[00:00.5]
Welcome to Inside Personal Growth podcast. Deep dive with us as we unlock the secrets to personal development, empowering you to thrive. Here. Growth isn't just a goal, it's a journey. Tune in, transform, and take your life to the next level by listening to just one of our podcasts.

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Well, this is Greg Boysen, host of Inside Personal Growth. And I want to basically say that we've got an author coming on, Merle Yost. He's sitting out in Palm, Springs area where we were talking about how warm it is today.

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Merle, welcome to Inside Personal Growth. How are you doing? Great, thank you. And thank you so much for having me. Appreciate you, getting in touch with us. And I think we reached out to you because we saw your book on a post on LinkedIn and I think it'd be really interesting.

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I'm going to let the listeners know a little bit about you, and then I'm going to let you kind of get into your own story. He's a psychotherapist, writer, speaker, and consultant. Uses the summary of his experiences and training to help others. All of his books, and, we're going to be talking about Facing the Truth.

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Do you have a copy of that book there? You want to hold up? I don't. I'm staying with somebody at the moment, and I don't think I have a copy with you. It's okay. It's okay. We'll put a flash it across the screen. So all of his books are about helping people live better lives. He's committed to continuing his teaching and efforts to educate people about themselves.

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Merle's own healing journey informs his deep compassion for people's emotional pain and profound belief in the possibility of healing. And he does have quite an interesting personal story as well, which, we'll let him get into. But, you know, look, I think when you write a book like this, Facing the Truth, I find that frequently authors writing books because they're traversing their own challenges.

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And it's always about, how do I tell my story and then write a book so I can help other people? And I believe that's the, same here. You open the book with this Erich Fromm quote about people dying before they're fully born. And then after 25 years as a therapist, what percentage of people would you say are truly living versus just existing?

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And then I'm going to put an add on question to this. How did you awaken as a result of this challenging upbringing you had, as a young person? And also, I would mention and being a gay person too, as well, that adds to the flame and fire.

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As for everybody listening, we know we just had all these gay pride parades. They're going on this week. And I'm totally in favor of all that. So you're at the. You're in the right place.

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Okay, so there's, several things. You asked two questions. One is, how many people do you think have kind of woken up after this 25 years of helping them dying before they're fully born? And I think the first part of that question should be give the listeners a little bit about your background so they really understand how it is that you, from experience, can help people, go through this pain.

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Okay, I'll try and condense this. That could be an hour explanation alone. I think the vast majority of people are just sort of walking through life, that they have certain amount of programming from their families.

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They swallowed it in whole and they are just going forward as if that's the truth. If that's all there is, they're not curious enough or in enough pain to go look for a, different explanation or understanding. I accidentally fell into this because I was. How do I.

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I was a very weird guy in high school. Very, very strange. And because I was completely dissociated, from all the trauma in my childhood. And, I just wasn't really there because I didn't know how to be there.

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The only way I survived was by leaving my body. And I think that's not an uncommon phenomena for a lot of people. They just check out and their bodies are going through the motions, but they're not really fully there. And then I was in college, I had a couple of friends as roommates.

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And, one of them said, I think you might benefit from talking to my therapist. And so I went off and saw her and we had a really good connection. It was the beginning of my journey of coming back into me. Well, what were, what were your aces?

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Adverse childhood experiences, listeners. Because, look, you have had a lot of personal pain. I remember this from the pre interview. I think, look, you're not alone because you get hundreds of thousands of listeners to the show that it may be experienced the same pain.

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And if I remember correct, I sent you to Cynthia Barrera's website. I think we played a clip from her grandfather admitting because her grandfather was molesting, as a, as a young girl and into her teen. Right.

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So tell people a little bit about this. You got legitimate trauma. Yeah, you could say, that. So there are two basic components to my childhood that are interactive and also just set the whole frame for me.

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One is, is that I grew up essentially in a cult organized around my mother's delusion that she was ruler of the world, sitting on the right hand of God. We got daily missives from gods and, and angels and robots and she flew around in spaceships and the whole thing, literally the world.

