The Peter Attia Drive - #172 - Esther Perel： The effects of trauma, the role of narratives in shaping our worldview, and why we need to accept uncomfortable emotions

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.480 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

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00:00:42.480 peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.

00:00:50.620 My guest this week is Esther Perel. Esther is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling

00:00:55.800 author of The State of Affairs and Mating in Captivity. She's given two TED Talks, which have

00:01:01.800 been widely viewed. She's also the host of the popular podcast, Where Should We Begin and How's

00:01:07.980 Work? The latter is a newer podcast. The former has, I think, is probably now in its fourth or fifth

00:01:13.400 season. She's given a number of other really fantastic lectures that you can visit and we'll

00:01:18.560 link to in the show notes. A couple of talks at South by Southwest that focus on relationships in the

00:01:24.260 workplace and such. I've wanted to talk with Esther for quite some time now. While she's known in most

00:01:30.440 circles as an expert on human sexuality, eroticism, and things like that, I, of course, maybe have a

00:01:36.060 bit of a broader aperture of her expertise and how it figures into relationships in general and have

00:01:42.280 found this to be very interesting. I wanted to have her on a podcast so that we could talk about

00:01:46.820 things that go far beyond what she normally speaks about. We do that. We start with her incredible

00:01:52.240 upbringing and childhood, which is kind of a heroic story of her parents and how that shaped and

00:01:56.680 influenced her. And then really go from there into how she followed her passion, both in her

00:02:02.880 education and ultimately her curiosity in her career and how it got her to where we are today.

00:02:08.440 So I'll say no more about this episode other than I think it's going to be very interesting to anyone

00:02:12.900 who's interested in relationships. And that's basically your relationship with yourself and your

00:02:17.220 relationship with anyone around you. And hopefully that includes everybody who's listening to this.

00:02:21.380 So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Esther Perel.

00:02:30.700 Hey Esther, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. It's been a while. I've wanted to

00:02:35.240 sit down and have the discussion we're about to have.

00:02:37.860 It's a pleasure.

00:02:39.240 I detect a slight accent. Is that New Jersey?

00:02:42.880 Oh, yes. Right across the river.

00:02:46.900 Right, right, right. How many languages do you speak?

00:02:49.380 I speak nine languages.

00:02:52.060 As someone who speaks 1.25 languages, it blows my mind. And I'm sure we're going to get to how one

00:02:59.680 learns nine languages. But you grew up in Belgium.

00:03:03.760 I grew up in Belgium. Yeah.

00:03:05.660 Tell me a little bit about that.

00:03:07.200 Linguistically or broader?

00:03:09.840 Yeah, broader. You've spoken in the past about the impact that your parents'

00:03:14.600 survival had on your upbringing. Maybe you could tell folks a little bit about that,

00:03:19.980 because I'm going to assume not everybody is familiar with your story.

00:03:23.120 So I grew up in Belgium. I was born in Leuven, which is one of the oldest university towns

00:03:30.700 in Europe. And then I grew up in Antwerp to two Polish parents who were both the sole survivors of their

00:03:39.660 entire family of the Nazi concentration camps. And they, by fluke, arrived to Belgium.

00:03:46.900 They had a permit there for about three months, and then they decided to stay. And so they

00:03:51.380 ended up being another five years illegal refugees in Belgium.

00:03:55.880 I was educated in Antwerp, which was a Flemish city. So I did 12 years of schooling in Flemish.

00:04:03.780 But we spoke also French and Yiddish and German and Polish in the house. And that just was the

00:04:11.300 way it was. It's the air that you breathe. Nobody made a big deal out of speaking all these languages

00:04:17.740 and learning them. So that's the basics.

00:04:22.200 When you finished your education, your high school education,

00:04:25.340 what was the next step for you? Where did you go after that?

00:04:27.960 The first thing I did after I finished high school was come to the United States to travel

00:04:33.860 for almost two months. And I ended up hitchhiking across the U.S. and seeing the country in a way

00:04:40.160 that I probably will never see it again. And then I went to study in Jerusalem. I went to the Hebrew

00:04:46.260 University. That's where I did my undergraduate. And then I started my graduate school there.

00:04:52.200 And I came to Boston to Leslie College to finish the second year of my master's program and to start

00:04:59.880 my training in family therapy at the Cambridge Family Institute and to work at Mass Mental Health,

00:05:06.020 which was one of the Harvard Medical School hospitals. And then basically, I never used my

00:05:11.580 return ticket. And here I am.

00:05:14.340 Let's go back to the hitchhiking trip. What made you decide to venture from Europe to the United States

00:05:19.560 in the first place? And when you did so, did you have this plan of actually hitchhiking? Or was that

00:05:24.740 something that developed once you arrived?

00:05:27.060 I had hitchhiked before in Europe and in Israel since I was traveling at age 14. A major way that you

00:05:35.820 traveled when you were curious and broke was to hitchhike. So it was perfectly in fashion at that time to do so.

00:05:43.480 And why the United States? Because it was the bicentennial and there were cheap cargo flights

00:05:49.940 that took you from Belgium to the US. Capital Airlines was this first invention of old planes

00:05:56.540 refurbished for people who didn't need much comfort. No, I had a greyhound pass. I was with my

00:06:02.400 boyfriend. We had a greyhound pass and we thought we would be traveling with greyhounds. But every time

00:06:07.640 my finger went up, it went so well. And I got invited into the homes of every kind of person

00:06:14.760 that lives in this country and the kindness of strangers, really, like in ways that I probably

00:06:20.060 would never have access to today. So it was the whole West Coast. It was Louisiana, Mississippi,

00:06:26.300 Alabama, and then the Northeast. So it turned out this way because of a whole adventure. We lost our

00:06:33.220 wallet and our traveler checks, if you remember that concept. Everything. And we didn't have phones

00:06:38.680 at the time, of course. So somebody found it. And this man came to pick us up at a downtown station

00:06:45.520 in LA. And he invited us to his house. And from that moment on, this trip took on a whole different

00:06:52.300 personality for us. That was that. Seven weeks later, I had really had an insider's look that

00:06:59.980 innocence and curiosity and a good sense of street smartness, which you need when you'd hitchhike,

00:07:06.340 of course. Did that, in part, give you a little bit of an affection for American culture? And is

00:07:12.560 that maybe part of the reason why you ultimately ended up setting up roots here? Actually, no.

00:07:19.540 I was fascinated. Before I came to study in Boston, I came for another trip. I did another hitchhiking trip

00:07:26.400 in Mexico for quite a few weeks. And then I went all the way from Merida to Miami to Quebec.

00:07:33.720 And then I did a third trip where I spent the entire summer in New York City in the late 70s. So

00:07:39.740 you can imagine it was a different city. No, I liked it. I was very curious, but I had no intention

00:07:45.680 ever of coming to live in what we called at the time in America. And I came to study because I had the

00:07:52.780 opportunity to come to Cambridge and nobody in my family had gone to university like this.

00:07:58.460 And I was the first and I had read Borges and I thought Cambridge was a fascinating place to come

00:08:04.320 and study and I should take this opportunity. And I had no idea that I would stay. So I stayed in

00:08:11.400 Cambridge for a couple of years. And then I came to New York thinking I have to do the New York adventure

00:08:16.420 for one year. And I came with my husband now who was boyfriend then. And I really didn't think I

00:08:23.740 would stay, but I fell in love with New York. That I knew. And it's always been very clear to me that it

00:08:30.840 would be Manhattan or abroad, that my real affection was for New York City. You could be anything and

00:08:37.860 every part of you in one place. And I had always looked for a place to integrate the multiple parts

00:08:44.280 of me. And this seemed to be the place where I could do so. Now, I want to kind of go back to

00:08:48.760 something you said at the outset, which is both your mother and your father were the sole survivors

00:08:53.360 from their families, meaning their parents, their siblings, their aunts, uncles, everybody perished.

00:08:59.260 Did I understand that correctly? Yes. My father came from a family of nine and he was the youngest.

00:09:07.880 My mother came from a family of seven. Every single one of their siblings were married with seven to

00:09:13.920 10 children. And so each of them lost 200 people about. And they basically met on the day of

00:09:21.800 liberation on the roads where people were looking for other people from the same area that could tell

00:09:27.580 them if anybody else had survived. And that's kind of how they met up. Yeah, that was it. They were the

00:09:33.980 only ones. Do you have a sense of what permitted them to be the survivors? Do you attribute it to

00:09:40.640 sheer luck? The odds seem almost unimaginable given the circumstances of their periphery?

00:09:47.680 So the war for them starts in 39 because they live on the German side of Poland. So this is a very long

00:09:53.780 war, six years about. My mother spends the first year in the woods. She's 18. She hides in the woods,

00:10:00.880 which is really where she suffered the most. And she actually went by herself to a labor camp,

00:10:09.140 a men's labor camp, because she had in her mind that if she can work in the kitchen or laundry,

00:10:16.940 that somehow at least she will wake up every morning in the same place. Whereas in the woods,

00:10:22.440 she had no idea. She couldn't take the dread anymore. She proceeds to go to nine different camps

00:10:28.700 over the five years. And my father went to 14 of them, including a stint in Siberia.

00:10:35.160 When I would ask them, there were generally a series of three points. The first one was luck,

00:10:41.740 simply sheer luck. I wasn't selected every morning when they chose a thousand people.

00:10:47.140 Somehow it didn't pick me. The second one was we wanted to live. We wanted to live. We thought maybe

00:10:53.840 somebody is waiting for us somewhere. And we were going to live with dignity. So my mother describes

00:10:59.760 mending her socks, folding her clothes, doing basic things that maintain their sense of humanity.

00:11:08.180 And for my father, my father basically in the last year and a half created a kind of a black market

00:11:13.600 in the kitchen where he had more access to potatoes, potatoes and potato peels.

00:11:20.300 And he managed to feed about 60 young people that all survived thanks to that, because it meant that

00:11:26.720 they could go work. And as long as you could work, you had a chance of at least surviving,

00:11:30.920 including he fed the Germans, the SS guards. And I think feeling that he could help others

00:11:37.260 gave him a sense of agency, of mastery, of I can do something here. So luck was a piece of it.

00:11:45.700 It wasn't the only thing, but it always was mentioned.

00:11:50.400 So when you were growing up, I assume that you had friends who were not from that background,

00:11:57.520 and therefore they would have, quote unquote, normal things like grandparents and cousins and

00:12:02.680 aunts and uncles, things that you did not have. Was that contrast stark for you as a young child?

00:12:07.960 I grew up in a dual situation. We had a clothing store in a working class neighborhood. I lived

00:12:15.840 above the store. I worked in this store. We were like the immigrant family on the block.

00:12:21.960 My parents had accents. They didn't speak very well Flemish. Like in any neighborhood where you

00:12:27.540 have that store that is owned, but instead of a food store, it was a clothing store. That's when I

00:12:33.140 am born. But I come 12 years after my brother. So this is, by then there is a store that didn't

00:12:38.420 start like this, right? My father on occasion would kind of say, you know, he would put their

00:12:43.780 hand on the shoulder of a client, of a customer, and just say, we went through some very bad things

00:12:48.980 during the war. And I would think, how would they relate to any of this? Then there was the Jewish

00:12:55.140 community that we were a part of, where most of the people had numbers on their arms. So the first

00:13:01.700 question you ask at two years old is, why don't I have a grandma or a grandpa? And then the second

00:13:08.060 time is, what is this number? And then the third time is, why don't I have uncles and aunts? And

00:13:12.980 it's not just because you see other children. It's because you read children's books. And in the

00:13:17.460 children's book is a story of a family, and it has a few generations. And we had none of that. And we

00:13:24.000 had about five pictures that showed that they had managed to save a few pictures. So that said,

00:13:29.820 there were these other people. The Jewish community that I grew up in was all Holocaust survivors.

00:13:36.020 This was normative for me. This was a very refugee community that you only know refugees, but then in

00:13:42.180 the store were these other people. You've spoken a little bit about it. I find it to be kind of

00:13:48.560 amazing how your parents' survival changed their outlook on life and how that impacted your outlook

00:13:57.280 on life. Say a little bit about that. There's zest for life, if you will.

00:14:01.940 One of the things my dad always used to say is, we came from harsh circumstances. We were used to the

00:14:08.020 bitter cold. I used to carry bags of cement on my back. We were much better prepared than those who

00:14:15.260 came from Greece or the Mediterranean or urban environments. There was something about being

00:14:21.260 from peasant stock, basically, that prepared them for hardship. The interesting thing is,

00:14:27.340 why does this story stay with me out of a thousand others that he has told me? They talked a lot. So

00:14:32.520 today, this is not really what you ask, but it's often when I get asked a question like this and I

00:14:38.960 start to answer it, I realize a thousand questions that I didn't get to ask. That I just took the story

00:14:45.920 as it was told, like a Swiss cheese with all the holes in it and never kind of said, but how did

00:14:51.020 you go from here to there? It's just like, we went and she mended her socks. How did you do that?

