Hey, Alyssa. Hey, Sam. Are you ready? I'm so ready. Dr. Badalli, are you ready? I'm ready.

Woo!

Okay, you guys. We are so excited. We are here with Dr. Badalli. She is a registered

psychologist. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Badalli, and any of this. She's a registered

psychologist. She has over 20 years of experience and she has graciously agreed to come on the

podcast today and talked to us primarily about phobias. I'm so interested in phobias. Me too.

I, as you guys know, have a lot of quirks, I would say, and not the term we're going with. Yes,

that's the medically. Yes, because I haven't been diagnosed. So I'm not trying to diagnose myself.

Okay, I have quirks. I've been really interested in everything kind of anxiety related,

because as you know, I've developed anxiety in my teenage years, which was odd for me. I didn't

realize that that was going to be a thing that happened. I got really recently interested in phobias.

So she's agreed to come on here and talk to us about that and maybe some anxiety and stuff

like that as well. So thanks again for coming on here. Before we get to jump right into the

phobia talk, I kind of wanted to ask just some questions about you and your practice and kind of

like why you became a therapist and all that. Sure, be delighted to answer those questions. What

made you decide to pursue that role? Well, I started my university career not knowing really what

I wanted to do. And I took a psychology course because I thought it would be interesting. And

you know, in that first year, I really started to fall in love with the subject. I became more

and more interesting to me. You know, and as is often the case when people find their passion,

there's like this personal piece, plus this kind of set of skills that you have that sort of

matches that. And at the time as a human, I was going through something difficult because my mom

had breast cancer and so that was a lot on my mind. And I just I was fascinated by the research

...