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Not just this planet, the world. And so we were not allowed to really make friends or to have anybody. We always lived in these remote places out in the middle of nowhere on farms and Ozarks. Ozarks, yeah, back in the Missouri Ozarks.

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And so I didn't really get a lot of interaction with my peers. School has a very limited amount of time to interact. Frankly. It's the after school stuff that you actually make connections and see people. So that laid the groundwork that my father molested me from the age of 9 to 12.

[06:58.4]
He would crawl into my bed in the middle of the night. How graphic I could be here. But he would throat fuck me. Which would cause severe disassociation because anytime that you. And anytime you shut off a person's air, which I was suffocating through this entire experience, is that that's what causes occluded memory and dissociation.

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And so I had no memory of this other than I was terrified of looking at tall buildings and I would hear the footsteps on the steps because I was. We were in a two story log cabin and my bedroom was at the front, at the beginning, the top of the steps.

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And I'd hear the footsteps on the, on the stairwell and I would just dissociate going out the window. I was just gone. It was the only way I survived that. Crazy, crazy. Now you know, look, there's other listeners that have gone through maybe not exactly what you went through, but maybe similar circumstances and you distinguish between public self and what you call root self.

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Can you walk people through what it looks like when someone is operating primarily from public self versus this, when they have access to the root self? Well, first of all, I don't think most people, even though root self exist, they are so lost in the programming they're getting from their families about who they are and how they're supposed to be.

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And the, their families are rewarding good behavior and agreement with their view of reality and punish you for contrary views and opinions. And so consequently people just buy into what it is they're supposed to believe and do and just go on and never know that there's any other possibility.

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So I think most people are just sleepwalking through life because of the programming that they got as children. And they don't often challenge the stuff that their parents threw at them. Yeah, it's like, I think we said this before, you know, I was talking to an author earlier today and I said, frequently, live in the world of MSU making shit up and then believing what we made up and then living the story that we made up.

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And what you're really, truly talking about at root self is hey, step back from that photograph of yourself and really see who you are, what your perception of you in this world. Right. And you wrote extensively about downloads, the beliefs we absorb in childhood.

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What's the most damaging download you've seen repeatedly in your practice? And how do people begin to identify these in themselves? Because look, we're just talking right now about beliefs that are people carrying on. You just told a story about your mother that was like, and spaceships and angels and you know, where she got all that from?

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I'm not quite certain, you know, other than, who knows, maybe she was schizophrenic or delusional or whatever. But my point is she started believing all those stories. Well, I think she had a pretty horrific childhood as well.

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And I think that at some point, if it's horrific enough, you simply create another world. You, you create your own internal universe that doesn't have anything to do with what's going on around you. That gives you a sense of power, a sense of control that you clearly don't have. And that's a survival technique.

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And it, at some point you hopefully get out of that. And she never did. I remember I wrote the last letter I wrote to her, I said that I can't imagine what trauma you must have experienced as a child for you to, to go into this other world to survive.

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So that was, that was really the essence of it. Yeah, well, look again, we do that as a defense mechanism. Yes, it's a survival technique. Survival, you know, and you, you have a chapter on small hurts versus big hurts and reframe how we process the pain.

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I think there's a Buddhist statement that Buddha said, you know, you're going to go through the world and there's going to be pain. And it's how you relate to the suffering that's truly the issue. Why do you think that our culture has difficulty distinguishing between legitimate trauma and everyday Disappointments

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because we have a victim culture. So everybody's on the output, I'm being victimized, the Magnum or whatever. And so there's, so there's so many things are tangled together here. I'm trying to untangle them.

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But let's go back to big hurt, small hurts for a second. Is this, that the that was a reference actually to forgiveness. And so every, like the woman says, that my husband said something mean to me this morning, that I forgave him.

