Speaking and Communicating Podcast

We're causing people to feel worthless, to feel unlovable, to feel inferior, to feel violated with no recourse.

You know, the tip of the iceberg of that, a lot of injustice, our horrible incarceration system, mass shootings, people who feel so alienated, who are in so much pain, who are in so much rage, that it comes out in a violent way.

We have to know that inside every single perpetrator is a victim somewhere who's untreated.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Angela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with Phyllis Leavitt.

Did I say that right?

You did.

You said it right.

Thank you.

She is a psychotherapist and an author who has been treating children, individuals and families for over 34 years.

Phyllis is here to help us to deal with different family dynamics, conflict resolution, and so much more when it comes to relationships with ourselves and with others.

And before I go any further, please welcome her to the show.

Hi, Phyllis.

Hi.

Thank you so much for having me here with you.

My absolute pleasure.

Welcome.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

Yeah.

My name is Phyllis Leavitt.

And as you said, I've been a psychotherapist for well over 30 years, and I've worked with all kinds of people.

And I just recently wrote a book called America In Therapy.

And one of the big reasons why I wrote the book is because what we learn about communication in the best psychology, nonviolent communication, nonviolent conflict resolution, really looking for how we can all take responsibility for ourselves to make communication work and be effective.

These are skills that the best psychology teaches us, and they're real relationships, and they prevent violence.

And so I wanted to apply what I learned from the best psychology to our country, to the workings of a country and larger institutions, because I think we're suffering today from such a lack of healthy communication skills when there's conflict, when there's difference of opinion, when we think other people are wrong and we're right.

And some of the basic skills that we learn in psychology are some of the best tools we can use to help heal some of those great divides that we're really suffering from today.

The same skills that apply to the individual level really can apply to the collective.

Absolutely, and we will definitely have a deep dive into that.

But first, what got you interested in psychology?

Out of everything, why did you decide that psychology was it for you?

Yeah, I mean, like so many people, I think I gravitated toward a profession that had personal meaning for me.

When I was in my 30s, I had three little children and in a very dysfunctional marriage, and I ended up in therapy myself.

And it really saved my life.

I really began to understand my own behavior, some of the ill effects of my early childhood conditioning, things that had hurt me when I was young, that were really affecting the ways that I was coping with life in general, which were not helping me.

And so really understanding my early conditioning and the things that had hurt me that I was still repeating in some way in my life really changed my life.

My youngest was two, I think, or maybe even younger at that time.

And I really wanted to go back to school.

And so I decided to go to school in psychology and became a psychotherapist out of my own wonderful experience of healing through lots of therapy.

Lots.

We really do give a shout out to therapists for the work that they do in helping us heal.

But here's the thing as well.

When you talk about your marriage, you didn't say, oh, it's his fault.

I'm the victim.

You know, you said I wanted to heal.

How did you come to have that perspective?

Well, let me tell you, I did say it was his fault.

I mean, I did say that.

I think that's where we start, right?

Because we don't know what we're generating from ourselves.

And that's one of the things that psychology really opened up for me was, because I had some trauma early on in childhood, because I grew up with, I'll just say this, my mom is passed away a long time ago, but a very narcissistic mother who had her own wounds and didn't know how to really nurture her children, I was attracted to someone like my mom, someone who was very wrapped up in themself and didn't know how to be nurturing and loving.

And I brought that to the situation, not as a blame, but as an unconscious way that we tend to repeat what we know.

We tend to try to get love and acceptance and belonging and nurturing and valuing from the kinds of people that we didn't get it from early on.

Or if we did get it, then we're probably attracted to people like that in our adult life.

But most of us in an unhealed state tend to repeat the wounds that we've already endured.

And so it's not really a question of blaming him or blaming me.

We were both unconscious.

We both were like moth to flame.

You know, that's how I described that marriage.

I was the moth flying into a very familiar flame.

Had I had more healing at the time, maybe that marriage would have survived.

