Hey, oh, oh, come on and take a seat on the virtual couch.

Hey, everybody, welcome to the virtual couch.

My name is Tony Overbay.

This is episode number 323.

I did that all backwards, but I still am a licensed marriage and family therapist.

And continuing by popular demand, if you go to Tonyoverbay.com slash workshop, I have an hour and a half marriage communication workshop where I talk

about how we show up in relationships, the fact that just being part of the human race, you are

emotionally immature coming out of your childhood and your adolescence. And all of a sudden,

we meet somebody and we just want to get it right. We have

these deep seated abandonment fears or wounds and so we're trying to show up in a relationship

and make sure that we don't mess it up. And then over the process of relationships, life happens.

We get jobs. We have kids. People get sick. We have to move. We have financial pressures.

And that's when we realize, oh, we are two different people in this relationship with two completely different experiences growing up. Even if during the courtship and early on in our relationship, we felt like everything was so easy. And it's easy because you're, quite frankly, you're not dealing with a whole lot of things right out of the gate. I mean, you're dealing with the things that newlyweds or people early in a relationship deal with. But when stuff starts to go down, when stuff starts to happen in your life, that's when you find out, oh, we have different opinions. And it is so normal, so natural to not truly know how to effectively communicate. And if you are the person that feels like, no, my marriage is a breeze, like this has been a piece of cake. Does your spouse have a voice? Do you truly understand and know them? Or do you feel like, of course, I know what they're thinking? Because if you do, that may mean that they don't feel like they are able to express themselves because you are often probably telling them, no, that's not what you mean. I know.

I know you better than yourself. Or that's not what I meant. Or anyway, I could go on and on. I love that stuff so much. I think you owe it to yourself. There's a dramatic term. To go to Tonyoverbay.com slash workshop, there is a small fee, $19 to get that workshop. And I lay out a lot of tools right out of the gate to help you just understand what a real healthy relationship

can look like. workshop and I lay out a lot of tools right out of the gate to help you just understand

what a real healthy relationship can look like and then what some of those tools are to get

there. So that was a long, unplanned ad for Tonyoverbaid.com slash workshop. So go check that out.

And let's get to today's topic. This one fascinates me so much because as I talk about the concepts around things like acceptance and commitment therapy and noticing our thoughts and noticing our behaviors and what we're doing and how the fact of what's wrong with me or I am so fill in the blank, I'm a piece of garbage or I'm dumb or that zero of that. If you are giving

yourself that kind of self-talk, negative self-talk, zero of that is helpful or productive. And I haven't

really done this intentionally, but if you look at the last few topics, I tackled shame a few weeks

ago because I just feel like we turn to this shame. We turn to this, I know I shouldn't be doing

this. What's wrong with me? I'm a bad person. And sometimes we do that by default. And I can have people in my office and I know they probably get annoyed. But when they're saying, and I know, what's wrong with me? And I shouldn't have thought that, should I? And they're saying those things. And I just, it's hard to not just say, I want to reframe what you're

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