JOSH: Hello, and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you've joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Annie Lalla about relational dynamics and connection, the sacred polarities of true love, and leading oneself out of victimhood.

SPENCER: Annie, welcome.

ANNIE: Yay.

SPENCER: What do you mean when you say that people should bring their 'A' game to relationships?

ANNIE: Well, if you're in a process of interviewing for your life partner, which we call dating, then every single person you interact with is either the one that you're going to end up with or their practice for that person. When an Olympic athlete goes to practice at the gym every day, they're practicing for that Olympic opportunity, and you don't just wait to bring your 'A' game when you're at the Olympics; you bring your 'A' game every time you practice so that you're myelinating the pathways of bringing your best self. While we may find ourselves on a date with someone and think, "Oh, I'm not into them. I'm not going to end up with this person," you want to keep practicing in your romantic dance, operating at the highest level of emotional sophistication, moral dignity, care, and consideration, because that's what's getting habituated.

SPENCER: Now, do you mean on initial dates, or do you mean throughout the whole relationship?

ANNIE: Well, exactly, so definitely throughout the dates. I usually say that term for people who are dating or interviewing, and when you're in your romantic relationship of choice, you are practicing to become the highest version of yourself, the best lover. The whole point of a relationship is for it to be a dojo, a school, a gymnasium for you to build your muscles. Even when you go to the gym, you want to bring the best game you can bring that day. And depending on your mood and whether you got enough sleep or what kind of day it is, your 'A' game might not always be the same every day, but it's really just an invitation to bring your highest self, your best self, to any interaction with reality.

SPENCER: Now, when you say that a relationship really has the purpose of growing or building your muscles, what do you mean by that? Because I think many people don't see relationships that way.

ANNIE: In my studies of relationship dynamics, I see the most successful long-term relationships as a transformational crucible or a dojo or gymnasium. When you go to the gym, you're going to enhance your longevity and your health, but you're also trying to build your muscles, your emotional fitness. In performance athletics, they measure your fitness by your speed of recovery: how quickly your heartbeat recovers from being intense, and how quickly you recover from a wound. In relational dynamics, I see more like emotional CrossFit Games, and your speed of recovery emotionally, from being angry, sad, upset, or dysregulated, how quickly you can come back to a grounded baseline is an indication of your fitness. Relationships are a context where you can cultivate more emotional fitness. At the gym, when you lift a barbell to build a muscle, it has to rip microscopic tears in the muscle at the heavy weight, which then tells the muscle to grow back more muscle fiber, so it grows back stronger. In a relational dynamic, every conflict, if done correctly, can be like a rip in the heart muscle of both of you and the relationship, and it can grow back stronger if you know how to navigate through conflict, which is what I teach people how to do. If you lift weights at the gym that are too heavy and you tear the muscle, then you're out of commission for months. There's a way that you can fight relationally that doesn't tear the muscle, just makes microscopic rips that the musculature can handle, and it grows back stronger.

SPENCER: Does that suggest that conflict is actually good for relationships?

ANNIE: Absolutely. I think conflict is the context in which intimacy is forged. Collaboration is one of the ways I view conflict resolved. A conflict is a collaboration trying to happen between two disparate philosophies, value sets, and metaphysical models. It's like trying to test two puzzle pieces. It takes some energy and some work, and often in the process of collaboration, you go through many tussles, which we can call conflicts. If you give up in the conflict, give up on the conversation, on the collaboration trying to happen, then you give up on the chance to develop intimacy. The tussling of the two puzzle pieces, the two different realities, two different perspectives, is a give and a take, an exploration, and a mutual understanding. In the process of conflict or collaboration, you learn about yourself, what you stand for, what you're willing to let go of, and you learn about your partner. I actually see conflict as a developmental process for intimacy, both with yourself as an individual in the context of an us, but also an understanding of your partner's differences and an appreciation of those differences. Usually, your partner has superpowers or a PhD in an area that you're still in kindergarten, so you attract someone who's your favorite teacher, not in the area you want to learn, but in the area you most need to learn to become more balanced and whole. That's what we call attraction.

SPENCER: What about relationships that have very little conflict, where they're loving, they're kind, they're gentle, and people just enjoy being around each other? They never really fight. Isn't that a very nice thing?

ANNIE: Oh, it's lovely. In terms of longevity, long-lasting relationships, human beings tend to operate most effectively in this zone of flow, where there's enough challenge to keep them engaged and fascinated in any process, including romance. In order for a relationship to last long term, I've observed it needs to have an equal balance of attraction and repulsion to create the tensegrity to keep them in orbit, kind of like the moon rotating around the Earth. There's the gravitational pull of the two bodies pulling them together, and there's a centrifugal force trying to spin the moon out of orbit. When those two vectors are equal and opposite in dynamic tension, it produces this long-term orbit. So, conflict is this moving back and forth between attraction and repulsion. Couples that are sweet and companions and get along, in my experience, don't express a passionate aliveness around the relational dynamic. I don't see an evolutionary process and longevity that comes from the challenge we need in our engagement with reality. I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm just saying the long-term relationships that seem the most exciting and passionate, value-creating for the world tend to be ones that have this dynamic tension between attraction and repulsion and this carving of you into your greatest self. One of the metaphors I like to think about is Michelangelo carving David out of the block of marble. He was known to have said that he saw David inside the marble, and he just carved away everything that wasn't David. When you fall in love with your long-term partner, your life partner, you have to see them as Michelangelo, and you have to offer yourself up as a block of marble. They're not trying to change you, but they fell in love with your essence. They fell in love with the fundamental characterizing feature of your soul. You hire them to carve away everything that is not you, all your defense mechanisms, your wound-driven strategies, your myopias and patterns from childhood to cope with the difficulties of being raised by human beings. You hire them to scrape away everything that is not you to emancipate the magnum opus, the masterpiece that is you inside the marble. It's kind of like scraping off barnacles off a boat. Oftentimes, when our partner gives us feedback, we think, "Oh, I'm getting criticized. They want to change me." No, they're trying to emancipate you from your smallness into your greatness. When you fall in love with a partner, you don't fall in love with them. You fall in love with who you get to be because of them, through them, beside them. You fall in love with them being a portal to your actualized self. In human developmental models, we're always unwittingly and unconsciously moving towards greater consciousness, greater expansion, a wider range of capacities. Being in a relational context where you're challenged, where conflict and collaboration are dancing through your conversations, you become more actualized. Your potential gets manifested more, and your capacity for love increases — love of yourself, others, and the world. If you just have this copacetic, no-challenge dynamic, I don't know if it affords the opportunity for challenge, growth, and development that all human beings naturally move through.

SPENCER: Most people are attracted most of the time to things that are similar to themselves. There are interesting exceptions, like most men want to be with women, and most sexually dominant people want to be with sexually submissive people. But mostly, people are attracted to similarity. Are they not? Is that widely believed? Maybe it's not true.

