disagreement they’re having. And the image I have in my head is of the two of them sitting together and having this difficult conversation, you know, or if they’re not sitting together, they’re in the same room, or maybe one of them standing, one of them sitting sometimes, maybe they’re stirring because it’s a tense conversation. But I had this vision as they were describing this disagreement of the two of them having a conversation together in the same physical space.

And they didn’t tell me otherwise, but I started to catch little cues of things that started making me think, am I miss hearing this? Are you not in the same room? were you one of you traveling for work or something? What’s happening? And then they sort of nonchalantly, like, it was just obvious. We’re like, no, we were in different rooms in the same house. I said, okay, you’re in different rooms in the same house. And again, I’m picturing them trying to have a conversation going like, so were you just talking really loudly?

And the other one could hear you? No, no, no, we were texting each other and I went, oh, wow, okay, this is totally different. So they were telling me this as though they were speaking, or at least that’s how I took it. But really what they were doing was they were texting each other. Now, this caught me really off guard. And of course, here’s my own bias, right? Some of this is probably generational, cultural, whatever it might be, all the factors involved.

But my immediate thought, not what I said, but my immediate thought was something like, wait, you’re in the same house? Like, why aren’t you actually talking to each other? Like, this can’t be healthy. as therapists, sometimes we have those thoughts, but I tried to instead engage my curiosity, which is something we’ve talked a lot about on this podcast. And rather than immediately judging it or deciding that texting was inferior, I was curious about it. Now the plot thickens here. Okay, so then one of them again, this isn’t something that was like to them, this wasn’t this huge disclosure.

You know, it just sort of came out as we were talking that one of them was using ChatGPT to respond. And so now I’m like, oh boy. So they weren’t, you know, again, I’m trying to piece this together because to them, this seemed like an insignificant detail, right? Like one of them mentioned using ChatGPT. And it’s not like the other one was like, what the hell? You know, it was just sort of like. And then the other one’s like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, I do that too. And so I’m going, okay. Wow. Um, was it actually what you wrote? I’m asking them, I’m trying to understand. And they’re like, well, kind of, basically ChatGPT helps me respond better is what they were saying. And I mean, gosh, that opened up a lot. First, I understood at least part of the discrepancy I’d been seeing, right? Because they were having conversations with me, not texting, they were having a conversation. And then I started, well, maybe, maybe we should be texting.

Maybe I should be texting them too. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Or maybe I should be using chat GPT as the therapist, for crying out loud. Maybe what I’m offering is inferior to what ChatGPT is offering. Who knows? But I could start to see some of the discrepancy because the communication was happening more effectively over text because they, at least in part because they weren’t operating under the same set of conditions as they were with me, where one person is sitting with another person, right?

There’s a lot in this for me because I first I was like, that’s interesting how neither of them were bothered by this. And I’m not saying that’s good or bad, but I was curious about that. And I was also then curious about do they sort of need context dependent ways of having conversations, right. Because if they’re doing this with ChatGPT, of course you can’t do that when you’re speaking. Well, I guess you could. I guess you could, right? Like if I’m having a conversation with someone, I could stop.

I could put my thoughts into ChatGPT, right? And then I could read it back to them, or I could skim it and then sort of formulate what I want to say from it. So I guess you could, but it would feel more awkward, I think, than if you’re having a text conversation. So my head’s sort of spinning at this point. And I’ll be completely honest with you, my loyal listeners. My first reaction is that this is bad. That’s my first reaction.

It’s not what I said, but that was my reaction. I was taken aback. I’m thinking, you’re in the same house, but you’re in different rooms texting each other, and ChatGPT is, you know, role playing you. What’s going on? But as I try to do, the first thing I did was question my own reaction. And I wondered what might I be missing here? And as I asked some curious questions about like, how they’re finding this useful for them, one thing that it did was it slowed them down and it gave them some distance to not be defensive or say what they their first instinct was to say in that moment.

