Dr. Brandon Vance

That's really huge and so touching. I mean, and so generous to be able to give it for free to people who can't afford it. I mean, I'm I'm really touched by that. And this is that the app does seem, you know, as I've been using it, it does, it is really engaging. And one thing about team therapies is such a clear model and where therapists go wrong is usually when they're not following the model.

And so the AI does follow the model and even something with like empathy, that is something kind of of the soul. you've distilled the five kind of major elements of empathy and also noted the pitfalls. And the AI doesn't make the pitfalls, and it does follow that model. And it's pretty remarkable in how tuned in it seems.

Sorry, feelinggreattherapycenter.com forward slash app group.

Well, thank you so much for having us. Really wonderful to be on here.

Yeah. I love you all. All three of you. All three of you.

Bye.

Yeah, such an effective and efficient and enjoyable app to use. And so it's just really exciting to be able to support people in using that and then working on these tools for anxiety and depression and coming together.

And so Heather and I have found that there's such a power in groups and people coming together, supporting each other, hearing each other's experience while they're working through something like initially the book clubs. working through David's book, Feeling Great, but now with the app. And so we'll have 10 weeks of groups and we're structuring it around the different lessons that are in the app.

And then during that, people can also be using this fantastic AI chatbot, which is like a really great therapist, a really efficient and wonderful therapist following the team model. And so this starts September 23rd, goes on for 10 weeks.

Oh, I'm sorry. It's eight weeks at 4 p.m. Pacific time. And so... So there's an ability during those eight weeks to meet as a large group and have demonstrations and ask questions from Heather and I. And then to break out into small, more intimate groups to get help from each other.

We'll have questions that structure those smaller groups so that people can really dive deep into the different topics that are discussed and sometimes practice activities as well in those small groups. And then we come back into the big group to summarize things and ask other questions from Heather and I. That's really, really fun. I've been loving doing that, loving working with Heather.

And it's really exciting to be then using this similar kind of structure to then work with you out.

Ha, ha, ha.

Group. Yeah. It's one word. App group. A-P-P-G-R-O-U-P.

Yeah, yeah. And anything else you tell yourself at that moment, what kind of justifies you watching this?

David, would you want to tag team on playing the devil?

Rhonda, anything else before we dive in or should we dive into that?

Yeah, if you would like to. Yeah. If you would like to. You can see what comes up. Yeah. You can talk back to the devil and talk with David.

Yeah, to your innocent friend. What's the best for you, Rhonda?

Oh, but Rhonda, you can. You can just watch it for a minute. It'll be easy. Just watch it for a minute. And you love relationships, supporting happy relationships. Michael won't notice. You're not hurting anybody. Just watch it for a minute or two.

Well, but you can stop. You can stop when you want, Rhonda. And also, even if you do spend a while, it's not such a big deal. It'll bring you into the community. Bob Schachter's grandparents started Kleinfeld, for example, just one of the many examples. And you can talk with Bob about that. This is such a connecting kind of thing.

It's important to have fun, don't you think? Yeah.

I love that. I love that one.

Yeah. So we're really trying to tempt you. And then I love what David, of course, asked, like, what else could we say to tempt you? And that kind of zoned in to what might have been a sticking point. And then you were able to talk back to that. And you got to huge by reminding yourself of wanting to read again and remind yourself like what you could be doing instead. Yeah.

Yeah, that's beautiful. So that's something we'll do in our group. We'll do devil's advocate. We're going to kind of work up to that, um, by doing some testing, we'll have an accountability form where people can kind of monitor, um, we'll be doing self-monitoring. And there's also this beautiful thing of mission accomplished and sovereignly refused.

So when people set a goal and then they report without any excuses, just simply say mission accomplished or sovereignly refused. Um, But then and eventually we'll be doing devil's advocate with each other. And that can be a way to kind of get the motivation down into the body, like where we really we put ourselves in that moment of a decision whether to use or not.

