Speaker 1: Hey, Fucker's it's Christina and Karin. You are about to
Speaker 1: listen to a clip from our podcast Guys We Fucked,
Speaker 1: and this week we have on the incredible therapist Guy Winch.
Speaker 1: You want to hear the entire interview and more from
Speaker 1: us and other minds like Michael Rappaport rocksand Gay Lena Dunham,
Speaker 1: Trevor Noah, head on over to Luminary podcast dot com today.
Speaker 1: Heartbreak is so heartbreak is the worst feeling a person
Speaker 1: can endure. I think, um, because Karin has this joke
Speaker 1: that we've referenced before because we're both stand up comedians,
Speaker 1: where when when a relative dies, Uh, you know, it's
Speaker 1: a really tough it's a terrible loss, but it's permanent
Speaker 1: and the healing process can kind of begin right away.
Speaker 1: But when you get heartbroken, there's there's all these what
Speaker 1: ifs that you cling to, like it's your last breath
Speaker 1: and it's it's It's wild how heartache brings out the
Speaker 1: crazy side and the most sane people. As you've said
Speaker 1: before in your talks and in your books. Um, and
Speaker 1: I'm curious, yeah, a lot of Like I've experienced childhood
Speaker 1: trauma and I didn't understand that I did until a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago. And it is a very jarring realization.
Speaker 1: You think you have this great childhood and then you
Speaker 1: look back and you're like, wait, that was really fucked up.
Speaker 1: And when I get heartbroken, that retriggers all of that.
Speaker 1: But I've I've seen people like Karin has never experienced
Speaker 1: childhood trauma and like the heartbreak was the impetus of
Speaker 1: this podcast. And I saw my comedy partnerer and her
Speaker 1: tongue turned gray. It seemed like she lost twenty pounds
Speaker 1: in two weeks, Like it was just such a drastic change. Um,
Speaker 1: is there any link between trauma and and your reaction
Speaker 1: to heartbreak? Because from what I've seen, there's not. But
Speaker 1: I'm curious what your opinion is from a psychologist point
Speaker 1: of view. So look, I'll answer it this way. If
Speaker 1: you think about the life experiences we can go through,
Speaker 1: and let's include all kinds of grief experiences in that,
Speaker 1: and maybe even trauma experiences in that. In the immediate
Speaker 1: aftermath of trauma or grief, people will get let's say,
Speaker 1: very depressed, they might get paralyzed, they might literally stop
Speaker 1: functioning with heartbreak. People go crazy, there is nothing, nothing,
Speaker 1: There is no other life experience we can have that
Speaker 1: will take a sane and I use that word in quotation,
Speaker 1: marks not legally the same normative person and overnight change
Speaker 1: them into someone who is behaving not just thinking and feeling,
Speaker 1: but behaving absolutely what we would consider crazy. And that's
Speaker 1: what I find so profound about heartbreak, that it's the
Speaker 1: only experience that can truly do that. I've worked with
Speaker 1: people who were ridiculously wealthy, who offered hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars to the person who broke their heart, truly
Speaker 1: and it was a sincere offer just so they can
Speaker 1: have a conversation. What. Yes, I would have done that
Speaker 1: if I had more money. I can see we see
Speaker 1: doing that. It's funny that you bring that up, because
Speaker 1: I did. I mean it was more like sexual. But
Speaker 1: I there was a person who I did offer several
Speaker 1: hundred dollars with like just to have sex with them.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't from like a sex work. It was
Speaker 1: an accident and it was more like just to get
Speaker 1: them in the room. Wow, okay, um, I have so
Speaker 1: many questions there, but I'm gonna we think in the
Speaker 1: room what what what does that mean to get them
Speaker 1: in the room for the so I could have that
Speaker 1: like a conversation, um like of of closure or just
Speaker 1: to kind of like smell them again, to feel them again.
Speaker 1: It's not like I needed to have sex, yes, for
Speaker 1: a conversation, right, this is for a conversation. I've seen
Speaker 1: people fly across the Atlantic to quote unquote surprise, And
Speaker 1: maybe I shouldn't put quotations around surprise, because trust me,
Speaker 1: it was a surprise person who broke their heart, who
Speaker 1: they knew what they were going to be on holiday
Speaker 1: with their family because they thought that if they just
Speaker 1: did this and brought their favorite that that maybe people
Speaker 1: and it and and we literally go off the rails
Speaker 1: and and and there's no there's nothing like it. There's
Speaker 1: nothing else just behave this way. And so yes, it's
Speaker 1: an extraordinary intense, difficult, painful experience. And as I said
Speaker 1: in my book, had effects are broken heart one, which
Speaker 1: is absolutely unsanctioned in terms of society. No one goes
Speaker 1: to their boss and says, my my girlfriend dumped me.
Speaker 1: I need the day off. It will be like, maybe
Speaker 1: you're not promotion material. So there's there's this, there's this
Speaker 1: real societal marginalization of how profound the pain is and
Speaker 1: how severe the impact is, and and that's the mix.
Speaker 1: That's something that makes us go so crazy. That's so
Speaker 1: universal that we experienced at any age, and that is
Speaker 1: so ridiculously difficult. There is just enough supportful in society. Wow,
Speaker 1: that is a really good point. She's sweeped on this
Speaker 1: for seven years, and you think of I've heard I thought,
Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard it all. But that's a
Speaker 1: really good stance on that people are so ashamed about
Speaker 1: their heartache because it makes them acts so out of character.
