Welcome to episode 710 with my guest Paul Shear. If you're new to the podcast, this is a place for honesty about all the battles in our heads from medically diagnosed conditions, past traumas, and sexual dysfunction to everyday compulsive negative thinking and the show's not

meant to be a substitute for professional mental counseling.

I'm not a therapist and the show's more like a waiting room. That's what I that's what I like to think of it.

I remember when I first started seeing a psychiatrist and a therapist and just that

discomfort of being in the waiting room and nobody makes high contact nobody

says hi to each other it's just a box of shame and when I started the

podcast in in 2011 I just I wanted there to be kind of a I don't know is I began to to feel better in my recovery I began to feel more confident and less shame about my struggles and my

issues and just generally who I was in a person as a person and I wanted kind of the metaphorical hand to reach out to that person in

the waiting room so that they wouldn't feel alone, and it would probably have just made them feel awkward and

creeped out. But in all seriousness, I wanted a place where people could feel less alone and also to just have some fucked up jokes.

Those have been so helpful in my recovery.

And I don't know, I just find some times that talking about mental health and trauma and

stuff like that,

sometimes it can get a bit overly precious.

And I love some of the meetings that I go to where there's really dark humor, not in place of the

vulnerability but in addition to it.

And that's kind of what I feel like I've created with this

podcast dare I say that. This is from the Ask Paul Anything survey and this is filled out by a woman who calls herself demon brain and I believe we read some of her surveys before and she writes this is a comment about the latest episode on Munchhausen by proxy.

I've been listening to your show on and off and by the way I got a survey filled out by somebody who took exception to Andrea

characterizing it is a conspiracy theory that there is a cabal of people in the child welfare

community who have nefarious purposes in taking children away.

And that was kind of news to me and I don't know the validity of that, no offense to the

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