00:14:57.380 Where did you find the needle? Where did you find all these very granular details that I have no real

00:15:04.320 answer to? But I think what I got was a few different things. The first thing I got, which actually

00:15:11.380 really came back very strongly during the pandemic this year, was the notion that everything can

00:15:18.620 disappear in a split second. Don't ever think that what you have is there to stay and is yours.

00:15:26.160 On the one hand, it prepares you for catastrophes, for disasters, for change. And on the other hand,

00:15:33.140 you can never fully, fully settle. You're never fully calm because you don't know that the ground you sit

00:15:39.620 down could not at any moment open up. That's, I think, probably the most important thing, is that

00:15:45.600 sense of impermanence, the sense of loss, the massa of loss, the collective loss of not just people,

00:15:54.300 but life, community, legacies, generations of stuff. I think I have a real sense of what that is.

00:16:02.740 I plumb into mine when I need to reach in other people's experience of loss like that. But also,

00:16:10.960 and dread, I mean, that goes with that. And then on the other side, yes, this enormous

00:16:16.160 zest for life. I mean, they were not just there to work and rebuild. My parents were real bon vivant.

00:16:22.640 I mean, they loved life. They really enjoyed party, to sing, to dance. And that, in my work,

00:16:30.240 and in my personal life, and in my work around trauma and around pain and suffering, I have a

00:16:35.900 reference for how one comes back from there, how one loves again, celebrates again, parties again,

00:16:43.900 in a way that is not just them, but to be the ones that I knew the best. And these things have

00:16:48.940 very much influenced me in my thinking and in my outlook on the world. There's lots of other things.

00:16:54.900 If, on the one hand, it's entirely remarkable that your parents survived the ordeal that they were

00:17:01.820 placed in, it seems equally remarkable that they weren't permanently scarred by it.

00:17:07.640 If we've talked about some of the factors that may have contributed to their ability to survive

00:17:12.600 what they did for six years, what do you contribute to their ability to come out the backside and

00:17:18.940 experience everything you just said? Which is, because I have to imagine that there are many people who

00:17:24.420 survived concentration camps, but they were never the same again. They were never able to form

00:17:29.900 meaningful relationships. The PTSD of the experience effectively left them dead, even though they were

00:17:35.580 still breathing. I'm guessing your parents didn't have access to MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD

00:17:41.140 and world-class psychotherapists.

00:17:43.540 No, but they had access to something else. See, my mother, in the 50s, went to the big professor

00:17:50.400 at the university in Leuven. And basically, he kind of said to her, what you experienced,

00:17:56.340 one can't just come back from. And there is no medication or treatment for this kind of stuff.

00:18:02.400 And she had nightmares, and she had massive eruptions sometimes. She'd go and check the door a few times

00:18:09.460 in the night at that time and stuff. We didn't call it PTSD. We just called it survivor syndrome,

00:18:14.820 actually, was the name at the time. But she had access to what today are called a spa.

00:18:22.480 My mother did thalassotherapy, mud therapy, walking on wet grass, all the things that today are part of

00:18:32.960 the wellness treatments that are all traditional things that were done in the bath of Eastern Europe,

00:18:39.500 in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, in Poland. And she went every year for a month to the spa where she

00:18:48.400 was doing bath and water and mud and big jets of frozen water. The stuff that you do when you go

00:18:56.680 from hot to cold, this was like traditional medicine. So that's the stuff she did to calm her nerves,

00:19:04.000 which was called at the time, you had nerve issues, nervousness. The other thing, because I have said,

00:19:11.620 it is a thing I wrote in Mating in Captivity that followed me around afterwards, where I said,

00:19:17.040 I was interested in that very question. What made some people want to live? What feeds aliveness? What

00:19:23.340 is this antidote to death or deadness? And I remember describing my observation between those who did not

00:19:30.700 die and those who came back to life, those who could never trust and those who reconnected again,

00:19:36.440 et cetera. I think what really, and this is very relevant for today, what my parents had was a strong

00:19:43.400 sense of community. So all these people come out of the camps and first they go to DP camps,

00:19:50.460 to temporary camps. And the amount of babies that were conceived there, because all these people

00:19:56.300 wanted to have children to know as a way of proving they are alive, that they are human,

00:20:01.600 that they can still procreate. And that in itself is such an act of healing. You rebuild,

00:20:08.800 you didn't destroy it all. You didn't sever all connection. There will be a future. There will be

00:20:14.000 more of us. That's the first thing. Then this community comes together and they have gatherings for

00:20:20.040 the survivors of town such and such, for the survivors of camp such and such. They plant trees,

00:20:25.700 they celebrate, they tell stories. They fundamentally understood something that today

00:20:31.620 we're trying to bring in that is such a, what is called today collective trauma, that was called

00:20:37.020 psychosocial trauma, demands collective resilience. They didn't try to do anything on their own.

00:20:44.140 Now, the first years, they don't talk much. They arrive to these foreign countries and most of the

00:20:48.900 time people don't really want to hear much of what they've gone through. You tell two sentences and

00:20:53.180 people can't hear anymore. Meaning even amongst each other.

00:20:56.860 No, no, no. With each other, they tell, but they don't always have to tell. You see, it could be this

00:21:01.600 kind of short, that camp was a bad camp. That SS, God, you did not want to be under him. I managed in that

00:21:11.100 winter. They had all these sentences like that, that just shorthand and everybody knew what was the

00:21:17.860 reference. Everybody knew what it came back to. So to each other, they talked a lot. I've always had

00:21:23.000 this image, I once told, because it's such a powerful thing. Every Sunday, my parents played

00:21:27.820 cards. Friends came over and they played cards. So they're playing Jin Rami and stuff. And as they

00:21:34.260 were playing with these cards, somebody would just suddenly say, whatever happened to John Morris,

00:21:41.040 John Mitchell, whatever. Oh, this one was gassed. This one was murdered. He didn't make it. He went

00:21:48.200 to Australia. And I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It was like there was no child development

00:21:54.260 approach in my house. Nobody looked to see if there's a child there to hear all of this. It was

00:21:59.900 done in this affectless way. There was no affect. Horrors were told in that, what today we would call

00:22:08.860 dissociation, but for the purpose of survival and regeneration. It was a very good natural defense.

00:22:19.860 And I think that what is interesting about that group, which is really the first time that people

00:22:24.960 understood the concept of adult trauma, because until then it was all about first five years of your

00:22:30.460 life, is that they came up with some of the most adaptive, resilient ways of going about things

00:22:38.400 without ever seeing a shrink, without any access to mental health, just something inside their own

00:22:45.160 tradition. That history, this was not the first time Jews were having a rough time in history, right?

00:22:50.840 These resources really were gleaned from a culture that is collective in nature, and it's not the only

00:22:57.720 one for sure. So that's, I think, really what helped them more than anything else. Walks in the woods

00:23:04.100 was a ritual. You needed to go into nature. This is like, everybody's writing about that this pandemic

00:23:10.040 year. Something that about them knew that being in the forest is healing.

00:23:16.500 Recently, you wrote something on Mother's Day, actually, about your relationship with your mother,

00:23:21.920 and you wrote about all the positive things and many of the positive things that your mother did for

00:23:27.720 you. But at the same time, there were things she didn't do for you, and it's left you with a feeling of

00:23:32.100 ambivalence, at least with respect to some of the mother-daughter things that maybe weren't there.

00:23:38.060 How did that unfold for you as you went from being a child to an adolescent? I assume at the time,

00:23:45.200 you didn't think this was abnormal because you had nothing to compare it to. I assume this was

00:23:48.340 a retrospective reflection.

00:23:50.440 I would say from the time I was an adolescent to the time I was an adult is really more the sequence.

00:23:56.320 So it's very interesting. I have not talked often about this, but I just was tired of hearing about

00:24:03.340 Mother's Day and Hallmark Heart Mother's Day. And I thought there's so many people who have

00:24:09.020 complicated relationships with their mother. Maybe we should put that on the table for a change.

00:24:13.960 So I whipped this thing out on Sunday because it's very easy for me with a good dose of humor to

00:24:20.320 describe my mother. And what's phenomenal is thousands of people that are writing to me,

00:24:26.760 basically say, this is my mother, this is my mother. So I know she's not unique, and she comes

00:24:31.940 in every culture, and she comes in every color. But basically, she had this thing with the evil eye.

00:24:38.900 She was a very superstitious woman. So this whole idea that you shouldn't say good things to your kid

00:24:45.000 because it will blow their head. She took that to the very concrete level. And so she had this notion

00:24:52.360 that she's there to tell you what other people will not tell you. And that's usually not the good

00:24:57.140 stuff. And so she was true to herself till the end. She didn't say one good word to me ever, ever.

00:25:05.120 How old were you when she died?

00:25:07.080 She was 80, and I was 42.

00:25:10.020 So by the time she died, you had already achieved a lot of professional success.

00:25:15.000 Yes, in my field, but I hadn't written mating in captivity. I actually started to write mating

00:25:21.020 after she passed away. And I remember saying, this is the first time I'm actually doing something that

00:25:27.700 I'm not sure I can do. And I don't think I could ever have done this when she was alive.

00:25:33.380 For fear that she would be critical of you saying, why are you doing this? You don't have the experience

00:25:37.460 to do this or something like that?

00:25:38.940 Yeah. I mean, because every time I made a decision, I had to have confidence one time for me and one time

00:25:44.660 for her anxiety. I had to prove to her, whatever it was, this was true for the hitchhiking trip too.

00:25:49.960 This was true for going to study in Jerusalem. This was true for coming to live in New York.

00:25:54.220 Everything, everything I decided, she would challenge me, challenge me, challenge me. And so I had to have

00:25:59.960 inside of me a sense that I knew that I can do it. I have to succeed at this. Not to prove her wrong,

00:26:08.500 but just to be able to do what I want. It wasn't to defy her. But this time I began to write and I

00:26:15.740 thought to myself, I have no idea. I remember saying, I've always done things that somewhere

00:26:22.460 inside of me, I think I'm capable of doing. These are sentences that I remember saying back then.

00:26:28.960 And this is the first time that I'm taking something out. I have no idea. But her voice isn't there

00:26:35.960 to make me feel like I have to be sure. I'm allowed to do something without knowing and I'll do the best

00:26:43.500 I can and I'll pour my soul into this. But that's all I have rather than I know I can, which was the

00:26:51.160 stance I had to have before then. So I think the ambivalence that you're asking about, it's not

00:26:57.480 uncommon that you have a family and the mom becomes the strict one. She's the stern one. She's the more

00:27:03.280 critical one. And my dad is sugar candy. He's the sweetest, the sweetest, kindest, loving, adoring

00:27:10.580 dad. And what you begin to understand once you start to study family therapy is that of course he's

00:27:18.760 always kind and loving and adoring because he leaves some of the dirty job to her. She has to put the

00:27:25.340 limits. She has to basically put the limits, do the discipline, do all the stuff that he doesn't like

00:27:30.940 to do. And I began to understand that the good parent and the bad parent or the soft parent and

00:27:37.540 the harder parent, that's a construct that is not just a matter of personality. Because my mother was

00:27:44.320 also very, she had tremendous charisma and she was funny and brilliant and all of that too. That in fact,

00:27:51.180 it's because of how he acts that that puts her in this role. And this role then is already,

00:27:57.680 the quota is filled. So he doesn't really have to do it. And once I saw that, I began to see my dad

00:28:04.300 is not the all good, that he actually leaves her alone, comes home three hours later, doesn't call

00:28:12.500 to tell her, leaves her standing with all the cooked food in the kitchen. And of course, when he comes

00:28:17.740 home, she's all pissed and yelling that he doesn't respect her or that she's there standing there like an

00:28:24.400 idiot in her. And me, instead of thinking, stop screaming, I began to say, why did you just do

00:28:30.680 this to her? You know, in your beautiful, loving way, but you just stood her up. And once you begin

00:28:36.540 to reorganize the movie and the interpretation of the movie, then you suddenly realize she's actually

00:28:44.440 not only the negative. My anger goes to her and my love goes to him kind of thing. And that's when

00:28:51.100 you begin to experience the ability to hold contradictory emotions at the same time. And

00:28:56.940 that's ambivalence. Ambivalence is the ability to hold both ends. I love you. And I also have a lot

00:29:04.040 of anger toward you. And those two are coexisting inside of me rather than I split off one part and

00:29:10.280 then I attribute it somewhere else. Once I began to do that, then I was able to diffuse her things.

00:29:19.040 You know, if she was critical of something, I had a way of joking with her that basically didn't allow

00:29:25.780 her to enter under my skin. And I just could really say, you know, all kinds of diffusing tricks that I

00:29:32.540 had learned, basically. My favorite one, which because I used it with so many people in my own therapy

00:29:37.700 work afterwards, was to just give her a kiss on the cheek and just say, I so appreciate how you're trying

00:29:44.040 to make me a better person. But I want you to know, I think you've done a good job. I'm where you,

00:29:50.200 I think you would want me to be. So if you want, you can go try to improve others.

