Hey deserving listeners, today's episode is going to be a long, long episode.

It's a deep dive that I've been working on for a few months now and the deep dive is on

Avoidant Personality Disorder.

This is going to be a patron only episode by the way.

So if you're not a patron, you won't be able to listen to the full episode.

This is the first episode in a series that I'm going to be doing

on loneliness in general. Lots of people suffer from loneliness. I get emails about it every almost every day. I talk with

clients about it. I talk with supervisees and students about it. Loneliness is

very I don't know, it's highly prevalent.

And I've never felt very good in the way that I help people

with their loneliness. I've found some success with some people, but with

a lot of people when I try to help them it never really works, especially when people

email me because I don't have a lot, they're not clients and I can't really get into it with them.

And I've come to realize that the typical advice that people give about reducing loneliness is useless.

Like telling people to, you know, just get out there, just get out there, be yourself,

you know, try to make friends, cultivate relationships, maybe dating apps or Facebook groups,

or you know you have to pursue your friends, cultivate long-term relationships, reach out to others.

Sometimes you got to put up with flaky friends, maybe always say yes to social events, or be vulnerable.

You know, all this is good advice, but I've worked with people individually with this kind of thing and found that it doesn't do anything.

None of these things have really worked.

Sometimes they do, but you know, most people that I talk about these things with it they just remain lonely year after year after

year and it makes me really really sad for them because the these people that I know I know to be lovely, likable, interesting, dynamic

...