Armand DiMele, joined by co-hosts Ben Starr and Giullian Gioiello, builds on a Joel Osteen sermon to argue that speaking well of others, directly or behind their back, is a small act with outsized power. Callers share personal rituals, childhood games, and friendships that prove the point.
Bottled-up feelings turn into rage, depression, and stuck stories. Armand DiMele and therapist Anne Marganow argue that accessing fear, sadness, and vulnerability is not weakness but the path to self-support, discussing breathwork, role-switching, and why hysteria is actually a flight from feeling.
Longitudinal research on 373 couples reveals that shared values matter more than personality, conflict predicts stability better than its absence, and men and women respond very differently to relationship talk. Dr. Terry Orbach walks Armand DiMele through five evidence-based steps for strengthening a good marriage.
Chronic negativity is not just a bad habit but a carry-forward from family history and depression. Armand DiMele contrasts “linking” thinking, tying happiness to future conditions, with Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow,” arguing that anchoring to the present is what separates genuinely happy people from miserable ones.
When coworkers and bosses drive us crazy, the cause is often older than the job. Kathy Elster and Catherine Crowley, authors of Working With You Is Killing Me, join Armand DiMele to explain how family-of-origin patterns quietly shape who we hire, who we resent, and why some toxic work relationships feel impossible to leave.
Desperation is the biggest obstacle in a job search, and the antidote is a sense of abundance. Nick Papadopoulos, Success Counselor, joins Armand and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, to share practical tools: defining your dream job by twelve characteristics, reading communication styles before a word is spoken, and showing up with intention rather than fear.
Art can unlock emotional breakthroughs that talk therapy alone cannot. Armand DiMele and Dr. Sherry Siegel, M.D. explore with psychiatrist Jeremy Spiegel his practice of using deep, sustained engagement with a single artwork to dislodge buried feelings, alongside reflections on mindfulness and the emotional toll of medical training.
Getting what you want is impossible when you don’t know who you are. Dale Goldstein, author of “Heart Work,” joins Armand DiMele to walk through his nine-step process for locating buried feelings in the body, grieving unmet childhood needs, and uncovering the authentic self beneath years of numbness and distraction.
Being truly heard is something most people rarely experience, argues psychotherapist Kevin Heaney, a specialist in addiction and family therapy. Armand and Kevin unpack how attunement and validation work in therapy and in everyday relationships, why hearing someone’s truth matters even when the story is incomplete, and how therapists can teach couples and families to do the same.
Every human defense strategy has a counterpart in nature. Armand DiMele maps four types of animal mimicry onto everyday human behavior, from gang colors to tomboyism to con artists, then takes a caller whose obsessive cleaning turns out to mask a deeper, unnamed fear.