00:29:57.360 It worked very well for me. I would laugh as I said it, instead of feeling the wrath mounting inside

00:30:03.640 of me. So what drew you to therapy as a career?

00:30:09.900 I would ask myself what drew me to psychology first. I'm a teenager at that time. I have a very

00:30:17.040 contentious relationship with my mom. We do a lot of good screaming on occasion. I am in a school system

00:30:23.120 that is extremely traditional. The student doesn't matter. Only the content matters. The material matters.

00:30:30.160 I start to read these alternative education books. And I start to read Viktor Frankl. And I start to

00:30:37.540 read Bruno Bettelheim. And I start to read Free Children of Summerhill and R.D. Lange and anti-psychiatry.

00:30:44.360 I become very, very interested in why do we feel what we feel? How come I'm having dreams about Hitler

00:30:53.400 and Nazis? And it's not my life. I didn't go through that. Why do I have those dreams? What does that do to

00:30:59.380 me? How do people get along better with their parents? At that time, sometimes when things were

00:31:05.500 really, really tough with her, I had this idea that if I could disappear, then I would see if she ever

00:31:11.340 misses me. I have these fantasies of how can I disappear for a while and put the fear in her that

00:31:17.520 she may have lost me and then see if she actually cares about me. And then I thought, where does that

00:31:22.900 come from? Why would I want to do such a thing? And this is the beginning of my interest in psychology,

00:31:28.940 in reading about human relationships, which I then did profusely. And then I also realized I actually

00:31:35.700 am quite good at this. People come to confide in me all the time, all my friends. I see what's not

00:31:42.120 visible in relationships. Everybody thought because of my languages that I should be an interpreter

00:31:47.820 or maybe a journalist or a lawyer because I could argue my case, a litigator. And I decided I think

00:31:55.120 psychotherapy could be a very interesting profession. Or a spy, by the way. You would have been a great

00:32:00.960 spy. That's right. I never thought of that one. So when you found yourself in Boston, you're now going

00:32:08.840 through your graduate program. What is your first job, career, your first step into your professional

00:32:15.400 career? Is it family therapy? No. My first, first job was at the hospital as an expressive arts

00:32:23.120 therapist working on the psychiatric unit. Because I had also had the whole adolescence and young

00:32:29.020 adulthood in the theater, and I had done a lot of puppetry. And I thought to study expressive arts

00:32:34.840 therapies would be a very interesting way of bringing together the arts as a modality, as a

00:32:40.700 psychotherapeutic modality. And I just worked two years first in the hospital as an expressive arts

00:32:47.740 therapist, primarily with groups, actually. Sometimes with families, but mostly with groups.

00:32:54.400 And there was something missing. I felt like there must be more. Plus, you're at the bottom of the

00:33:01.440 totem pole when you're an expressive arts therapist. It's like you're the recreation therapist after the

00:33:06.080 doctors have gone by, the therapists, the psychologists. Keep them busy. And I just thought that isn't going

00:33:11.880 to go very well for me. To be in a profession that is not valued when I think it is so incredible,

00:33:18.060 something is off. I was with Jack, I was talking to Jack at the time, who was just a colleague at that

00:33:24.360 moment, and kind of mentoring me slightly through my thesis. And he said, I think you would be interested

00:33:30.540 in family therapy. It's more contextual. It's more anthropological. It's more intercultural. It takes

00:33:37.800 all the other pieces into account, the way that you have done. I was writing about cultural,

00:33:42.840 religious, and racial identity. I was, this was too small for me. I needed a field that was more

00:33:48.600 expansive. The revolution was to begin to think in systemic terms, away from the individual

00:33:54.660 intra-psychic model into the interpersonal and societal or contextual model. That just opened up

00:34:02.760 a gate for me. And then I went to work at MassMental. And slowly I thought, I'm not sure that the hospital

00:34:09.700 setting is the best setting for me. How does that family therapy work in a hospital setting? When you

00:34:15.180 say hospital setting, do you mean inpatient setting? Yes. Yes, inpatient.

00:34:19.580 So does that mean that you're taking care of psychiatric inpatients as individuals or you're

00:34:25.940 helping families? Families. Of inpatients. Yes, with the identified patients. So I did it both

00:34:33.240 inpatient and outpatient. And basically, yes, you do sessions with the whole family. But it's not just

00:34:40.240 who is in the room. It's how you think about what is the patient. In family therapy language,

00:34:46.900 the patient is not just the patient because they feel certain things or they are struggling with

00:34:51.700 things inside of them. The patient has a function in the family, is often assigned by the family.

00:34:58.680 That is the person who's allowed to struggle and suffer out loud amongst a group of ascetic people

00:35:06.420 who are just like holding it all in type thing. That's just one tiny example. So you work with the

00:35:12.900 system and you try to understand what led this person to want to commit suicide. What led this

00:35:20.200 person to not eat? What led this person to destroy themselves or whatever the issues are? And that

00:35:27.980 notion that things are interconnected was also what I had experienced. I knew that some of the things I

00:35:34.860 was feeling wasn't just because I was born this way. It was in my dynamic with my parents,

00:35:39.540 with my mother in particular. When you study family therapy, you do genograms,

00:35:44.340 you look at intergenerational transmission, you constantly are studying yourself as you are

00:35:49.840 learning the paradigm. And at no time did I think, oh, this just applies to me.

00:35:55.660 This is a fascinating other way to look at things.

00:35:59.720 Now, when you did your master's, it was focused on family therapy?

00:36:04.300 My master's is in expressive arts therapies.

00:36:06.900 Okay. So that's what took you to your first role. So one thing that is interesting to me about

00:36:11.380 psychology versus medicine, in medicine, your postgraduate training, your residency really

00:36:18.100 prepares you for what you're going to do in your career. And frankly, many people don't do much

00:36:24.900 training beyond that, even though obviously one should. But it seems that in psychology,

00:36:30.220 you have to reinvent yourself. I mean, if you want to make the leap from expressive art therapy to

00:36:36.620 family therapy, you're not going to go back and do another master's degree or do another

00:36:41.260 clinical internship or something like that. So beyond your own experience, how are you finding

00:36:47.640 mentors and or sharpening the tool of your trade?

00:36:51.740 You can be a practicing clinician who every few years decides to learn one more modality,

00:37:00.840 one more theoretical paradigm. It's endless. It's absolutely endless. You can have an interest

00:37:07.860 in a topic. I'm interested in the area of trauma. I'm interested in eating disorders. I'm interested in

00:37:13.280 anxiety disorders. So this is one way to organize your interest. But you can also say,

00:37:18.780 I'm interested in working with families. And at that time, this was the heydays of family therapy.

00:37:25.940 There were five schools of family therapy, structural family therapy, strategic family

00:37:30.020 therapy, feminist family therapy, intergenerational. These were, you had a good 10 years of learning

00:37:35.640 just between those five, right? You can say, I want to learn. Now there is the neuroscience.

00:37:41.920 The neuroscience have come in and they have so many interesting new things to say

00:37:45.680 about how people regulate and co-regulate each other in relationships. I need to know that

00:37:50.860 because I want to be able to use that in my work. So my frame remains the same. I am a couples

00:37:55.980 therapist, a family therapist. I do individual work as well. But I need to understand the new things

00:38:01.660 that we know about the brain. Then there is a phase, everybody's talking mindfulness. I need to know

00:38:06.520 everything that mindfulness can tell me about working in relationships. It's that way. Basically,

00:38:13.160 if you are a curious person in mental health and in psychotherapy per se, which is one practice of

00:38:19.480 mental health, it is an endless, endless school. I admire those who sometimes continue. They're like,

00:38:27.700 I have colleagues who just throw themselves into a new approach and spent 500 hours honing that skill.

00:38:36.020 You have CEUs as well, Peter. There is an incentive that makes you continue to go and learn. But I think

00:38:44.800 the knowledge of human beings, which I think is not different in medicine in that sense, is endless

00:38:50.880 and is a new way of thinking. And then there becomes a dominant way of thinking. And then for 10 years,

00:38:56.700 everybody thinks like that. The truth of today becomes the joke of tomorrow. And then we move on to a new

00:39:03.040 paradigm. And it's amazing how, depending on when you enter the field, you basically rode the wave of

00:39:09.440 the moment. If I was in the late 19th century, I would have been a psychoanalyst. And you would have

00:39:16.160 thought of medicine very differently than you do. In a way, it shows you the social construct of those

00:39:23.440 fields. They are sciences and they are humanities, but they are also completely immersed in the context

00:39:29.220 of the moment. And if your CEUs are as valuable as our CEUs, they don't offer too much. Our CEUs are,

00:39:37.540 they're something that we do simply to maintain our licensure. But I'm still looking for CEUs that

00:39:43.020 teach much valuable content. In fact, the ones, at least for me, that I find most valuable are the

00:39:48.040 ones that are so far outside of my area of expertise that I can actually learn something.

00:39:52.280 But the ones that are generally close to what I do are not that helpful, which of course then makes me

00:39:57.000 question how helpful the ones are that are so outside of my area because they may be equally

00:40:01.360 far from what's likely reality. But so you're going along, you're doing family therapy. You're

00:40:06.460 now transitioning, obviously, from inpatient to outpatient. Is this when you moved from Boston back

00:40:11.900 to New York? Yep. And everything's going well. And then how did Bill Clinton change your life?

00:40:18.880 There's a little bit of a road to Bill Clinton.

00:40:20.980 You asked me, because I think this training thing, CEU, is a really important thing. And I'm going

00:40:28.340 to trace this back to my mother. I think that because of how critical she could be, I did often

00:40:36.760 seek mentors. I was very drawn to people who saw something good in me. I was drawn to people who

00:40:44.420 believed in me. I was drawn to people who thought I can do certain things. I would melt when somebody

00:40:50.800 would do that. And then I began to actually really seek these mentors, not just stumbled upon them as

00:40:56.880 a counselor in a summer camp or things like that. And this is kind of how I learned. I asked people

00:41:02.300 who I wanted to learn from if I could be their shadow. And I just was like a disciple, an apprentice

00:41:09.960 that watches the craft being done and learns from incredible clinicians. I mean, then I come to New York

00:41:18.860 and that's when I meet one of my next mentors, Salvador Mnuchin, who I have spoken about, because my

00:41:25.420 two main mentors have actually passed away in the last two years, one by old age and one by suicide.

00:41:33.100 So I've been thinking a lot about these things. And I basically started to work at the 92nd Street Y and

00:41:40.580 then started to work privately, because that's what it had to do with papers and immigration and license and

00:41:48.340 green cards and all of that stuff. And I basically did it the way that I knew my immigrant parents did. You

00:41:55.880 hustle, you find a way, you enter in, you do that kind of a thing. By the time this Clinton affair arrives, and by the

00:42:04.520 time I start to write mating, yes, I had a very nice psychotherapy practice I would teach. I was at NYU in

00:42:12.640 the medical school as a clinical instructor. I was lecturing. And I had developed a real specialty in the

00:42:20.020 area of working with mixed couples and families, intercultural, interracial, interreligious couples

00:42:25.880 and families. Why? Because the way I could build a private practice in New York City is because I knew

00:42:31.340 languages. I didn't know much about therapy yet, but I knew languages. And these people wanted to speak

00:42:38.060 their language with me. And that's how this began. And I had three supervisors who checked on everything

00:42:43.920 I did. And that's how I began. By the time the Clinton scandal arrives, I just didn't want to write

00:42:51.540 a book about mixed couples. That was the main thing. I began to feel like I'm ready for a new subject,

00:42:56.900 but I need a portal topic. And I like topics that open up to me, that connect to theology,

00:43:03.120 anthropology, sociology, psychology, big, like you. The CEUs take place in a different field.

00:43:09.340 I like that too. And I don't know. I just got inspired by the story because it kind of really

00:43:16.220 was this, what is this American attitude to sexuality and to sexuality as a matter of national

00:43:23.960 political agenda for that matter? How do I make sense of this whole thing? And then I wrote this

00:43:29.520 article in 2003 in an obscure magazine that was known only in our field. And that changed everything

00:43:37.280 around. I've read this obscure article in this obscure magazine, and you comment on being at a

00:43:44.300 conference and noting the fundamental difference that all the people at the conference who were American

00:43:51.240 had versus all of the non-Americans. Say a bit more about that.

00:43:56.800 I think that one way to say it is on a cultural level, there's been a real push to see sex as a risk

00:44:04.860 factor in America. Sex itself is the risk factor. Whereas I think the European notion and the public health

00:44:13.040 notions in Europe is that sex is a natural part of human development. Being irresponsible is a risk

00:44:20.020 factor. That changes everything. And so I don't think that clinicians in the field of psychotherapy

00:44:26.180 is free from that. I studied couples therapy and family therapy without one hour about the subject of

00:44:33.300 sexuality. How can that be in a culture where sexuality is so central? And in the love culture,

00:44:40.580 I'm talking, I'm not talking, you know, just the modern ideology of love is put that dimension front

00:44:45.920 and center. How can we do couples therapy and not ever talk about it? Years. Something is missing.

