Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show,

thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today,

as is frequently the case, but we've had actually a little break from seeing each other recently

by clinical psychologist Rick Hanson. So, Dad, how are you doing today?

I'm good. I'm a little jet lagged, so that's my anticipatory apology to avoid guilt and shame,

which is a topic we might be getting into here. Very topical here, Dad. I love that, and I love

your setting up of it. He's been doing a lot of travel recently, so I appreciate you showing up for this one, Dad. Jetlagged or no. But before we get

into it, I wanted to give a quick reminder about Rick's upcoming online course on changing

your mind. It also focuses on ingrained patterns and how to break them, and particularly how to

break out of these kind of old tired

scripts of behavior that we're all carrying around. That course starts on August 8th, and you can

learn more about it at rickhansen.com slash changing, and use coupon code being well 25 to receive

a 25% discount. So what I wanted to talk with you about today is that it's really easy for things to feel

a bit like Groundhog Day. Like there's a conversation that we just keep not having with somebody else,

or our to-do list has had an item on it that might as well be gathering mold at this point. It's been there for so long.

Maybe we keep ending up with the same kind of romantic partner or having the same argument or saying yes to things when people ask us even before we've thought about whether we actually want to do them or not. Maybe we keep on swerving away from different kinds of emotional experiences. I can certainly talk about that in some detail as you're aware. And if we're not aware of these kinds

of hidden patterns so they can run our lives, but even if we are aware of them, that doesn't

always help us do something about them. So today we're going to be talking about how these

patterns are fueled by avoidance, like you were just saying. We're going to define avoidance

coping. We're going to walk through exactly how this avoidance, like you were just saying. We're going to define avoidance coping.

We're going to walk through exactly how this avoidance loop works,

and then explain why knowing that you do this

...