And so just the act of slowing down, and it’s sort of getting in the way of defensiveness was useful for them. You know, basically, if I could summarize kind of what they were saying to me was like, hey, this helps me express something I genuinely feel but struggle to articulate. And then my thought is like, is that less real though, isn’t that part of what we’re trying to do in conversation is that we try and we fail, you know? So I’m having these and then we try again.

So I’m having these competing Understandings of this. And then, I’ll be honest with you too. Part of me is pissed off about this because, like in my own life, I’ve been trying, to be a better communicator and to be empathic and, to really show up in particular ways with people I love. And so then a part of me was upset because I’m like, damn it, do you know how much work this is, at least for me? Do you imagine like, I’m emotionally exhausted and I’m doing this on my own?

And so then there was this assumption of like, well, everybody should do that, which is I have to recognize that as my own shit, of course. Right. But I have to let you know that that’s part of what I’m processing. But I started to really listen to what they were saying and be curious through all of my own stuff. And, you know, if I could think of sort of a general example for them, it’s like if one partner here said to the other like, hey, I felt you ignored me last night.

And then maybe the other partner’s immediate response would be something like, you know, pretty dismissive, like, oh, that’s ridiculous. I was just exhausted. What do you mean, ignoring you? However, given a little bit of time and, maybe the assistance of ChatGPT, that response could change, right? And what they were telling me is like, oh, it allowed them to voice that they could understand where the other person was coming from, you know, and it slowed them down. And that kind of hair trigger defensiveness wasn’t there.

Now again, for me, I was thinking like, yeah, but isn’t that part of the work? And gosh, I’m trying to do this in my own life and you’re just outsourcing this work to ChatGPT But I couldn’t ignore what they were pointing out, that there was something about this that was staving off the effects of defensiveness. And boy, defensiveness is one of the biggest challenges, I think, for people in romantic relationships and for us that do couples work. So there was something there.

Then I started thinking more about this. As you can tell, this has been on my mind. By the way, if you’re waiting for me to get to the end of this podcast and tell you what the right answer is or what to do, um, spoiler alert, I don’t know, like I’m still thinking through this and right now we’re thinking through it together. Okay, so then I start having this thought about the way I’ve phrased it is like assistance versus substitution. And this distinction feels super important to me because if whatever tool, whether it be, you know, generative AI or something else, if something can help me understand why I’m getting defensive, that’s different than having it write a response for me.

Do you know what I mean? Because if it’s writing the response for me, I may not be learning much from it about myself or about what’s going on. And moreover, I am maybe outsourcing some of the hard labor that is actually really important in a relationship and helps us learn. So I’m wondering if those are two different things, right? Assistance is like, hey, this is actually helping me understand why I’m getting defensive. That seems like it could be useful versus like, hey, just write this response because I’m sick of this stuff.

That seems more like substitution. So, here’s what I’m trying to say. Can you help me say it more clearly is different from just being like, hey, AI, take take this over. So perhaps AI could help one, enter a difficult conversation in a particular place. And it could be something that helps someone learn about their reactions. And also, it could be something that helps people avoid having a difficult conversation. And so, you know, at what point does, I don’t know, what would we call?

Is this a communication aid? I’m sure I’ll get flamed by some people who know more about AI than I do, but just bear with me. You know, at what point does let’s call it a communication aid actually become like a surrogate, a surrogate. that distinction feels important to me. One other thought I had is that, not that I’m in love with empathy. I think empathy is very nice, but I think there’s sometimes there are things more important in therapy than empathy.

And we spend a lot of time with empathy. so I have a complicated relationship with empathy in therapy. But let me just say that I wonder if sounding empathic isn’t the same thing as actually being empathic. And I’m no expert with ChatGPT and all these things, but Claude, I was messing around with Claude some this summer, and, you know, those platforms seem to be really good at producing language that sounds like you have high emotional IQ or high emotional maturity, right?

