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Breaking Relationship Patterns: Steps to Healthier Connections

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By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To learn the skills to break unhealthy relationship patterns, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app In 2016, my family and I backpacked in a truly otherworldly place- the Lost Coast Trail on the Northern California coast. By day we walked and explored tide pools, filled with all manner of crustaceans and aquatic life. By night, we slept on lonesome beaches above snoozing elephant seals. This trip had a knuckle-biting wrinkle: In order to walk through certain sections, we had to use a tide chart to time when it was safe to cross under a long series of cliffs. Should we mis-time the tides, we’d be stranded with no escape and the consequences would be disastrous.  Tides are a good example of natural cycles that reliably occur and manifest. The seasons change, trees bud in the spring, leaves turn in the fall, human gestation lasts 9 months, cells differentiate themselves in fetal development to become limbs, organs, eyeballs. Incredible, ongoing, automatic processes that are happening all around us. These things happened before I was here, and they will be happening long after I’m gone. We live, we die, the world keeps turning. As the great Robert Hunter penned “Lovers come and go but the river will roll, roll, roll.” These automatic complex processes manifest themselves into our awareness whether or not we know anything about them. We awe and marvel at changing leaves, whether  or not we understand photoperiodism. We can see tides rising and fall, manifesting when we have to move our beach chairs to keep from getting swamped, whether we understand the math or science behind tidal forces. Who doesn’t love the emergence of fragrant lilacs in May, even if you don’t know anything about them. Our relationships also operate in natural rhythms and patterns. These patterns occur most often beneath our awareness, and they can manifest in healthy or unhealthy ways. They tend to change with age, but they also tend to get us stuck in ruts. This is what we need to focus on—how to notice, understand, and change patterns that are holding back your sense of connection and relationship health. Lets ground this in an example. My 6 year old son wakes up every morning, at 6:00 am on the dot (which is an improvement from 5:00 or 5:30 am when he was 3). When he wakes up, his natural rhythm is to get out his legos to play. Cool- we know this guy is motivated and excited to get his day started building Star Wars creations. We love his curiosity and energy around play. But we are also working with him on independence and getting into a healthy self-care pattern that helps him to take the next step in his growth. Step 1, get dressed. Step 2, brush teeth. Step 3, wash face. Step 4, dirty clothes in the hamper. Step 5, make your bed. Step 6, come downstairs and get breakfast worked out. Be ready for your day by 7:30 am. Whereas these sound like reasonable demands to me (they take me less than 5 minutes total), they are deviations from my son’s natural inertia and preferences. His gut reaction, or “FAST THINKING” stems from an emotion that says “you are taking away my fun and making me do something I don’t want to do Dad.”  He has a burst of emotion in response to the suggested change in pattern.  And my gut reaction or “FAST THINKING” response is to get frustrated and start to reflect his emotion back. “Why are we having this argument again son? Why can’t you just do these tasks? You know how to do each of them.” For this singular moment, this is our daily pattern right now. Both responding automatically out of our natural emotions with our own bodily goals: to return back to the way it was. My son wants to be able to continue to play. And I am drawn to conserve my energy for other things (not the painful step by step process of walking through each step with him for the nth time). Staying stuck requires no effort: I can simply ignore the fact that we are locked in a pattern. Change requires effort: noticing my role to start to take bite sized changes.  Although it is exceedingly numbing and inefficient, if I want to help build a healthier pattern with my son, I have to step back from my FAST THINKING gut response (emotion and thinking driven) and step into SLOW THINKING (values and goal driven). In this pattern, here are a few ways I can begin to shift. Foremost, I need to know myself, and take honest account of my risk for getting drawn into emotional reactions. To this end, I choose a practical remedy that is waking up 30 minutes before my son, having my coffee and quiet time, and being ready for him.  Second, I can begin the numbing and painstaking process of breaking his Step 1 (get dressed) into 4 smaller steps: take dirty clothes off, pick out new ones, put on new ones, discard dirty ones). As adults, we also get drawn into relational patterns with our romantic partners, friends, siblings, parents, and ourselves (especially if trapped in a pattern of social withdrawal and isolation). And just like the example with my son, whether we are willing to slow down and notice the pattern as it naturally repeats can make all the difference in whether our patterns begin to shift in healthy directions, or whether they stay stuck in the rut. Our bodies do not naturally differentiate higher minded ideas such as “is this healthy or not.” Rather, without careful thought, our patterns form based on natural, primitive, biological calculations that occur ‘under the hood’ or outside of our awareness. The calculation for us really has two primary components. The case for fast vs. slow thinking is laid out in the work of