ANNIE: I think we're attracted to a hybrid of similarity and difference because similarity affords some shared reality in the Venn diagram, so we can at least build on a conversation, but the difference is what produces the fascination. Very few of us are fascinated by our palms with the back of our hands because we get acclimatized and used to things, and we can take it for granted. I think of a human being as an infinitely interesting, unfurling phenomenon. If you can see the difference as developmental structures against which you build your skill set and expand your consciousness, it becomes like the barbells at the gym. What you're attracted to, really, from my observations, is a particular brand of heartbreak. You're attracted to a good-looking, intelligent, high-consciousness, committed-to-growth person — like all the things we say — funny, whatever. But you're also attracted to someone who replicates a specific brand of heartbreak that is reminiscent nostalgically of your attachment wound in childhood. That's what produces the chemistry because very often someone shows up that meets all your criteria. They're handsome, they're intelligent, they're all the things you have on your resume, but you don't feel the chemistry. I've noticed what makes someone feel that charge of attraction, sexual and intrigue, is the taste of potential heartbreak that is reminiscent of the original attachment wound. When you fall in love, your original attachment wounds port right over to your romantic partner, and we hire someone to replay that love scene. The attachment dynamic with your parent, from whom you had to earn love, becomes that imprint. The attachment imprint becomes the blueprint for your future romantic partner. We're running through the world, scanning ostensibly for someone we're attracted to and is smart and interesting, but we're also scanning for someone who replicates that wound so that we can put them in the movie scene with us, and they can play out the scene. At the end of the scene, this time, we finally get the happy ending — the kind of love that we didn't get from our original attachment dynamic. We hire someone to play out that role, and we then have to train them how to love us in the way we most needed but never got. Who we become in order to train them, without shame or blame, ideally as an inspirational invitation to their greatness, is developmentally actualizing for us. It's a very interesting growth dance that's built into the symmetry.

SPENCER: I've seen some cases where I think what you're describing is going on where someone had narcissistic parents and they seem to be attracted to narcissists, or at least they seem to not be turned off by narcissists in the same way other people would be. How often do you think this really happens? Do you actually think that most relationships are like this?

ANNIE: Yeah, so if you take the two extremes, let's take the clinical term narcissist, and then at the far end of, let's say, narcissist is one side of the number line and the other side is codependent empath. They're always attracted to each other because a narcissist has a very strong sense of I: self, needs, and wants. They have clear boundaries. They can assert their autonomy in the world. A co-dependent empath, the more martyr type, doesn't have a strong sense of self. They're deeply attuned to everybody else's needs in the space, with strong guilt, shame, and empathy. At some level, they're both attracted to their opposite skill because some higher part of them knows they need to practice that skill in order to become more whole. Co-dependent empaths and narcissists tend to find each other because they're seeking to be cross-trained in their underdeveloped skill in service of wholeness. Now let's take those two extremes, the narcissist and the codependent empath. Every couple I've seen that lasts long term is somewhere on the spectrum. Privately, when I think about a couple, I know which one is more, I call it "Nar-Nar," it's my pet soft name for the more agentic, self-oriented, autonomous, sovereign individual who's guarding the sacred polarity of me, I, individuality, and there's always another person who's attracted to that, who's guarding the sacred polarity of "we-hood", connection, communion, us, we. In long-term successful relationships — true love — there tend to be these two sacred polarities, the "me-guardian" and the "we-guardian." It can flip-flop, but in general, they find each other in order to cross-train so that they become proficient in both. To be in love in a long-term relationship, you need to be proficient at autonomy, individuality, knowing your needs, wants, and desires, being able to empathize with your own truth and your needs, and you have to become proficient at empathizing with other people's needs, wants, and desires. Whether the narcissist or the co-dependent empath realizes it or not, they're actually seeking wholeness in their attraction. Learning how to surrender as a student to your partner's intelligence and to become their advisor in the areas that they're underdeveloped is something that I teach couples how to do. So now I said those are two extremes. Every couple I've seen that is long-term successful tends to have these two sacred polarities in the dance. It's just how far they are from the center point. The narcissist is at the edge, and the codependent empath is at the edge, but every couple I've seen has these tendencies, and they're drawn together to balance out. It's almost like they have two biceps, and one's overdeveloped and one's underdeveloped, and they're walking around kind of lopsided. What's interesting is, in my relationship with my husband, he was definitely more I-centered when I met him. He was the most triumphantly autonomous person I'd ever met. He could hold a boundary. He could articulate his needs and wants. At the time, I wasn't aware of it, but I realized I was fascinated by that because I knew it was my underdeveloped skill. Over the years, I've had to train him how to attune to my needs, wants, and desires, and I've had to help build empathy algorithms to help have that cascade through his system. He systematically taught me algorithms for selfhood, how to attune to my needs and wants while blocking out the need to be in rapport with everybody else. I literally had to teach him inner game technology to dissociate from everyone else's requirements and attune and associate into mine. I've been teaching it the opposite. Together we're cross-training so that if and when we ever have a child, which is really the whole evolutionary imperative for mating, whether you have a child or not, that's always running under the surface. The whole point is that when you have a child, you are sufficiently cross-trained in both so that you can offer that educational platform for the child to have a powerful sense of self and the ability to tune to others so they can have successful relationships and collaborations. It's all by design to holographically represent these two genius potentialities in one person as best as they can. I'm never going to be as good at selfhood as my husband, and he'll probably never be as good at empathizing with others, but we're both quite competent at it now.

SPENCER: I like that model you present of the scale and how different people fall in different points, and perhaps people are attracted to people that are towards the opposite of the spectrum. I think I have a bit of a more cynical view when it comes to people at complete opposite ends of the spectrum. If you have someone who's really highly narcissistic dating someone who's, let's say, borderline or extremely empathetic, but also puts their whole identity of self in the other person, what often happens is that the narcissist just has their ego built up by the other person, and then the narcissist absorbs them into their own ego. It's really not a healthy dynamic. I'm wondering, would you disagree with that, or would you say that is often what happens, but there's a better way of doing that?