They’re good at producing that. The ideas of like, oh, I understand why this hurt you. Or I can see my part in this too. I want to understand, not defend myself. You know, whatever it is, I mean. These platforms can produce that really well. My concern, though, is that generating those words isn’t actually the same as being able to tolerate something from your partner. So you could generate those words. And they sound nice, but that’s not the same thing as actually being able to tolerate your partner’s anger or defensiveness in real time, and being able to actually remain curious or actually taking responsibility, and not just through words, looking or sounding like you’re taking responsibility.

And I wonder if those are capacities that develop through actually being with another person now. I want to be clear about this. You can be with another person in ways that aren’t just, physical. So I want to be clear that, texting or email or whatever, or back in the day actually writing letters. Imagine that those are ways of actually being with someone. So I want to be clear that I’m not saying that, those mediums aren’t real or they don’t produce real connection or real conversation or real empathy or whatever it is we might be talking about.

What I’m questioning here, though, is the outsourcing of the actual labor, which seems like a different thing. And if that labor is being outsourced to generative AI, what might be the consequences of that? And of course, that leads to, at least for me, it leads to a question of, okay, what happens to our ability to communicate without it? And that’s what I was seeing with this couple. That’s the difference I was seeing when they’re communicating with one another in real time, using their voices versus texting, using the assistance of AI.

If I’ve learned anything about difficult conversations, it’s that they require practice. I don’t just mean in romantic relationships, I mean difficult conversations in general. How do we find words when we’re upset? How do we learn how to sit in silence. how do we learn to deal with saying something that’s hurtful or inarticulately and then trying again? How do we learn to read someone’s face? And there are other sort of bodily cues when we are defensive. How do we learn to recover from that?

You know, repair. That’s a very psychologized word these days. But when we’ve done some sort of harm or hurt someone that we care about, you know, how do we repair that? ET cetera. Right. These feel like sort of the imperfections that are necessary to learn how to have difficult and intimate conversations. Like these things are uncomfortable by definition, but I wonder if the discomfort is at least in part, how we continue to refine our ability to engage in them better. And so then if AI is going to increasingly perform some of these functions for us, do those capacities weaken?

Like this is the same argument I’ve heard. I took a whole class this summer as an academic. As a chair of a department. We had to take this AI class over the summer, which was interesting, right? I mean, it was it was frustrating. Sometimes it was illuminating. Other times I learned from colleagues. I thought the instructors did a good job on a challenging topic in the current moment. Right. But in academia, and I would assume maybe K through twelve, but I’m not as tuned in there because I don’t work there.

But there’s this worry is like, are the students actually learning? Like if the AI starts doing so much for them that they’re not actually learning, that’s where things cross a line, right? And so I wonder the same thing about like relationships and emotional communication is like, if they start performing those capacities altogether for us, then do we actually, you know, lose that quote unquote muscle and the capacities to do this ourselves? Because eventually the real test comes, right? Your partner is sitting across from you, looking you in the eye.

They say something you know you weren’t expecting. Whatever it might be, you feel hurt. Maybe you feel angry. And now there’s no, ChatGPT prompt box. So what happens now? Now we have to learn how to have that conversation. Or maybe we’ve already learned some things, but we have to have it. And those are hard now. Maybe if something that ChatGPT or whatever we’re using has taught us is like, hey, I’ve learned that it’s helpful to slow down here, it’s helpful to slow down and not respond immediately.

I’ve learned that it’s helpful first to pause and try and understand what my partner might be feeling here. So I’m going to do that first, right? Okay, look, I could go further than that, right? But if ChatGPT teaches someone that because they haven’t outsourced the labor altogether, well, maybe that’s a really good outcome. But if ChatGPT is the surrogate, Like I was saying earlier at that point, well, now we might have a hell of a problem. And then I wonder about the way I wrote this down is like in my notes as I was pondering this, and I wrote this down after one of the sessions with this couple is what happens when text me is better than actual me, right?