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Get Out of Your Head: Committed Actions for Building Strong Relationships

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By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To learn the skills to improve your relationships, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app When I think about how to improve relationships and social connection problems in my life, my community, the world…the barriers feel daunting. The first problem in the change equation is me. I’m stubborn and reluctant to change, focused on me, and loathe to slow down enough to do the work. The second problem is that relationships involve other people, and they are as resistant to change as I. Third, the environments I’m trying to enact change in can feel like a real dumpster fire of polarization and disconnection. There is so much wrong with the ways that people are experiencing and considering each other right now. ` Although our social lives are complex, my research and work as a therapist over the years are grounded in a universal reality: Unless people commit to action or behavior change, they stagnate or relapse into old patterns. And unless that committed action is grounded in a narrative of redemption (rather than hopelessness or contamination), it is difficult to persist in the ways that bring about change (for more on the Power of Narratives, goto https://rewirerx.com/2024/05/02/what-stories-do-you-tell-the-power-narratives/). We are a culture obsessed with self, and as a byproduct, obsessed with the idea that our thoughts and emotions are the truth. Cognitive exercises intended to have you think more about thinking, focused on changing the way that you think and feel directly…can help for a time. However, motivation and persistence are rooted in social meaning and purpose,1,2 and efforts to change the ways we think and feel wither on the vine without social action and feedback from other people. It is not that thoughts and emotions are unimportant; but to stimulate change in the ways we feel and think about our relationships, action and behavior change are the key driver.3 Said another way: Unless you are out there testing with experience (instead of staying stuck in your predictions about others and how you will feel), then things don’t get better or don’t improve sustainably.   In order to change, we can learn to be mindful of our patterns of thoughts and emotions, use that mindfulness to identify an opportunity for change, and initiate a single action that is practical, values-led, and grounded in a specific goal. Emotions and thoughts are useful, as a signal or indicator, but not as a place to live or stop. The need for an active (vs. passive) approach is especially necessary in the context of social relationship change. Thinking more about improving relationships or waiting for other people to miraculously heal and improve enough for you to feel safe or rewarded…waiting for the other person to apologize first…this way will keep you stuck repeating the same patterns. If you don’t believe me, think about how you somehow find yourself in a loop repeating the same role and the same argument in your relationship with a spouse, child, parent, friend, etc. That pattern might look like this: she gets mad…he withdrawals…she accuses him of disengagement…he accuses her of anger…they argue about how they are arguing…they avoid talking about the deeper thing that needs discussion…they withdrawal into separate corners …repeat).  So, lets shift the lens. Instead of thinking more about thinking even in this essay, let’s try a simple exercise. The exercise starts with grounding your motivation to enact change in a goal for something beautiful or redemptive in your relationships.  Imagine: If you could have relationships the way that you ideally envisioned them, what would they be like? Not the barriers, or the ways that they feel unchangeable. But rather, the vision of beauty or hope that you held in the first place.  What was the vision for meaning and service that drove you down that path?  But relationships are not simple, and they can carry history, baggage, rigidity, volatility, resistance to change, numbness, indifference…In relationships how do we hold that beautiful and redemptive goal and not be discouraged by the limits of our thoughts and emotions? As the saying goes, the way to eat an elephant is…one bite at a time.  Steps for bite-sized committed actions.  Using this committed action exercise allows you to grow consistency and reliability to improve your own actions, which is the only part of the relationship equation that you control. When you ground an action in your values, you move closer to congruence with yourself, even if the outcome is disappointing or painful in the short term. We get derailed from goals when we organize our choices around “pain avoidance,” which is what you’ve been doing and is keeping you stuck. Examples to provide context. Example 1. Dave is a 48 year-old father to three adult children in their mid 20s. In his early 20s, Dave tells his story of feeling consumed with his struggles to provide financially, a lot of anxiety turned into irritability and anger, and slow disengagement from his family as work took over. Eventually, Dave and his wife divorced, and despite having shared custody, Dave’s involvement eroded over time, relegated to paying for things and sporadically showing up at events. Each time that he sees his kids now, he is consumed with regret and the pile up of losses. And his kids are deeply wounded too. Of course, this is not what Dave set out to do when he got married and started a family. Without change, Dave expresses that he will continue to carry this mortal wound. Today, at age 48, Dave takes the risk to articulate a redemptive goal: to reconnect to his role as a father and bringing about as much healing in those relationships as he can control. He is committed to doing so despite the fear of rejection and pain of loss that he feels. We discuss how it is critical that he hold his goal for his role as a father as a higher priority than his default mode