In this case, technology screens and then can really challenge us and be able to talk back.

Yes. Thank you, David. So this meets from January 22nd to February 26th. So starting next week, as far as I know, in terms of when this podcast will come out. And it's at noon Pacific time. It'll meet for an hour each week. It's $30 a session. And people can contact me if they can't afford that. And we'll try to work out something to find out more detail about these groups.

And actually, let me just mention that we also use some other techniques. We use some hypnosis techniques that we'll do some recordings of, which is a good way to help the body kind of automatic responses of the body, create new associations, also do some team techniques like future projection and things like that.

And then we'll be working with the triple paradox, some problem solving, relapse prevention, and breakouts and the power of groups. So just to add that in there. To get more information about this group and some other groups, which I can mention in a moment, you can go to feelinggreattherapycenter.com forward slash educational hyphen groups.

Nice. So much, David. That was so nice.

And this group will be there as well as our book club, as well as the Five Secrets groups and other educational groups. So that can be one link. You can remember feelinggreattherapycenter.com forward slash educational hyphen groups.

Educational groups, but with a hyphen in between it.

You've really inspired me because you lay out things in such a clear way and such an accessible way. And I know you all have talked before about just reading, feeling good, that there have been studies on that as being very helpful in terms of depression. And I've also found that groups and the pandemic also inspired me with that, that

Yes, dash groups, plural.

Yes, through February 26th.

It's on Wednesdays.

Yeah, there's the Feeling Great Book Club, which we've been doing for a few years now, where I'm partnering with the wonderful Heather Clegg. What a fantastic group. teacher, person, and psychiatrist. And that is on Mondays from February 20th.

It's a 12-week group starting either on Mondays at 4 o'clock Pacific time on February 24th for 12 weeks or Wednesdays, February 26th at 8.30 in the morning Pacific time. And that will provide for people in most places in the world to be able to attend.

And this is a wonderful book where people read your book, Feeling Great, which is such a fantastic and clear book with tools for anxiety and depression to break through those to live a more joyful and relaxed life. And we'll do expert demos and you can join smaller breakout groups to practice what you're learning. That's sliding scale. It's $14 a session, but it's sliding scale.

We won't turn away anybody for financial reasons. And that we want to make just really accessible to everyone. So we price it low and even go down from there.

coming together in groups of people has all those added benefits of community and of support and even an accountability. So that's been very fulfilling to run some groups.

Yeah, it depends on each session, but yeah, generally 30, 35 minutes for the breakout groups. And you're right, each breakout group has a facilitator, which is really cool, which is a treat. And those breakout groups are smaller, maybe six people, maybe eight people, but that's kind of the maximum. So it's beautiful because people can then become vulnerable.

We keep the same breakout groups each week over these three months, and then people start to develop... more trust and security in that group and they can practice some of the techniques. We also practice the five secrets during those groups as a check-in, which also lets people become more vulnerable with each other and develop trust.

So people develop friendships and stay in touch long after the Feeling Great book club stops.

Yeah, I think it's like when, yeah, it's $168 total, $14 a group, which is, yeah, whatever that is an hour, it's 80-minute group sessions. Yeah.

Right, right. Yeah, so in our groups, I think there is something about groups that can be really healing, having support from other people, being able to kind of chew through these ideas in your book. I love, David, when you write, and this is true with your app as well, you challenge people to do exercises and really engage with the material, and that's essential.

And now we can have this big group where you can see demos of people For example, the double standard technique and other techniques. And then you can go into the small groups and you can like work on ideas. You can share things about yourself with your peers, which is a little bit different than working with a therapist. So I think it can be its own thing. You can do it yourself without therapy.

You could also be seeing a therapist and do this to supercharge your therapy. Any of that can work well. The other thing we're going to do is we're going to have some app-specific breakout groups. So for people who are using your Feeling Great app, which is a fantastic app, by the way, we're going to have specific breakout groups.