When text me is better than actual me. And gosh, historically I found it to be the opposite for me. I want to like be actually me and I feel like text me distorts things. You can’t hear nuance, you can’t hear the tone in somebody’s voice, etc. but boy, I mean, ChatGPT will produce a near perfect response. So then you could imagine that through text, someone could be extraordinarily thoughtful. They could be patient, they could be empathic. They’re not defensive. All the things.

Again, this is what was happening with this couple when they were having these disagreements at home through text, but then sitting across from another person and they encounter something very different. I mean, I could even imagine, and they didn’t say this, but I was the one sort of asking this. But I could imagine a partner. And I feel like this is a reasonable question. If this continue, they might ask, hey, why can’t you talk to me the way you text me, you know?

And really, that’s, that’s a question we started grappling with together in our work. And maybe there’s something unsettling if the answer to that question is, well, because I’m not entirely the person you’ve been communicating with, you’ve been communicating with ChatGPT. And so now maybe there’s a gap between like an AI mediated self and let’s say like an actual embodied self, right? And now we might have a different relationship problem than we started with, because I don’t think we can always be the AI mediated self.

Oh gosh, that feels dangerous. Maybe I’m dead wrong. Maybe we’re all going to be AI mediated selves, I don’t know. Uh, and maybe I’m a dinosaur, but I’m feeling like there’s still something important about that actual embodied self, whatever that might be. And if there. If there becomes a gap between those two, that becomes too severe. I wonder what that might do to our relationships. And then I also wonder about the expectations that might set. Do we start to expect actual people or our romantic partners or family and friends or good friends to communicate like AI, you know?

So communication has to always be articulate. We can’t sort of bare the imperfections of our conversational partners. We just become accustomed to just like extraordinarily polished communication, you know, uh, beautiful apologies and, and condolences. And then just the most thoughtful emails or just every disagreement is carefully calibrated. And now I want to be clear that like, those are things that I would aspire towards. Like, I hope that I can give an authentic apology. I hope that I can be thoughtful in my communication.

I hope that when I disagree, I can try and be, measured and calibrate things well. And I think sometimes I do that well and sometimes not as well. There’s a whole, bevy of circumstances that lead to that. One is that I’m a human being. That’s probably the most important one. And it would be imperfect in how I do those. Right. Are we creating an expectation now that people have to communicate as well as AI communicates? I mean, what if AI was doing this podcast right now?

I bet, I don’t know enough about AI to say this for sure, but someone’s got to have some tool that could take my voice, right and do a podcast. And I bet they’d do a better podcast than I’m doing in the sense of, I bet they’d have less stutters and less R’s and, and thinking and all that, right? I bet it would sound better. You have to deal with me actually thinking through this with you, and it’s imperfect. But the thing about that is actual people are messy.

And so there’s something about that imperfection that is human. You know, we hesitate sometimes. We stutter, we misunderstand. We choose the wrong word. We’re defensive. We hey, can I start this all over? I think I’ve done this poorly. Right? Somebody says, you know, that’s not what I meant. Let me try again. Which actually, to me, that’s a very beautiful thing. When someone can recognize that and they have the humility to say, gosh, can I please try again? Of course, we don’t always do it that way in real time.

We may not say it quite as thoughtfully, but I wonder if some of that imperfection isn’t actually a communication failure. I wonder if there’s intimacy in that. Maybe being with someone as they struggle to find words. Maybe we interpret that as saying they’re struggling to find words because the relationship matters, and sitting through that messiness is actually part of the intimacy that makes us feel closer. And you know, for me, as you’ve probably noticed, these sorts of things often raise larger cultural questions for me.

And this one does as well. It’s like what happens when our communication gets objectively better, but it actually reveals less about who we are. You know what I mean? So like the struggle of communication, the back and forth and the really making an effort to do something well, through the messiness that reveals something about who we are as people. some of the relationships that are been most important to me. You know, you see someone just really try imperfectly. And that means a whole hell of a lot just moving through the imperfection.