I kind of doubt it.

But it enabled me to leave something that was really toxic for me and heal.

And I had to get out of that to heal.

So now let's talk about the work you do.

When you help people heal, first of all, do people know what's wrong?

Or they come to you and ask, this is what's happening.

What do you think is wrong with me?

So that we can solve that.

It's a great question.

I think people either think something's terribly wrong with them, which I also did.

I mean, I wasn't just blaming.

I felt like I was a flawed individual my entire life.

So I think people come because something's really not working in their life.

Their relationship with their children, their inability to express their creativity, their difficulty finding meaningful work or making a living, or getting along with their co-workers or their family.

People usually come to therapy because something isn't working.

And I think we tend to blame other people more than we blame ourselves in general.

I think we live in a culture that is very much promotes the idea of blaming other people rather than looking at ourselves.

But looking at ourselves without blame, looking at ourselves with deep understanding of where was I coming from?

Why did I make that choice?

Why am I behaving just like my mother when I couldn't stand the way my mother behaved?

Why are we doing the things that we're doing, but with compassion and a desire to heal the source of the pain that generates our most dysfunctional behaviors?

So when people come to therapy, it's usually because of the pain of something not working.

And I think good therapy steers us to the formative experiences that we've had ourselves rather than focusing on blaming anybody else, the formative experiences that we've had ourselves that have set us up to not function the way we would like to in the world or in the world of relationship, the way we would most like to have that happen.

As you said, when we keep repeating those patterns, which is frustrating to us, right?

We live on autopilot and we keep thinking, why do I drive myself crazy?

Why do I drive myself crazy?

Why do I keep doing this every single time?

Why do I keep attracting the same guy?

Why do I keep doing this?

Exactly.

It drives us crazy too, but we do it again the next day.

Right.

Because it's embedded in our unconscious.

And one of the great gifts of the best psychological work is to help us make the unconscious conscious and rework some of the beliefs that we took on about ourselves.

One of the great gifts of psychotherapy, whether we're talking about a person or a country, really, is because of our experiences, we've taken on certain beliefs about ourselves.

To the extent that those beliefs are negative, I'm not lovable, I'm not worthy, I'm not powerful, I don't matter, I don't belong.

To the extent that those beliefs are negative, we develop coping mechanisms out of those negative beliefs that are usually not functional.

I become a people pleaser, I become a workaholic, I become an addict, I become a rager, I become an isolated person who can't make relationship.

All of those ways that we cope actually are designed in our psyche to protect us, but they don't.

And that's the myth.

You know, I've had so many clients, for instance, and I've, you know, all kinds of symptomatic people because we bring our symptoms to therapy, but either a rager or somebody who is very isolated and alone, they really feel on an unconscious level that that coping mechanism is somehow going to protect them.

Anger can feel like a very protective mechanism, but it doesn't create relationship.

Isolation can feel like I'm going to retreat over here and nobody can hurt me.

Yeah, build up that wall, nobody can go through.

That's right.

But over here alone is a horrible, lonely place to be.

I think that's one of the things that psychotherapy really helps people understand and work through.

There's no blame in psychotherapy.

And the best psychotherapy, there's no blame.

If you became a rager, you may be hurting yourself and the people around you, and that's a cause for concern and a cause for hopefully the motivation to change and heal and grow.

But you came by that coping mechanism, honestly.

It was the best you could come up with from the hurt that you received that didn't get helped.

Why is it that when we say those things, I'm not lovable, I'm not enough, I'm not this and I'm not that, we say that privately, but sometimes we do verbalize it to those closest to us.

So if I say to Phyllis, I'm not enough, I'm not this.

Why is it that if you challenge me and say, Roberta, that's not true?

You know that's not true.

Why is that not a good enough reason for me to have that shift and say, hey, wait a minute, Phyllis is right.

I actually am lovable.

Why does it never happen like that?

If it was that easy, there wouldn't be any healing modalities around.

Right?