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That was really absurd as far as I'm concerned. I mean it's trivial, it's, it's making us mountain of Mohill. And instead of confronting him about what he said, she just decided to be a victim about the whole thing and forgive him as if it never happened. And then they wonder why they are communicating in the relationship because they're often their own little universes about how the world works and they're not actually at a shared universe there at all.

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It's really problematic and that we go back then to the downloads, which is the stuff we absorb from our family and about how to be in the world, how to confront or not to confront, how to survive. And so we then living out those instructions as we've watched our parents do it and then they trained us to do and we never get to the authentic us.

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That requires a willingness to really look at the pain and where the pain came from. So it's really essential to step back and really take a hard look at the whole thing and not as a blame game.

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Our parents are our parents. They passed on what they knew probably from their parents. Does that excuse them? No. It's their job to heal and not pass it on to the next generation. But your job is to heal you so that you're not passing it on to another generation continuing this family cycle of generation after generation after generation.

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Most people aren't that deep. They don't want to know their, their alcohol and drugs and sports and all the other things that they do to distract themselves from what's going on inside of themselves by being externally focused. Yeah.

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And I, and I would agree with everything that you just said. It's a, way to brush it under the rug. So they said you don't really want to look at it or are you looking out the rear view mirror? Are you looking in the front of the frame of the window, of the car?

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And frequently we're looking at stuff that's chasing us, not stuff that we're after. And it continues to chase you because you're constantly looking in the rearview mirror going how am I going to get out of the way of this one or that one or whatever until you confront it, you know. And it's not fun. No, it's not.

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It's not. I mean I'd been doing this for 30 years and I can tell you it's definitely not on both sides of the couch. And I, I put in I think a total 20 years by the time I was done with everything. But that's unusual for people. So some people just turn to the therapist into their parent and want to stay there forever and never grow up and move on.

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And it's not always the therapist financial benefit to have them move on and so you can have a co dependency develop and a therapeutic relationship too. So. Well, you have breakthroughs. I think at some point the pain is so great you don't want to live with anymore.

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There's breakthrough. I think I mentioned to you on our pre interview that I was so impressed with the way that psychotherapist, Phil Stutz handled stuff. And you watch his interviews. I'm sure you're probably familiar with him. He's pretty famous. Do you know who he is?

[15:10.2]
Okay, so he's a guy out of LA and he has a lot of noted celebrity figures that he is a psychotherapist for. And he's come up with some techniques. And that brings me to your victim identity disorder.

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You kind of coined this term. Given that we live in a time when victimhood is often validated and even celebrated. How do we balance acknowledge me acknowledging real trauma while avoiding this identity trap?

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Well, we're back to the same problem as you have to be willing to look at the pain inside of you. And our whole society is built on distractions, whether it be drugs, alcohol, movies, celebrities, travel, sex. We're all looking for an escape from having to face whatever's going on inside.

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And I don't know that that's in there in the book, but sexual compulsivity is simply a result of sexual trauma, early on generally. So consequently people get stuck into that cycle and they're just trying to keep that high of the post orgasm and the hunt and the experience as a way of distracting themselves from all of the pain inside of them.

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Yeah, and obviously you know, you went through that feeling, you know, like totally choked off you, you wrote that being different is not a choice. You just said, hey, I was not like I was a weird guy in High school.

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That's what you just told the audience. It's true. But argue that it can be a gift. So for someone struggling with this feeling like this or an outsider. No. I had a guy on the show not that long ago was bullied and he was bullied all through high school by women and guys. Right.

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And it really helped. It really created a poor self esteem and when he got in college he actually went home back and forth to live with his parents because he was so just didn't have the self esteem to deal with living in the dorm. Right.

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So talk with us if you would about that challenge you faced and feeling like an outsourcer. And how did you transform that pain and how would you advise others to gain their power and transform that pain?

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Well, first you have to own your own pain if you're going to do something about it. I would just. It was just all normal. I grew up in a remote first 12 years of my life. Ran the backwoods of the Ozarks literally and no neighbors and, and they only I didn't really have a social life of students because I didn't live near any of these people.

