From Connection to Everlasting Love with Enrico Gnaulati

Feb 22

Episode 12

Enrico Gnaulati Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist based in Pasadena, California, and Affiliate Professor of Psychology at Seattle University. He has published numerous journal and magazine articles and his work has been featured on Spectrum News, Al Jazeera America, China Global Television Network, KPCC Los Angeles, KPFK, Los Angeles, KPBS, San Diego, WBUR, Boston, KPFA Berkeley, Wisconsin Public Radio, Public Radio Tulsa, Free Thought Radio, and online at the Atlantic, Salon, and Psychology Today, as well as reviewed in Maclean's, Pacific Standard, the Huffington Post, The Australian, Prevention and the New Yorker. As a blogger for Mad in America and PsychAlive, board member for the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), and through his writings and advocacy efforts he is considered a nationally recognized reformer of mental health practice and policy.
His books include: Back to Normal: Why Ordinary Childhood Behavior is Mistaken for ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder (Beacon Press, 2013)
Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted Science are Ruining Good Mental Health Care (Beacon Press, 2018)
Emotion-Regulating Play Therapy with ADHD Children: Staying with Playing (Jason Aronson, 2008)
His latest books are: Flourishing Love: A Secular Guide to Lasting Intimate Relationships (Phoenix Publishing House, 2023)
Peacemaking with Preschoolers: Conflict Resolution to Promote Emotional Mastery and Harmonious Classrooms, (GoodMedia Press, 2023).
From the first beat of our hearts to our final moments of connection, love weaves its way through every aspect of our lives, guiding and enriching us. This life force goes beyond our conventional understanding of romance. Love is also the bonds we share with our friends, the support and care we receive from our families, and the self-love and compassion we cultivate within ourselves.
As natural as it can be, love is complex. Developing our capacity to both give and receive it is an achievement in its own right; and it’s another challenge to sustain meaningful relationships. Most often, these questions are the very reason we come to therapy.
Enrico Gnaulati knows this to be true. As a highly experienced clinical psychologist and author with over three decades of expertise working with children, adults, and couples, he has studied the balance of patience, understanding, and compromise required to maintain deep connections.
On this episode of The Art of Listening, Enrico uncovers the common thread that unifies successful and enduring relationships: the art of deep listening. Drawing inspiration from his own marital experiences and dedicated work with couples, Enrico imparts the wisdom of his latest book, ‘Flourishing Love: A Secular Guide to Lasting Intimate Relationships’. He explores how the pillars of listening, attention, and communication form intimate and lasting connection. He also shares his latest interests in therapeutic practice; his enduring labour of love.
Together, we delve into the fundamental questions of what healthy love truly looks like, and the profound growth that comes from embracing vulnerability.
Chapters
1 - Enrico's upbringing and trajectory to psychotherapy, from children’s to couples' work (4:24)
2 - The intricate and complex dynamic therapists face within couples therapy (11:30)
3 - The power of "virtues", and essential qualities to long-lasting, successful relationships (18:04)
4 - The value of attention in relationships, and how to be a deep listener (25:48)
5 - Enrico’s view on the importance of relationships and human connection (29:23)
Links
Enrico Gnaulati
Enrico’s Book ‘Flourishing Love: A Secular Guide to Lasting Intimate Relationships’
Enrico’s Book ‘Saving Talk Therapy’
Enrico: [00:00:03] Attention is the rarest and purest form of love. Showing true curiosity with one's partner or friends, taking an interest in them, and a very embodied, attentive, caring way. I'm very interested in how that is an act of love that sustains a long tum bond.
