Welcome to episode 748 with my guest, Rachel Kaplan.

If you're new, I hope you find this place to be a place for honesty about all the

battles in your head from medically diagnosed conditions, past traumas, and sexual dysfunction

to everyday compulsive negative thinking, and this show's not meant to be a substitute

for professional mental counseling. I'm not a therapist. You've been warned. But welcome.

Welcome in my most Midwestern DJ voice. Oh, welcome. We're going to be doing jello shots down by the river and the cuckoo van.

Everybody, come on out.

Free t-shirts for the first hundred idiots.

This is from the Awfulsome Moments survey, and this is filled out by a woman who calls herself Porous.

And share an awfulsome moment or two from your life.

She writes, watching my only parent walk away, the last look back.

I knew they weren't coming back.

Fast forward, their health declined, and someone called to tell me about it.

I replied by making fun of the only parent I had. Paul, maybe you think I'm an asshole for that.

I still have my humanity, but the memories are too difficult for a therapist to hear. I tried

talking about it in therapy. I do not think you're an asshole for that.

I think for a lot of us, myself included,

humor can be a great way to cope.

That's the first place my brain goes to.

But one of the things that I've learned is humor is a great thing to have in addition to,

but not as a substitute for being able to get, I don't know, vulnerable, honest. And I don't really

have any people that I'm very very very close to in my life that

...