It's a Friday afternoon. I have finally finished my work day and there is just one thing on my mind. I can finally go to the supermarket and get those cookies I've been dreaming about my whole day. I get to the local store which is near my flat.
I get near the aisle where there's a bunch of cookies and I'm standing there with a gaze and I noticed there's a little girl next to me. She's about four or five, let's call her Lucy. And Lucy has that same smile on her face like, all of these are gonna be mine.
At that moment I just take one or two packs for myself. She sees how I do this. She's like, uh-huh, this is how it works. She takes ten of them, puts them in her armpits and victoriously goes to the cashier's office and you have that sensation there's like...
ponies and rainbows and the sun is shining and she's gonna have a blastly Friday. I gather my stuff, get to the cashiers and I notice we're in the same queue. Lucy is there with her mom, she has thrown all the cookies there in the basket.
And unfortunately, as life is, mom takes all the cookies out, just leaves one pack. And when she takes them out, you notice that the sunshine and rainbow slowly starts to fade. And that's when Lucy starts to become a bit grim. She becomes a bit angry and starts to say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on there, Sparky.
What's going on? And then she realizes this is not going to end well. And then kind of those rainbows and sunshine and shines turning to rainy clouds and a thunderstorm. And that small, sweet Lucy isn't sweet Lucy anymore. She becomes angry and shouts and yells, Why?
Why are you doing this to me? Why? I want those cookies and so on, and starts to cry suddenly. And then kind of there's a fuss around the situation. Everybody looks how the mom is going to react.
And at this magical moment, all of you probably know a magical thing happens. Somewhere from. the store, the granny appears. She appears and starts to have an opinion, of course, on the matter that, oh, in my time things were different, yada, yada, yada.
Let's pause for a brief moment here. What you just... heard is basically a part of my daily life being a medical doctor and a psychotherapist that I hear a lot of stories which people go through and There's this myth that kind of you have to as a doctor distance yourself to distance yourself a bit from patients in order to kind of not get too involved, too attached, and so on, which is not quite true. When you are a psychotherapist, you need to actually let yourself feel, to some degree, to some extent, what the patient feels.
How that works is not magic. It's simple biology. You have a part of your brain that is called the limbic system, which is responsible for how you feel, where your emotions, yours and mine, reside. And when you have an emotional reaction, it's never logical.
It's neurophysiological, it's biology. It could be completely illogical. And when somebody feels something, you can start to feel in a similar manner.
To give you an example, a few years ago, I was asked by me and my girlfriend to babysit our friend's infant. Let's call him David. David is about eight months old.
When we arrived to their place, we... We go in and you have like a deja vu feeling. It's like sunshine and rainbows and ponies.
Everything is great. You go in. It's going to be a blast.
A blastly evening. The parents leave. We have a very nice time with David.
But an infant who is eight months old has a very special age. Everything is kind of nice. Up until one point, David notices something. You're not my real parents now, aren't you?
At which point, David starts to cry, as babies do, for five minutes. David's gonna be fine, we just have to try to caress him, maybe put him to bed. Fifteen. Okay then, let's change the diaper.
Yeah sure, let's change the diaper. Sure. We change the diaper. 25. Maybe let's feed him. Yes, let's feed him.
We feed him 40. At this point you start to have various ideas in your head. Like for example, David! Shut up David! Please shut up! Or that you would just leave him somewhere, or you could just ignore him for the rest of the evening.
But you realize you can't do that. An hour. An hour and ten.
And I remember so vividly, my girlfriend was holding David in her hands, and he's still crying. We're standing in the doorway, we look at each other, and we realize, we're screwed. And at that moment what basically happens on a neurobiological level? You can act out in this instance when you want to shake David, you want to put him away, you want to do something else, but it's interesting to notice in yourself how you actually feel.
And how I actually feel. felt at that moment was completely helpless, angry, in despair, scared at the same time, and don't know what to do. If you think about it, it's the same way how David feels. He's been abandoned by his parents.
My parents? Bastards. So, left him all alone with these two strangers at home. God knows what they are doing.
So, he's abandoned, all alone, helpless, hopeless, and scared. And the only thing you can do in this instance is to just be there with him, and to feel him, and to help him in his feelings what he's feeling. It's interesting when we start to feel something our minds change, kind of. to some degree to tell us what we actually feel. Every single one of us has been born with a completely different set of a brain.
How we experience feelings, how intensively that happens, would we experience all and the same feelings? The odd thing is, while we're growing up, we are taught, mostly by our parents, what feelings to feel and not to feel. Stereotypes exist because to some degree they are true.
If we are very open-minded, about things, then if I ask the ladies in the audience, you would probably want your man to be emotional, right? I can just, no, somebody said no, no, see, proves my point. So, to some degree you want him to be emotional, but if you're very open to yourself, you don't want the whole emotional spectrum.