ANNIE: The dance you just talked about is happening in every successful relationship that I've seen at some percent. What I do is I come in there and I get clear on what are the incentives of the narcissist, "What do you actually want?" In order to get a narcissist to shift their behavior, you have to show the developmental path lined up with their incentives. If there's nothing in it for them, they won't take action because they don't have native wiring for empathy. I have to basically train them. There may be people on the spectrum that are so far that I don't know how to help. I don't get people like Charles Manson and his devotees coming in. Who knows? Maybe if you let me at them, I could have probably emancipated them too. But I have an idealism around this, and I'm just going to put that proviso in. The idealism is that when the chemistry is right and true love is present, a narcissist's tendency can be tamed, and the codependent martyr tendency is tamed because the relationship itself won't work unless both of them take on the technology of each other. A codependent empath with a narcissist has to be inspired, which is what I do with my clients, in couples. I find the Nar-Nar polarity and I find the codependent empath polarity, and I hold them as equally triumphantly beautiful and crazy. I don't see the narcissist as the evil, bad one and the codependent empath as the poor victim. No, they're both equally crazy, and they come together to transcend their habits. If I can show the narcissist how the thing they want will be served by them taking on developing empathy algorithms, attuning to others, if I can show them how the things that they're struggling with in life are linked to this incapacity, then I can market to them the development of attuning to others and having other people's needs and wants matter to them. With the codependent empath, I have to help elucidate for them how the very things they want most in life, including the success of this relationship, are being undermined by their current inability to stand with a strong backbone and articulate their needs, wants, and desires; again, lining up their incentives. I have to shuttle tools and a portfolio of tools to allow both of these polarities to become more proficient in the opposite skill set, which is why they came together. This process is what I do with every couple. Every couple has this polarity. I don't say, "Hey, you're the Nar-nar and you're the codependent empath," but I quickly suss out in the current dynamic which way they're slanting. I don't have a bias to one or the other. I know that they're dancing together because they're trying to transcend this compulsive habit, and that's why they're attracted. It really becomes a marketing campaign of enrolling both polarities into coming closer to the center and seeing how their attraction is being derived from an admiration and aspiration to be like the other person. In fact, if I can get the codependent empath to become more agentic, I show them how it robs their narcissistic partner of that compulsion. It's almost like the universe hands out this couple so many kilojoules of self-absorption, and if one partner, like the codependent empath, takes use of those kilojoules of autonomy, there's less for their narcissistic partner to use. I have a lot of different ways that I sell each person using their values and their incentives on new behaviors. What I'm trying to do is get them to see the beauty, dignity, and intelligence of their partner's craziness and to take on more of it so that there's less for their partner to use. It's almost like using up the resource before their partner gets to it. Then I teach them how to do that because often the empath has no personality scaffolding. They don't yet know how to cultivate a self. I have to help them build that systematically, and I have to help build the narcissistic slanting partner's empathy algorithms and show them how all the places they've failed historically and are currently failing in their life are linked to this incapacity.

SPENCER: Are the tools that you teach them the same for the Nar-Nar and the codependent empath or are they different tools?

ANNIE: No, they're the opposite tools. The development path of the Nar-Nar is literally the opposite of the codependent empath. One has to be less self-absorbed and more attuned to others, and the other has to be more self-attuned and less in rapport with the other. So I'm teaching selfing and othering; these are the two skill sets. I've mapped how to educate someone in a systematic accumulation of autonomy to ossify into a self. Because I've had to do that myself in the laboratory of my own life, in my relationship. Because I'm married to someone who had to build the ability to attune to others, I've had to teach him how to do that. I can teach someone who's more self-absorbed to read the cues, implicit and explicit, read between the lines, the conversation happening beneath the words, and give them access to the data that is in the space but implicit, and how to interpret that. I'm usually trying to make the Nar-Nar more implicit in their communication and their interpretations, and make the codependent empath more explicit. "I want, I need. No, this doesn't work for me." So I have to teach them different and opposing skill sets, and I show them how their partner has the skill set in spades. Oftentimes, they say, "Well, I don't want to be like them." I'm like, actually, you don't need to. You could try your whole life, if you're a codependent empath, to be self-oriented and agentic, and you'll never be like that. Even if you did it 24/7, you're so far on the other end that if you spent your whole life trying to be like them, you'd just get near the middle. I have to train the codependent to tolerate the discomfort of feeling mean, selfish, self-absorbed, unloving, which is what they have coded as attending to their own needs and wants. I have to train the Nar-Nar how to track other people's needs and wants and make those important, and how that isn't a sign of weakness or insecurity. That's actually the missing link to them having successful relationships and what's been holding them back.

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SPENCER: If someone listening doesn't know where they fall on the spectrum, what could they do to help figure it out?

ANNIE: I think people flip-flop back and forth in different domains. It's not ubiquitous that you're always a me- or a we-person, but the thing I would ask them to notice is how easy it is for them to express their needs and wants in a space when it's out of rapport with what their partner wants. That's something my husband always found very easy. If I want to go have Italian food and he wants some other vegetarian place, he has almost zero quiver in his ability to say, "Well, I don't want that." His ability to say no and stand for himself is so congruent. I was in awe of it. I literally asked him, "How do you do that?" Because if I was around 10 friends who wanted to go to a vegetarian restaurant and I wanted something different, I would feel the pressure of folding to accommodate them. He described to me what he does, the inner game technology. He said, "What I do is I take everybody's needs and wants and I put them in a nice basket on a shelf in my mind, and I close the door. Then I just tune in to my third eye, and I just feel into what's true for me if everyone was out of the situation, what would I want?" I started doing this. I started taking everybody's needs and wants and putting them away in my mind. Once I took everyone else out of the picture, and it was just imagining myself on a Saturday with no one around to answer to, it was very obvious what I needed and wanted. I had connection to my needs and wants. It's only in the context of trying to be in rapport with others that it becomes confused. If you can't get clear access to your sense of your needs, wants, and your boundaries, you're probably more agentic in the relational dance. And in your relationship, if you tend to be always attuning to everybody else's needs and wants, like you can track the feelings and the needs of others quicker and more easily than your own, you're probably the more communal, we-centered person. Basically, do you empathize with yourself more instinctively, or do you empathize with others more instinctively?

SPENCER: It's really funny to hear you talk about this. Whenever I'm with a group of people, I'm always trying to predict what they want and trying to give it to them, because my first instinct is to make people happy. A technique that I've been using more and more is to tell people what I would do if I were alone, because I have trouble otherwise saying what I want, because I'm worried it will influence them. But I'll say, "Well, if I were alone, if nobody else was here, I would go to this place."

ANNIE: Yeah. And you said, "I want to make people happy." That is a beautiful, aspirational desire. It makes you very welcome in social spaces, as long as the word "people" in "I want to make people happy" includes you. This is where the codependent empath gets stuck; they want to help the world, they want to care about people, but the category called "people" doesn't include them. So what I tell them is, I want you to help people, love on people, make them happy. You open up shop, and there's a lineup of people you're going to serve today. Great. Put on a smile, and take your young, little self and shuttle them to the front of the line so that they get served first. When you do that, you create a sustainable system long term that can continue to produce value for people, because you're not undernourished and bedraggled and secretly resentful because you're giving and giving, and no one gives back, which is basically a trick for honoring their internal agency first.

SPENCER: That's a great metaphor. I love it. And then what about someone who is more Nar-Nar? They're more focused on the I. Do you have any particular tool that is kind of easy to teach that you could talk about?

