Hey, everybody, welcome to a special bonus episode of the virtual couch. It's episode

183. I'm your host, Tony Overbay. I'm still a licensed marriage and family therapist, certified

mindful, I'm a coach writer, speaker, husband, father, for ultramarathon runner. I'm going to skip the

rest of that. You can go check out my pornography recovery program, pathback recovery.com. Follow me on Instagram at virtual couch or on Facebook at Tony Overbay licensed marriage and family therapist. Please go to Tonyoverbay.com and sign up to find out about all kinds of exciting things. There, that's the fastest intro I've ever done. And kind of funny the way things work. I started recording my

intro and realized I had gum in my mouth. What a professional podcaster to have gum in my mouth.

So I stopped, took the gum out, and then realized that the audio was going through my webcam,

not through my very cool microphone. So had I not been chewing gum this morning, I would have

recorded some pretty shoddy audio. But instead, here we are. We got a bonus episode. And the bonus

episodes I've put out a couple lately. One is about the levels of intimacy. Another was called

Love Sense. It's based on Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy on her book about

the science of attachment in marriage.

It's an amazing book. And so that's a bonus episode I put out. And a lot of good feedback there.

So I wanted to put out this episode, desperately put out this episode, because as you will hear,

when I cut into the audio, and this episode was first released over a year ago and it was titled what if I can't

choose to be happy and this is something that again when you hear the intro to this episode

you'll you'll hear me point out that a question I get often and it's in emails weekly it can

be even daily sometimes a few times a, at least in session of people that

set out, they start their day, they say, okay, I know I just need to choose to be happy,

positive affirmations, make this thing work. And then when things inevitably can kind of be a challenge,

I'm trying to say super strength-based and not say, when things go wrong, you know, when things happen,

when life happens, and then we react, maybe not in the most positive way, we often beat ourselves up about it because we say, well, wait a minute, I was going to be happy today. So there's just so much good information that I think will be good for you to hear that will help you feel normal, that will help you kind of get out of maybe the what's wrong with me story that your brain might be telling you, maybe even on a day-to-day basis. And so even if you did listen to this a year ago, I highly encourage you to give it a quick listen again today, maybe turn it up to one and a half time speed, maybe even double speed if you dare. I think I can sound very chipmunk-like on one time one-time speed. And this is one that I think you might, if you could do me a favor and maybe share with somebody that you feel is being a little bit more down on themselves, hard on themselves, because they feel like they should have more control of their thoughts. I mean, the thoughts are just going to happen. The feelings and emotions happen. So what we do

with them, how we react to them? That's really the key. So, and I did say that I was going to get

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