00:44:53.720 And the field had organized itself in a very interesting way to never have to talk about it

00:44:58.360 because it said, if there are sexual problems, it's the consequence of relationship problems.

00:45:05.180 Therefore, focus on the relationship, fix the relationship, and the sex will follow. And that is

00:45:11.880 sometimes the case, but so many times not. There is more to the story. My thinking has always been,

00:45:18.580 this is not inaccurate, but there is more to the story. That's the way probably that sentence

00:45:23.720 drives my curiosity. You could be at an entire conference that talked about sexuality and never hear

00:45:29.640 the word pleasure, connection, sexual connection, eroticism. None of these words were being used.

00:45:35.840 And if I looked at the literature, you know, the nice thing about languages is I go and I read

00:45:41.300 other countries' literature and I'd realize this is actually not the only way to do this.

00:45:47.740 There is another way of looking at these things. That's where I was.

00:45:51.500 How is sexuality a lens into society? Because I get the sense that your real interest is deeper

00:45:57.520 than sexuality. Sexuality is a vehicle, I think, for you to understand more.

00:46:01.980 Yes.

00:46:02.380 Understand society, understand people.

00:46:04.800 Yes. And cultures. Yes, yes. And I think where this thing really originated for me,

00:46:11.840 when you write a book, there's about four or five books you've read that are kind of the foundations

00:46:17.480 for, oh, wow, you could see it like that. So at the time I read Octavio Paz, The Double Flame,

00:46:24.220 Essays on Love and Eroticism. First of all, he distinguishes sexuality and eroticism.

00:46:29.100 That distinction that is so important. And then he looks at religion. And then he analyzes how religion

00:46:36.040 has intersected with sexuality because every religion has had to do something about sexuality.

00:46:41.860 Here is what I began to look at was this. If you look at a culture or at a civilization and you look at

00:46:49.400 it's most archaic, rooted, sometimes intransigent aspects, what it holds on to, many of those things will be organized

00:47:01.460 around sexuality, and particularly the sexuality of women and children.

00:47:06.880 And if you look on the other side at revolutions, radical changes, progressive changes that happen in a society,

00:47:16.280 often also connected to industrialization and scientific developments and medical developments, etc.,

00:47:22.940 it also takes place around sexuality. And so in that sense, I think sexuality is a lens.

00:47:29.640 It tells a story of the values, the behaviors, and the attitudes towards the body, towards pleasure,

00:47:40.740 towards power, towards connection, towards the division of spirit and flesh, or mind and body,

00:47:51.100 or all of those things. The women in the psychiatric hospitals of Charcot were not just hysterical.

00:47:57.780 They were victims of sexual abuse. That's a very different story. And they were there because in some crazy way,

00:48:07.160 this was still safer than to go back to the places where they had been used and misused.

00:48:12.700 That's a way of beginning this answer. Does that make sense?

00:48:17.280 Yeah. Give me an example in the United States where, I mean, there's an obvious example,

00:48:24.300 which is a sexual liberation in the 1960s, which is a step function change in the political climate.

00:48:32.480 So I can certainly see that lens. I think I've never thought about it through a technological

00:48:37.480 or scientific lens with one exception. The one exception to me that doesn't get enough attention

00:48:43.300 is the development of the birth control pill, which I've always thought is one of the most

00:48:48.960 underappreciated, highest ROI philanthropic developments ever. Do you know that the cost

00:48:57.440 of developing the birth control pill in today's dollars, I believe it was less than a hundred

00:49:01.740 million dollars. And it was mostly footed by one woman, McCormick, I think was her name. I'm blanking

00:49:07.640 on her name. I used to know the story quite well, but it was an amazing story. And she basically partnered

00:49:13.600 with a scientist at Harvard whom she'd met at a dinner. And he had this idea that if you gave

00:49:19.540 women enough estrogen and progesterone, you could actually basically suppress ovulation and flatten

00:49:26.340 the luteal and follicular cycles. It was one of these things where everything came together at the

00:49:31.920 right time. So it was the combination of doing it in a political environment. I think they started

00:49:40.140 their work prior to the Kennedy administration. There was a lot of fear that a Catholic president

00:49:44.240 would not allow the FDA to endorse such a thing. But nevertheless, she very quietly plotted along

00:49:50.980 in funding this scientist. And I can't believe I'm blanking on his name, but the two of them really did

00:49:56.220 this amazing work. And it's one of the few things where there's no ambiguity about the impact it had.

00:50:02.240 So if you look at pre-birth control versus post-birth control, you look at the number of women that have

00:50:07.600 advanced degrees, the average income of women. I mean, these things changed not subtly, but

00:50:13.400 logarithmically. I'm trying to think of other examples where sexuality is so clearly tied. For

00:50:21.300 example, like the space program or something like that. Are there other examples I'm just missing?

00:50:25.520 I mean, I typically look at three of these revolutions. One is the democratization of birth control,

00:50:33.660 first and foremost. I mean, it changed so much other things. Yes, of course, the entrance of

00:50:39.560 women in the workplace and the advanced degrees, but also it fundamentally changed the meaning of

00:50:44.060 sexuality in romantic and long-term committed relationships. It also allowed for the first time

00:50:50.440 to separate sex from reproduction. And then we began to separate reproduction from sex. And now we

00:50:57.760 are separating anatomy from gender. I mean, these are conceptually revolutions. The mind has to adapt to

00:51:05.820 this thing. What that actually would mean to an entire history of humanity does not understand that

00:51:12.400 sexuality could ever not carry the consequence of intercourse. You know, penetration could never

00:51:19.780 be separated from the potential of childbirth and unwanted childbirth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:51:25.820 So the second revolution for me is the gay movement. They're not in order here. But I do think that

00:51:31.580 in those countries where the attitude to homosexuality has shifted, so many things shifted because by

00:51:39.740 definition, once we had contraception and once we were able to have sex before marriage, we basically

00:51:45.400 began to queer our relationships. Homosexuals have often, gay people have become more straight in their

00:51:52.440 pursuit of marriage sometimes. And for all the legal and every other recognition pieces that are

00:51:57.580 connected to that. I mean, it's really one of the most important shifts around that, including taking

00:52:04.260 it out of DSM, depathologizing this. I mean, sexuality, the history of sexuality is a fascinating history of

00:52:12.060 society and cultures.

00:52:13.880 When was it taken out of the DSM?

00:52:15.520 I want to say 73, but I don't remember exactly. I think we should have this double checked. This is one of these

00:52:22.640 dates I look up regularly and forget. But it is, to me, equally important because gays were so considered as

00:52:32.240 this aberration, this deviance, the anti-normative, and sexuality has been so much something organized around

00:52:38.900 the notion of what is normal, what is acceptable. And the women's movement. I mean, I think that too.

00:52:44.800 The notion that sexuality is not just a woman's marital duty, and that sexuality is not organized around

00:52:52.080 duty, but around desire. And the emergence of the concept of desire, which completely goes hand in hand

00:52:59.320 with the growth of the capitalistic society. So these things are so powerfully interconnected.

00:53:06.580 That's the three main revolutions. And then you look at them across the continents. If you read Foucault,

00:53:13.320 the history of sexuality, it really tells you the history of our attitudes towards children,

00:53:19.860 towards women, towards old age, towards pleasure, towards how much agency do we have versus how much

00:53:28.720 does somebody look at us from above there and sees everything we do. It's the history of so many things

00:53:35.720 that is being mediated through the history of sexuality. That's what I mean by it's a lens into culture.

00:53:41.140 But you probably could say the same thing about the history of medicine.

00:53:45.160 I haven't thought about it that way. There was a day when medicine wasn't scientific.

00:53:49.120 In my mind, I divide medicine into medicine 1.0, medicine 2.0, medicine 3.0. We have these

00:53:54.820 different... And obviously, the first iterations of medicine were entirely unscientific. As science

00:54:00.340 developed, so too did better understandings of not just germ theory, which is perhaps the first and most

00:54:08.600 salient advent within medicine. But it allowed you to dismiss the idea that bad humors were the cause

00:54:14.900 of so many ails. But it's interesting. I just haven't thought about it through the lens of that. But

00:54:19.740 certainly, the genetic revolution, even though it hasn't panned out as very interesting from a

00:54:24.480 treatment perspective, I think being able to clone the human genome some 21 years ago was a big step

00:54:32.560 forward from a cultural standpoint and that we now realize how similar we all are. We're less

00:54:39.300 dissimilar than we probably previously thought genetically. And I think it also gave us a sense

00:54:45.000 of realizing how non-deterministic genes are. In other words, it feeds into the importance of the

00:54:50.860 environment more. So much more about what probably creates differences between us is either epigenetic

00:54:57.980 or simply not modulated genetically at all. So this is exactly the same way that I think in terms of

00:55:05.600 psychotherapy. Say more. Well, you're looking at the contextual factors, the environment, the ecology, the

00:55:13.540 social class, the non-deterministic gene is the same as I am looking at the non-essentialist view of a

00:55:21.500 person. You become, by virtue of your interaction with others in certain places at certain time,

00:55:30.000 it's that juxtaposition between environment and person that creates issues, as we call them.

00:55:38.700 You are describing exactly the same thing when you say the genes are not deterministic, just on their

00:55:44.560 own. They become, by virtue of their interaction, with a host of factors in the environment.

00:55:49.660 We have the exact same paradigm from you in medicine as I bring. It's not always the case,

00:55:58.140 but I bring it, that one, to my work. Now, your work today is quite vast. And while I think many

00:56:03.900 people publicly who know you are familiar with your writing, your talks, a lot of it focuses on

00:56:09.900 sexuality. But yet so much of your clinical work is still rooted in couples therapy that doesn't

00:56:15.160 necessarily involve sexuality or doesn't involve sexuality as the core issue. Individuals whose

00:56:20.900 issues go far beyond sexuality or maybe don't include sexuality at all. You do a lot of trauma-based

00:56:26.840 therapy, and that's not surprising based on the background in which you came from. You experienced

00:56:33.140 firsthand what it's like to grow up with trauma survivors. And you alluded to earlier kind of

00:56:38.480 spending time reading. Did you ever come across Felix Adler's quote? I think he said something to

00:56:43.340 the effect of, the purpose of a man's life is not happiness, but worthiness. I'm curious if you agree with

00:56:49.480 that.

00:56:50.300 Even if you didn't have the but, I don't understand the sentence that the purpose of a person's life is

00:56:55.740 happiness. Happiness cannot be a purpose. Happiness is an outcome of multiple purposes, for that matter.

00:57:03.100 Happiness emerges out of something. It's not the goal, at least not in the way that I look at things.

00:57:12.060 Wouldn't people come to you and say, I'm not happy? And that's a chief complaint?

00:57:15.900 Oh, yes. I am a clinician for almost 40 years. I write a book about sexuality and suddenly it looks

00:57:22.380 like that's all I do. Of course, it's by far not. It's a subject I find very interesting, but it's one of

00:57:29.100 many. Now, when people come and they say, I'm not happy, my first thought, this is not what I say to

00:57:35.640 them, but in my mind, what I'm in line of this historical perspective we take, I'm thinking,

00:57:40.520 this is such an interesting thing, right? For so long, happiness belonged to the heavens,

00:57:45.540 to the afterlife. Basically, you suffer well on earth. And if you've done a good job at that,

00:57:51.620 you may get rewarded later. When did we bring happiness to earth? When did, and this is a book,

00:57:59.100 actually called happiness, I met the author whose name now escapes me at a conference. And he was

00:58:04.720 telling me that one of the very interesting developments was how did the Western parent,

00:58:10.460 when you ask, what do you want the most for your child? The main thing they will say is I want my

00:58:16.520 kids to be happy. This is very recent. That sounds like a knee jerk reaction. I would catch myself

00:58:23.620 saying that. Right. They don't want them to be healthy, right? Well, you could argue we almost

00:58:29.560 take it for granted, right? Maybe that's such a part of US culture now. Exactly. Because your thing

00:58:35.500 about the contraception is how much contraception not only changed female sexuality and couple

00:58:41.380 sexuality, but it also changed the meaning of the child. When you have 10 versus one, I tell you,

00:58:47.340 the child has a very different role in the family. Plus, you needed to make sure that kids could live

00:58:52.920 past age five and that you were not living with child mortality as a massive phenomenon. And then

00:58:59.000 you can begin to talk about early attachment and all those things. It needed kids who survive for us

00:59:05.140 to develop attachment theories like this with early childhood and look at the child development so

00:59:10.040 completely different. When people say, I want my kids to be happy, it needs you to know that it's a

00:59:16.240 given they are healthy. After them being healthy, what's the next thing you want? Oh, you don't

00:59:21.480 want them to be good people, decent human beings. That is a framework that also is obvious because

00:59:28.960 the notion is if they feel good about themselves, they will be good to others. That's the new framework

00:59:34.620 that self-esteem becomes the root of this thing and not values. That's a new paradigm. So when people

00:59:40.940 say they're not happy, we start a long conversation. Before we go there, which I want to come back to,

00:59:47.100 I want to go back to this point of when did that transition take place towards the self-esteem view

00:59:53.420 of the world? Because I, again, I think back to my parents who are also immigrants. It's just a

01:00:00.320 different world, right? I mean, the world they came from, you never puffed your chest out. Your parents

01:00:05.780 never puffed your chest out and told you how wonderful you were and how special you were.