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Building Your Empathy Muscle: The Key to Deep, Meaningful Relationships

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By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To learn the skills to start improving your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app Our brains are expectation and prediction machines. We are wired to do anything within our power to keep our relationships predictable on the day to day basis. On the flip side, from an emotional standpoint, we spend a lot of energy when predictions about people and places are violated. Our bodies enter a negative emotional state, however subtle, and autopilot dictates a predictable response: Do whatever it takes to return to a calm baseline. This phenomenon is called ‘dissonance,’ 1,2 which I will write more about in future posts as it relates to noticing and re-defining patterns in relationships.  The process of managing emotions in social relationships is taxing from a ‘cognitive load’ standpoint—meaning that we have to spend a lot of internal resources to regulate our emotions and environments. Relationships are effortful, with the amount of effort varying for some people more than others (e.g., introverts vs. extroverts). In this process, it is quite common and easy for empathy to get lost in the shuffle. And for empathy to ‘erode’ from the pattern that two people or family systems engage in across time. Empathy is defined generally as the ability of one person to share or understand another person’s emotional experience or perspective. Empathy can be further broken down into emotional components (feeling others’ feelings) and cognitive components (understanding others’ perspectives).3 Although there is a lot unknown about empathy, research is clear on one thing: Empathy is hard. “When given the choice to share others’ feelings, people act as if it is not worth the effort.”4 But why? Unless your biology is constrained by particular pathologies (e.g., psychopathy), most of us share a common value of empathy as being really important. I don’t know a parent who wouldn’t say that empathy is a key for what they hope to teach and extend to their children. We understand empathy as critical to human thriving and close relationships. It’s a foundational capacity for healthy mammals.5 Here is why. Because empathy is costly, effortful, and inefficient. Empathic responses require us to slow down, notice our emotions, regulate (inhibit) our natural responses, and inquire into the experience of the other (child, friend, partner, spouse, etc). Worse yet, in conflict empathy requires an even more advanced skill: inquiry about the way that you have caused some kind of pain or hurt. The opposite of empathy in relationships is defensiveness, including infamously unwise commitments to “winning” and “being right.” Or, gathering vulnerable responses from another person to convince them of their wrong.  Why should you care? Because self-defensive and invalidating responses erode your relationships with people (spouses, children, friends), undermine your social goals, and erode your relationships with your own self. All is not lost though. You can break patterns of self-defensive and invalidating responses, towards empathic responding that aligns better with your social goals and personal values. This requires a foundational shift in your thinking about what emotions are. For you to slow down to see your emotional reactions as ‘signals’ or ‘indicators’ that there is an opportunity to tap into empathy. Here are the steps to developing this skill: –  Self-defense: “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, so therefore, you should not have hurt feelings.” –  Exaggerated self-sacrifice: “I’m the worst. I hate myself,” (focus on me, not the other’s experience- nonetheless ends the conversation) –  Blame shifting: Some form of “you deserved it because…” – “Tell me what is going on so I can understand where you are coming from better.” – “Tell me how you’re feeling about the thing I did.” The practice of radical acceptance of the ways that friction and suffering are a part of the relationship is helpful here. Expect these ruptures and the need for repair. Further, the practice of radical acceptance of the notion that you are someone who can cause that friction or suffering provides an honest basis from which you can enter these conversations with curiosity, humility, and skepticism of your gut reaction. On this topic, see previous essay on Embracing and Expecting Friction– https://rewirerx.com/2024/04/29/embracing-and-expecting-friction-is-the-basic-building-block-of-relationship-wisdom/). What does it look like for you to be more moved by the effect you have on others than by the goal to self-defend? In this model, you start to shift your goals away from self-defense, blame-shifting, invalidation, and winning towards shared understanding of one another. You can start to replace patterns of litigation (“provide evidence that is irrefutable if you want to beat me”) and pinning down the other on their faults. And you can begin to serve a fundamental healing role in the lives of the people around you, imperfect as it may be. The evolution of this skill eventually allows us to communicate and be understood in complex areas with each other – “I’m angry about this, and I am sorry that my anger is hurting you. I really need to talk about it though.” – “I am hurt by your anger, and I understand why you are feeling that way.” One final note, to start getting a handle on this skill, you likely will have to catch yourself retrospectively having violated your own values on empathy towards your most important relationships. Meaning, expect to get this wrong sometimes or even a lot of the time, especially if this concept is new to you. The process of aligning with your values on this is not “perfection” or another place to “self-help” into a more polished person. It is to expect yourself to fail on this truly biologically driven avoidance of effortful and inefficient empathy, and to circle back and re-align with your values that say, “Hey, I think I missed something here. Can we try again.”     ___________________   1 Proulx, T., Inzlicht, M., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2012). Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(5), 285-291.

