A PhD In Relationship Advice - Dr Taylor Burrowes - #090

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. Today, we are talking all things relationships. My guest is Dr. Taylor Burrows. She was a mental health counselor and a marriage and family therapist for 14 years in Florida, which I can imagine probably has quite a lot of interesting families. I wanted to get Dr. Burrowes' professional opinion, I suppose, on the current state of the relationship market. I have my own opinions and you'll get to hear them, but it was nice to hear someone who has clinical experience dealing with the extremes of relationships. Distill those 14 years down into a list of things to do and not to do in a partnership. So expect to learn how routine incompatibility could be the first stumbling block, what she thinks are the primary causes of lack of trust, whether you can get over infidelity in relationship, the relative roles of men and women and how they should be reflected and masturbation. Yep, just gonna leave that there. Please welcome Dr. Taylor Burrowes.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by Dr. Taylor Burrowes today. Ms. Burrowes, welcome to the show.

**Taylor Burrowes** (1:31)
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

**Chris Williamson** (1:34)
I'm very excited to have you on as well. I'm writing thinking that you've got, essentially, a PhD in relationships.

**Taylor Burrowes** (1:41)
Yeah, you could say that. It's a PhD in marriage, couples and family therapy. So that almost covers them all.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
You're a doctor of relationships.

**Taylor Burrowes** (1:51)
Yeah. I like to include the relationship with oneself as well. So that's included in there too.

**Chris Williamson** (1:57)
Fantastic. How is your relationship with yourself today?

**Taylor Burrowes** (2:00)
It's going very well. Yesterday, I did a really good workout. I'm staying at this beautiful condo and I just had a lovely afternoon. Then I topped it up with a full home-cooked meal, and then did an evening stroll on South Beach, which I bumped into a lot of characters, and it was lots of fun, so I'm doing well.

**Chris Williamson** (2:20)
Did you take yourself out for a date?

**Taylor Burrowes** (2:22)
Yeah, basically.

**Chris Williamson** (2:23)
That sounds like the ultimate date night, but just with yourself. That's actually my perfect evening.

**Taylor Burrowes** (2:29)
I like to do that quite often actually, so that's the norm in my world.

**Chris Williamson** (2:33)
Amazing. We're just going to riff on relationships today, I guess. We've had a lot of interesting characters on recently. We did a full series, a four-episode series on our advice on relationships, and I've recently had Caleb Jones on, who's a non-monogamy advocate, talking about his sort of views. I guess, to start off, what does 14 years of clinical mental health and marriage and family counseling look like when you come out the other side of that? What are the sort of experiences that you have in that?

**Taylor Burrowes** (3:08)
Well, it had evolved in stages, basically, you know, like when you're a green intern, they say, you know, you have a supervisor, you're kind of like half licensed. So you're more of a student and you're kind of just learning the ropes, doing a lot of observations and probably scared shitless to actually be in control, you know, one day when you're, you know, you're front and center basically and have to kind of cover the whole hour by yourself. So you go through this process of confidence building really and empathy development. And so most programs, the best ones will mandate that you have to go through your own psychotherapy and group therapy and stuff like that. So you learn what it's like and you also process whatever maybe stuff you have from your own life experiences because notoriously, a lot of therapists have been through a lot of adverse events.
And if they haven't sorted through their own stuff, then it's dangerous because then they can kind of project that on to clients. So definitely important to do that. Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (4:14)
Yeah, I bet it is. Yeah.

**Taylor Burrowes** (4:17)
Can you imagine if you had a medical doctor that had a contagious disease and then operated on you? It's kind of like that.

**Chris Williamson** (4:24)
That's exactly what it's like. You're totally right. You said that a lot of counselors tend to bring in their own problems. Is that a disproportionate amount or a lot of people potentially taking on this role or this job? Are they searching that in an effort to kind of fix themselves?

**Taylor Burrowes** (4:41)
Yeah. Well, I won't say that all therapists are damaged. What I'll say is that it is quite common that when people experience trauma, they either go one or two directions, right? If they don't deal with it, they don't recover properly, then they can sort of in effect go through life as if they're damaged or handicapped emotionally, right?