Eileen: [00:00:31] I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is the Art of listening, a podcast that delves into the incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth. Talk therapy. Today's guest is Enrico Nicoletti. The fabric of who we are is love. From the first beat of our hearts to the very last. Love brings us to life and helps us grow like a continuous thread. It pulls us out of wrong turns and guides us toward right ones. It's the silk that wraps around us, protective in all weathers, nourishing, always with a tender touch, a knowing smile, an inquiry of concern. The action of kindness. Love ties us together and softens everything. Today, let's talk about love as it courses through our relationships all our lives in the therapeutic space. As speakers and listeners, we find freedom to create and to continue enriching our most meaningful connections. We come to therapy more often than not because we need to know what does healthy love look like, what makes it last and feel richer and richer? How do I hold on to believing when the doubts or the hurts take over? I put these questions to my esteemed colleague Enrico Galati. So the values, the virtues of benevolence, loyalty, forgiveness, what those words mean to you actually in living color. How do you know when you're it's happening?
Enrico: [00:02:22] I actually see those virtues as treatment goals. There is a way to conceive of psychopathology in terms of the absence of certain virtues, the absence of benevolence, the absence of courage, the absence of forgiveness, the absence of loyalty, and the presence of each of those you can construe as wellness.
Eileen: [00:02:47] My conversation with Enrico reveals his fiercely loving commitment to therapeutic practice, from working through trauma with children, and the painful breakout of his religious upbringing to his most recent work with couples, Enrico has thought about the meaning of true love through thick and thin. Today. He shares his depth of knowledge and experience and helps us reconsider not just how we build our most important relationships, but how we tend to them, how we invest in them too. With power to keep them well and constructively evolving in time. So as you listen, I invite you to look at the sources of love and joy in your life. Thinking about those who mean the world to us. Reflecting on feeling known and valued, understood and cared about so personally. What does love feel like as it flows from me to you and you to me? Please welcome Enrico Nicoletti. He is a clinical psychologist working with adults, couples, teens, children and families with more than 30 years in practice. He is the author of Saving Talk Therapy, which was first released in 2018. His latest book is called Flourishing Love A Secular Guide to Lasting Intimate Relationships. Enrico, could you share initially, what sparked your interest in psychology and what led you to pursue this profession?
Enrico: [00:04:30] You know, as a teenager, believe it or not, I studied to be a Catholic priest in rural Scotland and emigrated to the United States in about 1978, fully intending to continue studying for the Catholic priesthood. And then everything kind of took a right turn from there. I ended up in high school, then college, and I essentially had an emotional breakdown, having grown up in a very blue collar silo where Catholic upbringing, I very like there was a sort of a very restricted access to different paradigms of understanding in the world. And I think there was a feeling in which I had been hoodwinked by religion, that the provinciality of the paradigm was so limiting. There was that internal sense that I had been fooled, and all the years of repression that it took to sustain a vocation to the priesthood and this, that, and the next thing, uh, made me get into therapy. And I had some spectacular early experiences in therapy as a young man. And that pretty much cemented it for me that that was a profession that I wanted to get into my own personal experience in therapy and how life saving transformational it was. Then from there, I started taking psychology classes, going to philosophy, American Studies, and long story short, I went on got a master's degree in Existential Phenomenological Psychology at Seattle University and ended up in the clinical psychology program at Teachers College at Columbia. And that sense of vocation and mission has stuck with me. And, you know, all my writings, my clinical work, I, I still have that early, early, early sentiment of wanting to be of service. The books that I write, I latch on to some perceived injustice that, in my mind, requires some kind of social corrective. And that's a huge motivational reservoir for me. And I have a very sharpened perspective for, um, not just injustice, but for pretense, for hypocrisy. So these themes sort of pervade my writing and my clinical work. Yeah.
Eileen: [00:07:05] You know, I'm also thinking about how you started your career, as I understand it, working with kids. Um, and then you moved from kids to working with adults, from working with adults to working with couples. I wonder how you think about the trajectory of your own experience over time, in terms of the range of people and how you've come into your way of thinking and and being in the work?