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So I didn't have anything there. And now let me losing my train of thought. Well, you're going to actually help the listeners by advising them on how you transformed that pain and turned it into a power. Oh, being different.

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Yeah, well that was to some degree outcome of my childhood because I was green to be the heir, parent post mother's death. I would become the next ruler of the earth. Oh great.

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Just what you wanted to be. Any inflation or anything might you. So I was, I was told I was very arrogant and was also really smart. And that was sometimes this is a really bad combination. And but I was different.

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And I was because part large part because of the way I was raised in this really bizarre environment between the sexual abuse and the drama about being rulers of the world. So I never fit in with my peers. And then also being gay and could feel that energy but not know what to do with just.

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I was just the square peg in a round hole. When did you, when did you figure out you were gay? Well, I knew by kindergarten that I found the little boys much more interesting than the little girls. In spite of my parents trying to do that. I didn't really understand, probably till I was about 13, 14 and probably in high school that I really put pieces together what this really meant and what was going on for me.

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I remember my parents were Southern Baptist. And I remember one day and after church service, the pastor came up to me and said, if I thought my son would turn out like you, I'd kill him. Oh, my God. And I didn't know that at that point that I was gay.

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I did. I. I could feel this energy, but I didn't have any words, any minders for making sense out of any of this. So. So he was obviously much more sensitive to how it's going on than I was, and he didn't like it. So, but if.

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If you can't honor who you are, you can't make it through life. Otherwise, you're just everybody's pawn. What? Well, were you ostracized? I know I had a gay brother. Not the same age as you, but he's now since deceased.

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Used, to live in the desert as well. Now the reality is, is that he was just felt very lonely and ostracized. Even create a community. What? I went out of my way to create community because I.

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I was, My was. I don't know if you know what Demolay is. No. Demolay is the Boy Scouts to the Masonic Lodge. Okay. That's the simplest way I could explain it. And it actually saved my life in many ways because I met the first other gay men my age and they sort of saw what a strange little creature I was, and they took me under their wing and tried their best, to help me.

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And one of them is actually the one that pushed me into care. And so. And is this a recognized part of the Masonic Lodge? Oh, yeah, very much. And what's it called again? Demolay. D E O L A Y. It's, it's named after Jacques de Molay, the last grandmaster, of the.

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It'll come to be a man. It's the old stuff. Well, how cool is that? There's a place in the Masonic Lodge for gators. Yeah. Well, no, this was not overtly. This was all this was. No, they weren't welcoming gay people that I happened to run into.

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This was in Tucson. There were just several gay guys who were in key positions. And they adopted me as this charity case, I guess, to help me sort of dip along. Rural. Very cool. Very cool. So look, your concept of being self full rather than selfish or selfless, it's kind of fascinating.

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How does someone know when they've found some kind of healthy balance? Because, you know, look, you're trying to help listeners right now face the truth of their Life, This particular issue of being self full is an important one.

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And so I'd like for you to discuss that with the listeners. Well, to face the truth of your life is they're actually, it's necessary to be self full because we're so down, we're so downloaded with programming. But there's a article on my substack at Merle Yost, substack.com I call conditional love.

[23:14.6]
And it goes in depth into talking about how this programming from our families shapes us. And at some point we have to reject that programming and decide what we want to be. And if you can't get past that programming, you're just stuck in that loop of being who they want you to be as opposed to who you are.

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And so part of self full is taking responsibility for your actions, taking responsibility for choices in your life and not blaming everybody else in the world for what's wrong with you. You can acknowledge that they set this up and blah, blah, blah. But then, so what are you going to do about it?

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Being a victim is a dead end. There's no happy ending. You have to get out of a victim mentality. You can acknowledge that you were victimized, you can process the pain around that and you can do whatever you want to do about the person who does that outside of kill them.

