Detach From These If You Want Love, Peace, And Clarity w/ Bob Rosen EP 110

[00:00:00] Shanenn Bryant: All right. Today's guest is someone who understands what it means to lose yourself in fear, control, or anxiety, and how to gently find your way back to peace. Bob Rosen is a psychologist; leadership advisor and author of the powerful book Detached Letting Go to Gain Clarity, Control and Peace. but this isn't about detaching from people or emotions. It's about releasing what's not working. So, the obsessive thoughts, the fear of being left, the emotional spirals that keep us stuck. So, if you have ever tried to control love, just to feel safe, this episode is for you. Welcome, Bob.

[00:01:43] Bob Rosen: Hi, how are you?

[00:01:45] Shanenn Bryant: I'm good. So glad to have you here. First, I want to ask, what are some of the signs that someone might be overly attached, maybe not just to their partner, but to need that reassurance, control, that constant validation.

[00:02:04] Bob Rosen: Right. Well, there's been a lot of talk about the power of attachment, which is really about relationships. This is really the opposite. It is about mental baggage that we hold onto about ideas and ideals and thought, thoughts and behaviors. So, some of the signs, less joy in our lives more anxiety and stress, the sense that we can't control environment.

[00:02:35] The belief that, we're less than other people. Our self-esteem issues, the belief that we're not reaching our full potential. 

[00:02:45] Mm-hmm. 

[00:02:46] Bob Rosen: So there’s a lot of reasons why people are attached to these mental baggage.

[00:02:54] Shanenn Bryant: When I work one-on-one with my coaching clients, that's one of the big things that either keeps them from starting to do it or where they feel stuck is they think that, oh, I'm not someone who can overcome this. I'm not someone who can do this. so, we get in that perception of oh, I'm not going to be able to conquer this.

[00:03:14] Bob Rosen: I've always been a student as a psychologist. I've always been a student of self-awareness and self-development, and over my career coaching CEOs of large companies, I began to appreciate the blending of Eastern and Western psychology. Western psychology is really about setting goals and having aspirations.

[00:03:37] And Eastern psychology talks about being too attached.

Mental models in our brain, and they become like a psychological cancer, we can't get rid of. They're stories that we tell ourselves.

[00:03:52] Bob Rosen: I came up with these 10 attachments. Then I interviewed a bunch of my friends and colleagues who exhibited some of these attachments and they told their stories about how they were hijacked by them and then also how they got rid of them.

[00:04:11] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. I think, going through the list of all the 10 attachments, every single one of them, you could go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:04:16] Bob Rosen: Yeah,

[00:04:17] Shanenn Bryant: There’s a few that I really want to touch on if we can, because I know I am very much like our listener. The listener is very much like me. And so, when I looked at this list, when I was going through everything preparing for this interview, there were a couple that just stood out to me as I know it probably would the listener.

[00:04:37] So I wanted to start with the first one is the attachment to the past.

[00:04:41] Bob Rosen: I mean many of us harbor old memories of past experiences, past people in our lives, our parents, our siblings. I. Where we didn't have a great relationship with them

They stay stuck in our memories, and we can't get rid of them. And so, it's important to do a couple things to get rid of them.

First off is to become aware that they exist. One of the people I interviewed was Grace, a computer programmer, who had a very difficult relationship with her mother, and she brought that relationship into her adulthood and her parenting and the like. Then after being aware, you have to let it go. Right.

You have to understand the why of the attachment, and then to let it go and to embrace forgiveness.

One of the difficult things for people is that they have trouble forgiving scars from the past, but it's really important. And that's a major one.

But I've seen people who can work on this, they become de-shackled, if you will, and are not as attached to those various memories.

[00:06:02] Shanenn Bryant: I know even for my own situation, my father was an alcoholic. He was not around after my, too much in my life after my parents divorced. And so, I harbored that a lot and I had this big fear of abandonment and, I just, didn't trust people and that. led into this jealousy in my adulthood.

[00:06:21] And that was the thing once I let go of that, anger with him and that we had a, we built a beautiful relationship the last three years of his life. But I know what someone's thinking is okay, but how do I just let go? Like, it sounds super easy to just let go of this, thing or this story in particular.