Enrico: [00:07:30] I think there's a through line. I mean, in coming out of graduate school, I did specialize in child work. And, you know, I kind of learned early on working with children that psychoanalytic neutrality didn't get me anywhere. So I came out of an analytic program at Columbia University. You know, these ideas of interpreting the play and looking for themes, looking for how traumas getting acted out in the play and interpreting them to children. I found early on that there was like minimal receptivity on the part of the children. I was working to that model, so I sort of abandoned it. And I got in trouble a little bit in graduate school, because I remember a case with a supervisor with a kid that I was working with, you know, who had grown up in Harlem, and he had been the victim of a break in to his house. And I tried to kind of interpret, you know, his play along the lines of trauma and got nowhere. And so then just started kind of playing with them where we played this marble game where we would throw marbles against the wall, and which is a game that I played as a kid to see who could get it closest to the wall and trying to knock the other one's marble out of the way. And he got very engaged in that game. And I realized that play can be kind of a bonding experience with children that makes you a trusted, credible therapist that then actually gets them talking.
Enrico: [00:09:09] And so that kind of stuck with me. So the notion that you you have to sort of engage with clients, child clients, adult clients in terms of. Where they're at before you can go deeper. So even with my adult individual clients, even with couples right now, I'm not as put off by skimming the surface with seemingly non-therapeutic that might seem small talky stuff in therapy. I've learned over the years that that can kind of grease the wheel of a kind of a trusted bond, that then when the time is right as a therapist, that you go deeper and you ask deeper questions. But the prelude may need to be something different than what we therapists typically define as a therapeutic comment or a therapeutic interaction. Clients come in when they're at their most vulnerable, starting a therapeutic relationship, their most raw. And I think that requires a human response, not a bureaucratic response. And so I'm a big believer in when I'm working with trainees trying, you know, who are anxiously pulling out the paperwork and needing to get informed consent, needing to go over the the sort of the basic rules of therapy. I we need to kind of think prioritize human ethics at time while being mindful of professional ethics. Yeah.
Eileen: [00:10:46] With Enrico. We learn that building trust in our relationships doesn't have to start with raw vulnerability. Instead, it can begin with a willingness to engage even in what appears to be play, to meet someone on their grounds, speaking their language. Enrico is living proof that a personal experience of injustice can become an organizing principle, that even from a place of distrust, we can find our way. We can create a most meaningful and long lasting relational life. You know, this is a bit of a flight of thought, but I'm just sort of struck. Your latest work, Flourishing Love. It's all about connection, you know, lasting, fulfilling, workable connection. So tell me about the themes that you take up. What was the injustice or the edge that grabbed your attention and said, ah, now it's time to write Flourishing Love.
Enrico: [00:12:00] Mm. There's a couple of them. The first one was and it's personal. I mean, it's reflects sort of my own marriage, but also years of working with couples. It struck me that in most long terme, intimate commitments, marriage or otherwise, there are phases where you can experience relational alienation, profound relational alienation, the profound sense of incompatibility, hopelessness about the relationship. And it struck me as that if people succumb to that in an otherwise good marriage, that could tragically end what is essentially a good bond. And that was true certainly for me. Now that I'm older, I have a very solid marriage. I'm profoundly happy in my marriage. And I look back and I suppose there's a certain kind of the wisdom of age. So wanted to say something about that. So just normalizing how desiccated and dry marriage can become at times, even for normal everyday reasons, not because of deep incompatibilities. And I get into that in the book. I look at the phase of a marriage of children were involved there, child rearing years, and how I titled that chapter Surviving Domesticity and looking at how for large phases of a marriage, when there are children involved, the goal is not to thrive as a couple. It's just to basically survive. Something like two thirds of couples experience profound marital dissatisfaction after the birth of a child, and don't really rediscover pre childhood levels of romantic connection, oftentimes into the empty nest years.