01:00:11.020 And Bill Maher, who is absolutely hands down one of my favorite commentators on this subject says,

01:00:16.120 we live in a world today where if a teacher complains that the child is doing something

01:00:21.020 bad in class, the parent attacks the teacher. When I was growing up, if the teacher complained to my

01:00:26.980 parents, I was always assumed to be wrong. Even when I wasn't, by the way, there was sometimes when the

01:00:31.600 teacher was wrong. But there has been this transition towards the child is always right.

01:00:37.080 Self-esteem is the most important thing. What drove that?

01:00:39.860 I think that what we have is the rise of individualism that goes hand in hand with modern

01:00:48.400 economies and modern psychology. You know, for most of traditional life, basically you lived as part

01:00:59.060 of a community, your sense of identity, your sense of belonging, your sense of continuity. It was all

01:01:05.860 assigned to you. All the big decisions basically were made for you. What you were going to do if you

01:01:12.600 were going to be in the priesthood, in the military or on the land. And we had very little freedom,

01:01:18.760 but we had a lot more certainty of some sort. And you got your happiness or your sense of well-being

01:01:27.300 from doing the things that were expected from you. That's probably where the values actually of

01:01:33.280 your parents too. If you provided well for your family, if you were able to take care of your loved

01:01:39.440 ones, if you were an upstanding person in the community, if people respected you and invited you

01:01:45.380 at their table, you were happy. We move to a system in which the individual becomes the center,

01:01:53.780 not the community. And you have a lot more freedom for the first time, but also a lot more uncertainty

01:02:01.460 and a lot more self-doubt. On the other side of self-esteem is self-doubt. And you have to make

01:02:08.260 all the big decisions yourself now. And therefore you need a lot of certainty to know that it is the

01:02:14.500 right decision. You're not just part of a legacy that says, this is how we do it. This is the

01:02:19.560 transmission of what this is supposed to mean, how this looks like, what are the protocols.

01:02:24.520 It's all up for you now in this world of innovation. Now, when does it start? I think

01:02:30.900 there's different stages. Romanticism is already a beginning of that too, end of the 19th century.

01:02:37.500 But the 60s, the growth in our psychology, in modern psychology, it really is the beginning

01:02:43.500 of the growth movement. This notion that we can change ourselves. The goal is no more to stay

01:02:50.180 connected to the past and to the tradition and to the transmission. The goal becomes to be able to

01:02:56.680 innovate, to change oneself, to uproot oneself, to live, to go and be in a whole different part of

01:03:03.340 the country in order to do more. That begins to really change the notion of when you are a two-year-old,

01:03:11.180 I'm not just expecting you to do by learning and seeing what everybody else is doing. That's a

01:03:17.320 piece of it. But I'm also saying, when you are, I say, use your words, tell me what you want.

01:03:24.720 What do you want to eat? What do you want to wear? Because I have a sense that if I give you

01:03:30.160 that notion of knowing thyself and being able to make clear, affirmative statements about it,

01:03:36.960 that this is going to build your sense of self and your sense of confidence. Now, this is a Western

01:03:43.680 model. Let's be very clear. But that starts from the beginning. I am going to build that individual

01:03:51.720 that becomes my child. Now, given that for virtually all of our evolutionary history,

01:03:59.920 that was not the case. So much of our identity was based on our group. We weren't looking to leave

01:04:07.440 our tribe. Our relationships with the others around us were at least as important, if not more

01:04:16.100 important than our relationship with ourself. And what you're describing is quite a recent phenomenon.

01:04:22.520 I always ask this question through the lens of, I don't think evolutionary biology teaches us

01:04:27.540 everything, but I always like asking the question first through that lens. For example, when you

01:04:32.360 introduce a new food that's never been around, it can have bad consequences. If our body never

01:04:38.600 adapted to sugars in the quantities we're consuming them now, it doesn't mean it's bad in an absolute

01:04:44.860 sense. Give us another million years and we might catch up, but we're not going to catch up in 30 years.

01:04:50.100 So similarly, does this pose a challenge, put a more negative valence on that? Does it pose a concern

01:04:56.320 for you that we're in uncharted territory with respect to this model?

01:05:01.520 I can answer this on a personal level and I can answer this on a professional level, right? I mean,

01:05:07.320 we do actually know the consequences of how child-rearing is creating strengths and vulnerabilities

01:05:15.780 in our generation. It is interesting that we suddenly have a proliferation of work and research on the

01:05:23.340 concept of grit. Why do we research grit today? Because there is this other person.

01:05:29.760 There's an absence of grit in growing up, yeah.

01:05:32.800 Yes, because we have mush and there's a bit too much mush sometimes and so that mush needs to be

01:05:39.520 strengthened into grit. We study things because we start to realize that we need more of them

01:05:46.120 and that we've lost something and where has it gone and what has it morphed into, etc. I mean,

01:05:54.240 you and I do not raise our children at all the way we were raised. And our parents tried very hard

01:06:01.620 to stay loyal to those who had raised them, but then also to see what was happening around them

01:06:08.340 because they were immigrants. And that's what immigrant parents often do. They own the past

01:06:15.340 and the future. And on some things, they want actually to do what the local culture does because

01:06:21.680 they find that something that they appreciate. And on other things, they are aghast and they think,

01:06:26.880 I'm going to do it the way I have known it. And I think we have not immigrated, but culturally,

01:06:31.880 we are also in transition in terms of child rearing. There's a lot of questions today about,

01:06:38.580 these are also class issues. We have to be very mindful of that as well. But there are questions

01:06:45.780 about what does it mean to have a system in which there is one or two children for two parents who

01:06:54.280 often are disconnected from their grandparents, live far away, have full-time jobs, and need to

01:07:02.740 assume all those roles. And if you add a pandemic to it and the confinement, you get a real picture of

01:07:10.340 what those stressors are like. What does it mean when we solicit the opinions, the feelings, the thoughts

01:07:18.460 of the young ones? Because we believe that it is important for them to know them, to be able to

01:07:24.840 communicate, and to be able to expect that adults will change the plan to accommodate to the will and

01:07:33.980 the feelings of those little ones. And we take it for granted. Every second book today is not written

01:07:41.480 to make the life of the parent better or easier. Easier is a better word. It is written through the

01:07:47.420 lens of what does the child need. Now, the books until the 60s, even Spock is the real transition

01:07:54.340 point here, where all written, child-rearing books are another good entrance into cultural changes.

01:08:00.720 And this is more recent than evolutionary biology. This is just a few decades where the books before

01:08:06.620 were basically, what we thought was, is that a child, it was like the Rousseau view, right? A child

01:08:12.580 comes into the world, and your role is to shepherd this child through the pre-established stages of

01:08:19.840 development that are universal, and you just have to help the kid go through those stages. It doesn't

01:08:27.000 really change much if you do this or if you do that. That's how child development was conceptualized.

01:08:33.260 And it moved to a notion where child development is much more flexible and much more responsive to the

01:08:41.040 circumstances and to the kind of input that the parents put in. And so now, if you listen to Mozart

01:08:47.620 while you're pregnant, you could actually maybe develop some musical taste in utero. And this is

01:08:54.180 completely non-biological. This is completely cultural. And what I do with my kid, other people

01:09:01.680 who I leave my child in the care of need to be able to do so. We need mass reproducible child-rearing

01:09:07.220 techniques. This is a very important shift, for example, in terms of child development that is

01:09:13.680 a preset number of stages that are just there and the kid goes through them versus child development

01:09:19.620 that is in the hands of the person who raises the child. What is the impact of that then to the

01:09:25.220 patient who arrives in your office, who is a product of that child-rearing? The impact is how the

01:09:32.660 narratives get created. Who is responsible for my unhappiness? Why am I unhappy? If you want to take

01:09:40.280 the unhappy presenting issue. Have I always been unhappy? How did people respond to my unhappiness?

01:09:47.620 How alone did I feel with my unhappiness? In an environment where you expect your parents to be

01:09:54.620 attuned to you? If they are not, you will experience your aloneness, your isolation, your emotional

01:10:03.400 disconnection, very different than in an environment where the attunement of your parents is really not

01:10:10.920 part of your expectation on an emotional level of what parents are. You get that attunement maybe from

01:10:18.980 your grandmother or from your auntie, from other parental figures who can be kind and sweet because

01:10:26.980 your parent is there to make the rule and to make the discipline and to shape you. That's two different

01:10:32.680 models. So I keep that model in my head when a person comes in. And I also know where they're coming

01:10:39.140 from and what were their expectations? What did you think your parents, what did you want that they

01:10:45.860 would do or whoever were the people that were in charge of you? And how much do you blame them?

01:10:53.020 Look, I was working yesterday with a son who feels that his father has been always critical of him,

01:11:00.040 that he can never please him enough, that he could never do good enough for him. And I was thinking

01:11:06.900 a hundred years ago, would there have been such a son? Yes.

01:11:11.220 But he would have probably never thought to have said anything, right?

01:11:14.340 Well, he wouldn't have had a therapist to go talk about this with. And to think that the father

01:11:20.960 has to come and apologize to him. I'm thinking this is very interesting. The father on some level

01:11:27.940 does think he did something challenging. But the parent of a hundred years ago would have said,

01:11:34.380 I did the best I could. My role is not to pump you up. My role is not to make you feel good about

01:11:40.360 yourself. My role is to make you into a responsible person who takes your role seriously and does for

01:11:47.780 others that what is expected from you. That's my role. My role is not to make you happy.

01:11:54.220 These conversations take place all the time at this moment, because there are generational differences

01:11:59.940 and cultural differences. I mean, cultural as in the conception of what is a parent? What is the role

01:12:05.760 of a parent? What do we expect should happen between parents and children, little ones and older

01:12:11.340 ones? It changes nonstop. It moves, it moves, it moves, especially with the father. One of the

01:12:18.240 biggest changes that has taken place in modern family, Western families, is the rise of the role

01:12:24.200 of the father. The father, not just as a material provider, but the father as an emotional unit,

01:12:30.100 which coincides with the woman going to work as well, so that they can both be material providers

01:12:36.380 and emotional caregivers. This one to me is very interesting. I'm saying a lot of things.

01:12:43.000 Well, this particular issue around the role of the father, because I think back to when I grew up,

01:12:48.220 I can hearken to countless discussions between my parents where there would be an argument over

01:12:54.640 why wasn't my dad ever watching me at a sporting event or going to a parent-teacher night or doing

01:13:02.200 anything that involved being a part of my life. The reality of it was he worked 14 hours a day,

01:13:10.120 six days a week, and on the seventh day he worked maybe eight hours. There was simply no time for him

01:13:16.900 to do those things. Frankly, incredulous that he would even be asked to do such a thing.

01:13:21.700 But he was at your wedding. Yes, he was at my wedding.

01:13:25.240 Right. Was he at your graduation? Not high school, but college and medical school.

01:13:29.960 Of course, not high school. He had a few major dates where he knew the father shows up there.

01:13:38.960 And his point was, I am doing the thing that I am supposed to be doing. This business of working,

01:13:47.620 he would say, I don't do this for me, I do this for you. That's right.

01:13:51.020 And you can imagine that he was an extension of the culture he grew up in where it was harsh. I mean,

01:13:58.100 it was very harsh. I'm sure there were many people my age who grew up in that environment

01:14:03.480 and are now being confronted as the ones to change that, as the ones that will not simply be able to

01:14:10.380 mirror the environment they grew up in. Right. But first of all, your dad is still the majority

01:14:18.060 of fathers on this planet today. That notion that you work to take care of your family when you work

01:14:25.900 all these hours. It's for them. And you come to a few major events, not because you don't care about

01:14:33.400 the others, but you have not received a license to think that the others are as important.

01:14:38.260 Isn't it fascinating that the high school graduation is not considered something where

01:14:43.380 the father should be at? This is not things that your father decided alone. This is totally

01:14:48.140 headed down, passed down through generations. Now comes your generation and you will attend more

01:14:56.480 things. You will attend more games, more birthdays, more graduations. You have a license,

01:15:05.840 a collective cultural license to think of more things as places where you are, A, expected to be at,

01:15:13.380 B, not be frowned at for what is he doing here? Shouldn't he be at work? Kind of thing instead.

01:15:20.800 But there is still a lot, a lot, a lot of other places where mom will dominate culturally

01:15:27.500 and people expect her to be there and not you.