But if I've been telling myself this story that, you know. nobody loves me or I don't belong, or I'm gonna be abandoned. If I've been saying that for years and years, how do we let go of it now?

[00:06:51] Bob Rosen: One of the dilemmas is that people have strong attachments to their parents.  They didn't get enough love, they were abused. You go down the line.

[00:07:00] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah.

[00:07:01] Bob Rosen: and one of the rights of adulthood is to recognize that our parents did the very best that they could Their tools, their belief systems, their emotional health or lack of it and at some point, we've just gotta say, they did the best they could, and it wasn't perfect, and I didn't get the environment that I wanted work expected, but I have to move on and take control over my own life.

Thats a very important rite of passage for healthy adulthood.

[00:07:38] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, that was the turning point, of me going, hang on a second. Like I've been angry and blaming him for all of these things all these years. He was, trying with the tools that he had at that time and like really understanding Okay. he was trying his best. Just like I'm trying my best as an adult and I don't have it all figured out either.

[00:07:58] Right. Like, oh yeah.

[00:08:01] Bob Rosen: I think you also feed into the attachment to control and to perfection because, when you have an attachment to control, you feel the need to control everything, both your past, your present, and your future. And life is not controllable all the time.

[00:08:22] What we have to do is to accept. the vulnerability that comes from not being in control. We also want a perfect parenthood. We want a perfect past and life is not perfect, and we have to fall in love with our imperfections. So here are two attachments, control perfection that affect our attachment to the past.

[00:08:47] Shanenn Bryant: It's funny because that's exactly where I was going next. Because when we're jealous and insecure in our relationships, we are absolutely trying to control our partner, right? Who our partner's talking to, where they're going, how are they behaving? I expect them to do these types of things.

[00:09:06] Who are they texting, how are they texting? All of that. We're very much trying to control that other person in the relationship. Not intentionally, of course, but that control comes out. And you say control is like an addiction, right?

[00:09:19] Bob Rosen: Yeah, it is. there are four ways that control influences people. One is people who have the need out of fear. Mistrust or anger to control other people. Then there are people who find themselves in positions where they are controlled by others, and they lack their sense of self-esteem and personal power to step up and own who they are, independent of that person.

People who are passive aggressive who aren't comfortable expressing their power and their control, and they do it informally and indirectly. And then you have people who are people pleasers who live in other people's worlds. So, control influences people in a variety of ways. but I do think that the secret is to yourself to be vulnerable to decide what you can and cannot control.

[00:10:13] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. Really take an inventory of let me be realistic in what I can control and what I can't control.

[00:10:20] Bob Rosen: No question about that.

[00:10:22] Shanenn Bryant: So how do we stay connected in the relationship but not consumed by it? 

[00:10:29] Bob Rosen: That's a great question. I think there are a number of people, first off, the percentages of people who say that they are lonely is going up considerably, and as a result, people feel disconnected.

They may become self-absorbed. They may isolate from other people, or they may actually just cultivate a selfishness about them. And generally, it has to do with a fear of intimacy and connection.  Many of us are scared of being vulnerable in front of other people. 

But relationships require, I'm in a 40-year relationship and it is so critical for me to be authentic and to be myself and to show my vulnerabilities in order for us to courageously communicate with one another. So, I think intimacy in the connection. So how do you deal with it? You have to put love over fear with your own self-love. And then loving the other person. Then you have to become much fat, more facile in empathy and deep listening to really take the perspective and understand where the other person is going. 

Finally, I think you have to graciously serve others. And all three of those are hard to do. John Gottman's research has said for a long time that he can predict divorce in 96% of the situations because couples come in and they exhibit contempt and defensiveness and stonewalling, and he knows that the relationship is on bumpy grounds.

[00:12:14] Shanenn Bryant: Going back to how we started the conversation, if I've got things that, from my past or from my parents that I'm still dragging around and carrying into this relationship, and then you say something maybe in that part. might possibly trigger me. I'm not really listening to what you're trying to communicate, I'm more, I'm, now I'm thinking about me and how that's making me feel. And I think that's a really hard thing in a relationship to actually hear something that maybe isn't positive that your partner saying to you without getting defensive and upset and, maybe some of that resentment.