But if our communication gets better or it gets so good that it’s perfect, then we maybe actually experience less of who the real person is. And so I wonder about this in a cultural way, not just in romantic relationships, but just through everything. So I don’t know how AI is most useful in this context. I can tell you that with the couple I’m working with, it’s led. Being curious about this has led to an interesting place, because what we’ve discovered is that AI helps them slow down, right?

AI helps them communicate more thoughtfully. AI stops defensiveness from taking over conversations. AI helps with all of those. I don’t know that AI is totally responsible for it. And so what our work has really been is like, all right, how do we start taking some of those lessons and bringing them into actual conversation and the awareness of that, and the sort of meta conversation about AI and their relationship has been really useful. And now we actually are starting to see them when they’re together with one another, not texting and without AI, they’re actually learning something from all of this.

And I don’t know how it’s all going to turn out, but the early returns are good. They’re having different kinds of conversations. And when I listen to why they think they are, in short, they’re saying because I’ve become more curious about what AI is doing and why and how it pertains to me. And also, I think, they’ve been saying in their own ways, they’ve become more discerning about AI. So they’re learning something from it. They’re not simply outsourcing it. So then maybe a useful distinction to ask to genuinely and honestly ask is whether we’re asking AI to replace the conversation or to help us prepare for it.

And even then, I think we got to be careful because if it’s helping us prepare for it perfectly or we’re leaning too heavily on it, I wonder what gets lost, you know? And like anything with AI, I’m interested in the prompts. Like if the prompt is, hey, write a response to my partner. Yeah, that seems like kind of a boring prompt that we’re probably not really going to learn a lot from, but what about these prompts? And these are some of the prompts that we’ve come up with together, myself and the couple I’m working with.

Why am I getting so defensive about this? What might I be missing about their perspective? Ask me questions that will help me figure out what I actually want to say. Help me prepare to have this conversation in person. So those are four that we’ve come up with. I think there are more. I just took these from my notes. So again, with AI, something I’m starting to learn and I’m by no means an expert, the prompts are really important. So just write.

My response to my partner is an outsourcing prompt. But the four sort of questions that I just went over. These are prompts that may actually help us learn something about ourselves and about our relationships. And again, I’m not saying this is perfect. I’m not telling everyone, hey, go run out and use AI. And you’re like, no, I’m just trying to be curious about one, how it’s being used. Because listen, it doesn’t really matter what I think about AI and how people should or shouldn’t be using it.

That horse is so far out of the freaking barn like that. It doesn’t matter what I think about it, frankly. People are already doing it. And so part of why I’m having this conversation with you today, those of you working with couples, is I’m wondering if you might explore this with people. They might be doing it and you don’t even realize it. Right? And so I think it’s important we understand how this is shifting because the shift is happening fast and it’s not happening exactly the same for everyone.

So in this sense, I mean, maybe I, you know, if we’re using the sort of prompts that I laid out above, maybe it becomes more of like a rehearsal space rather than a substitute. Right? And the question that started all of this, because you’ve heard me say, oh, be curious. So I wrote down the question that sort of started all this that I asked. Here was my question what is ChatGPT making possible for you that becomes so difficult when you’re sitting together?

That’s where we started. And then as I was listing some of the other things that I asked, are you saying that it helps you slow down? Is it making it any easier to hear the other person? Is it helping you recognize the way defensiveness takes over your relationship? Sometimes. Does it sometimes help you find words that you were having trouble finding? So these were follow ups, but the initial question is what is ChatGPT making possible for you that becomes so difficult when you’re sitting together?

Now, I don’t think that’s a great question for every couple. I don’t even know that. That’s a great question for every couple that might be using ChatGPT in this way, but it’s where I started with this particular couple, and I thought it was important for me to share that question one, because you already heard all the messiness of what was going through my head. What was going through my head is, this is bad. All the alarms were going off, whatever. And then you often hear me say, well, we should try to be curious.