Why is it so deeply embedded that no matter how much those closest to you, those that you know, love you say, that is not true about you?

Because it's experiential and it's embedded in a place of experienced trauma or dysfunction in our psyches.

I can tell you very specifically from one incident that I will never forget, how deep one incident can go into a child's life.

I have a younger sister.

When I was little, I had a younger sister.

We were flower girls at my cousin's wedding.

We were probably, I don't know, six and four.

We were very little.

And we had these beautiful little dresses, and we had to stand in a receiving line for the wedding, where people came by and shook the hand of the bride and the groom and everybody.

And there was a man that came through the line, and he could not get over how beautiful my sister was.

And he just ood and awed over my sister.

What do you think I experienced?

I'm the ugly sister.

I'm the one nobody sees.

I'm not lovable.

I'm not pretty.

You know, I'm invisible.

Of course, there were other things in my childhood that reinforced that belief.

That was the tip of an iceberg, but I'll never forget that moment, and I remember how I felt.

So those things can have such a tremendous impact on a child.

That's a minor incident.

But if it's reinforced by other messages, which in my life it was, then it becomes part of our belief system about ourselves.

And when you're little, when you're six or you're four or you're two or you're eight, what you take in just feels like the truth.

We don't have, most of us, and you'd be a very unusual and blessed person if you did, most of us as children don't have any other part of our psyche that can say, wait a minute, that was that man's view.

That's not me.

That's not the truth.

We just don't have that facility.

And so unless we're surrounded by people who really affirm our lovability, our worth, that we should have a voice, that we can be heard, that we have appropriate power in the world to affect the world around us within the limits of being in relationship with other people who also have needs and wants and desires, often we don't get it.

And if you're someone who was beaten, who was molested, who was seriously harmed as a child, you do take in very negative beliefs about yourself, and then you cope the best you can.

But without help, it's really hard to undo that trance of whatever the negative belief is that you took on.

And as you said, it's how you felt.

They usually say what we always remember.

I mean, imagine how long ago it was when you were four or six.

Right.

But how it made us feel is the reason it keeps being reinforced and is the reason we never forget it.

That's right.

How the incident made us feel.

Yep.

It's exactly right.

That emotion can be re-triggered easily in our adult life, right?

Right.

But he looks at you sideways and you think, oh, they think I'm ugly or they think I'm stupid, or they don't like me or whatever.

And whatever the trauma is underneath that experience, just gets activated like that.

And I think the healing process, and again, none of it's perfect.

I can still get triggered, but I know what those triggers are more or less right now.

I have some access to reworking that within myself.

And that's the beauty of the healing work that's possible, is that even if you get triggered, even if there's an old stimulus that comes your way, you've developed more of that capacity within your adult self, not to move back into being six years old.

Because you know how sometimes we say adults are kids in big bodies?

Totally.

Yeah, we still relive some of those experiences.

We still, the little girl who was called this, who was bullied by kids at school, we still relive that sometimes if we haven't healed it.

And speaking of therapy, I know that it obviously doesn't take one or two sessions to heal.

However, sometimes you hear of people who say, I've been in therapy for my people pleasing for seven years.

Does it need to be that long a process?

Well, this is what I would say.

I think people are really different.

Because I've worked with people that I worked with for six months, and I've worked with people that I've worked with for two years.

And I had a client that I worked with for 11 years.

That's very unusual.

But this person had a history of very violent sexual and physical abuse for her entire childhood.

So we can't judge that it took 11 years for her to really come out of that place.

And it was a process.

I mean, she was coming out of it through that time.

So I think there's really no judgment.

But I think what you really want to evaluate, whether you're talking about 6 months or 2 years or 10 years or whatever, is something happening.

Am I getting better?

Am I coping better with life?

Am I gaining more understanding?

Or am I just repeating the same old story week after week after week, and nothing's happening?

So I think we just have to really look at that on an individual basis.

And certainly, there's therapies that are more effective than others.