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Transforming Your Narrative: The Power of Redemption in Relationships

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By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To start transforming your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app Human beings are story tellers. We use stories to entertain, teach, warn, and convey history. Synthesis of 2,000+ works of fiction show that nearly all stories take a form that falls into six main emotional arcs, or plotlines.1,2 Here are a few of the most commonly repeated emotional arcs that we tell and consume:  These stories also represent the form of narratives that are running in the background of our minds about our own lives and relationships. I want to offer a deeply transformative idea: You are the protagonist of your story. You are on a hero’s journey. The type of narrative you are telling shapes your values, goals, and direction. On the subject of narratives, psychologist Dan McAdams says this: The stories we construct to make sense of our lives are fundamentally about our struggle to reconcile who we imagine we were, are, and might be in our heads and bodies with who we were, are, and might be in the social contexts of family, community, the workplace, ethnicity, religion, gender, social class, and culture 3 To go further, the narratives that we hold—about ourselves, friends, parents, spouses, romantic partners, children, siblings, the world— are how we organize our choices, words, and actions towards them. Two particular narrative forms on which relationships operate are narratives of Redemption and Contamination.4 Perhaps, given the struggles of your life, things have felt contaminated from the start, and you’ve built a narrative around how all good things come to an end or relationships sour eventually. Perhaps it has felt like one battle after another, one loss after another. Or perhaps your “life was going well, until PERSON A came into it.” That the answer is “this is contaminated and unsalvageable. I’d be happier and better off without PERSON A.” Or perhaps we shift focus to the unavoidable themes of contamination in the world at large (climate, politics, healthcare, the church). That there is nothing left to do but watch it burn. What’s the point? Who can argue with the fact that there is plenty to feel despondent about right now. If your short-term goal is to shed your life of inconvenience and friction, then contamination narratives work great. But the long-term costs are high. If the true desire of your heart is for deep, beautiful, committed relationships and communities, you might consider an alternative. Take the risk to dream about what relationships in your life could look like. In your hero’s journey, what would it look like organize your life and personal relationships around a narrative of redemption? The arc of this story is something good, turned difficult, turned good again. A redemption narrative does not suppress the truth, and it does not require burying the reality of suffering and pain. In a redemption narrative, acceptance of the struggle that you are experiencing is a necessary part of the journey. With a narrative of redemption running in the background, the work that we put into relationships deepens our eventual satisfaction and meaning. Redemption narratives guide us to action that hopes, towards something deeply worthwhile. Contamination narratives guide us to positions that things are ‘unchangable’ or ‘unsalvagable.’ These types of narratives lead us to avoid the pain of deeper investment and engagement and to hedge towards beating others to an inevitably hopeless result. When operating out of a contamination narrative, why risk time, vulnerability, painful communication, or apologizing for my actions? If I am operating under the assumption that the eventual outcome will be rejection and loss, then I organize myself around self-protection from that outcome.   Alternatively, here are some of the actions that spring from a redemption narrative: By showing up in these ways, based on the hope of redemption, we align with our aspirational selves. We model redemption for the people in our lives. In the end, redemption narratives share the same structure: Something good, turned difficult, turned beautiful. 1 Reagan, A. J., Mitchell, L., Kiley, D., Danforth, C. M., & Dodds, P. S. (2016). The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes. EPJ data science, 5(1), 1-12. 2 Lafrance, A. (July 12, 2016). The Six Main Arcs in Storytelling, as Identified by an A.I. The Atlantic Monthly 3 McAdams, D. P. (2008). Personal narratives and the life story. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 242–262). The Guilford Press. 4 McAdams, D. P. (2013). The redemptive self: Stories Americans live by-revised and expanded edition. Oxford University Press. 5 McAdams, D. P., Reynolds, J., Lewis, M., Patten, A. H., & Bowman, P. J. (2001). When bad things turn good and good things turn bad: Sequences of redemption and contamination in life narrative and their relation to psychosocial adaptation in midlife adults and in students. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 27(4), 474-485.