01:15:31.500 It's funny you say something there about why is he here? I used to have this reaction when I was

01:15:38.160 growing up and I would go to my friends' homes and their dads would be home for dinner and their

01:15:45.200 dads would be around on weekends. And my reaction was not, why don't I have this? My reaction was,

01:15:53.240 why are their dads so lazy? What is it with these lazy men who come home at five or six o'clock and

01:16:02.440 have dinner and then watch TV? Why aren't they working? This is really how I felt. And I just

01:16:08.940 couldn't understand this idea that a guy would sit around on a Saturday and mow the lawn and drink a

01:16:16.860 beer and watch some sports. Peter, but that's not just how you felt. That's how you were taught.

01:16:23.020 And that's how your father was taught because he needed some way to justify why he was working

01:16:28.960 himself to the ground. If you want to get a man to work day and night, you have to make him feel that

01:16:35.720 this is what real men do. This is what responsible fathers look like. This is what people who are driven

01:16:42.640 do. This is the name of your podcast, The Drive. If not, you need to create a consonance between the

01:16:49.300 behavior and the belief. And those are cultural systems. And then the son, in order to accept that

01:16:57.160 his dad is never there, he needs to internalize that system too. Because otherwise he would say,

01:17:03.140 I miss my dad, rather than I'm proud. I have a real hardworking father. He's never there,

01:17:09.560 but he's the best father because that's how I've learned it. I've put it together like this. And

01:17:15.380 then when I see that guy who's home at six o'clock, I'm thinking, not serious.

01:17:22.420 Not serious.

01:17:24.140 Not serious.

01:17:25.400 Let's talk a bit about these narratives because I'm very interested in these sort of

01:17:29.900 intra and inter-relational narratives that come in and out of your office. There's a form of

01:17:36.540 psychotherapy I'm sure that only deals with the relationship with oneself. And undoubtedly,

01:17:41.940 there must be a lot of good that comes from that. But you don't view it as a vacuum. You don't

01:17:48.780 really think that it is possible to simply better one's life by bettering your relationship with

01:17:54.040 yourself. Is that a fair assessment?

01:17:56.780 Yes. And I would say that the very framework of bettering your relationship with yourself

01:18:03.060 is in itself a cultural narrative. That's a construct. That's exactly what happened in the

01:18:08.420 last 50 years. Suddenly, this thing, bettering your relationship with yourself, feeling good about

01:18:13.640 myself, becomes an organizing principle rather than feeling good about how I act towards others

01:18:21.580 is my organizing principle. Or feeling good about how I stand below God is my organizing principle.

01:18:28.160 So I think there's an emphasis. Nobody just looks at the self and doesn't see the relationships to

01:18:36.300 others. But there's an emphasis. And my emphasis is the constant dual track between the intrapersonal

01:18:45.860 and the interpersonal. Between what's happening inside and how what is happening inside is affecting

01:18:52.660 my relationship with others. I can't think about one without thinking about the other. Because I don't

01:18:59.640 fundamentally believe that one can know oneself without knowing oneself in relationships to others.

01:19:07.380 Now, that is a construct too. It happens to be the one that I work and think by. That is not a truth.

01:19:15.560 That just is the way that I organize relational thinking. I think of people as relational beings.

01:19:22.100 When you talk about your father, and especially when you talk about the way that you looked at these

01:19:27.560 other men, to me, this is a beautiful example of how you say, this is how I felt. And I know that

01:19:35.600 your feeling sits on a cultural message. That the narratives, the frames with which we interpret and give

01:19:44.540 meaning and give value that the things that are happening to us, they don't just come from us.

01:19:49.960 They come from a combination of the collective manufacturing and the personal responses to

01:19:57.240 it. It's always both ends. Is that clear? It actually is. And as an outsider, one of the

01:20:04.120 most difficult aspects of what you do must be changing a narrative. Because when somebody comes

01:20:08.920 in with a narrative, it seems almost hardwired, which is not to say they were born with it. Of course,

01:20:14.080 this gets back to what's predetermined and what is not. But when a person shows up in your office,

01:20:21.220 it's often in the same way that they show up to the doctor. Very few people come to the doctor when

01:20:26.200 everything is perfect to say, hey, I'm just here for some preventative care. I feel so good. I just

01:20:31.760 want to make sure I feel this good in 20 years. What can you do for me? Similarly, most people aren't

01:20:36.880 showing up in your office saying, I've never felt better. My relationships are amazing. I want to keep

01:20:42.220 this going. So there's a negative selection for people who walk into your life, which is on some

01:20:48.940 level, they must have a narrative that has failed, that has led them astray. Either a narrative about

01:20:54.920 themselves, a narrative about others, and probably more likely a combination of these. Those narratives

01:21:01.120 are probably often quite entrenched. So how do you go about challenging them?

01:21:06.320 You're right. Both medicine today and psychotherapy are problem-ridden contexts.

01:21:15.560 They're problem-ridden narratives. If you don't have a problem, there's no reason to come to me

01:21:19.480 or to you. That's right. If you don't have a diagnosis code, I can't even charge your insurance

01:21:24.260 company for you to be here. Same here. So that is a cultural construct. That is a narrative.

01:21:31.000 So people come to therapy to talk about their problems. They don't go to therapy if things are

01:21:37.860 fine. This is a very important piece of information, by the way, for couples therapy.

01:21:43.300 Because couples therapy is in a bind. Relationship therapy, but especially couples therapy is in a

01:21:49.560 bind. Because on the one hand, so many people come way too late. Way too late. Stuff has been

01:21:57.280 so entrenched. And you kind of want to say, why did you come five years ago? On the other end,

01:22:03.540 if they would come when things are still okay, or somewhat okay on occasion, then what's the problem

01:22:10.440 that you're already going to therapy now? This is fascinating. It's like you can't go if it's good,

01:22:17.000 but then when you go when it's really bad, you should have come when things were really better.

01:22:20.760 Okay. So this is one thing. I think what you've just articulated is probably

01:22:26.440 the core of a lot of my work. It is not the core of all psychotherapy work. I think there are

01:22:32.720 different ways to enter the story. What I mean by the story is the life of people. I believe that

01:22:40.020 our relationships are a story. We tell stories about our relationships. And I think that I remember

01:22:49.180 in the first episodes of Where Should We Begin? I said, when people come to me into my office,

01:22:55.920 I was trying to explain to the people I was producing the podcast with, what is my couple's

01:23:01.860 work? And I said, people come to me with a story. At the end of the first session, the only goal of

01:23:08.540 the first session is for them to leave with another story, or with a sense that there can be another

01:23:15.460 story. I was about to say, your first goal strikes me as far too ambitious for one session. I would

01:23:23.600 think even casting doubt, casting doubt on that narrative and suggesting there may be an alternative

01:23:28.620 one would be an amazing outcome for two hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm talking

01:23:32.800 about. Doubt and hope. An enormous part of my work is to reframe. I think that this is an amazing

01:23:41.260 piece. Why? Because it's not just an intellectual thing in my head. It's because I think that words

01:23:47.340 shape the experience. The way I tell the story is going to create the way I feel about the story.

01:23:56.300 And then it's going to create the way I therefore will act upon the story that I think there is.

01:24:02.540 If I talk with you now, and in my mind I have this notion, he doesn't really care about me.

01:24:11.060 He doesn't really value me. He's just doing this to be nice. He would have stopped this an hour ago

01:24:17.620 if he could. I have no idea. I think he disagrees with everything he has said. He really doesn't think

01:24:24.700 I have anything interesting to say. He's so sorry he invited me. I mean, this instantly fills my belly.

01:24:34.260 So this is not just a thought. This is not just a feeling. This is also an embodied experience. So

01:24:40.600 I'm in my belly now. I have this knot, you know, and what am I going to do now? And I just feel so

01:24:47.480 bad about myself and I don't know how to talk to him. And then it's going to influence how I'm going

01:24:54.440 to talk next. And now I'm going to start to talk all too long and too much because I'm actually

01:24:59.460 feeling unsure. And then my insecurity makes me talk more and I'm rambling and I'm all over the

01:25:04.960 place. And he's even more now thinking that I am not interesting. And this could all go into my head

01:25:10.920 right now. My narrative, that one phrase becomes my experience and my experience becomes the motor for

01:25:21.240 my behavior. And the motor for my behavior is going to land me probably in a place that is

01:25:27.560 often the exact opposite place of where I actually want to go. That's a narrative. Now, if I sit here

01:25:34.620 and I think Peter is really happy with doing this, he's been waiting for this for so long. And I think

01:25:41.400 he's, you know, he had a doubt for a moment. He was wondering, should we, should we not? And I think

01:25:47.020 he's feeling good that we did it. That is going to completely change my entire experience.

01:25:53.600 Now, maybe this example isn't a great one, but does it matter which of those is reality?

01:26:00.200 But the reality is the story you tell. It's the subjective reality.

01:26:05.900 Yeah. Your story is independent of how I feel.

01:26:09.640 That's right. It's a projection. It's what I imagine. It's how I've internalized it. It's how

01:26:16.420 I think my mother did or did not love me. Yes. The interesting thing is, is it reality?

01:26:22.880 Completely. Because it's the one that is dictating my life. That's why it is reality. Not because

01:26:30.280 there's a factual truth to this. So the reframe is not that this is more true. When I teach my students,

01:26:38.140 I say, when you reframe, the only way that you know it's a good reframe is because the other person

01:26:45.080 bites on it, takes it, likes it, says, oh, I prefer to live by this view. Your father wasn't

01:26:54.160 neglecting you because he was away 14 hours a week. Your father did this because he thought that this is

01:27:01.120 his total devotion to his family is to actually never be there is the ultimate presence and

01:27:08.220 devotion. Now, do we have a different feeling about your dad and about what happened to you?

01:27:14.580 I'm just playing with this here, right? Of course. I suspect there are so many patterns that you see

01:27:20.040 in these narratives. And like, if you think of all of the negatively valenced emotions, depression,

01:27:27.220 anxiety, sadness, anger, all of the things that can not just hurt a person, but hurt their

01:27:35.680 relationships. I'm curious as to what are some of the common themes that you see around those

01:27:41.080 beliefs and how you begin to chip away at the armor of a person's firmly held beliefs that are

01:27:49.920 no longer serving them. Let's go back to your word before about wordiness. What I just played out

01:27:56.840 here with you are probably two of the most important narratives. The first narrative is the narrative of

01:28:04.540 being unwanted, fundamentally unwanted, not just because born not wanted, but unwanted, unloved,

01:28:11.880 uncared for, undervalued, unappreciated, unseen, un and something after. And I can bring this from my

01:28:21.720 childhood. I can bring this from the way that I grew up. I can bring this from the way that other

01:28:27.900 kids in my classroom never, ever looked at me. There's loads of places where this emerged and then

01:28:34.120 grew inside of me and becomes the lens through which I see myself in the world. The second narrative

01:28:41.280 where I think, hmm, you think it's okay. It may not yet be where it wants it to be, but I'm not

01:28:50.240 in a state of self-condemnation. I actually am looking for the appreciation. I'm looking for the

01:28:57.360 acceptance. I'm looking and experiencing that acceptance, that I am worthy. There's a reason

01:29:04.500 I'm here today. All of that. I think those two are probably the most fundamental of our narratives.

01:29:12.260 And they are rooted in trauma and in neglect and in either having had too much of something or too

01:29:18.560 little of something, right? This is pretty much where trauma sits. To me, that's the dominant. And it

01:29:24.660 will influence my anger, my sadness, my loneliness, my sense of, shall I tell him what I think or what

01:29:33.120 I feel? Do people even care? Does it matter? Would they miss me if I wasn't around? My despair. All of

01:29:40.280 these bigger pieces, you can see the way that they are interconnected to this fundamental, is there a

01:29:46.600 reason for me to be here on this planet for being alive? Do people think of me when I'm not there?

01:29:52.920 Do I exist inside others? Do they want good for me versus the opposite of all of that? To me, they're not

01:30:02.540 that complicated. And then the stories, thousands of stories, multitude of different stories can be brought

01:30:09.500 back to these two fundamental pieces. Similar with, do I experience a sense of agency and control over my

01:30:18.720 life? Can I make changes? Or am I completely at the mercy of? I have very little power. I live with a

01:30:27.720 sense of powerlessness. Nothing I will do will make a difference. Those two are directly connected to the

01:30:33.580 first two, by the way. Is there anything adaptive about that narrative? Because so much of the trauma

01:30:41.780 response is initially adaptive. And again, if we use the childhood trauma, in the case of your mother,

01:30:48.820 we could probably look at many of her responses once she survived these concentration camps and say,

01:30:56.180 wow, even though through the lens we would look back, we would say those were really maladaptive

01:31:01.180 behaviors. They actually had a very adaptive root or origin. They protected her in a way.

