Hey everybody, before we start the show I want to make a couple disclaimers.

This show does cover a wide variety of topics related to mental health and life in general,

and some of those could be sensitive for you.

I want to simultaneously encourage you to be brave in consuming difficult content, but also respect and recognize your limitations.

So please use your best judgment. I will never be offended if you need to skip a question or an episode entirely but feel free to feel it out

check out the episode and just see what happens if you need to skip that's okay

but you know feel free to give it a shot first I also need to say that while I am a

psychologist I'm not your psychologist and I'm not your therapist.

This is not intended to be direct medical advice and you should not use this as a substitute for professional help.

So with those said let's go ahead and get into the show. All varieties. This is the Hardcore Self-Help Podcast episode 93. I'm your

host Dr. Robert Duff, a psychologist from Southern California and the author of the

Hardcore Self-Help book series, but I am not your host today. Doing something a bit different.

So I am currently on paternity leave. My wife is having our second child, our second boy,

and taking some time off to focus on you know bringing

him into the world and focusing on family for a bit so I'll be off for a few weeks

and this is going to be the first of probably three episodes, though we'll see how that goes.

But I'm planning on at least three episodes of something being a bit different.

So today, what I'm going to be doing is having a friend of mine take over the show and she picked out a few questions that were

submitted to me in the past and she's going to be answering them.

The person who is on this episode is Dr. Amber Baker.

She is a clinical psychologist.

She actually was in the same program as me in graduate school,

...