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Embracing Friction: The Key to Building Strong Relationships

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By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To start the process of transforming your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app The technology boom over the past 10 years has improved our lives in so many ways. Want to avoid the tedium of grocery shopping? Order online for delivery by 4pm. Want to avoid the misery of picking through plumbing parts or types of caulk at The Home Depot? Don’t bother waiting in line, pick up curbside.  Need some googly eyes to finish your Halloween costume? If you order in the next 23 minutes, Amazon will have it to your house tomorrow. Need entertainment on a rainy day? TikTok and Youtube have you covered.   The sales pitch of all this life improving technology is for a frictionless existence. In many ways, these technologies have significantly improved my life. But what I have seen over and over in my clinical practice, relationships, and within my own heart is that this promise of frictionlessness leads to a dangerous generalization: That my life and relationships could be frictionless too. That the problem of suffering can be resolved when I get into the right college, job, location, marriage, house, school district, salary, community, church, friendships…and on and on in an exhausting loop. There is a problem inherent to this obsession with a life without suffering and friction: it’s unavoidable.  Ironically, my suffering is magnified by expectations that perfect circumstances and frictionlessness are even possible, and that they will make my heart change. To quote Bob Dylan, “that he not busy being born is busy dying,” from the second that we arrive on this planet. Suffering is a guarantee. When I expect not to have these experiences of friction and suffering, they come as a surprise, and bleed out of me in ways that are harmful to myself and the people around me. A conflict with a best friend becomes grounds for ending the relationship, because it made me unhappy or pissed me off. A child with emotional self-control difficulty becomes ‘labeled’ as a real problem, because he intrudes on my peace and happiness. A valley phase of a marriage characterized by low satisfaction and low fulfillment becomes grounds for divorce, because its preventing me from living my best life now.   I have a choice to make in my worldview. By embracing and accepting the truth about suffering, we can begin to change our relationship to it when inevitable suffering and friction arises. Friction, in choice 2, becomes a signal for an opportunity for deeper connection. Times or experiences of suffering give meaning and color to times of joy. When we are saturated with excess and obsessed with stress free existence, we begin to lose the perspective and need for one another, and begin to sanitize our communities of relationships that produce anything uncomfortable. Day to day, this suffering comes in the form of negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that cause us to feel and inflict pain on ourselves and others. It drives us to isolation and loneliness where at least we can avoid pain. This provides short term relief at the cost of long term health in relationships. When we begin to accept that there are inherent biases and dangers within our own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, we can learn to begin to see them clearly when they arise. For example, when I understand and accept that when I am stressed out about work, that I have a tendency to respond to my children or spouse in irritated ways (this is how my biology works!), I can improve my ability to begin noticing and taking responsibility for that behavior that is producing suffering in the lives of me and my family. Through this, I begin to reduce my suffering (from misalignment with who I want to be as a father) by aligning with my own values (my aspirational self) as a father and husband. And I begin to improve the suffering of the people around me. Imperfectly and friction filled as it may be.