ANNIE: Well, if the Nar-nar wants to have connections, if someone is so far down the sociopathy vector that they're like, "I don't care if I have friends or relationships or connect with my family," I don't know what to motivate them with. But if any relationship in their life matters at all, all I have to do is show them how that relationship could be upgraded in the direction that they want, were they to take on the skill set. So aligning the incentives for their own benefit is art, and it's really important. For the Nar-Nar, I show them, "Listen, you can do life alone, and everyone else is a pawn on the chessboard, and I want you to feel into whether that life is nourishing to you." I have to get them to care about having a relationship before they'll take a tool. So once I can assume that there's motivation, like they have a wife or a kid or a parent or someone whose relationship matters enough, and I can align the incentives, then the tool I would give them is to imagine that there is no caretaker for that person on this planet but them. The well-being of that person will not be met unless they're tracking the needs and wants of that person. I'm going to train them to do the opposite of their instinct. Their instinct is to track their own needs and wants, not the other person. So I want to train them that they're the sole caretaker of that person's well-being: on your mark, get set, go. That's your job. That's the tool. Now for the codependent empath, I want to say you're the sole caretaker of this mammal creature that you're shepherding through reality. You're it. Not your mom, not your kids, not your husband or your wife is ever going to be able to nourish your needs and wants at the granular level that you're attuned to. Your job is to attune to your nervous system in real time, track your needs and wants. I teach them how to do this as close to real time as possible and present that to the world; otherwise, you won't have healthy long-term relationships that work for you. So yeah, I'm training them to be caretakers, either of themselves or of the other. The codependent is compulsively taking care of others. We need to do affirmative action for self-care. The Nar-Nar is compulsively taking care of their own needs. When you do affirmative action for care of others, if they spent the rest of their life tuning into other people's needs and wants, it still wouldn't flow past their native instinctive protection of their needs, wants, and desires. So it's just working the opposite muscle.

SPENCER: Is the ideal for both people in the relationship to get to the center?

ANNIE: The closer you get to the center, the higher the caliber of your partner. Especially when I'm working with singles, I'm systematically trying to raise their self-esteem. Self-esteem is linked to how close you are to the center. I think of self-esteem as having two components: your ability to cope with the wide variety of realities that life brings you, which is about resilience. The second part of self-esteem is your belief that your happiness matters. It's about worthiness and deserving. I need to cultivate both of those trajectories for someone to call in relationships that are healthy. I've noticed that whether you're a Nar-nar or an empath, your self-esteem increases when you cultivate your opposing underdeveloped skill because then you can cope with a wider range of experiences. Your window of tolerance widens. I'm building resilience by widening the window of tolerance and the range of realities that they can cope with. There's some part of the Nar-nar, deep in their soul, that knows they're trespassing on other people's dignity and safety. When they start behaving in a way that they can more triumphantly sign their name to because it honors both their dignity and the other person's dignity, I notice their sense of self increases. They fall more in love with themselves because they're behaving in a way that they actually admire more. They didn't even realize they were acting in a way that they didn't admire. The same goes for the codependent empath. Every time they give away their needs and abdicate from their needs to accommodate everybody else, their self-esteem is reduced. I'm systematically trying to raise the self-esteem of both polarities so that who they attract is closer and closer to the center. Even if you're already in a relationship, as you start to move towards the center, your partner has a compelling invitation that it's hard to resist to move towards the center. It's like a ratcheting up, and I shepherd couples through that process. It is possible, if you're in an extreme narcissistic dynamic, that as you start to build your autonomy and sense of self, the structure collapses. You have to be willing to risk the current state of affairs of the relationship in order to have the relationship at the next level of growth. That's something a lot of people don't realize. It molts. It goes through transformational dilemmas and hero's journeys. The relationship itself, which is like a living breathing entity, breathes in together, communion, connection, and breathes out separateness, autonomy, individuation. It needs to breathe in and out equal amounts in order for the relationship to sustain.

SPENCER: So relatedly, you talk about relationships as a higher order, emergent entity? What does that mean?

ANNIE: I think it's made up of two components, and it floats above, and by nature, it's unpredictable. We don't know exactly what it is, but it transcends and includes. The us transcends and includes each person in the relationship. When two components are part of a system and are edified, the emergent entity of the relationship is strengthened, and as the relationship is edified, the components increase. Whenever I'm trying to make a decision with my husband, there are three votes: what does he want, what do I want, and what would serve and nourish the relationship? I've noticed that if we can get clear on what would serve and nourish the relationship, and we roll it out, it always ends up being an upgrade to each of us individually, inside the us. I'm always looking for what is the three-way win solution. When you say, what does that mean that it's emergent. You know what a whole is; it's a whole part. You're two people in a relationship, and you're part of this whole called an "us," which is also part of another nested layer. Just recognizing that you're in this harmonic chain of being. The place in the chain that I like to work on is relational dynamics between two people — any two people: husband-wife, mother-daughter — and the intimacy dance between them has a set of laws of physics that govern it, and I've been mapping those laws of physics. It's my favorite place to intervene in the dance with my skill set. I actually see the relationship entity as my client with two heads sticking off it. I work for the relationship and its health, and if either partner does anything to get in the way of the well-being of the relationship, I will lovingly reflect that back to them while retaining their self-esteem and dignity so that I can invite them into being a collaborator with me on creating a healthy us. That's what they hired me to do. In some ways, I think of myself as working for the future unborn child of the couple, whether they have a child or not. That's who I'm trying to answer to so that there's more synchrony across this dichotomy. Every time you transcend a dichotomy, you move up an emergent level. I really think relationship is the ultimate opportunity to transcend the dance of dichotomy, that is the human game.

SPENCER: It makes me think about how America is a group of people, individuals. But then there's America, which is this thing that's not just a group of people. And if you're talking about how to improve America, the collection, you might propose very different things than if you're talking about improving the individual people. So I'm wondering when it comes to relationships, what are things that nourish a relationship that are different than just nurturing the individual people in it?

ANNIE: So I've noticed that relationships, remember I said, in order for them to feel healthy and survive long term, they need to have an equal infusion of the components being in communion and the components being autonomous. What would nourish a relationship often depends on the current context. Most conflict in relationships occurs because the couple has been too pushed up against each other for too long. They need to actually take an exhale and separate, and because they're not doing it organically, a fight is getting picked to produce a separation, or they've been too separate and they actually need to come together, and there's a fight to try and produce intimacy. Fighting and sexual connection often look very similar in the animal kingdom, so a fight is actually often an attempt at intimacy. Fumble, bumbled as it may be, it's an attempt to push one person's being up against the other, even if it's in the form of aggression. Aggression and intimacy are actually very deeply connected, not just through sexuality. I don't think there's anything that nourishes the relationship but not the individuals. You won't get access to it unless you consider what would serve the relationship. Everything that nourishes the relationship, in my experience, also edifies both individuals, either in the short term or the long term, and they might not be able to see it in the moment, but part of why you join a relationship is to get access to those kinds of emergent possibilities.

SPENCER: But there are things that nourish individuals that don't nourish the relationships, right?

ANNIE: Yes.

SPENCER: So, what's the example there?

