Armand DiMele maps out what to do when someone you care about lashes out unfairly. Rather than fighting back, he argues for showing genuine hurt, explaining why tears disarm anger more effectively than counter-attack, and why most rage burns itself out in about 22 minutes if you stop feeding it.
Armand DiMele, with co-hosts Ben Starr and Giullian Gioiello, lays out a three-part framework for how the mind works: pathological thinking (emotion-driven and invisible to itself), logical thinking (pure comparison, no feeling), and psychological thinking (intellect in harmony with emotion). Callers bring the theory to life, revealing how denied feelings quietly hijack everyday thought.
Reasonable people become their worst selves with their partners. Armand draws on John Gottman’s research to explain why couples slide into contempt, rage, and stonewalling, and offers practical tools like the five-to-one positivity ratio and the “pause clause” to break destructive cycles.
Men talk to establish status; women talk to build closeness. Armand DiMele and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, unpack why these opposing drives produce so much friction in couples, from the male instinct to solve problems to the female need for consensus, with callers weighing in on real relationship struggles.
Love means something different to everyone, and Armand DiMele makes the case that it is fundamentally an internal feeling rather than a fixed set of behaviors or rules. He examines love as fear, possession, safety, sex, and even addiction, arguing that your version of love is valid whatever form it takes.
Does the drive to be noticed make us miserable, or is feeling significant essential to mental health? Armand DiMele and Lisa Arnone, LCSW, trace the line between healthy agency and egotism, explore how depression strips away a sense of mattering, and ask what we might discover if we stopped trying to be seen.
Depression is not a problem to be suppressed but a transformative process, like bread being kneaded before it rises. Armand DiMele and co-host Roberta Maria Atti trace alchemy from ancient Egypt and China through religious persecution to its core insight: that destruction and conflict are essential stages on the path to something higher.
What does it mean to be fully alive in the present moment? Armand DiMele and co-host Lisa Arnone, LCSW, dig into Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow and the autotelic personality, arguing that real positivity comes from seeing reality clearly, not from manufactured optimism.
Stop attacking yourself and start listening. Armand DiMele walks listeners through a step-by-step practice for reaching the instinctual, feeling self he calls the “creature,” using guided relaxation, breath work, and a non-dominant hand writing exercise to open a dialogue between the rational mind and the emotional self.
Most people are not emotionally ill, just emotionally out of shape. Armand DiMele and Dr. Vivian Wolsk, Executive Director of the Gestalt Center for Psychotherapy and Training, explore emotional fitness, the body’s role in identifying feelings, the empty chair technique, and why negative programming feels so compelling.
