The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free. Dr. Kenner.com, t you are worried about friendship or worried about how to forgive a friend? Yes, ma'am, yes. What's going on here in Texas?

Okay, it seems like I'm—how would I call it? Not fixated, but it may be a guilt issue of remembering certain friendships, certain mistakes, and trying to go back and connect with the old friendships or acquaintances. Okay, obviously, a lot of people have already formed an impression that couldn't get out of mud. Basically, it kind of stuck, okay, on either side. For me, it's hard kind of to forgive myself because the less they respond, yeah, the more guilty I felt about it, as if I did something very bad. So you need an objective way to analyze what you yourself see as a misstep. What you yourself see is something that you wish you hadn't done, and you feel it's appropriate that you should feel guilty, but this, the silence is in a way deadly because it's not allowing you to connect and repair the wound—the wound primarily to yourself, but also to them. Yeah, so if you could give me one example of one that's really painful for you, a friendship, you know, tell me what you think you did in a nutshell because of time factors. But what did you do to a friend? And tell just give me the nutshell version.

Something like very big back then, yes, really nothing too big. But a friend used me to almost what I call as what I call, and that was like 15 years ago in the military, plan to attack somebody when it was all about two people falling in love with one girl, but I had to be in the middle to side. And at that time, I decided to tell both of them something bad, okay, which was and just leave both of my friends, male friends, and then after all, the lady left both of them anyway, okay, but I told her she will leave. Your friendship is broken. Now you're choosing for me to choose one side, and I will choose none of your friendship, so I just have to leave.

Okay? So basically, when you said you attacked someone, did you physically attack someone? Oh, no, no, no, no, it's almost none of this was physical. It's all about whether you support me or support somebody else, whether you loan me money to start a business or not, how much you trust me or not.

Okay, did someone ask you to loan money or else to loan them money? Yeah, certain situations like I said, none of it escalates to the point of attacking my integrity for eternity.

Okay, I hear you. Okay, so listen that, or really attacking somebody with a knife and that kind of stuff. I was never that aggressive or that passionate of any crime, right? I guess it's all about guilt, maybe for something that other people may see.

Okay? So if you can recognize that you may be holding yourself in a court of law that's not objective, meaning you may not be being fair to yourself. If I had two friends come to me, and I like them both, but they're both in love with the same gal or guy, and they tell me, you got to stick with me, or you got to stick with the other one comes over and says, Well, you've got to support me. You've been my friend. I would say I value both of you, and I'm not going to get in the middle of this, and when you guys resolve it, then, you know, let me know. But I don't want to be drawn into a fracas, an argument, a fight, a battleground over a woman when I don't even—I'm not attracted, you know, I'm not the one fighting for the woman. Now, that happens all the time in friendships, all the time. I don't mean every day, but it's a very common occurrence where look. What happens in divorce? That is true, if a husband and wife split up, and what happens to the friends? They have to choose sides.

Hey, I got to interrupt this because we've got to pay some bills. 30 seconds. That's it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance. I wish I knew more about what girls want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where's that ad I saw? Here it is, The Selfish Path to Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at selfishromance.com and buy it@amazon.com, huh? The Selfish Path to Romance—that is interesting.

If a husband and wife split up, what happens to the friends? They have to choose sides, and typically, at the beginning they say, you know, some say they're not going to choose sides. We love you both. Is good in both of you, and after—and that's usually a temporary, unstable situation because if the divorce was a nasty one, if the divorce was a decent one, that's a more feasible situation. If it's a nasty divorce, what happens? People choose sides, or they walk away from both and say, Listen, my life is too short. I want to wait. They may not say it in these untactful words, but they may be thinking they will do it right and talking, and they might just move away and segue over to other friends who are not going through tumultuous time and not trying to pull them in opposite directions, like pulling the arms of an octopus in all different directions. It's like, I don't play octopus, and I don't think you need to play that. So if you walked away and you didn't beat up on them or attack them physically, and you just said, Hey, listen, I want out of this. I don't want to have to choose sides.

There was so much slandering between the two of them. It bored me today. Okay, put me in a difficult situation where I thought back then, okay, these guys—something's wrong with them? Because there were very—none of us was ugly, yeah, very young, 20, 21, right? So many fish in the sea. Why would you be stuck to the same divorce? Ugly woman? Okay, like, no, no, no, no, something's wrong with these guys. But then I still think I should have been probably more mature about it, or I don't.

Oh, well, that's a different situation. I can say about many things in my life when I was younger I should have been more mature about it. In fact, occasionally, I still have those moments. Geez, I didn't handle that very maturely. And I'm a psychologist, so if you're easy on yourself and you learn from experience, it's called adopting a learning stance, and you just learn, what if I learn now? How would I handle it a bit differently? Very nice. You pat yourself on the shoulder and say, Yeah, I've got more skills going forward.

In terms of the past, it sounds like you, within the context of what you're telling me, made a reasonable decision to walk away from both of them, and that's not betraying them because they, in a sense, betrayed you. They put you in an awkward situation. And whose life is it? If they are friends, who chooses your friends? Me, based on what your evaluation of them? Are they good for me or bad for me? And sometimes people get better with time. Sometimes people make worse and worse choices and destroy their own character. And even if you love them at one point, you don't love them anymore. And so it's a constant process of looking at your own emotional response towards a person and learning to ask yourself, what's contributing to my liking this person, or my feeling ambivalent, or am I feeling negative towards the person? And when you give yourself that skill of evaluating a person accurately, knowing what it's based on, you can get rid of what my favorite author termed unearned guilt. Earned guilt, you own it; unearned guilt, you don't own it. You dump it, you put it in the trash, and you put a smile back on your face. You have a wonderful warmth. You have a wonderful laugh. And I think you have a right to have good friends in your life.

So thank you so much for the quality, and I appreciate you very much. For more Dr. Kenner podcast, go to Dr. Kenner.com and please listen to this. NAD.

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by Drs. Kenner and Locke:

Understanding another person is not always easy. You come to understand your partner in layers. You see the obvious aspects first, and gradually come to understand the deeper layers. This takes mental work. For example, you notice that your partner gets upset when you're away on business, but you might not discover until much later that this is tied to fears of abandonment stemming from a traumatic childhood or a former cheating spouse. Your partner might not even be aware of such fear if not much time has been spent introspecting. If you keep listening, observing, and talking, you will gradually come to know your partner more intimately, and assuming no surprising negatives are uncovered, you will feel much closer as a result.

You can download chapter one for free by going to Dr. Kenner.com, and you can buy the book at Amazon.com.