[00:12:51] Bob Rosen: I think one of the main reasons is that we don't love ourselves. I think it's the most important thing is that we are in love with ourselves. And I don't mean in a narcissistic sense, I mean in holding true to who we are, what our purpose is, what our values are, what our self-esteem is, and then we can start to have that conversation.

[00:13:13] But without loving ourselves, we are very vulnerable going into those conversations because what you want is the truth. And you want courageous conversation, but boy can that hurt if you don't love yourself.

[00:13:27] Shanenn Bryant: That really shows up in these jealous relationships or insecure relationships because now your partner's, I don't tell them the truth because of their reaction a lot of times to it. And so now you have that thing that you feared you have created in the relationship.

[00:13:42] Like I fear that they're not telling me the truth, but then yeah, that's just how. How we get as humans after a bit of like, okay, well when I do tell the truth, this reaction is really extreme or it doesn't go well, so you know, maybe I won't be completely vulnerable again.

[00:14:00] Bob Rosen: And you also touch in two additional attachments. One is the attachment to stability. Most of us believe that the world should be stable. I. But stability is an illusion, and uncertainty is reality. And so, we have to become much more agile in our interactions with the world. And secondly is that others of us are attached to the future. live in the future, if you spend too much time in the future. always worrying about what's going to happen. So

[00:14:38] Bob Rosen: So if you go into a conversation with your partner or a workmate and you're attached to the future, influenced by the past, needing to control it and to be perfect and not being open to the uncertainty of how it happens and unfolds, you're in prob, you're gonna have problems

[00:14:59] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah.

[00:15:00] Bob Rosen: in that conversation.

[00:15:01] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. because that's what a lot of people, that's what most of us do, is oh, let me think of all the different ways that this could go, or, and we certainly usually think of all the different ways it can go wrong, right? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:17] Bob Rosen: I think one of the things that under girds, all of the attachments is fear.  And that really affects all of us, and what we need to do is we need to recognize that fear comes in all shapes and sizes. We all have our own demons, but we have to allow ourselves to get comfortable being uncomfortable with our fears.

If we can't address those fears directly and really look at them from all sides, we never get through these attachments. And each one of the 10 attachments has an underlying fear associated with it. So, I talk about that with some real practical recommendations about how to address those underlying fears.

[00:16:02] Shanenn Bryant: Okay. Do you have a couple that you could, like what are the top two that you could share with us? one is our attachment to success,

[00:16:11] Bob Rosen: The primary fear is the feeling of failure. Or insignificance.

So, what is the attachment to success? The attachment to success is. that your personal success depends on what other people outside of you think about you your own definition of success. So, it really is built on the paradigm that what you do defines who you are Right. who you are as a human being. Drives what you do. And a lot of people are driven by those external factors, it has a huge impact on people because a lot of strivers, highly ambitious people are attached to this kind of success. And if they don't look at the fears of failure of. In significance, inadequacy, they never can get their arms around success, and they never feel successful

[00:17:18] Right.

[00:17:18] Bob Rosen: even with the fact that they may be making tons of money living a great life with a huge house. Um, I mean, I know somebody who had a tremendous attachment to fear.

[00:17:32] She was never happy with her career. She was always talking about her customers and how much money she was making. And at 65, she dropped dead in her kitchen from a heart attack. And so, it, she kept it inside of her. So, this attachment to success is a real big one.

[00:17:51] Shanenn Bryant: Do you feel like that makes it hard for us to figure out, like, what do we really think success is? Because it's like all of these things are telling us what it is, making money, what kind of car you drive, what kind of house you live in, how you dine all of those things and. We're maybe not thinking about what is it?  What do I think that success looks like?

[00:18:14] Bob Rosen: That’s the question.  What brings me happiness independent of other people's opinions. I, there's a story in the book of, a fellow by the name of Matt, who was my physical trainer for a long time, and he was my exercise, guru and mentor, and he told me a story about how his mother and father wanted him to be an engineer.

