Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today, as is frequently the case, by clinical psychologist, Rick Hansen, dad. How are you doing today? I'm good, Forrest, and I'm always happy to be here with you. Same, same, I'm really happy to be here with you today. This is going to be our first mailbag episode of 2026. If you have a question that you would like to hear answered on the podcast, the best way to do that is by signing up for our Patreon. I normally ask our patrons

first when we're going to do a mailbag episode. It's patreon.com slash being well podcast. But you can also

send an email to contact at being well podcast.com. And before we get into it, I also wanted to give you a

quick reminder about one of Rick's online courses. It's titled Rewire Your Anxious Brain. It started on January 24th,

but you can still sign up for it and get plenty of value out of it. It's 12 weeks long. It's a brand new

offering from Rick this year, and so far we've gotten really positive reviews on that. So you can

learn more at Rickhanson.com slash anxious and get an additional 10% off with the coupon code BWP 10.

That's the letters BWP and then the number 10.

So, okay, our first question today, really interesting questions all around on this

mailback episode.

You were just telling me before we started recording dad how kind of thought provoking Lisa's

has been for you.

So the first question that we had, I tend to move into a freeze state in response to conflict,

and I really appreciated your episode on the topic. I've become more aware of this tendency,

but now when I notice I'm in a free state, but still can't do anything about it, it creates an

extra layer of helplessness and shame.

These feelings seem to make it even harder to do anything about the free state itself.

Is this normal? Am I missing something? And what can I do about it? What did you think about this, dad?

I thought a lot about it. For one, I thought about the creatures outside my window in our home, the squirrel,

the lizards. You have a very active backyard. You're right on the edge of open space, yeah.

It's like Dr. Doolittle. You got a bird feeder. They're a family of quail that come down.

It's really something. Oh, I've seen foxes, turkeys, and deer walking through our backyard, coyotes.

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