And there are people that are way more deeply traumatized than others.

It certainly is.

And obviously, we're not judging that.

But sometimes what happens is that a person needs some form of therapy for the inexperience they've had.

And they hear that and they think, I'm going to have to work on this for seven years?

Oh, and then they don't do it at all.

Right.

Seven years is unusual, but it's not inappropriate for certain people.

And I think that a lot of people, like what I've noticed is I've worked intensively with people for a period of time, and they're kind of done.

And then they might come back two years later for a tune-up.

Something in their life triggered something that really upset them and they're not handling it well, and they come back for one or two sessions.

It can look any different way.

When I first went to therapy, I had sexual abuse in my childhood, and it was very traumatic for me, and it deeply impacted my life.

And when I went to therapy, I had so much pain that part of me didn't really want to be alive, except I had children who I adored, and I would never have never have hurt myself.

But that was the psychological state that I was in.

And one of the first things I said to the first therapist I went was, I don't want you to judge me for how long this is going to take.

I don't know how long it's going to take, but I don't want you to give to me the feeling like I'm not doing this fast enough or well enough.

I think we just need a lot of compassion for what people need.

We don't know what's inside other people.

Most of the people that I've worked with over the years look like they're functioning okay.

They have a job, they take their kids to their doctor's appointments, they take them to their soccer games, they walk their dog, and they may be suffering really, really deeply inside.

And so I think it's so important to just look at each other with compassion and not judge.

Absolutely.

So your book America In Therapy, you gave us a small synopsis of what it's about.

We recently had an election.

America, based on what happened afterwards, the aftermath of the election, what therapy do you think that is needed right now by America?

Yeah.

Well, you know, I think it really relates to the topic of your podcast, because I wrote the book before the election.

My book is out now.

It came out before the election, but it's out now after the election.

And I think the message in my book is actually needed more than ever, which is a lot of the divisiveness and violence that we're experiencing in our country, and the escalation of that, and the weaponizing of that on a psychological level.

These are mental health issues.

A lot of what we really need to learn in our own lives and in our country is how to communicate differently.

Because the communication that we have now is all about who's right, and who's wrong, and how am I going to prove you're wrong, and how am I going to dominate you into some kind of submission or humiliation or othering or judgment.

The whole model, the whole paradigm of right wrong, of win-lose, which is really what that paradigm is.

I win, you lose, and I'm going to beat you into some kind of submission, and I'm going to make other people not like you and vilify you, or criminalize you, or whatever, is what hurts us in our own lives.

That's exactly what hurts people in their individual lives is being made wrong, you know, having retaliation come toward them, or punishment, or excessive blame, or intense judgment, and not seeing people for their beautiful essence that's buried underneath whatever their coping mechanisms might be that aren't functional.

Healing doesn't come from judging people or hurting them, or humiliating them, or ostracizing them.

Those are the things that caused our symptoms in the first place.

So my message to the country really is, we're doing that to each other as a nation.

We're causing people to feel worthless, to feel unlovable, to feel inferior, to feel violated with no recourse.

And of course, they're going to become symptomatic.

You know, the tip of the iceberg of that, I mean, there's a lot of tips to this iceberg, but a lot of injustice, our horrible incarceration system, mass shootings that are on the rise, people who feel so alienated, who are in so much pain, who are in so much rage, that it comes out in a violent way.

And as horrible as those things are, we have to know that inside every single perpetrator is a victim somewhere who's untreated.

And if we don't commit as a society to having a whole different form of communication, non-violent communication, non-violent conflict resolution skills, so that we can bring out the best in people, so that we can help people cooperate and hear each other deeply and want to cooperate with one another, I think we're going to have more of the same.

And it's frightening.

I've only been in this country for four years, so you can fill me in on this.

Was it always this way?

And also because of the politics, or was there ever a time, the 80s, the 90s, where America wasn't this divided, and families went this much in conflict because of the politics?