[00:18:44] Bob Rosen: He wanted to be a physical therapist and he followed their advice and felt guilty because they were paying for his education

[00:18:53] Bob Rosen: One day he looked in the mirror and he said, this is what I want to do. And it freed him to be the happy, successful physical therapist that he is today. And I think everybody has a story like that where they've had to make their choices about their career.

I suspect you have as well.

[00:19:11] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, actually just going through that, recently of hey, I'm being really, drawn to continue on what I'm doing versus maybe this other thing that I just kind of had been forced to do. Right. So, yeah, that's huge.

[00:19:26] Bob Rosen: Another one that comes to mind, because it's a great question that you asked, is the attachment to youth. 

The challenges is that we reach our peak physically and cognitively around age 30 and the rest of our lives is about degradation

[00:19:47] Yeah.

[00:19:47] Bob Rosen: physically through lifestyle, risk factors and diseases and all of that stuff starts very on, very early on. And as people get older in midlife and they start to enter retirement. They undergo an, in an incredible, transformational point where they can choose one of two paths. They can choose a life of introspection, of freedom, of maturity, of allowing themselves to explore a whole new way of living. Or they can pursue a path of regret and anxiety and fear of death and illness. And many of us harbor known as internalized ageism. We actually believe that older people are less respectable and respected, so we have to confront those fears of aging and our attachment to youth. now how do you do that? 

Well, you have to live a healthy lifestyle. have to develop a youthful personality of optimism and curiosity and learning. You have to confront that internalized ageism. I. That exists inside your head. In fact, 86% of the population in the United States actually admits that they harbor internalized ageism.

[00:21:19] Bob Rosen: So, this is a real attachment that we have to sort of loosen and get rid of in order to embrace, aging. We have to age gracefully.

[00:21:28] Shanenn Bryant: That's interesting that you bring that up, Bob, because I was, you know, as you were talking, I was thinking back to my grandpa who, towards the end of his life, he got, his personality just changed a lot. And he was like, oh, people just, they're not interested in old people anymore and no one wants to come and see you, and no one wants to talk to you.

[00:21:46] And I was like, oh grandpa, come on. That's not true. And I think he probably was getting that feeling just in general from society. Then it just shut him down to where it almost fulfilled itself because Okay, yeah, now you're super grumpy and nobody does want to be around. Right. So, I can see how getting caught up in that and certainly, talking to women every day, all day long, this is a big one for us too, because it's like, oh, that's all we wanna do is just reverse time and it's re having a really hard time.

[00:22:22] Adjusting to all the different changes of your body and the way you look and all of that, it's really tough.

[00:22:29] Bob Rosen: And we, it plays out differently. We just talked about how it plays out in later life, people between 20 and 35 are the most stressed age generation right now. They're stressed about money, about career, about relationships, and women. Actually, have a greater capacity to feel that because they're more likely to think and feel and then act versus men who act and then maybe they discover a feeling or a belief

[00:23:02] Or they don't. Yeah.

[00:23:03] Bob Rosen: and so women experience this and so the question is how attached they are to their own youth and their own evolution. People in the mid-career who are strivers, attached to rewards, money, status, prestige at the expense of their family, their friends, their relationships, their health

[00:23:29] Right.

[00:23:30] Bob Rosen: So, every generation experiences this attachment to youth and age differently.

[00:23:36] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, it's a tough one. It's a tough one. I do wanna talk about, earlier we were touching on our thoughts, and I want to talk about obsessive thinking because it's definitely something that we do when we're jealous and insecure. and we really get into this loop of, not being able to stop.

[00:23:57] Thinking about who our partner's talking to, who they're texting, why they didn't respond right away. and it just goes down the line. So, I wanted to just talk about or get your thoughts on obsessive thinking and where that kind of falls in this attachment, these 10 attachments. Like how is that showing up?

[00:24:16] Bob Rosen: I think it falls right at the center. Of these attachments. and it's typically fear-based.  We can't let go of thinking. And so, when people obsess something, it's an unconscious way of trying to solve the problem by over and over and over. However, it doesn't solve the problem because we never confront the story behind the obsession. why are we doing this? What are we attached to? Is it the past? Is it control? Is it perfection?

[00:24:56] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah.