You want him to be firm and stable, a man on a high horse, or Mercedes, whatever you prefer. But you don't want that embarrassment, the shame, the fear, the excessive jealousy. You don't want that, do you?
The same question will be for the men. You do want your lady next to you to be emotional, right? Of course not. You want her to be on the shy side, maybe a bit afraid.
Sometimes you can again ride on your high horse and your Mercedes and save them from despair. But good girls don't get angry, do they? You don't like the hysteria, you don't like the anger.
And these are the stereotypes that are taught to kids already from day one to basically eradicate some of the feelings that they have. And the more the years go by, you start to actually think you don't feel something and then you put your feelings somewhere else. You start to think you're angry at somebody else, you start to think you're afraid or ashamed of something else, which is not quite true.
To maybe not so talk much broadly and saying everything about you, I would like to share a story about me. How my feelings get to some degree in the way of my work. Four months ago, I received one of the worst phone calls you can get.
In the evening when I finished my work, my mom called me and told me those words I was always afraid I would hear from her, that my father had passed away. And I remember when I came home how filled with rage I was. I screamed and I yelled and I broke some furniture in my apartment.
And my girlfriend was there to see that, that thing happening to me. Of course, the funeral goes by and life goes on, and then you start to notice something interesting that some weeks have passed and walking kind of on the street to work, I don't even think about my dad in any way, any shape or form. but I'm looking at the people around me, and I notice a feeling in myself.
I hate every single one of them. I hate their smile, I even hate babies that I see. And you start to notice, what the hell is happening to me?
You get to work, you're angry at your colleagues, you want to tell them how important it is to cherish relationships, that how important it is to do stuff, to do things on time, not to let things go, and so on. and so on and so on. Months have passed and I was asked to do this TED talk. And I was preparing the speech for my TED talk and every single time I did it, I realized it's not good enough, this is not good enough, that is not good enough. And at some point there I...
even had the idea I'm gonna cancel this whole dead thing I called up my mom and said you know I think I'm gonna give up all this dead thing I don't want to do it and she said why so well because I don't know because I'm gonna stand there and I know what I'm gonna what I'm going to say and so on. And then it hit me. Why I didn't want to be here. It's not because I don't know what to say. I give lectures all the time.
I know what I'm going to talk about. The reason why I didn't want to be here because I know I would feel something standing right here. What I'm actually feeling right now. I notice my heart racing.
I notice that I'm sad that he's not here. He's not going to call me after this lecture. I notice that I'm angry that that's an inevitable thing of life.
At the same time, I'm to some degree maybe scared of shame. What if I drop a tear while I'm talking to you? How awful is that going to look? But...
I didn't finish the story about Lucy, did I? If we go back to Lucy, Lucy's mom could have done anything. She could have told, that's now how a girl behaves.
Look at that granny who's shouting at you. Look at the man, that tall man behind you, he's looking weirdly at you. I'm looking, what's actually happening?
And she didn't just keep silent and not say anything, she didn't devalue her, she didn't condemn her, she didn't do anything of the sort. All she did was get the groceries that she had. I took Lucy on her arms and I heard her just so vaguely that Lucy continued to tell mom I want those cookies so badly and I wanted them.
And the only thing that Lucy's mom said to Lucy was I know honey, I know you did. But it's okay to be angry, it's okay to be sad. And I remember I'm walking home from this kind of very simple scene any one of you has maybe already seen.
I go in my apartment, my girlfriend meets me, she asks me, well, how was your day? I said, I started off with a smile on my face. I said, I just saw a girl not get any cookies.
She's like, what? Are you okay? I'm probably in a psychotic state right now.
I said no, I tell her the whole story about the store. And then at some point I noticed that my smile kind of turns into a kind of single tear that I have. And she asked me, why are you crying? Is everything okay? I said no.
I miss him. Like a lot. And the hardest thing about feelings actually is that it's easy to some degree to think about them in your head.
But it's much harder to actually express them out loud. And all of my patients have... every single time asked me one and the same question.
What's the difference that I tell you that I'm angry, I'm scared, I'm helpless, I'm hopeless, I'm happy. What's the difference? And I tell them this is the difference. that somebody's here, this time it's me, who actually doesn't just understand what you're going through, but I feel what you're feeling to a certain amount. Question always is, the experiences that we have in life, how will that impact your and mine ability to, let's say, be there with somebody and feel these feelings?
The same way as David needed somebody. needed somebody to be there, the same way Lucy needed somebody to be there. Even I need somebody there to be there for me. And I hope every single one of you has the experience that not somebody understands you, but somebody feels you. Thank you.