Or you've seen the wave change and things start to look different from what they used to be?

That can only speak from my experience, but in my experience, it is really different.

I've never seen anything like this in America before.

I mean, people were always like, you know, are you a Democrat?

Are you a Republican?

Are you a Libertarian or a Green Party person?

But in my lifetime, I don't remember the amount of hatred being generated and being proliferated.

When I was young, and I didn't listen to, you know, a lot of news when I was younger, but I don't remember the media ever being the way the media is now.

It was just more like, we're going to tell you what's going on.

There was a demonstration.

This person said that, you know, this politician stands for this, that politician stands for that.

But it was never, in my experience, until very recently, loaded up with threats of violence, extremes of hatred, extremes of discrimination and othering.

This is something new.

And sad, because I think there was a movement in the 60s, 70s, and maybe the early 80s for more love to imbue politics, more acceptance, more cooperation.

I'm not saying it was perfect.

Our country has done some amazing things and perpetrated incredible violence.

You know, we have both, but I have never seen it be the way it is now.

And speaking of the news, I always tell this joke to my American friends.

I say, I come from a tiny third world country in South Africa.

When they tell the news, they say a red truck hit a gray car with four kids and a husband and a wife, and they passed away.

Unfortunately, that's the story.

And they move on to the next one.

Here, I always say, they use too many adjectives, meaning they put too much of their opinions on the story and the descriptions themselves are overly done to sort of make your imagination or your brain go a certain direction instead of just telling the story.

Right.

And it starts to make people think differently.

I think that's really true.

And I think part of that is also, which stories are being chosen to be told?

There's a lot of stories that are not chosen to be told that are of the wonderful, generous, kind, caring, considerate things that people do, and they never hit the news.

The projects that people undertake to feed people that don't have enough food or help them grow their own gardens or work to really enhance the education for children who are in marginalized school systems.

There are so many good things.

Those that are going on in our country all the time that are not put forth as the role models for what we're hearing on a daily basis.

So it's partly the way the stories are told and what's told.

It then feeds, like you said, into, if they tell that story, people are going to be bored, go to another channel where there's more exciting stuff and by exciting, it incites all the stuff we've talked about.

But also, are we then responsible for participating in that type of narrative instead of switching it off and look for more uplifting stories?

Well, thank you for saying that, because that really is, in my book, I call us the family of America.

We are a family.

We have disparate sections and populations, and we're a melting pot of many, many different people with different traditions and different backgrounds and different religions and different genders and different whatevers.

But if we look at any large grouping of people as a family, we know that in an individual family, for instance, we do hold the family responsible for what they teach their children and the environment they create for their children and what they put out into the world.

And we want parents to teach their children to be cooperative and to be kind and, you know, to not go out and rape and kill and steal, for instance, right?

And we have a society in which actually we're holding parents more and more responsible.

I don't think that's the end game.

If we have parents in an individual home who are wielding, you know, touting guns and, you know, spewing hatred, we have to help those families heal.

We can't just punish people because they learned what they learned somewhere.

And so then if you take that model and you look at the whole country, if we have leaders that are spewing hatred and proliferating gun violence and war, we have to look at ourselves of how do we heal this family?

And that's why I wrote the book.

We have to heal the family of America, the way we need to heal the individual family that's highly dysfunctional or abusive.

And there are principles of how to do that.

Not that we, I have all the answers, I don't, but I have 34 years of experience working with extreme dysfunction in my own life and with so many people that I've worked with.

And one of the bottom lines of that, and this is the short version, and I have lots of details in my book, is that we have to look at what conditioned us to believe and behave the way we do.

Just like the individual person who comes to therapy, looks, what happened to you?

What happened to me that I made the choices in my life, that I ended up at the age of 35 deeply depressed?

What happened to me?

I wasn't born that way.

Nobody's born that way.

Something happens to us.

So what's in the history of our country as well as us as individuals that has brought us to exactly this place in the history of America, where we're more divided than ever, we're more violent than ever, we're more hateful than ever, and we're condoning it?

