Episodes

June is a time of transition for a lot of families. The end of the school year, graduations from one phase of schooling to the next –– endings and beginnings have a way of surfacing the feels. And no one likes to process endings more than psychoanalysts. So as we’re at the end of the school year, and Rob has a child who just graduated high school — how?! –– we decided to spend some time today talking about endings. Rob shares some wisdom from his son’s head of school, Gillian talks about naviga...

In our society, we’re not good at openly talking about death. We’re even worse at speaking openly about death by suicide. The silence that so often accompanies suicide–what our guest calls “the shroud of suicide”–creates additional burdens for surviving family members, especially women who survive their spouses. The expectation to shield others from the full weight of the death, to even erase the facts of the experience, is an enormous pressure that has long-term consequences across generations...

Everyone struggles sometimes when their kids have strong opinions or feelings and they need them to just do the thing already. And when frustrations are high, it can be easy to slip into the kind of old-school parenting a lot of us were raised with and that we might be trying not to replicate. Our guest today, Kirk Martin, host of the Calm Parenting Podcast, knows those struggles intimately. In our conversation, he shares his journey with his son, Casey, and how he came to realize that he neede...

All of us have some level of innate desire for autonomy and equality. But for some, the need for autonomy and equality tangles with Survival Brain in ways that have major impacts on their well-being, even overriding basic survival needs like food, sleep, hygiene, or physical safety. Though it can sometimes look that way from the outside, PDA (Persistent Drive for Autonomy or Pathological Demand Avoidance) is not just a knee-jerk, “You can’t tell me what to do!” PDA causes outsized reaction...

There are many ways to do therapy, and many reasons why people gravitate to certain modalities, both as patients and practitioners. And while there are some who will insist that their way is the way, we’re happy to acknowledge where our preferred methods overlap and diverge with others, and how different therapies can help people arrive at the same place of better self-understanding and moving through the world with more ease. Today, we’re chatting with Gillian’s longtime friend and ...

It might sound silly, or even impossible, to have a theory of everything that might show up in our clinical work. And yet, when we’re sitting with people who are stuck or sitting with people that are suffering, so often it comes back to one of a few fundamental feelings, and all of the emotional gradations that come from them: safety, grief, and shame. Today, we’re digging into these emotional primary colors that are at the root of so much of what we see in our clinical practices, how they sho...

Fear has a way of obstructing our development as people, as parents, and partners and friends. Our anxieties make us grasp for control when what we really need to do is get out of the way and let things unfold. Easier said than done. Today, we have Gillian’s dear friend and “soul mother,” Paula Tursi, with us. Paula is a New York-based yoga and meditation teacher, spiritual guide, writer and thinker who is at once deeply spiritual and highly pragmatic. In our conversation, we talk about the ro...

Establishing safety and trust is how we create connections and personal change, in therapy and in life. If we aren’t open to new experiences or perspectives, it’s a lot harder for any of us to get to all the good, gushy, connected stuff that helps us grow. Today, we're with our friend and colleague, Dr. Matt Morrison, who is the training director of Long Island University's Psychological Services Center. Matt brings his experience supervising student psychologists and joins us to talk about his...

Ask any activist or philanthropist why they do what they do, and they’ll likely have a story about why they care so deeply about their causes. Sometimes those stories go even deeper than they consciously realize. Today’s guest, Bradley Tusk,  philanthropist, venture capitalist, author, and one of Rob’s dearest friends, is committed to ending childhood hunger and saving democracy through mobile voting. Our conversation delves into progressive politics and the tensions that can exist between impl...

Survival brain impacts the way we parent, and in many ways, it’s the bedrock of our cultural myths. A survival mindset frames the world as a zero-sum game where we have to fight each other for resources. In this model, individualism and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps are the only ways to succeed, and are equated with moral goodness. We see the impacts of survival-based thinking all around us. People seek external, material markers of status and success that have them always reaching for...

Human beings need connection. We’re social creatures. But we are increasingly isolated, lonely, and dissatisfied. Today, we’re joined by our friend and colleague James Ellis, who’s here to help us understand the deep cultural roots and uniquely modern influences of our modern loneliness epidemic. This one goes beyond parenting as we dig into the ways our culture narrows our view of who can meet our emotional needs and has us chasing perfection in those relationships. We also get into why socia...

How do you raise kids who approach the world with curiosity, compassion, and the drive to make their communities more supportive and inclusive? Today, we’re talking to Gillian’s dear friend Lauren Hough Williams about how her childhood shaped her into an expert in building systems where everyone has a place. In this episode, we dig into how Lauren’s position as the eldest of five siblings helped to create her community mindset. We discuss the role of privilege and its attendant sense of safety...

Most parents set out with the best of intentions to prepare their children for the world. Of course, our actions and behaviors don’t always have the intended effect. Parenting is hard, and sometimes we screw up in ways that damage our kids and our relationships with them. So what do we do with our parenting regrets? Today, comedian Ash Diggs joins us to talk about the regret and repair in parent-child relationships, using the classic Harry Chapin tear-jerker “Cat’s in the Cradle” as our jumpin...

Survival brain is a universal feature of parenting. When our inner cave person is activated, fear dominates, as we worry about our kid’s ability to survive a dangerous world. When survival brain comes online, everything is an emergency, our ability to think rationally is short-circuited, and molehills become mountains. As our brains quickly spiral, we imagine that the kid who isn’t doing his homework tonight will be doomed to a lifetime of failure and destitution. While the threat-mitigation be...

If you came into our therapy rooms, we definitely would be asking you about your family of origin. It’s where it all starts. As psychologists who work with families and who are currently raising kids, we’re obsessed with how childhood experiences impact caregiving, and how parenting transforms us. Where did our parents come from? How were they raised? How did they bring us up? And how do we parent our kids as a consequence of our family history? These are the questions that hold the key to what...

Your kid slams his bedroom door in your face, and five minutes later, he's giving you puppy eyes asking for a snack. Why is he like that? On I Hate You. What's For Dinner?, we explore whether childhood explains everything. We're Gillian Boudreau and Rob Galligan—two clinical psychologists in private practice who met in our psych PhD program a couple decades ago. Since then, we've been mulling over what hurts and what heals in people. As psychologists who work with kids and families, we're cons...