Speaker 1: I wish we Yeah, we gotta normalize that more. We also,
Speaker 1: you do feel like you have to lie about it
Speaker 1: because I remember the breaking pathetic that was the impetus
Speaker 1: for this show. Obviously I couldn't go into work that day,
Speaker 1: but I didn't call out heartbroken. I called out like
Speaker 1: period cramps or something. To me. You know, I've worked
Speaker 1: through I've gone to work with terrible period cramps hundreds
Speaker 1: of times, just bleeding right through my pand But but
Speaker 1: I mean when I was heartbroken, I mean I I
Speaker 1: worked in a spa at the first time. I was
Speaker 1: severely heartbroken, the worst of them, and I had to
Speaker 1: bring clients down this dark hallway and I had to
Speaker 1: cry so often that I remember that dark hallway was
Speaker 1: such a gift because I could cry for you know,
Speaker 1: thirty seconds while I brought them to get their robe
Speaker 1: in their slippers and then you know, wipe away the
Speaker 1: tears and it was dark enough that they couldn't see
Speaker 1: give it to them and then go back to the
Speaker 1: front desk. So it was like it was that's how
Speaker 1: frequently I needed to go through the grieving processes. And
Speaker 1: that lasted for like, I mean that was six months
Speaker 1: a year of that? How long? How long does heartache last?
Speaker 1: Or how is it? What's an amount of time that
Speaker 1: makes sense? And is is there amount of time where
Speaker 1: you would be like, okay, you need we need to
Speaker 1: do something different here, you know? That is the question
Speaker 1: I get us very frequently, most often by people who
Speaker 1: are heartbroken, who who I have sessions with. I do
Speaker 1: sessions with people from all over the world are who
Speaker 1: are heartbroken, and what they want to know is like,
Speaker 1: is this normal this amount of time? And and here's
Speaker 1: the basic answer to it. It depends on numerous factors,
Speaker 1: but it depends obviously on the on the length and
Speaker 1: the quality of the relationship. But it truly depends on
Speaker 1: what that represented. So for someone, for example, who's had
Speaker 1: such trouble finding dates and just never meet someone and
Speaker 1: they're just almost practically given up on finding love, and
Speaker 1: then they go on three or four dates and the
Speaker 1: dates are great, and they have, over those three or
Speaker 1: four dates, developed such hope that you know, like Etha
Speaker 1: James is singing at last in their head all the time,
Speaker 1: and and and they've told everyone, Okay, this is it,
Speaker 1: this is it, because you know when it's it, and
Speaker 1: I know, and they've built such expectations and when that
Speaker 1: goes south, that can devastate them for many, many, many months.
Speaker 1: And so there's it's not the correlation between how long
Speaker 1: the relationship is or how intense it is. It's truly
Speaker 1: about a what it represented for you and be what's
Speaker 1: the context of your life? Um. And for some people
Speaker 1: the confluence of those kinds of factors can make something
Speaker 1: last a long time. But that's it our want, our
Speaker 1: basic instinct, the um, the the tide that pulls us
Speaker 1: is to usually do all the wrong things, and so
Speaker 1: that often will extend it because we are indulging and
Speaker 1: because I shouldn't say indulging rather because we don't know
Speaker 1: that we are. Um. But we are allowing ourselves to
Speaker 1: do everything wrong that's going to keep the pain alive,
Speaker 1: that's going to keep the hurt going, that's going to
Speaker 1: keep us from recovering. And we don't realize that's what
Speaker 1: we're doing. We think we're responding to instincts or we
Speaker 1: have all these rationalizations for it, but in fact we
Speaker 1: are doing every wrong thing we possibly could. Is there
Speaker 1: a you know a lot of times human behaviors linked
Speaker 1: to original survival instincts, like, um, you know, a man
Speaker 1: would be set really attracted to a woman with large
Speaker 1: breast because deep, deep, deep down she could feed the
Speaker 1: baby the best. You know that kind of stuff. Is
Speaker 1: there a survival part of heartache at all? Yes, but
Speaker 1: not in the way you expect um In this way
Speaker 1: when when you touch a hot stove as a kid
Speaker 1: and it hurts, your mind's job is to prevent you
Speaker 1: from touching it again. So what your what we evolved
Speaker 1: to do is to avoid danger, to avoid threat to ourselves,
Speaker 1: and pain physical or emotionally is threat. And so what
Speaker 1: on what we evolved to do is that when we
Speaker 1: feel a threat. When we feel pain, our mind will
Speaker 1: try and convince us to avoid doing the thing that
Speaker 1: caused the pain in the first place. And the way
Speaker 1: it does that is by reminding us how painful it is,
Speaker 1: because if we forget, we might indulge in the hot
Speaker 1: stove again by touching the hot stoves, So it keeps
Speaker 1: reminding us over in that that stove was really hot,
Speaker 1: that store was really hot. When it comes to heartbreak,
Speaker 1: what does is our mind's job is to remind us
Speaker 1: that that was very painful, and so it will do
Speaker 1: things that will generate a lot of pain so that
Speaker 1: you don't make that mistake again. But by doing so,
Speaker 1: it's really delaying our recovery, which, again from a mind sperceective,
Speaker 1: is a great job. The longer I lay the recovery,
Speaker 1: I delay the recovery. The longer I can get them
Speaker 1: to feel really painful, the you know, the least likely
Speaker 1: they are to go and do this stupid thing cooled
Speaker 1: love again. Um, of course that's complete. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: in contrary to what our goals are in that moment.
Speaker 1: So our goals are to move past it, no, stay
Speaker 1: with Yeah, So there is there is a you know,
Speaker 1: some connection to this evolutionary psychology in that sense, Hey
Speaker 1: fucker's I hope you enjoyed our interview with Guy Winch.
Speaker 1: That was just a tiny portion of our conversation. If
Speaker 1: you want to hear the whole thing and more of
Speaker 1: guys we funked, head on over the Luminary podcast dot com,
Speaker 1: where you can get a subscription. First low is two
Speaker 1: dollars and ninety nine goddamn sense a month.