01:31:06.680 They shielded her from subsequent pain. In the examples you just gave of feeling unworthy or

01:31:14.720 unwanted, what's the adaptation there? I don't understand how that is, even at an emotional

01:31:22.840 level. I'm not disagreeing with it. I'm just trying to understand what the adaptation is and why it's so,

01:31:27.760 because usually when something is so prominent, there's a reason for it, right? Or at least that's my

01:31:33.940 teleologic explanation. Of course. With the same information that we just shared, I could do

01:31:40.300 a narrative analysis, an attachment analysis. This is one lens, one reading of this thing. So,

01:31:47.980 for example, I'll give you a personal, there's actually two personal examples that just came to me.

01:31:54.660 One I probably have, I don't even know when, if I've talked about it, but it's, I sit with a patient

01:32:00.820 one day who is also a child of Holocaust survivors like me. And he's telling me, by age eight, I made

01:32:08.900 sure my kids can take a train and be on a bus and all of that. And he says to me, I'm very protective

01:32:15.660 of my children. And I'm thinking to myself, you're so lucky you're talking to me because I too have that

01:32:22.620 same distortion. Protective is not, I make sure that I'm not leaving my eight-year-old alone

01:32:29.000 on a plane. I send my seven-year-old alone on a plane because in my parents' book, to be protective

01:32:37.240 was not to be there for you. To be protective was to make sure that you would know to survive

01:32:43.660 if they were not there. And it was the way I was raised. And in many ways, I did pieces of that

01:32:49.960 with my own children as well. It's like, I wanted them to be able to manage on their own

01:32:55.380 in case I'm not there. Manage on their own really meant survive. We didn't use those words,

01:33:01.260 but that's what the legacy was underneath this. My parents also, without ever saying this,

01:33:07.540 but told enough stories that let you think that in the camps, the vulnerable died.

01:33:12.800 When my children exhibit the vulnerability, it scares me so much. It did, because I've worked

01:33:19.960 a lot on this, that I sometimes wouldn't know how to just respond and just in a simple,

01:33:26.760 basic, empathetic way. I was so scared. I wanted to toughen them up that they would say to me,

01:33:33.880 why can't, you know, they joke now with me that if they were not with, what is it in American,

01:33:40.540 in 42 degree fever, they could go and do whatever they needed to do. If you're not dying,

01:33:45.840 there is no reason to stay in your bed. I had that mentality that you have to be really,

01:33:51.480 really, really sick to not go to school and things like that. And now they laugh. But I know that there

01:33:57.420 were probably moments where they wished I would just say, come, I'll put you a cold compress on

01:34:02.140 your head, which I did too. But I didn't do it from that place of, oh, my little one, you know,

01:34:07.500 I was more, okay, that's what you need to do in order to get you back out. I was grit driven,

01:34:12.240 if you want, in that sense. So that was adaptive. It was adaptive for her. And then it was no longer

01:34:20.300 adaptive for me, because we're not in the camps. And I don't need to raise them to survive as if

01:34:26.420 we're in the Holocaust, because we're not in the Holocaust. And that is the most important piece

01:34:31.100 around trauma work, is to understand that your reaction is the reaction as if the past is happening

01:34:38.300 right now. And in fact, it isn't happening right now. And to be able to then create the ground

01:34:45.100 underneath you to put a reality, a different way of experiencing yourself, that is not fed by all

01:34:52.580 the horrible things that happened to you then, that is a part of the trauma healing work.

01:34:59.300 And that transition, I think for anyone who's gone through it, it's really quite a process,

01:35:04.740 because it requires pausing. And for many people who are in adaptation mode, there's no room for

01:35:12.220 pausing. Once you have an adaptation to cope with trauma, it selects, it's reinforcing itself,

01:35:21.260 it's making you stronger and stronger and pushing you further and further. And you might miss the fact

01:35:27.160 that it's become maladaptive. The transition from it being adaptive to maladaptive can be so far in the

01:35:32.880 rear view mirror, you've entirely missed it. And I think this is where this idea of the relationships

01:35:39.060 with others starts to become the mirror through which you can actually be confronted with something

01:35:45.000 that says, hey, there's something wrong here. Yes, this worked for you before when you had no other

01:35:52.200 responsibility. This maybe worked for you when you didn't have a family. But now that you have a

01:35:56.680 family, this is no longer adaptive. Yes, I use the word generally, it was useful then you badly needed

01:36:04.060 it. But it's not serving you now. Your reality has changed. And you're still holding an umbrella,

01:36:10.880 even though there is no rain. Another way of saying it is a lot of people, this is if you go to the

01:36:17.240 survivors, but I think you can translate it, often felt that it was very difficult for them to get close

01:36:24.520 to their children. They had lost children, they had lost parents, they had lost siblings.

01:36:30.180 On what basis will I allow myself to get close to anybody or love somebody again? Now here they had

01:36:35.520 these kids, but they couldn't get close to them. Because if I don't get too close, then I won't be

01:36:40.460 in such pain when I lose you. Now, it didn't keep the dead closer. It didn't create a good relationship

01:36:50.240 with the children who constantly felt like there is nothing I can do to win your love because I will

01:36:55.360 never replace your dead ones. This idea that when you've had loss and massive disruptions and injured

01:37:02.960 attachments, that you protect yourself by not coming too close to the other people. Now I'm going to go

01:37:09.960 back to your original question. It may even have been adaptive for you, but in your relationship with

01:37:16.780 your child, it's been a major lack. So intrapersonally, I understand it. Interpersonally,

01:37:25.940 it's problematic. It's not adaptive interpersonally. Hence, I need the parent or whoever is on this side

01:37:35.940 to understand the effect of how you protect yourself on your child. And I need you, the child,

01:37:43.420 to understand that what your parent is doing isn't actually because of who you are, but it's because

01:37:49.780 of what happened to them. Did you get this? This could be a couple now too. I just did it with parent

01:37:54.540 and child. I completely get it. And I now want to ask a question about the ability of the person who

01:38:01.660 is able to make that transition versus that who is not. So if you look at a hundred women with breast

01:38:09.000 cancer, who all receive comparable standard of care, depending on the stage at which they're

01:38:15.600 diagnosed, it's very clear to predict how many will live and how many will not. And truthfully,

01:38:20.980 it really comes down only to the biology of their cancer. And I know that's a very unpopular thing to

01:38:26.540 say, but I really do not believe that the person who lived wanted it more and the person who died

01:38:32.640 gave up. I've seen too many people who fought like hell, who died. And I've seen too many miserable

01:38:38.480 sons of bitches who didn't give a damn, who lived. So the reality of it is survivorship in cancer comes

01:38:45.500 down to a lot of luck and a lot of biology of the tumor and things like that. In your line of work and

01:38:52.660 what you're just describing very specifically for this transition, that person who goes from having

01:38:59.420 traits and narratives and coping mechanisms that protected them at a time and are now either

01:39:07.500 hurting them and or hurting their relationships. Why are some people able to do the hard work that's

01:39:15.060 necessary to make the change and others not? What are the predictive factors of that?

01:39:21.160 I think this is one of the most difficult questions. And why in the same family did one person land here

01:39:28.880 and the other person with the same circumstances took all of that. For this person, it became

01:39:34.780 everything that drove them. And for this person, it became everything that broke them.

01:39:39.420 It is a question I ask myself so often. I can riff on it, but honestly, I do not know. It's one of the

01:39:48.860 mysteries. It's multifactorial, is for sure. It's not the same thing each time. Your example is so nice

01:39:57.400 and clean. And I should clarify in my example. I think there are lots of things the patient can

01:40:03.160 do. I think their nutrition matters, exercise matters, management of stress. I think the point

01:40:07.360 I wanted to make is their will I don't believe matters. Whereas I wonder how much willpower or

01:40:14.200 desire to improve by itself is the critical ingredient here, or if in times that's insufficient.

01:40:22.340 But interpersonally, will doesn't just exist inside one person.

01:40:28.980 But you have once said, maybe I'm wrong on this, but didn't you once say that the key to couples

01:40:33.600 therapy is the moment that each partner is less interested in what the other one is doing wrong

01:40:40.560 and more interested in how they can be better or something to that effect?

01:40:43.820 Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Now I come to therapy and I've decided that I do want to talk about what

01:40:52.560 I have been doing, or I want to talk about the ways in which I have stayed far, or the ways in which I've

01:40:58.940 never said to you, I love you, or the ways in which I even tell you about how I've lost so many people

01:41:05.260 important in my life. I don't really know what it means to love. I don't trust that when I love,

01:41:10.800 it's there to stay. I actually even have developed a view that when I love someone,

01:41:15.760 he dies, or if I love something, it breaks, it destroys, it disappears. This can go very far,

01:41:22.300 this notion, right? Now my will, I'm coming to talk to you about this whole part. But my will now,

01:41:30.540 the moment I have said something, is now public domain. And now it will all depend,

01:41:37.360 the shape of my will from here on, is going to be in part what I'm holding, and in part how you are

01:41:45.900 responding. If your response to me is, now you're telling me all of this? Why? Because your wife is

01:41:52.880 about to leave you? Is it because I put you an ultimatum? Is it because your son hasn't talked to you

01:41:58.080 in two years? Now you're telling me? That instantly is going to do something to my goodwill,

01:42:04.500 let's even put it like that. My ownership, my responsibility, my vulnerability, by just putting

01:42:09.640 myself out there. If instead you say nothing, and I'm like, are you hearing this? How are you

01:42:17.000 receiving this? I need to sit with this for a while. Thank you, but I do need to sit with this.

01:42:23.540 I'm not prepared to just say, I forgive you. It takes a little more for me. Or number three,

01:42:29.680 I say, everything you've just said was all about you. And I appreciate that. But you haven't said

01:42:37.460 much about how you think that this has had an effect on me. And I need to know that you have a

01:42:43.020 sense of what that did to me. You're being absent, or critical, or belligerent, or violent, or, you know,

01:42:50.820 too little or too much of something. Version four, I really appreciate your saying this. And this,

01:42:58.800 by the way, can be in one session or over four months, right? But in the next version, I say,

01:43:05.480 I've been wanting to hear you talk about that. I've done my own work. And I know that a part of

01:43:12.280 your distance from me is because of what happened to you. And that it's not because I had an A,

01:43:18.240 or a B, or a C, that this is not any of this. All four responses will shape the will.

01:43:26.760 This will is not, you know, one fixed, what you call the predetermined gene. This will is

01:43:33.720 completely malleable, and will change and express itself differently at the mercy of the response of

01:43:41.340 the other person. And obviously, why all of this matters is something you and I have spoken about in

01:43:46.900 the past, which is everything we're talking about factors into longevity, not just in sort of a

01:43:56.000 biochemical sense, where in theory, if your relationships are better, your hormone levels

01:44:02.780 would be better, and cortisol levels would be lower, and all of these things would be better.

01:44:06.840 But in just a more fundamental, stark manner, what advantage is there to living longer if your

01:44:14.520 relationships are poor, and the quality of your relationships therefore determines the quality

01:44:19.480 of your life? I'm a full convert to that. That's something that five years ago, I would have never

01:44:25.480 given a thought to. I mean, it was not even in my ballpark of thought. And today, of course,

01:44:31.300 I believe it emphatically. To me, one of the things that's been interesting is learning that if that is

01:44:36.980 true, there needs to be a new comfort in sitting with uncomfortable emotions, that the ability to sit

01:44:45.920 in discomfort must be a new trait. If I use myself as an example, historically, anytime I felt

01:44:53.840 uncomfortable, I had a tool to numb it, to get away from it, to distract myself from it. So anything that I

01:45:04.040 didn't like emotionally, I had a very quick Band-Aid for, such that I never had to sit in discomfort.

01:45:11.820 And what would you do?

01:45:13.160 It would depend, but it was usually, it could be anything from binge purchasing watches,

01:45:19.100 exercising obsessively, outbursts of anger, which sounds paradoxical. You wouldn't think of that as a

01:45:24.780 tool to numb discomfort. But of course, as I talked about on the podcast with Terry Reel,

01:45:30.180 anger is very transiently quite numbing. In the immediate moment of an outburst of anger,

01:45:36.120 it actually squelches the feeling of inadequacy and loss of control and sadness. But if you want

01:45:42.640 to move into this quality of life, where now all of a sudden your relationships are important,

01:45:49.340 you realize very quickly there are times when you have to be uncomfortable and you have to sit in that.

01:45:53.780 A psychologist, Susan Davis or something, she gave a TED Talk.

01:45:58.440 Susan David.

01:45:59.100 David, yeah. And she gave a TED Talk and I really liked it because she said something to the effect of,

01:46:03.580 she said it much more eloquently, but the gist of it is the admission you have to pay to a meaningful

01:46:07.880 life is being uncomfortable, is being able to sit in uncomfortable emotions. And she made a very

01:46:13.200 funny comment in the talk, which was, if you tell me you don't want to feel blank, blank being some

01:46:19.560 uncomfortable emotion, then I tell you, you have a dead person's goals. I probably saw that talk

01:46:24.880 three or four years ago. It was very profound to me. How does that factor into your work?