ANNIE: Okay. So usually in a relational dynamic, in conflict, there's one person that really wants to work it out, they lean in and they get more kind of fuser, and they want to talk it out and hug it out and fix it. And there's one partner that needs space, needs to go on their own and leave the situation for a while to get regulated. The person who really wants to talk it out, what feels most nourishing to them is to continue talking it and work through the conflict in real time. The other partner, what works for them is they want space, they want to leave. And what nourishes the relationship is whatever is at the evolutionary edge of both people, which doesn't feel comfortable. They don't want to do it, but it's developmentally useful. They might not feel that in the moment, maybe later on after they've learned the skill, out of desperation, because nothing else is working, they'll go, "Oh, that was developmentally useful. I'm glad I learned it." But in the moment, they were kicking and screaming. So an example might be I'm fighting with my husband, and I want to talk it out, and he wants space. What would edify me, or feel good for me, is for us to stay in communion. What he wants is space, but what the relationship needs is for him to stay in the conversation, even though it's uncomfortable, and regulate himself while being in communion. What it needs for me is the willingness to take space or be open to it and regulate myself without needing him to support me, so self-oriented and diminishing along the evolutionary path for one or both people. If one partner is jealous of their partner's connection to their family of origin, if one partner is like, "I don't want you to talk to your family at all. I don't want you to see them this Christmas." It looks like it's what they want because they're jealous and they want the attention of their partner, but if that doesn't produce the relationship entity feeling more robust, you kind of have to split test it. One of the ways you can tell if a request is commensurate with the highest development of all three entities — yourself, your partner, and the relationship — is you notice. If I did this thing, would it make me fall more in love with myself, my life, and the world? If the answer is no, then it's not part of the relationship. It's not part of your path. Also, if your partner asks you to do something that you don't want to do, you might want to ask, "If I did do this thing that they're asking for, would it make me a more extraordinary version of myself? Would I be more in admiration of myself?" If the answer is yes, even if you don't like what they're saying, they're doing their job, which is to hold up a sacred mirror for the developmentally most useful thing for you to take on, to increase your consciousness and your growth as a human. I don't know if I'm answering your question, but the truth is, I work at the relational entity level. I'm always just looking at what serves that, and I'm always dealing with my clients being in opposition to it because it means they have to be bankrupted along their unconscious pattern. They don't want that; part of them doesn't want that, the small, wounded part, but their transcendent, wounded higher self is begging for it, which is why they're in this relationship and why they hired me. They want to be emancipated from their habitual defense mechanisms into freedom because those mechanisms puppet them. Entertaining what would serve the relationship is one of the ways to move out of the frame of whatever your small, wounded self is fighting for.

SPENCER: If you're working on behalf of the higher order entity, the relationship itself, how do you think about when a relationship makes sense to end?

ANNIE: So I think every relationship that is happening right now is supposed to be happening. There's no couple I think that should be broken up that isn't broken up. You come together to constellate because you're seeking a particular education, upgrade, nutrient. That's why you came to the school. And you don't graduate from the school until you get that nutrient, that education, that upgrade. And so any couple, no matter how much drama or fighting, I used to be like, "Oh, maybe they shouldn't be together." And then I realized, after researching it for a while, no, they're going to stay until they get that education, and once it gets uploaded, they will organically find their way out to graduate. "I break up, but graduate from that school with their diploma," which means no relationship is ever a failure. They're all a success because you all leave with an education. And what I do with couples who seem to be distraught and not aligned in their future visions is I might ask questions to them, the answers to which elucidate, "What is the ROI they're getting? What is the nutrient that they came to get, and did they get it? Is this relationship helping them fall more in love with themselves, their life, and the world?" And if, more often than not, the answer to that is no, then this relationship is not serving your aliveness, which is the purpose of a relationship: to maximize your aliveness, not your happiness. Sure, you're happy and ecstatic many moments in a relationship, but the opposite of dead is not happy; it's alive. And to me, to be in love is to be entering a container where your aliveness is expanded. When you shine white light through a glass prism, it breaks out into the rainbow. When you shine love through a human heart, it breaks out into the full spectrum of all emotions, from ecstasy and joy to fear, jealousy, envy, despair, rage, hopelessness — that full spectrum. So when you say "I love you," what you're saying is I'm willing to feel the full range of my human experience in order to be in this relationship. I'm not going to project my feelings onto you. I'm going to learn how to feel them and integrate them, and I'm going to give you the dignity of allowing you to feel your feelings without shifting, changing, or rescuing you from them. And that process of being in your aliveness and learning to integrate a wider range of sensations that you can tolerate and inviting your partner to do the same, you're continuously upgrading the amount of aliveness you can hold, i.e., consciousness, and that's the whole purpose of the game. So in terms of if a couple needs to break up, I can catalyze by asking questions to help them integrate the education they came to get, but I don't ever try to break a couple up. That's an organic process that happens on its own time. And if they're not ready to break up, it's because they haven't quite had the message land yet.

SPENCER: I understand why, in your position, you would never want to break a couple up, but it seems to me that some people are in relationships that are just simply making their life worse, with no benefit, and I don't see why they shouldn't break up. For example, one time, my friend was in a very abusive relationship, and I asked her if she would do an exercise with me where she wrote down the things that her partner had done that were abusive, and she wrote them down. And I said, "Would you be willing to keep this list with you for the next week?" And she said, "Okay." And then she broke up with him that week, and she told me that having that list really helped her get over the hump and actually break up with him. And I was happy that that happened because I think he treated her poorly, and I think she'd be much better off with someone else.

ANNIE: Absolutely, and he couldn't treat her poorly without her permission. So once you realize that abuse or toxic behavior is always a collaboration, people don't like to hear this, and I'm not saying she's to blame. I'm saying we train our partners how to treat us, and then they treat us that way. And so what I'd want her to learn, which you might have facilitated with the exercise, is to notice how she was tolerating and training her partner to behave in a certain way, and that when she chose, she got her power back to desist from the collaboration of the dance she now had. She has a new set of musculature that she can now take into her next relationship. I don't want the partners to leave without the thing they joined the gym membership for. She joined to learn the dignity of her agency, and I want her to get that memo before she graduates. Otherwise, she's just going to attract another Nar-Nar and play the same game trying to learn those skills. I want them to get as much out of their gym membership that they already paid for before they go buy another gym membership. So exactly what you did, I'm doing some version. I'm not trying to break them up. I'm trying to help whoever I'm working with see clearly, direct their attention to places that they previously were squinting at the data from which will then elucidate a course of action that is more aligned with their maximal aliveness and success. But I'm not breaking them up. I want her autonomy to be leading that because that's what she's going to need to succeed in the next relationship.

SPENCER: Right. And I think in that case, she certainly did not deserve the things that were happening to her, and she did not cause them directly.

ANNIE: No.

SPENCER: She was allowing them to happen. And it says she could have broken up with him earlier. She could have identified the way he was treating her and abusing her and said, "No, I'm not willing to tolerate that." So maybe that's what you're pointing to.

ANNIE: What happened in the process of you working with her, and her observation with her list during that week is she was tracking her internal self-esteem and self-reverence and self-dignity, which was able to be held in the same space as this behavior coming towards her. And I'm not even making the person wrong. I'm just saying, "If you don't want to get wet in the rain, you don't go out in the rain, or you have an umbrella." It's just feedback, and you helped her see, what it seems like you did is helped her point her attention to her own self-esteem and dignity, worthiness, and wherewithal, so that she could take actions that were aligned with her self-reverence. Sometimes we have to help someone believe that they're worthy of self-reverence. Sometimes we just have to shuttle to them the tools to emancipate themselves from situations that are not commensurate with their self-reverence. Whatever it is, it's about giving them access to the impact on themselves and giving them a way to affect the outcome that is most useful to them. I just want to stay away from the habit we have in our culture to demonize an abuser and, "Oh, the poor victim." As a relationship coach, I find that very damaging. It's much more useful to help both partners see, whoever you have access to, how they're collaborating on creating a suboptimal dance and then giving them access to the tools to emancipate themselves from the dance. It's literally like giving someone a fish versus teaching them to fish. And I love that she was able to extricate herself from a situation that was no longer serving her maximal success. And so definitely, I want to help people do that. And I do get a suspicion when I work with couples that there's a dance here that is a disservice to both the self-esteem of each person and the relationship. The more I can help both partners see that, the quicker they can graduate. But I don't tell them to break it up. I want them to stand for themselves and be awakened by a situation that they find themselves in, that they collaborated on creating. If they don't take ownership of the way in which they collaborated on creating it, i.e., training their partner to mistreat them with their permission, then they won't notice that they're doing it again in the next relationship, and I'm setting them up for success long-term, not just getting them out of this one.