What has brought us to that place?

And can we look at that with a spirit of healing and compassion and bringing skills?

And I just want to go back to the subject of your podcast, because one of the things, I have a whole chapter on this in my book, among other things, but it's really like, how do you constructively deal with conflict?

And again, I don't have all the answers, but I do outline some things in my book that I think are really critical.

And the bottom line for healing, for dealing with conflict and healing from conflict effectively is that, I focus on myself, not on you.

What can I be responsible for?

How can I communicate with you in a way that you are more likely to hear me?

Which means if I'm blaming and shaming and attacking and threatening you, you're probably not going to hear me.

Of course not.

I don't hear people that behave that way toward me, right?

So what can I be responsible for?

Can I own my own part if I have a part?

Can I be responsible for the tone of voice that I use, that I'm making eye contact with you, that I don't go like this when you're talking or walk out and slam the door?

Or can I listen with some kind of an open mind while I still advocate for what I believe in?

So there's two bottom lines, I think, to the most effective communication.

I put six principles in this chapter.

Restraining my most dysfunctional behaviors, yelling, rolling my eyes, slamming the door, walking out, threatening you, calling you names.

Restraining myself from anything that's aggressive like that and hurtful.

Reflecting on myself, where am I coming from?

What is my agenda here?

Am I open minded or am I acting out of some old wound on automatic pilot?

Can I be responsible for the way I'm communicating with you?

Can I make amends if I'm sorry?

If I really am responsible for part of what's going on, can I make amends to you in a sincere and genuine way?

Can I seek some kind of compromise or reconciliation with you?

And do I desire to reconnect with you?

Because that's the ultimate goal of the best communication.

And it doesn't always happen.

Sometimes we have to leave each other in peace, but if we can reconnect in some sense of deep understanding and love, that's the best of all possible worlds.

Those are some of the skills that I really talk about and really try my best in my most imperfect way to implement in my own life.

The other principle is the motivation to actually heal relationship.

Do I want it bad enough, or am I just willing to walk away and think you're a jerk, and I'm right and you're wrong?

Yes, sometimes there are times to just say, you know what, let Phyllis go in love, but you don't have to be in the same thing.

But we have become, because we don't have conflict resolution skills anymore, we've become so accustomed, block, block, block, block.

I don't want anybody, block, block.

You're dead to me, block.

And it has become such a norm.

Yes, some cases may warrant that, but it is becoming more and more of a norm because we just don't want to deal with it anymore.

And as you mentioned mental health earlier, sometimes we feel that we're protecting our mental health by not dealing with just block everybody.

Well, I think there's a difference between deciding, this is a situation I don't want to engage with, and really walking away from it with some kind of equanimity or peace, or just, you know, your integrity is intact and you haven't harmed anybody.

And walking away in a way that's retaliatory, or I'm going to ice you out as punishment for what I think you did wrong.

That's very different.

That's very, very different.

The bottom line is, am I doing harm?

Do I want to do harm?

Do I want to get back at you because you hurt me?

I might want to, but is that functional?

Can I be bigger than that?

Can I not lash out even though I'm so angry and I'm so hurt?

Can I not lash out because that doesn't serve?

It's good to express and be emotionally intelligent about it and express to Phyllis that you hurt my feelings and this is why and this is why I'm offended.

But we don't have those skills anymore.

We either block or lash out.

We just go extreme.

Whatever it is, we go extreme nowadays, unfortunately.

Right.

And we're human.

I'm going to be hurt sometimes.

I'm going to be angry sometimes and so is the next person.

Can we tolerate that and still want to heal the relationship?

Because that's part of it.

One of the things that I experience in the marriage that I'm in now is, we trigger each other, we get upset with each other, we have issues, but there is this container of love around our relationship.

We know we're going to come back to connection.

We know we both want that.

