Why Do We Date People That Need Fixing? - Dr John Delony - #920

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Dr. John Delony, welcome to the show.

**Dr. John Delony** (0:01)
My man, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (0:02)
How are you?

**Dr. John Delony** (0:02)
Thanks for the, dude, I'm fantastic. I love being back in Texas, where I was born and raised, man. It's good. Are you adjusting?

**Chris Williamson** (0:09)
I am slowly becoming native. Someone told me that I was allowed to use the word y'all because I've been here for three years now.

**Dr. John Delony** (0:15)
That's a huge welcome, Matt.

**Chris Williamson** (0:17)
I get the sense.

**Dr. John Delony** (0:18)
That's big, man.

**Chris Williamson** (0:19)
I get the sense that it is me being conned into saying the equivalent of the n-word for texting people and the Texas Tribune is going to catch me hard R-ing my way through y'all a couple of times. I'm not falling for the Psy-up. I can't quite get to that. I'm up to sidewalk and trash can, but y'all not yet.

**Dr. John Delony** (0:41)
What's the alternative to trash can?

**Chris Williamson** (0:42)
Rubbish. Rubbish bin.

**Dr. John Delony** (0:44)
Oh, yeah. You got to be careful with rubbish bin here.

**Chris Williamson** (0:46)
Rubbish bin. Yeah, you don't know what that means. Crack that open. Come on, get it in you.

**Dr. John Delony** (0:49)
All right.

**Chris Williamson** (0:50)
You've been waiting for this.

**Dr. John Delony** (0:50)
I've been excited for this moment.

**Chris Williamson** (0:52)
Well, you'll have an unlimited amount going to the office soon.

**Dr. John Delony** (0:55)
Well, I appreciate that.

**Chris Williamson** (0:55)
Orange sunrise for you. Excellent.

**Dr. John Delony** (1:00)
This is my first one. This is my live review.

**Chris Williamson** (1:03)
Cherry Popper.

**Dr. John Delony** (1:04)
That's outstanding. Well done, man.

**Chris Williamson** (1:07)
Thank you.

**Dr. John Delony** (1:07)
Well done.

**Chris Williamson** (1:08)
Good. You're now five IQ points smarter. Ten. Each sip is like-

**Dr. John Delony** (1:13)
I accept, man. It'll light me up like a Christmas tree.

**Chris Williamson** (1:15)
Half a standard deviation. All right. I have no idea how I didn't stumble across you and the work that you do, because it aligns so much with lots of the things that I'm very interested in, and I really appreciate the way that you are firm but gentle and reassuring. I think when you speak to people, a lot of the conversations around relationships and dating and mental health tend to me to either be so soft as to not have an impact, or so brusque and harsh as to cause people to get defensive and for it to feel a little bit more about the host or the commentator, the advice giver than it is about the person who has the problem. So yeah, I think really, really great.

**Dr. John Delony** (2:01)
I appreciate that.

**Chris Williamson** (2:01)
Thank you so much for that.

**Dr. John Delony** (2:04)
I wanted so badly to be the Huberman of mental health and of relationships. And early on, it was very clear, that's not why people want to talk to you. They've never seen a big, tall, loud, tattooed up Texan talk to that mother who just blew her life up, like, compassionately. And I think in our strange little weird ecosystem that we live in, there's a lot of people that know about stuff, and they've just never sat with hurting people, right? There's a lot of theories and a lot of ideas, but man, you can hear somebody who's actually sat with somebody who just lost a child. And there's a different level of compassion, right?

**Chris Williamson** (2:43)
What have you learned about how to hold space for somebody that's going through a difficult time, from the, my first ever relationship just broke up with me, all the way through to the, I just lost a child?

**Dr. John Delony** (2:59)
Dude, let me tell you this, so, my wife she was a research professor, she quit her job for, she's like, man, it sounds strange, especially for her. I think I want to stay at home and have kids. And that was just like, like, who are you? What have you done with my wife? It was amazing. We talked through it. It was awesome. And gets pregnant, miscarriage number one, gets pregnant, miscarriage number two, then miscarriage number three, but it was an ectopic pregnancy.
And it ruptured, right? And so she is a really strong, tough West Texas woman. And she sits in that living room and says, I'm not doing this. It's not happening again. Which, you know, like, I mean, she almost died in our living room. Well, here's the thing, after miscarriage one, and especially number two, lucky for her, she was married to a guy working on his second PhD. And I was also a crisis, God, the word that gives me hemorrhoids expert. And so I would show up in the community to sit with people who had loss. And dude, I rubbed her nose in my charts, in my graphs, in my answers. And then this happened. So a close friend of mine who's suffered unimaginable loss. I show up with my son, who was four at the time, we go to the ER, they're wheeling her back. And when you show up at crisis scenes, it's hard to describe, there can be blood on the wall and bodies, but you make eye contact with other responders and you know the scene's safe. You know it's a scene's classic. And then there's something we call crazy eyes. You look across and it's like, oh, this scene's still live, like there might be a shooter still here, right? And you can see it. And I walked in and I made eye contact with the head of the OB-GYN at a Texas Tech Medical Center. And I remember holding my son's hand saying, oh, this is it. This is the last time I see her. They wheel her off. I text somebody to come pick my son up. I go to this little room that's about this big. And a buddy of mine, a West Texas rancher, who's a children's author, walks in, hat, everything, he's taller than me. He nods. I say nothing. He says nothing. He sits by me. 30 minutes, one hour, one and a half hours, two hours. Then the physician busts in the door, holding up like a iPad thing. And she says, we lost the baby, but your wife's okay. And I exhaled in this rancher who he hadn't spoken, other than, hey, he reaches over and grabs my shoe. And I look over at him and he starts crying tears. I don't even have yet. But the important thing is he said no words. It didn't matter. And in a culture that we won't shut up, Chris. When your friend has a breakup, golly, dude, the last thing they need is all of your theories and answers. And, well, oh my gosh, let's Google. That's catastrophic. They just need to sit there and bring tacos, bring a bottle of wine or bring whatever you got in the fridge. You know what I mean? And we don't have a culture of presence. We have a culture of answers, of talking. And so what I've learned over the years, what do you say to a mother whose kid is dead in that room right there? Nothing. But she'll remember that hug, right? She'll remember that exhale. And that will get her to the next gulp of air, to the next gulp of air, right? There's just no words, man. And so the more I've been sitting with hurting people, I'm finding myself talking less and less and less and less.