Hey everybody, before we start the show, I want to make a couple disclaimers.

This show does cover a wide variety of topics related to mental health and life in general,

and some of those could be sensitive for you.

I want to simultaneously encourage you to be brave in consuming difficult content, but also respect and recognize your limitations.

So please use your best judgment. I will never be offended if you need to skip a question or an episode entirely but feel free to feel it

out check out the episode and just see what happens if you need to skip that's okay

but you know feel free to give it a shot first I also need to say that while I am a

psychologist I'm not your psychologist and I'm not your therapist.

This is not intended to be direct medical advice and you should not use this as a substitute for professional help.

So with those said let's go ahead and get into the show. Hello friends of all varieties this is the Hardcore Self-Help

podcast episode 102. I'm your host Dr Robert Duff a psychologist from

Southern California and the author of the Hardcore Self-Help book series and before I say anything else I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you

You know I periodically just need to say thanks because this is a weird thing you know I sit in my office and I record questions and interviews and I broadcast

them out to the world and, you know, tens of thousands of you guys listen to them and try to get

something out of it. So it's just a crazy scenario and it's a beautiful part of being alive in this day and age and I just really appreciate your attention. I appreciate your support. I appreciate your questions, your feedback, all of that that so just thank you

This week is going to be an interview I'm interviewing Dr. Ron Holt at Dr. Ron Holt on Twitter

He is an amazing guy as he puts it he's a proud gay man and he's also a psychiatrist who does

not focus necessarily on clinical practice anymore but focuses more on

advocacy for LGBT Q issues and so we talk a lot about that. We talk about the process of coming out, how to do that safely, all sorts of really, really interesting stuff. And I'm just super happy to have him on the show because he can talk about a lot of stuff that you know I have no lived experience of so it was a really good interview and I do hope that you enjoy it.

Next week I will be back with another question and answer episode. I'm not going to have alternating episodes every

single week. It really depends on how many interviews I can get scheduled and

stuff like that, but I do have one more interview in the can so you can expect that

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