We know in our imperfect ways that we do want to be responsible for ourselves, and we do want to come back to love.

You know, that's probably the most important thing of all, even if you don't even have any skills.

You know?

Right.

You love your siblings to death, but sometimes you figure, yeah, but you always come back to the fact that you love each other.

Right.

Yes.

Do you think that the spike in this mental health crisis is fed by what's currently going on?

And is the solution for people to just protect themselves and retreat?

You know, I think it's a multifaceted answer, and I probably don't have all the answers.

And again, this is one of the reasons why I wrote about the Family of America, because the Family of America is made up of individuals.

And one of the things that I see from having been a therapist, working on a very one-on-one, one individual, one family, one couple, one child level for so many years, is that I think families in America in general are really hurting.

Many families are not supported to make a good living, or have adequate care for their children, or have good job opportunities, or access to mental health resources when they need them.

So I see in a kind of way that I think maybe the average person isn't really aware of, the level of abuse and neglect on a continuum from mild to extremely severe in families in America today is actually higher than I think most people either know or want to know.

So I think we have many suffering people, many suffering children who don't have access to help or the kind of nurturance they need, and they grow up with their dysfunction and their less than stellar coping mechanisms out there.

So our families desperately need help for resources, for mental health, for feeling like they belong.

Every family needs to feel like they belong here.

That's part of the trauma to many people is that even if their family is relatively healthy, the messages they're getting from society about the color of their skin or their gender preference or their religion or whatever are still that they're inferior and not wanted.

This is a very traumatic condition for many, many people in our country today, and I think it's escalating.

Not that it was ever great.

You know, I think we've been struggling with this issue for a really long time or forever.

But then if you have those kinds of values and policies being implemented and perpetuated from the largest family systems, you have this perfect storm of individual dysfunction and mega family dysfunction colliding.

And I think that's part of what we're seeing today.

And that's why our understanding of how to heal family systems on all levels is just critical to our survival.

It certainly is, because that's who society is.

It's us.

Any last words of wisdom?

Anything I haven't asked you, we're hoping to share with our listeners.

Thank you.

I love the topic of your podcast, because I think if we could actually focus on our communication and make it healthy and make it safe and make it respectful, I always say it this way.

We all want to be heard.

We all want to be spoken to with respect, with some level of care in some way that feels safe and affirming.

And yet we don't give that to each other.

We just want it for ourselves, but we don't look at the other person wants the same thing.

So the way I say it is we need to learn in our communication, in addition to all the skills or along with all the skills that you're talking about, I'm talking about, am I talking to you the way I want you to talk to me?

Am I listening to you the way I want to be heard?

If we could do just that in Congress, in our homes, we'd have a different world.

Words of wisdom from Phyllis Leavitt, the psychotherapist and author of America In Therapy.

We need so much healing, not just in America, but globally.

So thank you so much, Phyllis, for sharing all your wisdom and expertise today.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate you and the work you're doing.

My absolute pleasure.

Thank you for your kind words.

Before you go, is there any way we can find you online, if any of our listeners want to reach out to you?

Yes, please.

My website is my name, Phyllis Leavitt.

You can probably read it on there, but it's phyllisleavitt.com.

You can read all about my book on there.

You can find my book from all the major booksellers.

I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter, and I have lots of videos on YouTube, and you're welcome to reach out to me through my website if you would like to have further conversation or more information.

If you do reach out to me on my website, you'll receive a free copy of what we were talking about, those six steps, those six elements of repairing relationship when there's conflict.

And I made a PDF that is like a mini course that you can apply in your own life.

You will get a free copy of that.

Thank you for the free gift.

We always love those.

We appreciate your generosity.

Phyllis Leavitt, psychotherapist and author, thank you very much for being on our show today.

Thank you so much.

My absolute pleasure.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

Please log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on the show that will be of benefit to you.

We encourage you to continue to get communicating and let us know how communication skills continue to improve your life professionally and personally.

And stay tuned for more episodes to come.