01:46:30.860 Couldn't agree with her more. Susan David was a guest on my training platform on sessions recently. And

01:46:36.400 when she says it, I couldn't agree with her more, but it's a very basic thought of anybody who does

01:46:45.720 psychotherapy. Anybody who does psychotherapy, as I understand psychotherapy, my goal is not to make

01:46:52.760 you happy, to make it look like you're never going to have any of these feelings. Because that person

01:46:57.260 that came in saying I'm unhappy would love to not have those feelings sometimes. Sometimes, not always.

01:47:03.040 So the idea that this is what you feel, and that doesn't mean you have to act on it or do something

01:47:10.740 or chase them away or make it disappear. This is your experience in this moment. Now, we can do a lot

01:47:18.760 of things with this experience. We can understand it. We can name it, first of all. We can name it.

01:47:24.180 We can frame it. We can understand it. We can put it in context. We can celebrate it. We can write

01:47:33.120 about it. We can physicalize it. We can do a lot of things with this experience, these feelings

01:47:40.500 that you're having. And you need to understand that sometimes they will just come through. They

01:47:45.800 will pass through you, and then they will get out to the other side. You don't have to squelch them.

01:47:51.520 You don't have to judge them. You don't have to be contemptuous of them. I don't say it in those

01:47:56.660 words. This is the idea. You don't have to numb them. Because you were numbing them, not just because

01:48:02.720 you were numbing them. You were numbing because you were judging, because you didn't think you should

01:48:06.720 be feeling those things, because what's wrong with you that you have those things. So there was the

01:48:10.760 contempt in it as well. There's a lot of things very, very, very, very quick before you've even

01:48:16.100 gone to buy your next watch or whatever thing you were doing. So sitting with your inner life

01:48:23.660 and remaining somewhat curious and kind to your inner life. And some call it today self-compassion,

01:48:34.900 but sometimes it's not necessarily always compassionate, but at least it's not contemptuous

01:48:41.440 and judgmental of your inner life, or despairing of it, or terrified by it, that it will never go

01:48:48.020 away, that it will never leave you, that this is your state forever now, etc. This is psychotherapy.

01:48:54.240 This is individual therapy for me. I'm going to really put myself in the kind of work I do. This is

01:49:00.860 the essence of a lot of the individual work. Fascinatingly, when I see somebody alone and

01:49:09.020 then I get to see them with their partner, and now I see how all those things play out, not just inside

01:49:15.940 of you, but in between the two of you, it's a whole other story. It's like I've just spent time in one

01:49:24.080 room of the house, and I didn't even know there was a whole annex to that house. And this is when

01:49:30.200 you understand the difference between the relational thinking, which Terry, of course, is one of the

01:49:35.940 main teachers of, and the individual perspective. And I think that the real importance today is for

01:49:43.880 most of us to be able to not just live in one. The mistake of a lot of the systemic thinkers was that

01:49:49.980 they stopped thinking about the individual and the internal life. It was all systems thinking. That

01:49:55.460 didn't go. And the mistake sometimes or the lack in people who have just an individual perspective

01:50:01.220 is that they're not looking like you talk about the gene in context. That integration is where the

01:50:08.140 nexus of my work sits. Would you agree with the following statement? So a very, very close friend of

01:50:13.980 mine, Jim Kochelka. You know what's very weird, Peter? I'm used to hearing what you think about

01:50:19.780 what I say in this time. It's like you move on to the next question. So I'm kind of left with like-

01:50:25.640 It made me think of this other thing, right? It made me think of this idea that I've been

01:50:30.220 really internalizing. And I'm curious if you agree with it. A friend of mine, Jim Kochelka,

01:50:35.520 who's a wonderful psychologist, though I've never worked with him in that capacity, he's a friend,

01:50:40.460 said something to me once of the effect, you can't believe everything you think. You can't believe

01:50:46.340 everything you feel. The mind is a very dangerous organ. I had never contemplated that until he said

01:50:53.500 it. I had contemplated the first half of it, because that's what mindfulness meditation teaches you,

01:50:59.680 that you can't believe everything you think, right? As you separate yourself from your consciousness,

01:51:05.920 you begin to realize that you have a constant internal monologue, and it is not the same as you.

01:51:11.260 You are not your thoughts. But it's when he layered on this second piece, which is,

01:51:15.580 and you can't even believe everything you feel. And then he pointed out basically, look,

01:51:19.960 the mind can be very dangerous sometimes. And it then takes me back to things that you've said,

01:51:24.960 which is a lot of these narratives that we have about ourselves and others are surprisingly well-worn.

01:51:33.900 And they're not novel, even though for any individual in the throes of pain,

01:51:39.100 they feel incredibly unique. No one else could possibly feel the way I feel right now.

01:51:44.600 I completely agree with him, because the mind creates narratives. It's a different way of saying

01:51:51.660 the same. When you say you're not your thoughts, but subjectively- It's a shorthand, yeah.

01:51:56.940 At the same time, I could say, but subjectively, you manufacture your thoughts, and your thoughts

01:52:03.760 define you. But it's not immutable. These are constructs. What I mean by construct is it's

01:52:11.380 creations, and creations can be changed with new creations. You can't totally believe what you

01:52:18.000 feel, because sometimes your mind is making you believe the feeling. For example, your mind can make

01:52:25.560 you believe that you feel, at this point, nothing. A, you can feel nothing because you're frozen.

01:52:34.180 B, you can feel nothing because you're trying very hard not to show anybody how upset you are.

01:52:39.760 Three, you're trying to make it look like you're not attached to this person at all,

01:52:43.400 and if you want to break up with me, no big deal. I was never that in love with you anyway.

01:52:48.140 And this is the mind trying to pretend that it knows my feelings, and it wants to convince me

01:52:54.500 that I'm not hurt. I'm not hurt. I'm not hurt at all. And the more a person says something like that to

01:53:01.640 me, and the more I want to go and hold them and press right there on those places, those bony handles

01:53:12.500 where so much of that sad, fragile, hurt wound sits. And then just, I've had people in my room where the

01:53:21.800 tears are literally streaming down their face, and they're saying, I'm not hurt. And I'm looking at

01:53:27.260 them, and I'm saying, the fracture inside. One part of you doesn't know the other part of you,

01:53:33.680 in literal terms. Your eyes don't know that they're tearing. Your heart doesn't know that it's aching.

01:53:40.400 This is our work. To me, this makes sense. And it stands in a bit of a contrast to, I think,

01:53:48.700 something that Susan David once said, which is, the key to resilience is the radical acceptance of

01:53:54.600 all emotion. And do you see those as compatible beliefs? The key to resilience is the radical

01:54:03.620 acceptance of all our emotions. So to me, there's a lot of truth in that statement, but it presumes

01:54:11.960 a certain definition of the word resilience. And it is a view of resilience as internal traits,

01:54:20.460 personality traits. And that's a very individualistic perspective on resilience.

01:54:26.360 Like you are a resilient person. You know how to face adversity. There are many definitions of

01:54:33.580 resilience, actually. This is one. But resilience is also our ability to face adversity in a way that

01:54:41.720 allows us to rebound and then to re-engage with life. That would be, when I say my parents were

01:54:48.960 resilient, that would be another definition of resilience. It wasn't about just the things inside

01:54:54.400 of them. It was a combination of what I said, the collective support, the community, the people who

01:55:00.280 helped them, the luck, you know, what they had experienced before the war, how they grew up,

01:55:05.840 you know, lots of different things. A collective definition of resilience is our ability to tap

01:55:11.800 into the collective resources. It's actually not what's inside of you. It's what's around you.

01:55:19.180 That too is resilience. Sometimes resilience is actually the ability to know and to go and ask for

01:55:25.640 help. I'll give you a very beautiful example that my husband was telling me recently about a young

01:55:31.200 man. Basically, I forgot the details now, but it's something about how guilty he feels. I wish I will

01:55:38.940 not mess up. It's like telling a joke when you don't arrive to the end, right? The man feels tremendous

01:55:44.140 guilt because he actually went to call the police at the neighbor's house because of the violence that

01:55:50.760 was in the house. And he has carried this as the ultimate betrayal all the time. What he didn't

01:55:57.560 take into consideration is that it actually prevented the father from doing something even worse. And I

01:56:06.180 forgot what that thing was. When the therapist just said to him, what you think was about how could I run

01:56:13.100 out of the house at that moment and leave my mother with my father? You actually, by calling the police

01:56:19.160 at that moment, were able to bring other people in that could do more than what you could do as a

01:56:26.400 nine-year-old. And what you did was one of the most loving things you could have done for your mother.

01:56:32.100 Now, that's a reframe. Now, is it true? It only depends if the person bites. If they take that story in

01:56:39.920 and that story replaces another story and gives them a completely different sense of what they did and

01:56:47.340 what it meant and what the consequences were. Therefore, it is true. Not because it has any

01:56:53.560 truth in absolutes. That's what I mean by narrative. That person now leaves the session and is thinking

01:57:01.140 about what I thought was the worst actually was probably the kindest. I have not been that bad

01:57:09.400 person. I was young and I tried to do this and blah, blah, blah. It goes on like that.

01:57:15.960 That is a different description of resilience, you see? And a different description of the power

01:57:21.500 of narrative in resilience than just to see it as it's the radical acceptance of all emotions. I think

01:57:27.680 it's a truism. There's a truth in that statement, but it doesn't capture the way that I like to define

01:57:33.180 resilience. It's probably a better way of saying.

01:57:35.180 What problem about the human condition are you still most curious about? You're a person who

01:57:40.940 is endlessly curious and is constantly evolving. What is the next frontier for you clinically?

01:57:47.660 I could answer it in topic and I can answer it in... Yesterday, I did a session. At the end of the

01:57:53.840 session, I said to the person, it took us three years to get here. I feel like we finally... It's not true,

01:58:02.080 but it is true. It's both ends. You know, on the one hand, no, we've had many very important sessions,

01:58:07.720 but on the other hand, there was a level at which we got that I thought, man, some things take time.

01:58:15.780 And sometimes I'm impatient and I sometimes forget. It's like a painter. Till the end of your life,

01:58:23.460 the next painting will be something different than the one before. It's like a session needs to be

01:58:29.400 something different than the one before. There are times when I think, what more can we talk about?

01:58:34.840 And then we just open and stumble on something. So in that sense, it's less about what I want to

01:58:42.140 learn about the human condition as how deep can I go? How deep can we go in a conversation,

01:58:51.380 in understanding the vast continent that is the human being?

01:58:56.140 And then there is the thing you said before, which really is a question that fascinates me,

01:59:01.760 which is why this one yes and that one no? I'm very intrigued by that. And by the way,

01:59:09.600 that is a different definition of resilience. The vast majority of people who could... And then

01:59:15.040 this is a question that you can ask yourself too, that really had conditions of life that could have

01:59:20.040 left them in very dire circumstances. And who actually turned those things around and became

01:59:26.420 driven and ambitious and creative and successful in the multitudes of ways that people can be

01:59:34.060 successful. And I think one of the things that I always ask, and I think that that is a piece of

01:59:39.720 resilience, is was there a teacher, a coach, a neighbor, a family member or friend that saw that thing,

01:59:49.480 that nobody else was seeing, not because they didn't care about you, but because they were too busy with

01:59:54.000 their own craziness. And the person saw them and they could let that person help them, mentor them,

02:00:01.500 teach them, connect them, give them the first job, you name them. That piece seems to be a big,

02:00:07.700 big, big difference between those who are living more richer lives, maybe is the best way of saying it,

02:00:15.980 and those who just struggle remained at the center of their life all the time. That doesn't mean that

02:00:21.440 the other ones don't struggle. They were able to put some of the pieces together. And I find that

02:00:27.640 an incredible thing, that it sometimes hinges really on... It is about connection. It is about

02:00:33.680 relationship. But it's not just a relationship with your parents, or it's someone in your ecosphere

02:00:40.360 that put that hand out, and you took it. It's not just because there are many times people put the

02:00:47.520 hand out, but the people don't take it. Or they take it, and then they let it go. And then they drown.

02:00:54.340 They held it. They held it when there was absolutely, overtly no reason to want to hold on to it.

02:01:01.340 But I find that a very important moment in our life. And many of us have had moments like this.

02:01:08.540 Esther, I want to thank you for sharing so much today, and for all of your work. It's touched the lives

02:01:14.400 of many people, myself included. And I hope that there are a number of people who maybe aren't familiar

02:01:19.520 with you, who have become more familiar with you now, and maybe people who were familiar with you through

02:01:24.120 one very narrow lens, who can now appreciate sort of the breadth of your, both your interest and your

02:01:29.880 expertise. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this week's episode

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The Peter Attia Drive - August 16, 2021

#172 - Esther Perel： The effects of trauma, the role of narratives in shaping our worldview, and why we need to accept uncomfortable emotions

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