Oh, can you share some of that? What could that be?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I'm thinking of one partnership in particular, where, you know, they're not technically married.

Like us, they're sharing the duties of parenting a son.

And they both identify as neurodivergent, but in very different ways.

And so it's the case that one partner in particular really just cannot meet the emotional needs of the mother.

And so they've stopped trying.

Like they've just realized like instead of bashing their head against the wall of frustration and resentment, they can actually reconfigure their relationship.

Is there a link here as well? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so how does that play out? How does that get to be a job?

Yeah, well, the justice part is more of an antecedent to what I'm doing now.

And so I was working in the field of restorative justice where I really learned this protocol, sequence, philosophy, ethos, paradigm, whatever you want to call it.

And it's a really revolutionary alternative to the criminal justice system that we have in this country, at least in the United States, right? where retribution and punishment and trying to figure out who the wrongdoer is, who the breaker of laws is, to really something that humanizes conflict in a pretty radical way.

You know, what restorative means is restoring ruptures that have occurred in relationships.

And so this is a tradition that comes out of indigenous societies and cultures that understood that no relationship or no person was disposable.

And so when ruptures happen, we have to tend to them because we have to find a way to live together.

Can you say more about that? Because that's liberating.

How did that evolution happen and what made it possible to build something so professional out of something so personal?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I love the way that you're framing that.

We were friends first for many years.

We actually met at a residential massage school program in Northern California.

We're both East Coasters.

What did working with victims and offenders in the criminal justice system teach you about repair and couples recovery?

Yes.

Yeah.

For me, I think it's, you know, so much of my processes revolves around conflict.

You know, it's the work that I'm doing with clients is I'm focused on how to teach people to approach and handle conflict differently.

And so for me, conflict has really become central in terms of how to really cultivate intimacy.

Like, I really see it as one of the single best ways to develop deeper levels of intimacy.

I think the deeper I go into exploring conflict and how to operate within its realm differently, I'm seeing like, "Wow, this is the single best way into levels of intimacy I don't know if we can get any other way." Um, and so I'm really curious about what helps us do intimacy well.

[laughs]

And how confusing for my brain to... be physically safe and yet psychologically so scared, overwhelmed, concerned, and not knowing how to regulate within those two parallel existences.

Yeah, and I think one of the things that we're also waking up to, as the world becomes more complex, so does our inner world.

So we're becoming more and more aware of our own intra-psychic experience, I think in a way that wasn't available to so many people in the past.

So that's my sense is that as human beings, we're becoming more and more aware to the inner experience.

And as we do that, we're starting to hear these voices in a newly acute way.

And that's what the book that we wrote is really about, is about learning how to pay attention to some particular voices, voices that are really driving a lot of this sense of dysregulation or overwhelm.

And when we're talking about the inner critic and shame and the interplay between those two, There are fewer things in my mind that can drive a sense of overwhelm faster and more intensely than inner critic and shame.

Yeah.

yeah then let's start with that how do you integrate ai in your coaching programs what do you find there

so i the second i was able to use zoom ai internally, I jumped on the chance to use that as UCLA Anderson first brought it into Zoom.

And it was really, in my opinion, it only started to improve the coaching sessions that I did with everyone that I worked with.

And what I mean by that was we cover a lot.

The coaching sessions I have for UCLA Anderson, the career coaching sessions, tend to be 30 minutes in length.

And so with that type of length, the idea is you need to cover a lot in a short period of time.

Alumni technically get access to four sessions per year.

So what's the most common AI related challenge that you're hearing right now from your coaching clients from these fields?

How did that transition happen?

So I started the show in 2023.

And this was when the Great Awakening happened.

Well, actually, prior to the Great Awakening, which is COVID-19, where everyone, when a lot of information started to be exposed out there, I started debating on Clubhouse.

So prior to me even doing a podcast, this was about 2020.

I started doing debates on Clubhouse because we were we were locked in our houses and we were debating on mask mandates and debating, you know, why we're locked down for so long.

So I was doing those type of political debates.

Yeah, your bread and butter is the feminist stuff, right? Like, that's your strongest stance.

Mm

... was the first time I ever recognized, you know, and that was really what...

I still back then wasn't even hewing out the language of attachment yet, but looking back I can see, oh, there's a real anxious avoidant pattern that was happening in me, um, that really stems from my relationship with my mother in so many ways.

But I was seeing this pattern, realizing, oh, this is, this is following me every time I get into a relationship with a woman.

And the breakup was so tumultuous.

We were actually living together and working together.

I mean, it was just, it was so incestuous, and it was with a group of friends, and it, it was just, you know, kind of a young mistake to make in so many ways.

Mm.