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Reaching New Heights: How Relationship Goals Can Transform Your Life

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By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To start the process of transforming your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app I live in the north country, where winters are long and hard. When spring starts to come on, people begin emerging for the slightest sliver of sunshine. It might only be 43 degrees, but you’d be surprised at how amazing an afternoon hour of sun feels in early March. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: apricity (the warmth of sun in winter). In my family, biking has taken on a particularly obsessive quality.  When spring starts to arrive, we can’t wait to get out of the basement cardio dungeon to start really getting on our bikes outside and in shape for cycling season. We even (perhaps unwisely) set our sights on something that we’ve started doing annually: a century bikepack (100mi) on the first weekend of May.   The problem is that the weather from mid-March through mid-May is so unpredictable. For example, yesterday morning, April 26, the outside thermometer read 24 degrees Fahrenheit. Sure, by 3:30pm it was 60 degrees, but with a busy schedule the only time available to ride was the early morning cold. Don’t forget spring showers either…an extra layer of suffering. But remember, we have a goal to enjoy a big day at the start of May. To get there, we can’t let weather dictate our choices. We can work around the weather to a point, trade back and forth with each other for “best window” to ride in, know as much as we can about it and get gear to try to stay warm and dry. But inevitably we have to accept, acknowledge, and suffer through to some extent. What awaits us on the others side of this hard work and commitment is pure joy. This is a sound metaphor for methodical goal setting and movement towards goals in relationships. Although relationships offer some additional complexity (for example, the fact that they involve two or more people with different personalities, levels of “healthiness,” and goals), goal setting is step 1 to improvement. Social relationship goal setting provides basis for consistency, reliability, and making upward progress in a cohesive direction. Here are some relationship goal examples that come from my therapy practice or research:   Holding such goals in highest regard can change your life and relationships. Making consistent, small, incremental progress towards one of these goals is key. Further, developing an awareness or mindfulness and skills set to notice when you are making choices that move you away from these goals is both possible and freeing.   The key is to hold goals above the notoriously fickle “weather” patterns of daily negative emotions and thoughts. A simple, almost rhetorical question I ask in therapy to drive this point home is this: Given the sheer frequency and dynamism of thoughts and emotions, how could these possibly serve as the true guide for our choices?  Our thoughts and emotions are bias prone, and lead us in patterns of repetitive avoidance, keeping us stuck. Emotions and thoughts are not the truth…they are subjective, repetitive biological phenomena. Future posts will unpack how emotions and thoughts occur in ways that drive us to avoid or stay “stuck” in patterns that keep us separated from progress towards social relationship goals. I’ll unpack key skills to notice opportunities for active choice points towards goals, revolving around mindfulness-of, acceptance-of, and careful observation of emotions and thoughts. To clarify, the model is not about suppressing or ignoring emotions and thoughts. Rather, its about changing your relationship with thoughts and emotions, to use them as a signal for action towards goals rather than viewing them as the end-all-be-all Truth with a capital T. How powerful a skill it is to notice a repetitive emotion or thought that is keeping us stuck, for example, future prediction traps like: “My wife will never say sorry for how she hurt my feelings…so I’ll just stuff them and avoid the conversation”…only to have it leak out later inevitably. Finally, how values (e.g., honesty, gentleness, compassion, loyalty) can guide the content or form of a single behavior towards a goal.

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Why Haven’t We Improved Authentic Social Connection?