[00:24:57] Bob Rosen: pleasure? and so obsession is a way of sort of reinventing problem solving on an unconscious level that doesn't work. and so, we have to stand back, get conscious of it, and then attack it as an attachment. The fear underneath it, and then we can loosen the obsession.

[00:25:20] Shanenn Bryant: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:20] Bob Rosen: but it's not easy for some people.

[00:25:23] Bob Rosen: as I was mentioning, a lot of people live in the future and the way they deal with their anxiety about the future is they obsess over what's going to happen.  It does nothing. I ask people at dinner parties all the time would you rather live in the past or do you live in the past, the present or the future?

The past is all driven by anxiety. I'm sorry, the past is driven all by sadness generally, and the present.. everybody wants to live there, but they get stuck at either end of the poll.

[00:25:59] Yeah, and I know it's like that future thinking and trying to plan again, oh, what's gonna happen in the future? How's this gonna go? Is like this, thinking that you're preparing yourself when you're not. You're just making yourself anxious, really. Right.

[00:26:14] Shanenn Bryant: yeah, yeah,

[00:26:14] Bob Rosen: Exactly.

[00:26:15] Shanenn Bryant: yeah.

[00:26:15] Bob Rosen: have, I just got copy, my first copy of my book,

[00:26:19] Shanenn Bryant: I love it.

[00:26:21] Bob Rosen: and,

[00:26:21] Shanenn Bryant: That's great.

[00:26:22] Bob Rosen: yeah, it's so much fun to hold on to. a book and I've written. Eight of them. But I'm most proud of this book because I told my own personal story, like you have, about my attachments in my early life and my attachments later on in life and, and one night I woke up, and I had this dream that I was attached to all these things, and I wrote them down, but it wasn't the right time to write this personal book. So, I put it in the attic, and I brought it down 12 years later, and it

[00:26:58] Wow,

[00:26:58] Bob Rosen: came out of me. And I just told the truth about myself in a way that I had never done before, and I loved it.

[00:27:05] Shanenn Bryant: That's incredible. yeah. I love that when you can just go, okay, here's the truth. it's ugly. parts of it might be ugly, but I really think that's how people connect the most and how they can see themselves in other people. Right? I mean, that's part of doing this podcast I get all the time where people go, “I can't believe you said that.”  “I can't believe you admitted that that's what you used to do” or that, you know, and that was the goal is I want to make it okay for people to know that, hey, you're not alone, you're not in this by yourself. And some of these things we all working through or suffering through sometimes.

[00:27:49] So I love that you did that and that's got to feel so good. I was going to bring up like, this isn't your first rodeo when it comes to writing books, but it sounds like this one is really the one you're most proud of.

[00:28:01] Bob Rosen: I am, I talk about my husband of 40 years. How I was attached to success, very ambitious, and uh, and I would get burned out. And I had some back problems and neck problems, and I had some surgery, and I was given Demerol. And late in my life I became attached to opiates

I became addicted to opiates for a while, and I've been sober for four years.

But I wanted to write about that and to help people who are too attached to pleasure eating, alcohol, shopping,

social media. You go down the list. When we are not comfortable, we choose substances addictions that help to alleviate the pain, So, there's a whole chapter in the book about the attachment to pleasure as well.

[00:28:55] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, yeah, yeah. because we get into that, like overeating or binge-watching TV or all of that, certainly happens. I know here, there like the attachment to alcohol because people feel like, oh, this loosens me up. I won't be jealous; I won't be insecure. But then it, we know that it doesn't help, it actually hurts and makes it worse for that person.

[00:29:20] And now we really don't have control over our emotions if something does bother us. So, congratulations on the book. It's fantastic. We will link it in the show notes and if somebody does want to find you, Bob, where do they go?

[00:29:37] Bob Rosen: They go to bobrosen.com very easily. We've created an assessment. Oh, and how attached you are. That gives you feedback and all about the underlying fears and recommendations on the 10 attachments. We've also created a little book club in a box, so if groups of people wanna read the book together, we've created some facilitator guides and things, and it's all on the website, Bobrosen.com.

[00:30:06] Shanenn Bryant: Fantastic. Thank you so much for being here. I enjoyed the conversation and thanks for your time.

[00:30:12] Bob Rosen: My pleasure.