So some portion of our breakout groups will be just for people using the app. So then they can work on that with other people and share their experiences with the app.

Thank you, David. What beautiful words. That's so generous and kind of you, and I really appreciate that.

Yes, we did. What's that like? That was fantastic. People love the group and they absolutely love the app. They felt really connected to the group. The chatbot of the app that gave great empathy. And I think the learning modules are fantastic. So having them, it was a little bit like the book club. We structured it a little bit similarly. We did some demos.

We had people do five secrets in the breakout rooms. And then they would work on what they're learning through the app also with each other in the breakouts. I think people generally loved it, those groups. And we get feedback after every session. So like you're saying, David, we get better and better over time.

Yeah, I think it's great. And sometimes it's hard to see feedback if it's negative feedback, but it's a gift. Feedback is a gift. It helps us grow and learn.

Well, I know there were a lot of folks, but I did have the pleasure of reading drafts.

poem by roomie yeah yeah roomie yeah yeah do you remember anything about that poem i think i put it in the in the book what yeah it was a poem i think the one that you in the book was called inside this new love die your way begins on the other side your life is covered in thick clouds slide to the side um there's this beautiful part that says um

Take an ax to the prison walls, walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now, the full moon. The speechless comes out now, something like that.

Yeah, it's such a beautiful thing to see as we do some demos in the Feeling Great Book Club event and see some of these role play techniques you've developed are so powerful and with enough preparation, you know, going through the agenda setting, of course, the testing empathy.

And then getting to some of those, you can see people just shift and accepting their own humanity, accepting themselves as human and not having their egos be so much in the way. You know, some moments of like, as you call enlightenment.

No, I love working with large groups of people, but I also love working with small groups. And also the combination is beautiful. So I'm very happy with how the book clubs have turned out. And that's really thanks to you.

It's not what makes me happy.

It's not my motivation, but it brings such joy to do these. And also, as you were speaking, it reminds me of the five secrets, which is also a way to lose our ego. Once we can truly disarm and let our ego step aside, having those skills is also a way to start to let our ego step aside.

And so to weave that into another plug for our groups, we also do these five secrets, what we call deep practice groups, where we have small groups of eight people about, and we work with people in that group and with breakouts to learn the five secrets and practice those deeply.

Sometimes we'll do a forced empathy exercise and really help people hone these skills that are so helpful in terms of communication in all kinds of areas of our lives.

Yeah. And all people really need to remember is feelinggreattherapycenter.com, actually, because then you can you can find it there. Oh, yeah. If you want to go directly to the education, you can add that.

You both are so kind and so heartwarming and I'm blushing here. So, but thank you so much. And, and just also for the ways that both of you touch so many people in such healing ways, it brings tears to my eyes to think about your work, David, over these decades and also to the podcast that just really touches people and heals people.

Podcasts are such a gem. And as a therapist, they reorient me towards good therapy every time I hear them. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic.

Yeah.

Well, from a few places. The first inspiration was a patient of mine, and we can call him Elias, and he has OCD and we've done a lot of exposure therapy. In fact, he does exposures every day, which is wonderful. But then after he had made lots of progress with that, he began to talk about that his phone, he just used it all the time.

And Instagram reels, these short little video clips where he'd spend sometimes hours looking at those. And then he'd realize afterwards, gosh, I spent all this time and I would like to not be doing that. And yet I need Instagram to communicate with people. And so what do I do?

And so, of course, having studied with David, I took a paradoxical approach and we looked at the positives of him doing that. And then we did a bit of a role play. about triple paradox, and we can get into that later. But he, at that point, wasn't very motivated. He couldn't talk back to those reasons to be using Instagram Reels. And so I didn't push it. I didn't try to get him to change.

He's also a very social person, and I thought that a group contest could be really helpful to him. Meanwhile, I was asking, so we have a baby who's now 21 months old.