Enrico: [00:13:54] And I kind of wanted to normalize that, for instance. But then the deeper I got into the topic, it struck me that there was no pro marriage book from a secular perspective, that the religious right had commandeered that literature. And so then I, I developed an interest in what is a secular position on marriage look like. And I also wanted to punch back a little bit in terms of the hypocrisy on the religious right that they're that they have like a bastion of family values and look at data sets that actually dispel that. So, for instance, some of the highest rates of divorce right now are in communities around the country where evangelical Christians live. Some of the highest rates of pornography viewing are among evangelical Christians. And so I wanted to make the basic argument in the book that, you know, secular values at an overarching level are not the cause of marital cynicism in the United States right now. And that's what the book's all about. But it's also very practical. Pick it up and read it, that there's a lot of great practical advice for couples. I describe what flourishing love looks like, how to aspire to it, and then I have a giant chapter in the back that therapists will like on couples therapy.
Eileen: [00:15:21] I appreciated the point you made that it's hard work doing couples work. There's a lot more and something that sets couples work apart from individual adult work or child work. You know, we all use the words communication, intimacy, trust. But when that's, you know, ailing if not broken and heading for the falls, what does it mean to you as a couples therapist?
Enrico: [00:15:54] I mean, I think I forget who made the funny quote once that doing couples work with the average couple is like trying to land a helicopter in a hurricane. And I think for those of us who do couples work and try to do it well, we've long abandoned any narrow definition of neutrality and therapeutic abstinence. You know, to do effective couples work, you have to have a preparedness to be very participatory. Tory very engaged to take charge of the clinical situation. I remember years ago, Phil Ringstrom, who's a very well regarded relational psychoanalyst. I was talking with him and he described a situation with a couple that were having your standard bloodbath conflict, and he stood up and he took both of his fingers and pointed at both of his eyes. And he said to the husband, who was yelling and screaming, you only get to talk when I do this with my eyes. And it just seemed at such a at variance to kind of how those of us that have a psychoanalytically friendly approach to couples work, work. Right. And that interests me. Like how to really come down on a client who's behaving egregiously, how to step in, and what do you do in therapy when what is it like to take sides clinically, and how do you take sides effectively, where you really align with one partner over another and then vice versa fluidly throughout the course of a session or a series of sessions, and really override a dynamic and get clients to kind of reboot and construct the session in ways where the the heat is turned down so that there can be some meaningful dialogue, some cool reflection on their dynamics. Those sorts of topics interest me to.
Eileen: [00:18:03] We both know that what brings people to therapy, way more often than not, is something about relationship with someone, even with themselves, but and how deep it goes, and what the patterns are that have set up a deep way of being that's hurting at least as much as helping, if not more so, the values, the virtues of, I want to say benevolence, loyalty, forgiveness. I wonder, you know what those words mean to you actually, in living color. How do you know when you're it's happening actually in a way that you trust as opposed to feeling hoodwinked.
Enrico: [00:18:47] But that's a great, great question, Eileen. I mean, I, I actually see those character virtues as you could conceive of them as treatment goals. So I think there's a way to conceive of psychopathology in terms of the absence of certain virtues, the absence of benevolence, the absence of courage, the absence of forgiveness, the absence of loyalty, and the presence of each of those. I think you can construe as constitutive of mental health and wellness. I even language my interpretations with clients along the language of character virtues like, gosh, that was that was I think that was incredibly courageous of you. I think that that level of loyalty helps your husband to think well of you in the marriage. Like literally using those words. It's like I'm struck by how able you were to recognize your own guilt and to apologize and humble yourself in that way. Wow. So I that's I find that very clinically useful. And I it fits with kind of the way my own professional identity is evolving as I get older, where I'm turning to philosophy more to stoicism, Aristotelian thinking, to kind of see how that, you know, what that has to offer clinical work.
Eileen: [00:20:23] Here. Enrico shows us that words bring us calm and that our dearest relationships could be the most fascinating mysteries of our lives. On one hand, they ground us, reminding us of what we've learned, where we've been. They say something about the road so far. Its fears, its joys, the depths of our bonds, the resonance of our collective story. And yet these people. Our most important people are still significant others, and so they keep us guessing. We spend our whole lives circling our memories. To make sense of them. We cherish the connections that feel like true love. Learning from the hurt as we go. So when fascination and agony lie side by side, what do you do? I just wanted to ask the question then, just simple and straight up in your way of thinking, what are the qualities essential to any long lasting relationship?