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And but you have to take back all the power in your life that you've been giving away. But we're trained to give all our power to our parents. And they, and they, and if so much of it is conditional, what I call conditional love is that if you do what if you're the way I want you to be, I'll love you.

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If you're not, then I'm not going to love you. And that can be overt or covert, but it happens all the time. This is how parents control and teach kids to be who they want them to be. Well, and I think you've brought up a point and even the way you paraphrase that, we're confident that's what you needed to do.

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I don't believe that when people first initially face this that they're that confident because they're relying on this feedback from others so that for them to be so certain. You were very fortunate to have, found these two guys in the Masonic that took you under their wing and helped you break free.

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And it sounds to me as if they just might have been the two guys that help push you through or guide you through. With a lot of advice I always look at, the hero's journey. You go out, you venture out this case, you find a couple of people, they're helping you along the way, run into challenges.

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Like you have many of them along the way. So there's a part in the book around parenting and relationships and you provided six keys to raising healthy kids. Well, obviously you weren't included in that when you were being brought up.

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Including avoiding emotional incest. Can you explain what emotional incest looks like and why it's so damaging, yet often unseen? There is a healthy and normal boundary between a parent and a child.

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And when a parent turns to a child, as there's emotional support, their confidant, whatever word you want to use, they're violating that boundary. And so therefore the child doesn't get, an education around boundaries.

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It's just all a free for all and anything's possible. And so that tells them that they are needed and that what their. But what the child's needs are aren't as important as what the adult's needs are. And so they never learn to put themselves first.

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Yeah, and I agree with you. They did cross the line when they did that. I think it's okay for a parent to be supporting and be loving, but if you're reversing the role that you're looking to the child to be parent, the support, it's too much for a young child or even middle, even teenager to really take because they're looking to blossom and do other things.

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Not to be there to be a support for mom and dad or. Their job is to find out who they are and what they like and what they don't like and navigate this world, not, not nurture their parents and keep their parents from falling apart. Yeah, yeah, so true.

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You know, I don't know how long you've been on this therapy trail. Has it been 17 years? Well, at least. I mean, I was kind of thinking back, I was still. I just got into college is when all this really started turning around.

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So I was probably around 19. So that's when I started therapy. And I was there at least until, oh, 20s, 30s, somewhere in my early 40s, I think. So 25 years. Look at you.

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17 years, your own therapy and then 25 years of helping other people, after you got your licenses and everything. What's the most surprising thing that you've learned about, you know, just human beings in particular and human nature?

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And what would you advise those listeners out there today and facing the Truth to really have courage to face the truth of their own life. Because you know, like you said, people can live in shadows all their life.

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They can go to their grave and a big shadow, right, of who they trade their parents for their partner, who they're just recreating their parents relationship and the dysfunction that was going on there. It's.

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We're a pain avoidant culture. We do all these distractive things. We have drugs and alcohol and we have sex and, and anything to avoid going inside and facing that truth. And so you have to find a support system, support you through that.

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You have to find other people who've done that because they're the only ones that can support you through this, frankly, because they know what that is like. And if you can't face that, you're just going to go on the programming and keep the same thing going over and over again. And I think the whole point of being alive is, is, is really figuring out who you are so that you can be fully present because otherwise you're missing most of what's going on in you and them.

[29:31.4]
You're just playing out this silly game and, and it doesn't go very far. Well, you know, easier kind of said than done as you know, because that's how people end up working with a therapist for 10, 15 years. Right. They're coming dependent. They've never broken free from this yet.

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They're trying to find a way to do that. And, but you're assuming the therapist has ever done that too. There's plenty of therapists out there who, Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure. So you, so you look after having been the odd guy in high school and having the sexual abuse as a child and having a mother who was flying around like a crazy person, you, you write about the importance of aloneness versus loneliness.

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And everybody out there's heard this. You know, our surgeon general says there's an epidemic of loneliness right now. Right. And I would say he's absolutely correct because I've interviewed all kinds of other therapists who've come on here and talked about loneliness. In the hyperconnected world we live in, how does someone learn to truly be alone with themselves but not lonely?