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By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To start the process of transforming your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app I often present my scholarly work at national conferences, and was recently in the audience at a symposium on the topic of social support and recovery from traumatic events. Scholars of national repute presented various studies from around the world, showing how important social support is in the prediction of disease proliferation or disease reduction. I recognized the measures, methods, analyses, and findings as near identical to those that I’ve presented and published for more than a decade. I came to a moment of clarity: We have spent 50 years recycling the idea that social connection is the most important factor in the prediction of flourishing, health, meaning, thriving, and happiness. Great! We’ve identified a problem ad-nauseum. So, since we absolutely know this to be true, social connection must be improving in our culture? No, it’s not. In fact, social connection and cohesion are in rapid decline in nearly every sector of our culture.    We will stay high level here with the evidence for the erosion of social connection. For starters, the U.S. Surgeon General recently declared loneliness and social disconnection problems as a priority public health crisis…DEFCON 1. Another data point comes from the work of Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who identifies the centrality of low social connection in the prediction of early death and poor quality of life. A third high level data point comes from the groundbreaking work of Jonathan Haidt (see “The Anxious Generation”) demonstrating the heartbreaking disconnection syndrome teenagers and emerging adults are mired in. If you need more evidence and don’t buy what I’m selling here— that we are in a social connection crisis— then this argument and focus of our work in this community building project is not for you. Full stop.   So, what are the options for me to learn to improve social connection? The truth: we’ve made no progress in developing scalable approaches that lead to better and deeper social connection for ‘we the people’ struggling to connect deeper out in the real world. For the 90% of us who live in the middle (between the extremes) and are experiencing the visceral decline of authentic social connection. There are two key drivers of our lack of development in the area of social connection interventions that are worth understanding here. First, improving social connection is not aligned with profit driven healthcare that focuses on reimbursement ROI. Our medical reimbursement system and funding agencies can’t make money on treatments that target mechanisms of health and root causes of disease (for example— social connection and physical exercise). Instead, these systems are designed to reimburse and profit from symptom reduction and disease treatment (depression; social anxiety; PTSD; diabetes; cancer care). Said another way: healthcare systems prioritize reactive disease treatment rather than disease prevention.  To take this thought to a more disturbing place, it’s also not profitable for people to improve social connection in ways that propels us to rely less on disease-focused medical interventions and more on natural social networks. Yikes. A second driver of our lack of investment in social connection interventions is that there is no natural place or governing body from which these interventions would emerge. The field of clinical psychology is the group of people focused on the design and production of treatments. Unfortunately, clinical psychology as a field is also deeply dedicated to the medicalization of mental illness (cleverly “reappropriated” by using the term mental health) by focusing on disease diagnosis and reduction of symptoms. This is problematic for many reasons.  Foremost among them is that disease-focused, medicalized approaches do not align with what the majority of people want or necessarily need. As a case study in this reality, research among veterans seeking mental health care shows that 96% of them consider improvement in social relationships as their #1 priority for seeking care.  In response, they are offered disease reduction treatments (e.g., PTSD treatments) rather than care that aligns with social relationship priorities. Most often, regardless of who I am seeing in my therapy practice (veteran, physician, firefighter, nurse, college student), the reason for seeking treatment is that relationships are suffering in one form or another. Try this thought experiment from a recent case: Kathleen is a 21-year-old junior in college, presenting in my clinic for difficult feelings of loneliness, low motivation, and low meaning in her day-to-day life. As part of the intake assessment, we learn that Kathleen has struggled to develop deeper friendships, and she had hoped that college would be the place that this would happen for her. She feels this opportunity slipping through her fingers. We also identify mild-to-moderate symptoms of anxiety and depression.  She states a clear goal: Please help me to improve my relationships, meaning, and mental health. What would be the most natural place to enter improvement in Kathleen’s goals? Her presenting problems and motivation for seeking help revolve around improving relationships, meaning, and mental health.  But the treatments that are prescribed as ‘best practices’ are designed to target disease reduction. A disease reduction offering in this case may focus on treatment with an SSRI for mood management, a benzodiazepine for anxiety flair ups, and cognitive exercises to manage anxious or depressed thoughts. This approach teaches Kathleen that her problems are medical in nature, and that the answer lies in medical/clinical treatment. But that’s not what Kathleen asked for. Further, does Kathleen have a disease? We begin to discuss her mood and anxiety as possible downstream symptoms stemming from a lack of authentic and life giving social connection. Instead of organizing Kathleen’s care around disease reduction, we collaborate to organize our efforts around her natural motivation to develop more, better, and deeper social connection. To develop the kind of friendships that her parents said they made during their college years. We also work on anxiety management skills, which Kathleen naturally identifies as

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Reclaiming Connections: The Power of Values in Relationships