Enrico: [00:21:44] Well, at this phase of my life, I'm very interested in granular expressions of love. Simon Veal has has an expression that attention is the rarest and purest form of love. Attention is the rarest and purest form of love. I'm very interested in just how love like showing true curiosity with one's partner or friends, literally taking an interest in them, and a very embodied, attentive, caring way. I'm very interested in how that is an act of love that sustains a long terme bond, especially in this day and age where there's so many distractions, so paying attention, true curiosity, and just decency. This sounds hopelessly kind of old fashioned, but seeing please and thank you over expressions of appreciation, and it's kind of a little arcane right now in terms of what's going on in the larger culture around gender. But I'm very interested in the old school ideas of Deborah Tannen's, you know, like, like gendered ways of communicating gendered communication styles and how those can get pathologized and seen as deficits between members of a couple when they're just stylistic differences that need to be appreciated. So Deborah Tannen's ideas of rapport talk report versus report talk report, and the masculine tendency to engage in transactional communication be overly logical to want to fix problems rather than listen that stylistic, that style of communication versus rapport.
Enrico: [00:23:43] Talk with communication for sharing and bonding reasons. That tends to be much more of a feminine communication style. And how, you know, an appreciation of those gender differences can can be very beneficial in couples work. At least I found that to be true over the years. So that's to answer your question. I'm really interested in how difficult it is for the average human being to be explicit with loving and affection and appreciative. Feelings that they're actually having. But that they withhold them. And what that does to one's state of mind to withhold genuinely experience, but thwarted feelings of appreciation, love and affection for our friends and loved ones. So being able to be more explicit with that, not just global statements of appreciation, but but specific reference and specific things that were said or done that registered for you and the open, spontaneous, fluid and fluent expression of that as fundamental to what I call flourishing love in my book.
Eileen: [00:25:04] Right.
Enrico: [00:25:05] Mhm.
Eileen: [00:25:06] So attention, curiosity, decency and active sharing.
Speaker3: [00:25:14] Mhm.
Eileen: [00:25:15] Of the truth of one's feelings as a consequence of attention.
Enrico: [00:25:20] The positive ones, the positive ones. Not just the negative ones, the analytic tradition, it's like no.
Eileen: [00:25:26] Not just the.
Enrico: [00:25:26] Negative. Yeah. Don't repress that anger. Don't repress that frustration. Yeah. Don't repress that loving appreciation that you're actually feeling. But that for reasons we could talk further about why do people do that. Why do they withhold the love they have, you know, and not express it to the people that they love?
Eileen: [00:25:44] I was really struck when you said attention. Mhm. Like it's true in the internet age of 2024 etc. with the world going on in the state that it is, which can feel overwhelming and curious on its own, but in the granular ness of our real human day to day most immediate lives paying attention. Actually is no small thing.
Enrico: [00:26:15] Uh, one of my favorite books is an old book by a sociologist called Charles Durber. It's called The Pursuit of Attention. And, you know, in that book he looks at support responses and shift responses. So when you're listening, a support response would be, oh my goodness, I never thought about something like that before. Tell me more about that. I can tell that something that you're really interested in. We therapists call that empathy. He is a sociologist, calls that a support response. A shift response would be something that is said that is sort of at a tangent to what the other person's talking about. And it can it can be co-opting the conversation, or it can be saying just changing the subject and bizarre ways like, hey, did you remember to pick up, by the way, did you remember to pick up milk this morning on your way home? And I'm really interested, even doing couple's work, the importance of being able to kind of exhibit more of those kind of support responses that show that you're paying attention, not that you say you're paying it, but you show it in that kind of granular way.