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SPENCER: Do you worry that people who are genuine victims will feel like they're being blamed for the mistreatment that they get?

ANNIE: I think when people listen to me, when I work directly with someone, I'm very attentive to the psychic scaffolding and the level of what they can handle and what they can't, and so I'm shuttling underneath the door or the fence enough agency and power so that they can take on behaviors that emancipate themselves. I've never had a client say to me they're feeling attacked. If I'm going to take away the victim frame, I'm always shuttling back power in exchange. I never just take it and leave them naked. I do it at a very slow on-ramp, titrated and attuned to where they're at. I'm not saying I can't get it wrong, but once someone sees that what they're getting for the victim, wherever they're holding the victim's story, if it's at the cost of their agency and power, then I just want them to have their power. It's not them trying to take something away. I just want them to identify with something that they're proud of, whatever that is, because I'm trying to build self-esteem, so it's always in service of their edification. And so I think people can sense that. So I don't know, maybe taken out of context, someone could, but one-on-one, I doubt they would be able to be offended.

SPENCER: I think there's a tricky thing where sometimes victims have things they could do that would protect themselves, that they're not doing, but at the same time, they don't deserve what's happening to them, nor did they set up the situation that caused the abuse. Asking them to say, "Think about ways that they could protect themselves more," could also come across as blaming them for the situation.

ANNIE: I don't want to go full tilt woo-woo here, but I will. I think human beings come into the game with different curriculums and different things they're here to play with and experiment with on behalf of the conscious cosmos. I'm a victim of sexual abuse, if you could call that, molested as a young child. I've done a lot of work around it to integrate and assimilate, and I've gotten clarity around how a lot of the skills and the strengths that I have in my life came on the back of that, what you could call an unfortunate circumstance. I've done so much integration around it now that I don't even have lament around it, and I took it on as a curriculum to transcend. The compensations that I got in response to that trauma are now part of my dharmic imperative and my skills that I'm really proud of. When I say I've done work, I mean I literally called my entire family system — seven on my dad's side, eight on my mom's side — into a room with the uncle that was the molesting uncle, not just to me, but to other girls in the family system. I created a family gathering where I put my molester in the middle of the room and had him systematically listen to all of the trespasses that happened with me and other people in a social context where it was set up so that he was forced to take responsibility. I literally led myself out of victimhood.

SPENCER: That's amazing.

ANNIE: And not just emancipated my young self, but all the girls in the family system. I'm not saying, "I am a victim." I'm saying, "I know what it's like to be sexually abused at two years, four years, and 12 years, and there is a way to wrestle your power back and to stand fiercely for your own." Because I was able to do that, I'm not saying everyone else has to. I'm just saying there is an available path to freedom where you can flip the whole trauma story into an educational platform for your greatness. I'm an invitation for people to entertain that, and I will shuttle to them the power and the tools to get there.

SPENCER: I'm not a very spiritual person. I'm perhaps 0% spiritual, but through my non-spiritual lens, it sounds to me like what you're doing is giving people helpful frames to look at their life differently that ultimately are better for them or healthier for them.

ANNIE: When I say woo-woo, I don't know what Big T truth is. I just want frameworks or models that produce explanatory and predictive power. When you're working with the internal, invisible psyche, the subjective mind, all you have is metaphor. You can't go in with a scalpel, so frames, models, and metaphor are the way I intervene in that complex, labyrinthine space in your head. I'm a pragmatist. I'm like, "What's useful here? Does it work?" If it does, I keep it until I find something that works better. I'm not saying it's true. I'm just saying it's useful.

SPENCER: If you're comfortable talking about it, how did you get to the point where you could challenge your uncle in that way and hold him to account for what he did?

ANNIE: I was in a family system that had zero technology to stand up; it was culturally inappropriate. I came to my mother and father with this realization. I didn't remember it; it was repressed in my memory. It wasn't until I was 14 that I even remembered anything, and I brought it to my mom and dad. I saw them just kind of go comatose, which was confusing and terrifying to me. But then over time, as I understood the psyche of parents, I realized they were dealing with monolithic shame that this happened on their watch, and they didn't know how to respond because in the family, the unspoken rules of this culture and system were that you don't confront the person. Everyone just realized this had happened, and they all kept their children away from him. I thought, "Oh shit, this family system does not have the technology to prevent this from happening again in the future." An inner vigilante in me recognized that I could either perpetuate that dance and be part of the system, or I could be the one where the buck stops, that in this lineage, things are going to change. I started to imagine what I could create that would have maximal transformational utility for every member of the family, such that the suffering that I went through and my other cousins was not in vain. I had many different iterations that I tried. I thought I would put an ad in the magazine or in the newspaper where he lived, showcasing his criminal acts. I thought about a few different things. But this one, the confrontation in the context of the whole family system was done in a way that wasn't meant to shame him. I wanted him to not be able to escape feeling the truth of his conscience, so I wasn't shaming him. I went list by list through what happened to me and the impact. What I wanted to elicit was his endogenous conscience, not shame from the outside, but internally generated awareness that he trespassed his own dignity, because he's a father of daughters too. I wanted that to be done publicly, so that if he's going through that transformational suffering vortex, and I'm going through this transformational vortex, everyone could have a reference experience of what it looks like to go all the way from victim to your own hero in your hero's journey. If I'm going to do that, I want it on reality TV, and I want everyone to get a front row seat. I was optimizing for many different things: my own healing, his healing, the family system's healing, and reference experiences for what's possible when you're feeling disempowered. "Hey this is what we are doing now." I was always asking myself, "What would I have to do here so that everyone in the audience would be clapping for me if the audience was filled with all my future successful selves and everyone I admire?" My husband told me once, "If you're not sure what to do, just ask yourself, 'What would the most extraordinary woman in the world do?' The most emotionally brave woman, then do that, because that's who you are," at least to him. I just kept that running: what would the most emotionally brave, extraordinary woman in the world do here? That's what I came up with. I did this probably when I was 18, the age at which I gathered everyone, including some of the other victims. No one else had the courage to speak, but I spoke on behalf of all of them. I've never heard of anyone doing something like this, but I think it shifts the story and the lineage forever. At the end, he was so present to the impact on all these people's lives that he broke down in tears of his own shame. It's not because I shamed him; it's because he was forced to sit with his own conscience. I believe something shifted in him, and that particular set of behaviors was no longer available to him. I forgave him, not because he even asked me to. I forgave him because it felt organic, and I got to be free. I was seeking freedom from my own entanglement, and I wanted to liberate as many people as possible at the same time.