Yeah. He was met David before. And yeah. And my wife, Rosa, and I were talking about parenting, and I've wanted to be a parent for, you know, 20 years. And I thought I'd be a really wonderful parent, and I think I'm pretty good. But I was asking her, what do you think I could do better in terms of parenting?

Just wanting to keep in touch with each other as we go on this journey of bringing up Lansipa. And she said... I'd like to not have him see you using your phone. And boy, that just brought up a lot of sadness. And I realized that I was like using my phone around him, like looking at my phone and he was experiencing me some that way.

And it was for all kinds of different reasons and I can give excuses and reasons, but really I don't need to be doing that around him. And I don't want to be, but I was doing it mindlessly. Part of this inspiration for the group is for myself, for me to stop doing that, and also to give me motivation and accountability to stop doing that.

I noticed that, and this goes for a lot of my patients and a lot of people I see, that it's really easy when one's waiting in line or even using the bathroom to pick up your phone and look at something, whether it's checking email, whether it's a reel on Instagram or Facebook, whether it's some message or some news or quote doom scrolling, people going through negative news.

And these devices were meant to addict us. And they literally teach principles of addiction in developing tech programs. And so I thought that I've heard that from so many people and to be able to free ourselves from what I'm calling mindless tech use, I think

A lot of times, tech is built into our lives, and we may use it for communication, we may use it for work, we may not be able to completely give it up. And so this group isn't oriented toward that, but it's oriented towards, in a sense, freedom, being able to make an intentional choice about using it or not.

Yeah, so it can range from binge watching a TV series, watching something, and then the way Netflix and other online kind of TV programs go is that they'll just go to the next episode, right? And you'll have cliffhangers and you'll want to see the next episode and you see the next episode. So some people stay up until three or four in the morning binge watching TV.

It could be playing video games and getting consumed by those. It could be spending every spare moment connected to your phone. And it was heartbreaking. A few months ago, I was in a diner, and I saw a family walk in, three kids, two adults. They sat down at booths, and the two adults just started staring at their cell phones.

And the kids were crawling all over the place trying to get their parents' attention. And the parents were so absorbed in their phones. I don't know what they were doing with their phones. So those kinds of things... to free ourselves up from that. And as I say, they're quite addictive. Principles of addiction, a substance is more addictive the quicker it hits your brain after using it.

That's part of our learning. So if we're reinforced right after doing some behavior, we tend to do that behavior more. When cocaine was refined from coca leaves, it became much more addictive. Same with alcohol, same with heroin and so forth, right? And they've used those principles in developing things with screens. So video games and TV programs and phone reels and stuff.

So you get these short bites of something that can be reinforcing or can create an intense emotion like news that's really bad. And that then encourages us to do that thing again and again. And it can be very hard to let go of and also hard to get perspective on. David, you've mentioned... how the cognitive distortions can be, in a sense, the opposite in addictions.

So for example, I might, if I'm depressed, I might have a negative view of the future, or I might mental filter and only look at the negative things. Whereas if with addictions, I might forget the consequences of something. I might filter out the negative and only look at the positive. So...

if we can take a step back and monitor and look at our behaviors, which is part of what we'll be doing in this group, to get a clear view of what we do and do we actually want to continue using these things mindlessly, quote mindlessly, or do we want to develop more intention about it and also free ourselves to make a choice to use them or not, or how much we want those to be in our lives.

And there's some great techniques that you've developed, David, in order to help us do that. And then, of course, the power of groups can also keep us accountable. We can have goals. We can share that with each other. We can get support. We can do role plays in small breakouts with, for example, the devil's advocate technique and other techniques.

Yeah. And so when you zoom into that moment when you're deciding to watch it or not or to keep watching it, yeah, what else do you tell yourself? What excuses do you tell yourself? How do you decide this is really fun? I'd like to try that dress. I'm curious.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll only watch it for a minute. Yeah. Any other?

Okay. Is there anything it says about your values in a good way that you're watching this or the kinds of things, kind of person you are, what you're interested in?