The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com

Here is a question that I received from Joe. Now, you know, from time to time, we get traumatized, and many times we know what the trauma is. Maybe you're in a car accident and you're afraid to get back in a car. I had a friend, an acquaintance, once who was in an airplane accident, and he deliberately got back in the plane. It was his own little plane, not a commercial airline, and he deliberately took lessons, got back in the plane again so he wouldn't carry that fear for life. Well, many of us don't fly planes. I certainly don't, but what happens if you're traumatized? Here is a situation: What if you're traumatized and you don't know where it came from? How do you find out what might have caused it?

This is from Joe:

Dear Dr. Kenner, this may sound crazy, but I get extreme nausea whenever I hear a certain song. It has happened at least two dozen times, okay? It’s 24 times here, even if the song is on in the background and I’m not listening. A sudden wave of nausea and sometimes a headache ensues. The song is Keep Your Hands to Yourself by the Georgia Satellites. I’m not sure if, as a youngster, the song was playing while I was on an amusement park ride or what. But it isn't an intermittent problem—it happens every time. I was wondering if you had any idea why or what I could do to get over it. I heard it probably for two seconds about three hours ago, and I'm still feeling sick. Thanks, Joe.

Joe, you don’t want to beat up on yourself. What you want to do is figure it out. I think it’s fascinating that the idea of an amusement park ride came to your mind. You may not be able to trace it back to its origins, but why not give it a shot? You have an amusement park ride or what?

Now, the nausea is explainable. When we get nervous, we trigger our autonomic nervous system, and one branch of that, the sympathetic branch—which you don’t need to know in detail—triggers a response. It releases adrenaline and cortisol, and one of the effects it has on us, besides sweating and tensing our body muscles, is that we can feel nauseous. We don’t have time to digest food, so the digestive system shuts down because we’re in a fight-or-flight mode, and we feel nauseous. And so that’s just telling me that there’s some anxiety that you’re hiding someplace. And that song is a clue to it.

Now, I actually went on the web and listened to the song and wanted to do a West Coast swing to it. So it isn’t a bad song. I mean, it’s a little harder, more edgy, but you know, I could do a West Coast swing to that. So it’s not the song itself; it’s whatever happened in association with that song, and that can happen all the time. I’ve had people come into my office who’ve been abused. They smell cologne from maybe somebody who works in my office, a man’s cologne, and they go, "Oh my god, I’m feeling anxious or nauseous," and it’s just the cologne that triggered it, because their abuser happened to wear that cologne.

The same with me. I can hear a sports game going on, and most people would say, "Where’s the TV?" And I hear a sports game going on, and I get very closed in. It triggers my autonomic nervous system. I get angry, and I just get really anxious, and that’s because I was surrounded—my father listened to the games forever, and his teams were always losing, and he would get angry. So I just didn’t like the games. So understand its cause. You can get therapy for it. You can recalibrate your emotions. Play a different song for yourself, or think about that song differently, but try to find out its source, because hopefully it’s not abuse. Hopefully it’s just an amusement park ride that scared you.

And here’s a little more from Dr. Kenner:

"I just had this talent for falling in love with the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"How many guys were there?"

"Three. Last one was the manager of a finance company back home in Pittsburgh. They found a little shortage in his accounts, but he asked me to wait for it."

Do you feel like you are unlucky in romance? That’s from an older movie, The Apartment. Do you find that you keep dating somebody that’s just like the one before, and you keep repeating the same problems again? Maybe it’s the way you’re picking people. Maybe people camouflage well, and they present as healthier than they actually are. Let’s say that you keep ending up with alcoholics, and you’re not looking for one, and the person says they never drink, and you didn’t know they were a closet alcoholic. So sometimes people camouflage that.

How do you find out about a potential partner’s character? If you want to know how to choose the right partner, you need to know how to judge people well, how to look for the right information, and how not to be blindsided. And you can read all about this in a book that I wrote with Dr. Ed Locke. It’s a book on romance, from soup to nuts: how to make yourself lovable, how to choose the right partner, how to enjoy sex, how to resolve conflict, how to keep love going over many years, how to sustain it and keep it vibrant, and also an appendix on how to part ways if you’re no longer soul mates and find love for yourself again.

And that you can get at SelfishRomance.com—S-E-L-F-I-S-H-Romance.com. You may be thinking you’re doing everything right, going out of your way to please your partner, and the more you do, the more you feel taken advantage of. And that is not a win-win situation; that’s a win-lose situation, because you’re eventually going to feel increasingly more resentful. And that doesn’t bode well for a long-term relationship or a happy long-term relationship. Many people stay together and they fake to the outer world that things are hunky-dory inside their marriage, and many other people split up and wreck a lot of havoc for themselves and for kids, if they have kids.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com.