Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

So if you know what to do and you know what you want to do and for whatever reason, you're not doing it, that's what I define as stuck.

If you're okay with what's going on, if you're cool being on the couch for 12 hours watching Bridgerton, like, okay, cool, like awesome.

I'm not here to tell you that you should do anything else.

But if you are stuck, if you are wanting to do a thing and you know you have the ability to do the thing and you have the resources to do the thing and you're not doing the damn thing, that's what I call stuck.

That is our guest in this episode of The You Are Not So Smart Podcast Professor, author, therapist, speaker, Brit, Frank, a trauma specialist who treats people with a unique and powerful set of techniques and approaches which taken together helps clients to get out of the feeling of being stuck.

Now I'm pretty sure you'll be hearing a lot about Brit Frank in the coming years. Her signal is rapidly rising above the noise and I was thrilled to get a chance to sit down with her and just nerd out about how hard it is to be a person.

And though this interview is supposed to be about her new book, The Science of Stuck, breaking through inertia to find your path forward, which takes all that she's learned both in the theories behind all this as a professor at the University of Kansas and in practice as a professional therapist.

What at least half of this interview turned out to be was a wide-ranging conversation chasing down many nested tangents about everything from procrastination to somatic markers to trauma to the multitudes of the self and more.

Her book though stuck, I feel like it will soon join books like The Body Keeps the Score and Healing the Shame that binds you and in the realm of hungry ghosts as one of those self-help books that actually does help cells.

So without any more introduction, here is my conversation with therapist, teacher, speaker and trauma specialist, Brit Frank.

I will fold this closure immediately, sent this to a family member of the PDF. I was like, hey, this is for the interview I'm doing. I think you would really enjoy this.

I've talked a lot about momentum and talked a lot about what it takes to just straight up saying, look, you're not crazy, you're not stupid, you're not lazy, you're a biological organism responding to its environment and there's top down bottom up things happening in your body because your brains in your body.

And that's just from reading a small portion of the book. That's how quickly I was on board with your message. So awesome.

Cool.

Let me get to do a little bit of the thing where we get to know you for a second and just because I want to do that as a human being, but also I think this is important for the book that you wrote.

I'm meeting you now as you are now and you are this exemplary human being who is a professional who has your shit together and you have a cool job and you're helping people and your intellectual and all these things right.

It might be surprising people to learn. This was not always the case. I will lob that up like a little softball to see what you do with it.

I did not come out of college fully functional as an adult human with therapy information and knowledge. I was a hot mess and I say that with great self compassion and love, but it's true.

I was a master at the art of self deception. I was a drug addict, a love addict, a relational addict. I had eating disorders, I clinical depression, borderline personality, my DSM diagnosis list was not short.

And so I really had a hard time with this human thing. So people were like, well, did you come a therapist because you just love to help people and I'm not that altruistic.

It was more like I needed to not die and I needed to figure out how we operate and why we do the things we do. And after I figured some of that out, I just thought it was really cool.

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