SPENCER: Wow, that's amazing. Did he end up acknowledging what he did?

ANNIE: Yes, absolutely. He fought at the beginning; for the first 10 minutes, he was fighting and pushing back. I found my colleague at 18 and said, "This is not a time for you to talk," because I'd asked him at the beginning, "I want to speak for half an hour, and you'll be able to speak after." I gave him clarity about the structure, and he interrupted a few times, but I held the boundary really strong. Energetically, he recognized that he was messing with the wrong person. He calmed down. The way I did it wasn't attacking; it was just transparency, and I was very intentional about that. I wanted his conscience to come up, not my shame from the outside. People don't change when they're shamed from the outside; they only change when they feel their internal conscience, which is endogenous shame, come up and sit with it. Whenever there's a gap between your values and your behavior, the gap is always trying to be closed, and I wanted him to have that private experience so that something could change.

SPENCER: You said that your other relatives, your cousins, who had also been abused, didn't feel comfortable speaking up. I'm wondering, did you connect with them about it afterwards?

ANNIE: Yes, I knew all of their experiences. They were all younger than me. I'm the oldest child in the family, of the siblings, and I gave them an opportunity, but they would just break down and cry, and it was obvious that they were struggling with some trespass. But mine, I had enough indexed descriptions of the trespass that everyone in the room knew it generalized out to all the girls.

SPENCER: I'm just curious, were you able to talk to them after about what their experience was, being there and sitting through that?

ANNIE: Yeah, they felt represented. Some of them felt remorse that they couldn't be part of the troubadour, that I was alone doing it, but I was very clear to them, I'm doing this on behalf of all of us. This is for all of us. And whoever can speak speaks. And so I was the one that spoke, and I assuaged any of their concerns about that, but I feel like all the people who were impacted and the parents of the girls too, had a sense of vindication, but vindication not on the back of the dignity of my uncle. I did not want to erode his dignity because he needs that dignity to have the psychic scaffolding to hold his own endogenous shame. If you take away someone's dignity by shaming them, they collapse, and then they never get the upgrade. They just go, "No, no, That wasn't me. I can't handle it." So it's counterintuitive, but you need to let the person retain their self-esteem and dignity when you're giving them feedback, and let them take the feedback and then work on it privately in their own conscience, and then an upgrade is possible. I'm not saying it's guaranteed.

SPENCER: I wonder if this is how you think about it, I imagine it as you want them to feel like they are no longer that person who would do that thing, because now they're a better person who would never do it again, rather than feel merely embarrassed about having done it.

ANNIE: I don't want to put them in a double bind, because we can't change the past. They can't go back in time. So what I want them to do is see a future. It's like I give them access to a future where they've transcended that behavior, so they can be their own hero to themselves. I don't want to corner them into "you messed up, you can't change it, and you're doomed for life." People don't take on an enterprise that they can't win at. If they don't see a way to win at something, they won't even try it. So I have to give them a place and a way to win. I invited him. I said, "There are young girls in this family, and you have two daughters, and there's a future you can live into where this is done." I painted the whole future for him that allowed him to emancipate himself. He can privately take it on or not, but I didn't doom him to a tormented self-attack, shameplex. That's also what I was demonstrating to the family system: how to do this in a way that helps someone grow without demolishing their dignity, because it's the lack of tracking the dignity in another person that got him into this. He was not present to the dignity of these children. He had to squint at that. I know sexual abusers have to squint at some piece of truth. When they engage in the trespass, they sully not just the spirit of the child; they sully their own spirit. Until they're called into clarity and conflict and integrate the repercussions of their behavior, those two souls don't get free. I wanted to free him as much as I wanted to free me. It was primarily me, but I knew enough about psychological systems that he would win too. I want everyone to win, and I want something to change, so he had to have a way out of the hell.

SPENCER: I imagine there are abusers that are so extreme that they literally don't care. They know they're hurting people, and they're completely indifferent, but I imagine that most abusers, on some level, do care, and so they must engage in sort of extreme rationalizations. Is that your anticipation as well?

ANNIE: Yes, and the extreme rationalizations are custom-crafted to protect their awareness from being pressed up against their own shame or guilt. Their unwillingness to feel their shame and guilt keeps the shame off of them and ends up getting embedded metaphorically in the abusee. This is why people who've been sexually abused run around with sexual shame. It's not their shame they're carrying, it's the unfelt shame of the abuser. Having that entangled dance be unentangled, so that the appropriate shame that was his is recognized by his nervous system, is crucial. I had to give that back to him and not be running into my system and giving that back without finger-pointing, just like, "Hey, this is yours. It was never mine." Giving them the opportunity to actually be with that shame is the only chance of rehabilitation. I don't know if that's available for all abusers. I just think it's worth trying.

SPENCER: The way you talk about this story makes me suspect that you used your empathy as a motivator by making it not just about you. I wonder if it had just been about you, just protecting yourself, would you be as motivated to do what you did?

ANNIE: No.

SPENCER: Or did you really leverage your empathy in order to get the strength?

ANNIE: Definitely, but it was empathy for self from the past. It was like, "What didn't happen historically that allowed this trespass to happen to me? Oh, someone didn't speak up when they saw something. That's not going to happen." It's almost like I was trying to time travel back to the past and do what I wish someone had done for me, but I can't do it for me, but I can do it for someone in the future. Honestly, when you take an action in the present moment, at some level, it cascades backwards and forwards through time because time is a function of consciousness. I was both doing it for me and for anyone else that could follow, so that I could sign my name, like I did everything I could, so you little young girl in the future weren't trespassed. But I was also doing it for my younger self at the same time. Secondary to that is all the girls currently in the family system, all the parents of the abusees, and my uncle himself. I don't know how conscious I was of that at the time. I was just doing what felt appropriate, but there's my ability to empathize with as many components in the system, which is multi-perspectival, which I didn't even know what that was at the time. It is empathy. I don't know if it's empathy or perspectiving. It's a pragmatic perspectiving. I just wanted something done, and if you really want something done, if you're upset about something, you can either shutter your grumble and frustration and blame shame onto the person, or you can get a behavior change. You ain't never getting both. It may change for a little while if you grumble, but it's not sustained, internally motivated change. I've just learned when I'm ready to actually get a change in the system, I need to regulate my emotions, get clear on what's optimal, that's not coming from a triggered state or a wounded state, and then execute on that. When I make a plan of action from a grounded nervous system with a very beautiful vision that is motivating it, I think that's how you make miracles happen. I think that's how you create transformational change in complex systems. I don't know how much of that is empathy or just intense pragmatism.

SPENCER: You make a really interesting point, which is that maximizing for behavior change may be very different than if you're maximizing for other things: how good you feel having done the thing, or what's emotionally cathartic. I'm curious how this comes up in other areas of your work, where people may be doing the thing that's not actually going to produce behavior change, but maybe it feels satisfying to them.

