 I think of myself more as an editor than a therapist when I'm sitting in the therapist chair because I feel like people come in with a faulty narrative. That's why something, they're stuck somehow, something's not working. They keep repeating the same patterns over and over. So there's no sort of forward progress. They're not really the protagonist in their own story. And they come in with these faulty narratives and I'm there to help them edit their stories. So sometimes people are carrying around stories that they learned very early on, things like, I'm unlovable or I can't trust anyone or nothing ever works out for me or whatever the story is. Sometimes you see the narcissism side of that, which is, nobody's good enough for me. You see both sides of that. When you start really looking at the story, like when people come in, first of all, we're all unreliable narrators, all of us, every single one of us, because we are telling a story through our subjective lens. And when we tell a story often, especially to your friends or to a therapist, we're kind of gunning for them to validate our version of the story. Like we don't want them to say, well, wait a minute, what about this? What about the other person's perspective here? We emphasize certain parts of the story. We leave out certain parts of the story. We minimize certain parts of the story. Who are the supporting characters? Who are the main characters? Who are the victims? Who are the heroes? When you start really looking at that, the entire story can change and that's where freedom comes in. When you liberate yourself from the tyranny of a faulty narrative, you can see that in my book and maybe you should talk to someone, every single person in the book, I follow the lives of four very different patients and then I'm the fifth patient in the book and you see me go to my therapist, all five of us come in with a story that is very different from the story we leave with. That editing piece is so crucial to breaking these patterns because we're driven to live out the narrative repetitively and if that's our vantage point, then it's going to continue happening in our lives and we all have that friend that we could see their narrative very clearly, like the friend who's constantly jumping from partner to partner but can't find the right one, living out that narcissistic story but it's often really tough to find our own narrative because we're so used to sharing it with others, that viewpoints become so clear to us and the unpacking of that narrative really, as you said, gives you the freedom then to move on to live your life more fully. Right, and so much of the time what is holding us back is this story that we're locked into. On my podcast, The Deer Therapist podcast, we do sessions with people and you can see that even in one session, someone will come in with this story that they've told us and we work with them for a session and by the end, we've given them a new way to look at the story. We give them a homework because you have to act on it. We like to say that insight is the booby prize of therapy, that you can have all the insight in the world but if you don't change out in the world, the insight is useless. Like I'll have therapy patients who will say something like, yeah, so I got in that fight with my partner again over the weekend and I understood exactly what I was doing and I'll say, well, did you do something different? Well, no, but I understood why I do it. Well, okay, that's the first step but you actually have to do something different with the insight. So we give people homework so that our listeners can hear what happens when you change the story and then you change your behavior and those are the two things that move you forward. Those two things in tandem.