[30:43.7]
Well, but I think there's a whole movement around meditation. Where's this the whole point of being alone? And so, and they, they have different ways of doing this and different paths and so forth. Could be sound and, or mantras or whatever, but it's, it's really nurturing a relationship with yourself and deepening that self awareness.

[31:05.3]
Because most people. Too much narcissism, I'm going to give you a slightly different definition of narcissism than what's popular culture is just that it's the absence of a sense of self. The only way that they experience themselves is in the reflection. They get back from the other.

[31:21.2]
You go back to the myth of narcissist. He goes along on his horse, he stops to get some water. He sees his reflection in the pond, and then he can't leave because he's fallen in love with himself. I would assert that he actually saw himself. He experienced himself for the first time.

[31:37.2]
When he would leave the water, he would cease to exist. That is what narcissism is really about. And so, so it's all about in this reflection. So many people have strong narcissistic characteristics because they're so conditioned that what they're getting back from others is who they are.

[31:55.1]
Well, we have a leader of this country who's probably a big narcissistic. He says they're going to use his video of him in graduate school to show what a narcissist looks like. I mean. Yeah. And the reality is a narcissist does not make a good leader.

[32:16.2]
So partner anything. And so, you know, the reality is that's, that's why we're kind of leaderless at this point. You know, to be a leader, you have to be strong, you have to be confident, you have to be compassionate, understanding.

[32:34.3]
None of those qualities have I seen actually shine through. And I could make a list a mile long of the things I haven't seen versus the things I actually have seen, which you're probably right. The biggest one is narcissism. Yeah. And it's somebody who wants to kind of take over the world the way that you heal narcissism.

[32:56.4]
Because a therapist is. My job is to continue to reflect back to them my experience and giving them accurate, just, empathy. So that must make you feel really bad or blah, blah, blah. And so they take that in piece by piece of piece until it solidifies inside that they know what's them.

[33:17.1]
And so. But it's where so many parents are missing the boat here. They're not doing that reflecting of a child's experience. They help them, Dylan. It's really kind of a dichotomy. I don't really think many people like that really want to know that's them. Right.

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I mean, you said a reflection in the pond falls in love with himself Right. I think the moment they fall in love with themselves, they miss the point. Right. As opposed to simply existing. Exactly, exactly.

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Because that's. That is the thing that perpetuates, actual, How do you want to call it? Their character. What keeps them out there, what keeps them alive, what feeds them, what gives them energy, you know, is.

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Is that, Yet they don't see it as an illusion. They see it as. That's who I am. Oh, I'm this person that's needed. I'm this person that's one. I'm this great whatever it is that they are. So, look, just facing the truth of your life.

[34:23.5]
For all my listeners, we're going to link to Amazon, to the website, put a link to Merle's Website as well. There you can learn more about him. It's just Merle E R L E Y O S T dot com.

[34:38.9]
There you can sign up for his newsletters, you get updates. You can check out his other books. You can, basically go to Amazon, as I said, and get a copy of this book. But we'll be putting that link up. And in wrapping up this interview, if someone reading this book could only implement one concept from it, what would you want it to be?

[35:02.5]
And what's the single most transformative shift that people can make? Now, I know we could say waking up, but let's reframe that in a different way because we do know that a lot of people walk around asleep, and, you know, it's like sleepwalking.

[35:22.8]
They don't even remember getting out of bed and. Or walking anywhere. Right. So how do you give people a piece of reality dosage? You mean outside of the book? Yeah.

[35:38.0]
So in other words, the book. What. What's one thing you want? Well, the tri with me, possibly the most important chapters of victim identity disorder. I think we have an epidemic of being victims in this country. And you can't heal until you stop that. I had three editors melt down over that chapter alone because they saw themselves so clearly in the description I made of what that looked like, and they got it.