ANNIE: Yeah, and I tell them, "Hey, it's okay if you want to shutter your upset onto your partner because they forgot to close the fridge or lock the front door. Go ahead. When you're done and you're ready to actually get some change, come over here. I have all kinds of technology for you." My main frame around that is most people give feedback in a form I call "WTF: What the fuck?" It's got shame, blame, and make wrong laced in, and whether it's an eye roll or a grumble, the other person can feel contracted and diminished in your utterance. I always try to translate WTF assertions into what I call MLK assertions. MLK stands for Martin Luther King, and if anybody had a reason to be what the fuck, it was him. But he didn't. He translated his grumble into an inspirational invitation for an entire nation to upgrade to their higher self. If you could just see how you can take your WTF and alchemize it into an inspirational invitation to the other person to their greatness, how can you line up their values and show them how the thing that you're wanting is actually an edification along their own internal sense of self? That takes more intentionality and strategy and a more regulated nervous system, but that is an invitation to the other person to go along a path that they already want to go, and then you're much more likely to get the thing you want. Their self-esteem and dignity are conserved, and the system gets a chance to upgrade. I'm always teaching my clients how to translate their WTF complaints and criticisms into invitations to the other person's greatness and to package it that way. That's one thing. Also, if you're receiving a complaint from somebody, a complaint is really, "I love you, I believe in you, and I know you can behave in a way that's even more aligned with your values, and I want to help you get there." But most people don't give complaints with that level of sophistication in the bedside manner. They just shutter their frustration and grumble because they're triggered. I've just noticed over time that an expression from a trigger isn't as effective long term as a very intentionally conscious, incentive-aligned marketing campaign for someone to actualize along their own value set. That's what I'm always teaching my clients to do, to get the outcome that they want, which is usually not just to grumble. They're actually tired of that. They just want to shift. Most people don't have the courage to be with their pain. The actual pain of the interaction and blame and shame is an attempt to avoid being in your own pain. Anytime I see blame and shame, I just reverse engineer. Oh, there's so much pain that they don't know how to be in it. The thing is, if you're trying to blame and shame someone and get them to recognize the hurt or pain you're in, they can't see it because they're busy defending. You want them to feel your pain, but you're not even feeling your pain. No one's going to feel your pain unless you're standing in it with your open kimono, with your hands bleeding, which takes a lot of courage, but that's the kind of courage that will inspire the other person to wake up. Everybody wins when I can show the couple how to do that and support them in that process, so that a complaint becomes an inspirational upgrade.

SPENCER: How explicit do you suggest that people be when they're asking someone to act according to their values, are you literally saying, "Hey, I think it would be more aligned with who you want to be if you acted this way," or is it more subtle than that?

ANNIE: "Hey, husband, I know you love being part of this household, and you want to support the team, and you want the house to be organized. I know that when you come into the kitchen, putting your dish straight in the dishwasher would be the kind of contribution that you want to make as a co-leader of the household." I'm just making this up. "I want to encourage you to do that. What can I do to support you in making that happen?" It's unique for each person. For example, my husband highly values respect. If anyone feels disrespected around him, and I show it to him, he wakes up. If I say, "Hey, that was uncomfortable" or "that was kind of hurtful," he doesn't want to hurt me, but it's not the highest thing. Whereas if someone said, "Annie, what you said was hurtful or made me feel unsafe," I instantly go into, "Oh my God, I have to change it." So I'm learning the keywords so I know if I say, "Hey husband, what you said just now made me feel disrespected, and here's what I'd love to hear instead," I know I get his attention in a different way than if I said that was hurtful. I'm always helping my clients track the keywords to use in the marketing campaign to get their partner to buy in and click the button to do the thing they want. The work it takes to research your customer and understand what motivates them to click on the button is a developmental upgrade for you, because if you're trying to get your partner to change and it's not working, then there's another level of split testing available for you. You'll notice that as you split test and find what works, you become a more powerful version of yourself. It's all perfectly matched; your partner is custom designed by the universe to drive you exactly the right amount of crazy that forces you to develop in the area that you most need to complete your developmental journey. If you take on that frame, everything's just a gymnasium and curriculum for you. You never want to keep yourself in circumstances or situations that diminish your sense of dignity. No one's taking care of you except you. If you go to the party and you feel uncomfortable, and your spidey sense is saying it's not safe, and you ignore that, you're not shepherding and taking care of this creature, this mammal, which is your only job to do. I'm always teaching people how to do that self-care. Self-care is not bubble baths; it's attuning to your nervous system in real time and trusting that data as the most important data in the universe. That skill, alongside everything that happens, is curriculum.

SPENCER: I think that's a perfect place to end. Annie, thank you so much for coming on. It was great to chat with you.

ANNIE: Yes. Thanks, Spencer.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks: "How can we best and most quickly tackle the climate crisis? What's the most effective thing for each of us to do as individuals?"

SPENCER: In my view, there's only a few strategies for working on reducing man-made climate change that are realistic. And I think people often try really unrealistic strategies. So the three realistic strategies in my view — and by realistic, I just mean that they seem much more plausible that they could work, but I don't mean that they're easy, right? So the first is government collaboration. If major governments around the world took climate change really seriously, they could basically make a pact to do something about it. But it would essentially have to involve China, the US, India, and Europe. They have to all be involved, and then other countries obviously would be great if they were involved too. But without that, I think it's really, really tough. And of course, very few people have the power to make that happen. But by electing leaders that are interested in that, then that does increase the probability that that could happen. So leaders that are willing to create a kind of multi-country collaboration. The second thing that seems like a plausible strategy is better technology. I think so many organizations have tried to get individuals to act against their own selfish interests to help the climate by getting individuals to try to pollute less and stuff like that. And I think those strategies just really, really don't work on average. I think there's abundant evidence of that. But if technology improves, it may be in people's interests to reduce their greenhouse emissions. And when it's in people's interest to do that, I think they will do it. And so that is the second plausible strategy is more investment in technology. What that could look like at the individual level: it could look like starting a company. It could look like joining a company that already exists or playing around with new ideas for technology, learning about new technology, et cetera. And so I'm not an expert at all in this area, so I don't know exactly what technologies are needed. But I do know that there are a bunch of technologies that, if developed, could really help because they could shift it so that it's actually more in people's interests to pollute less. And also, you can talk about carbon capture technology and the potential benefits of that. The third main strategy that seems plausible to me is increasing pressure on mega corporations because there really aren't that many corporations that account for a lot of the greenhouse gases. I think it's just a few hundred that account for a surprisingly big proportion of it. And so if there was a way to influence those companies, for example, to get them to agree with each other to do things differently or investor pressure for the people that own their shares, perhaps that could actually move the needle and make a difference. And then finally, I'll just add there are meta strategies. Meta strategies are things like getting other people interested in working on these existing strategies that might be promising or creating more momentum towards those strategies. So that's what comes to mind. Obviously, it's hard to know what to do at an individual level. But if you really want to do something that's plausibly effective, I would urge you to think about those strategies and think about where your personal actions might fit into those. Of course, I might be wrong. There might be other strategies that are really great. But I'm pretty skeptical of all the other strategies that I've seen.