Dr. Wendy Suzuki
speaker
915 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 7 Jan
Dr. Wendy Suzuki’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
the more time that we can get him together with family where he came alive and he could think and talk about all the memories that he had is a great way to go. As Japanese Americans, I'm third generation Japanese American. My parents are second generation Japanese Americans. Other Japanese Americans out there will know. We don't say I love you to each other Not because we don't love each other.
It's just that you don't have to say that. It's just not part of our culture. But when my father had this dementia diagnosis, I said, gosh, you know what? I want to start saying it. But it's very awkward when you're an adult child and you've never said I love you to your parents as an adult. do you just like blurt it out? It's like, what should I do?
I had a long internal conversation about this and I realized that I should ask permission. Like, let's talk about it. And I didn't want to say, oh, because you have dementia. I was like, let's keep it light. Let's just ask. But I wanted to do it for my mom and my dad. And I would call every Sunday and
When I called, my mom would always answer the phone and I would tell her about the week and then she would hand the phone to my dad and I'd tell him all the same stories. And then, you know, that's how the conversation went. But this Sunday I decided I'm going to ask. whether we can start saying I love you for the first time in our whole adult lives. So it started out normally.
And at some point in the middle, I said, you know, mom, I realized we never say I love you at the end of these conversations. What do you think about saying I love you? Silence on the other end of the phone. It's like, what is she asking me? She's never asked me that before. And of course, I was just terrified that she would say no, because she might. I mean, she may not be comfortable.
I didn't know. I'd never asked her that question before. But after what seemed like hours, it was just a few seconds, she said, I think that's a great idea. I said, oh, okay, great. And so we kind of finished up our conversation. And then both of us realized at the same time, I think, that we had nothing more to say to each other. And we both knew that we had both agreed to say this thing.
I kind of describe it as, you know, it felt like two lions kind of circling each other. What's going to happen? Who goes first? And, you know, it was my ask. So I said, okay. Okay. I love you. And she said, I love you too in our very Disney voices so we can get through it. And so I had the conversation with my dad and it was a little less awkward with him because I knew my mom said yes.
I knew my dad would say yes. And so we agreed with my dad. I said, we said, I love you, hung up the phone and burst into tears because I had kind of changed the whole family dynamic of generations of not saying I love you. And that was a tipping point in my family kind of history from not saying I love you to saying I love you.
But the reason why I started telling the story is that the following week I called back again and my I love you with my mother was significantly less awkward. My father said, I love you first. And he remembered after a whole week. He was in the middle of dementia. He didn't remember anything. But he remembered that we had agreed to say I love you. And he said it first.
And because I'm a neuroscientist that studies memory, I know why. And it's because emotional resonance makes hippocampal dependent memories stick. And his hippocampus was not working well. But the emotional resonance of his adult daughter asking for the very first time to say, I love you, it formed a new memory in my dad.
And that was obviously something that I'll always remember because the last time I spoke to him, we also said, I love you.
Absolutely. It is possible. And I think the first step is to realize that anxiety and our stress response, which is causing all those negative feelings, evolutionarily, that is a protective mechanism. It is necessary for our survival. It was and it is necessary.
So it was evolved so that if there is a lion coming at us or a dangerous situation that you're in, that you automatically have that increased heart rate, that increased respiration, all the blood goes to your muscles so you can run away.
Our problem is that in this day and time, there's not a lot of lines coming at us, but there's all the worry that we see every single day when we look in the newspaper and look at our Instagram feeds. And that worry of a possible terrible thing that might happen, that also activates our stress and anxiety systems. But it is there for protection.
How do we harness that and bring it back into submission so it can help us in the way that it was developed or evolved to help us? That is to put us into action. I want to use that energy to go into action, to try and check off all those things. I have this, I don't know when your anxiety hits you, But it always hits me right before I'm going to go to sleep.
It's like, oh, and then, you know, what if this happens tomorrow? Did I do that? What if that happens? What if that happens? And so that action, the way I use it is I say, that's OK. That is going to be my to do list for tomorrow. I'm going to take action. And knowing that I can and will take action helps me go back to sleep because it still happens.
Oh, that's so beautiful.
Yeah. I love thinking about something you're going to do for somebody else tomorrow coming from this practice of healing your own shame. One of the superpowers in good anxiety that comes from your own anxiety, and this is a beautiful example that you just told me, is the superpower of empathy.
For... First for yourself and recognizing it in yourself and then giving it out to others. Because just as you described your journey, a lot of our own anxieties have been with us since we were little. Same anxiety. They stay for decades. For your lifetime sometimes.
So I have many, but the one that I talk about here is shyness and kind of social anxiety. And I've learned, because I'm a teacher and because I want to become an author, I've learned the skills not to have those kinds of anxieties. But I was painfully shy as a young girl. And even into college, I found myself in social situations and wanting to join and not feeling comfortable or even in class.
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