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By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To start the process of transforming your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app In today’s fast-paced world, values often appear in business and organizational mission statements, but they are equally crucial in our personal lives. Personal values like honesty, authenticity, gentleness, and persistence guide our actions and choices, helping us break painful patterns and build meaningful relationships. There is a lot of talk of ‘Values’ out there. Simply defined, values are aspirational qualities of action, or desired ways of behaving. As individuals, we can have and define our own values as well. For me, this morning, my core values are definitive: Honesty, Authenticity, Gentleness, Persistence. Values are not achievable…not something we can perfect. Rather, values serve as a standard or goal by which we can measure choices or actions. And a guide for choosing new actions and breaking painful patterns and habits. Last week, my 6-year-old son broke a window on the backside of our house with a rock. I was upset. A cost calculation ran through my head. Words came out. In relationships, values are a trustworthy anchor by which we can determine how to respond and engage with others. Much more trustworthy than emotion or thoughts. Values are especially foundational in relationships that matter…because they’re the ones with the highest stakes that produce the most emotion (both positive and negative emotion). Romantic partnerships, marriages, long standing friendships, parent-child relationships, family relationships, workplace collaborations. The ones that propel meaning in our lives, without which we are left feeling isolated. Because my role as a husband and father matter so much to me, and therefore my marriage and my relationship with my children matter so much to me, these relationships also produce the most emotion on both ends of the spectrum (joy and pain).  My body produces the most powerful emotional signals, designed to keep me going back to improve, repair, and draw upon these relationships. Emotional friction in relationships is a feature, not a bug. In this model, the broken window and my painful response becomes an opportunity for connection for me and my son. This approach avoids leaving painful scars in our relationships that perpetuate disconnection in the future. In which my son learns to fear my reactions, and I learn to fear my own reactions. In which we begin to avoid one another. In which I start playing the “fathers and sons greatest hits” song about how my son doesn’t respect my hard work, and he learns to live down to that expectation. A real classic that fathers and sons have been playing for centuries. I’ll write a lot more in the future about how emotions drive us away from our values in the moment—towards patterns of hiding and withdrawal from relationships. How emotions drive us to avoid going deeper with others for short term relief (“whew…I don’t have to have that argument today”) with long term consequences for deeper connection that can only come from being known (which includes painful but worthwhile cycles of conflict and repair). But this is priming the idea. We can learn to choose values to propel us towards our aspirational or desired selves, and our relationships towards those that we envision. Rather than staying stuck in repetitive patterns that define emotion driven lives. And this is not a “you” problem…its an “us” as a human race in 2024 problem. Values are our way out. Choose your values. Notice when you are behaving in ways that are incongruent with your values. Choose an action to realign with value. Rinse. Repeat.

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The Problem and The Purpose

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By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To start the process of transforming your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app For more than a decade, we’ve been living as unwitting participants in the greatest social rewiring experiment in the history of the human race. As we have traded authentic analog connection for virtual existence, our isolation from one another has produced a kind of skepticism, mistrust, and lack of experience with one another.  Our social musculature has atrophied, involving the capacity and skills to develop and deepen real relationships that allow us to authentically share in each other’s triumphs, losses, joys, and sorrows.  Places and people with whom to celebrate. Places and people with whom to grieve. The erosion of authentic connection is juxtaposed to the rise of carefully crafted and manicured virtual connections that occur largely through social media. These virtual relationships create a way of thinking about others that makes us mistrustful, fearful, and disappointed (read: unrewarded).  Our brains are social comparison machines- and they tell us that we are not good enough, beautiful enough, or talented enough to live authentically and boldly in our friendships, families, and local communities. To have our real, messy selves revealed is terrifying. Our motivation to act towards others in authentic ways is undermined by a lack of perceived rewards that will come from interactions, manifesting in justifications such as “It is not worth is” or “I don’t have time.” My goal with this blog is explicit: To unpack the features of an intervention designed to improve relationships, communities, meaning and purpose. My goal is to build a community around a philosophy and plan to reclaim our social world. To re-engineer or RE-WIRE the ways that we ground ourselves and our young people in the meaning and thriving that can only come through relationships and community. To build the art and practice of relationships, service, and vulnerability.

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