Eileen: [00:27:27] And to take it one step further about listening, what's the difference between paying attention and really listening to really hear someone? How do you know when you're doing it as a clinician, as a spouse?
Enrico: [00:27:42] I mean, I think obviously there's a listening to the words there's but but I mean, in our clinical role, I mean, I'm, I'm a big believer in, in the face and facial listening with clients where your face and their face are in constant communication and the subtle. Subtle things that get communicated facially. And I listen with my face. So I'm Eileen, and the importance of listening with your face and showing facially that you discern what the client is getting at. So it's something more primal and more in that sort of primal. Listening has great value and not to be overlooked.
Eileen: [00:28:35] Holding our gaze and paying attention. Sitting still with patience. The picture of acceptance. This is listening. It is an embodied action. And, well, it's also an act of loving. When you engage fully with someone, whatever the relationship, when you mean to really register them, you are showing regard for the other and the bond you share. As therapists. This is the meaning of our work. But these deep connections are the potential we all share. People with people, soul with soul. Throughout your career, your work has consistently revolved around the importance and the value of communication, of relationships in the context of talk therapy and but beyond from your life's work. And Rico, why do you believe there is so much value in human connection?
Enrico: [00:29:46] Hmm. Oh, gosh. I mean, it's obviously there's so many directions to go in there, Eileen answering that. But one thought is that, you know, because it gets to the heart of what it means to live a meaningful life. In my book on flourishing Love, I came across this really interesting study that was put out by bereavement workers who'd been I was put out by a researcher who had interviewed bereavement workers, like hospice workers, interviewing them about what they had witnessed with people's death experiences. And the researcher talked about that almost to a person. When people are on their deathbed, they're not thinking about how many billable hours that they lost, that they wish they would have had, or they're thinking about their loved ones and wanting to do right by their loved ones. And so that is so we know from people's death experiences when they're in that moment of existential urgency, that what's on their mind is the quality of the their love relationships that they've been in partners, family members, and wanting to make sure they're getting solace from knowing that they're in a good place with those that they love. But of course, the other argument would be from an evolutionary standpoint that, you know, if we wouldn't have survived as a species if we didn't get good at relating and communicating and, you know, in ways that allowed us to survive.
Eileen: [00:31:24] And just like that, Enrico brings us back full circle, reminding us that loving is survival. Yes, but also so much more. It's the best thing we have the chance to do for ourselves and for each other, from the first to the very last moment. Loving is its own reward. Enrico has committed to his life's work in the name of love. When it was lacking in his youth, he went looking for justice from the boiling realization of religion's shortcomings and feeling hoodwinked. Enrico found new methods to soothe himself and others. The healing practice of psychotherapy. Working with children and adults. Enrico saw that everyone opens up differently. He tuned into his patients linguistics to access their inner lives. This translated to a new side of his practice, bringing him back to love once more. With couples, he began to contribute differently, toying with the rules to offer a novel definition of marriage more than a religious symbol. Enrico sees marriage as a personal bond that we nourish and reframe as time goes on. It is an active commitment to a partnership. This kind of promise is secular. It stands for itself and includes, but goes well beyond the romantic.
Eileen: [00:32:58] Long terme relationships ask us to stay conscious of our communication. Noticing when it is transactional or rooted in true feeling. Our truths need to be expressed, known explicitly for our sake and for those we care about. Last but not least, Enrico shows us that love flourishes naturally when we pay attention, when we make space to be open, to stay curious and to trust. This is how loving turns into power. So when we ask what makes good, loving, lasting and true, the simple answer is to listen. Take the time to sit and hear those who matter to you. Keep taking the time and you will open a vessel that expands and strengthens and reveals the real reason we're here. This has been the art of listening. Again, my name is Eileen Dunn. Please join us for our next episode as we continue to dive into the space between speaker and listener. You can follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, if you enjoyed the show, please leave a review in a five star rating. It helps us grow so that we can keep bringing you new conversations. We'll see you the next time.