That was my attempt at trying to be curious about this. Now, how good of an attempt was it? I mean, good enough. I think it helped us get somewhere that’s feeling useful. I don’t think it’s the world’s greatest question, but I keep talking about curiosity. I feel like I owe you, some example of what that might look like, at least for me. And so then if we can start to understand what ChatGPT is making possible or whatever LLM they’re using is making possible, that in this case is difficult when they’re sitting together.

Now, how do we help develop those capacities so they eventually belong to you? That’s where things get interesting for me, right? Because maybe then if we’re actually developing these capacities over time and they become part of us now, maybe our relationship with AI has become useful. So to close this episode out today, I don’t know that the answer is, you know, we should stop using ChatGPT to help us communicate. Seems many people are doing this. And by the way, even if I think that’s the answer, the universe doesn’t care.

It’s already what’s happening, right? And so there may be times that AI can help us slow down. It can help us become a little less reactive. It can help us consider another person’s experience or help us find words for something we are genuinely having trouble saying. Like those are very real possibilities and I don’t want to dismiss them. But I keep coming back to this question of, you know, what are we actually practicing? And what are we outsourcing, at least at this early stage?

For me, because this is the first time, at least, that a couple has admitted to engaging in this practice. I have no doubt other couples I’m working with probably are in some way or another. But again, this question of what are we practicing and what are we outsourcing? If ChatGPT helps me recognize my defensiveness so that I can return to my partner and I can engage differently with my partner, well, maybe I’m developing something then, you know, if it helps me understand what I actually want to say and then what might actually be useful to say, and what’s the bridge between those two things?

Well, maybe this technology has helped me become a bit better relationally, you know? But if every time a conversation becomes difficult, I need to outsource this. I need something else to construct the most thoughtful version of me. Uh. I’m a little less sure about that. Because eventually, there’ll be a conversation in real time. You know, someone we love will say something we’re not prepared for. We’ll feel hurt. We’ll feel misunderstood. We’ll have to tolerate that excruciating silence will stumble over our words.

We’ll say something badly. We’ll have to start over again. All the things right. And we’ll do that sometimes. And by the way, our conversational relational partners will sometimes, too. And maybe that’s not something we should be trying to eliminate. Maybe it has a purpose and maybe some of that awkwardness, the imperfection, the struggle of really communicating with another human being and another person we love is, maybe that’s what helps us actually know and be known. Like I think sometimes we think knowing and being known, it’s the way that happens is through great communication.

And yes, I mean, sure, effective communication is helpful, but I wonder if it’s the struggle together through that, which actually at a deep level helps someone know and be known. So if that’s true or any important parts of that might be true, maybe the question then isn’t whether ChatGPT can help us communicate better, because it clearly can. Right. Like I have no doubt I haven’t tried this yet in a relational context. I’ve tried it like when I have to write some big email or something about a, you know, grant proposal or whatever.

I’ve tried it then and I can tell you damn sure communicates better than I can. So I imagine relationally it can. And what I’m the ways I’m hearing other people doing it, it sure seems to. So the question isn’t whether it can help us communicate better, because it clearly can. The question then is whether we’re using it to actually become better communicators, right? Or whether it’s becoming the better communicator on our behalf. And these are my early thoughts, but I actually think that distinction is going to matter way more as these technologies become a bigger part of our lives and a bigger part of our relationships.

All right. I think I’ll stop there for today. Thanks for hearing me out. This was an interesting one. Thinking about how to put this all together has been fun. It’s been interesting. I’ve learned a lot about myself and doing it, and I think I’ve learned something about the continued evolution of our world and of my practice as a therapist. So thanks for hearing me out. Feel free to, you know, send me emails and your thoughts if you’ve encountered something, maybe, maybe you’ve asked some questions or found your way through this in ways that are really interesting as well.

I’d love to hear those. As always, you know, if you’re enjoying the podcast, please give us the rating and all the things you know and send it to your friends and your colleagues and people you might think would enjoy this. I’ll tell you, it really means a lot to me that you would take the time out of your day to listen to any of these. It means a great deal. I don’t take it for granted. All right, everyone, until next time.