[36:01.3]
And that it was really confronting. And it is, because it's really challenging your whole experience of being in the world. That frankly, most of us need that challenge because we're stuck in some old paradigm or so, old way of being that's keeping us from truly being alive and being present in the world.

[36:19.1]
And once you get to that piece, the difference is so dramatic. It's like everything becomes full color as opposed to Being in black and white, it's really that different that you have to stop going, oh poor me, I'm a victim.

[36:34.3]
Everybody, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, we all have been victimized, all of us, right? Nobody gets through unscathed. But you can live in that or you can say, well I've learned this from that and I know not to repeat this and blah blah blah and move on and say, but it stopped being a victim.

[36:50.5]
It's just not, it will stop you from having a, real life. Well, I think one of the things I remember when I took my course in spiritual psychology, the thing that the professors would always say is that you're 100% responsible for your own access.

[37:08.1]
I mean the reality is when you really get that, you take responsibility, a hundred percent responsibility. Then anything in the outside world, whether you've attracted it to you or not through your energy, right?

[37:24.0]
Whether it's good, bad or indifferent. Reality is you were that. No, that person caused the accident. No, the reality is, is that you gotta take responsibility for your own actions. Right. It takes two people. So.

[37:41.1]
Well, my version, I'm a Buddhist. I left Baptist church, shockingly enough for those kind of experiences. But my belief system is that I, I, that everything that I went through in this lifetime was pre planned.

[37:58.9]
Because that was what I needed to do to become the healer that I was to become. So I took responsibility for all of that and that just completely changed the universe. You cease being a victim. That does not excuse my father, doesn't excuse my mother, it doesn't excuse all the other crazy shit that happened in my life.

[38:17.1]
But that's their karma, that's their responsibility to deal with. It's not my job to make it easy for them. Also, as a Buddhist, you have this perspective on your time here on the planet. It shifts.

[38:32.4]
I remember at a meditation retreat with Joel and Michelle Levy up on the Orcus Islands, the, the monk came over from. I forget exactly where he came from, but somewhere in Asia. And they said, is there anything we could get for you? And I may have told you this story, but I think my listeners like okay, yeah, I'd like to get a watch.

[38:53.3]
I said, well, what do you want to watch for? He says, so that I can tell how much time I. So at one end of his bed he had a skeleton. At the other end of the bed he kind of hung the watch and then he put the watch on.

[39:08.5]
Is like how much time I really have left. Meaning like the contemplation of death. Contemplation of dying. Look, none of us are getting out of it alive. Right. And so when you look at your finitude and you say, oh, you know what?

[39:25.4]
Can I make the best of today? Can I live in the now? Can I get rid of this baggage that I'm carrying? Because the reality, it's not helping me one iota to carry all this baggage. All it is is like a 50 pound weight around each leg, trying to move forward.

[39:44.3]
And as soon as you cut the chains of that binding, you really see the freedom in life that can totally exist. And that's what your book is about, finding the truth. So I want to thank you for being on the show and sharing, your own personal insights, your personal story, again, for everybody.

[40:06.2]
We'll put a link to Amazon to get the book, as he said. Yeah, push the substack link as well. Yeah, we'll do that as well. Definitely. Because it has the details of my story in there. They really want to look at what's all there.

[40:22.4]
Well, they can. Yeah, they could do. I mean, look, your website is loaded. So once they get to the website, they can cruise around and look at, everything they need. But there is, there's a section there to get updates. So there's services, contact him resources, obviously.

[40:41.6]
And those resources are what we're talking about is the articles and things that he's written. And Merle Talks is another one. So Merle, thanks again for being on the show, sharing your story, sharing your book, allowing our listeners and viewers who watch watch on YouTube, to get a better understanding of, the truth or facing the truth about yourself.

[41:07.6]
So thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me. I enjoy this a great deal. Thank you for listening to this podcast on Inside Personal Growth. We appreciate your support. And for more information about new podcasts, please go to inside personal growth.com or any of your favorite channels to listen to our podcast.

[41:27.7]
Thanks again and have a wonderful day.