Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family

therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized

nuggets of health. Do you know someone who always gets offended, whose life seems to be always full of drama and victimhood?

Maybe small issues get blown out of proportion, or their life is just always in chaos?

How about you personally? Are you ever that person? Are you creating your own suffering?

Sometimes I like to oversimplify. I do this because when we try to put our

problems into categories, it helps us to clarify what we should do to solve them. So in this video,

you're going to learn about two categories of pain, clean pain and dirty pain. And this is really

important because when you can tell the difference, then you'll

know what to do about it. Because the vast majority of pain is the type that we cause ourselves.

That means that you can resolve the vast majority of the painful feelings that you have,

and you can create a life filled with peace, hope, and happiness. I recently read this story about Rose at rewireme.com.

She got a call from a friend who said, I need to talk to you about something,

but she wouldn't tell Rose what it was about. So they made a plan to meet over coffee,

but because of their schedules they had to wait two weeks. So for two whole weeks,

Rose worried about it.

She wondered what her friend needed to talk to her about. She racked her brain. She wondered if

she had offended her friend or if her daughter had done something to her friend's daughter.

And Rose said, as time passed, all I thought about was what I might have done wrong.

I played back every encounter we'd had over the past month

to the point where I became so distraught with the idea of what I might have done that I was driving myself a little crazy.

Rehearsing explanations for my phantom behavior was causing me such great distress that I finally called a mutual friend to see if I could find out what I had done.

...