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Episode Transcript:

00:01:38 – Eric Zimmer
Hi, Rosemerry. Welcome back to the show.

00:01:40 – Rosemerry Trommer
Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me back.

00:01:42 – Eric Zimmer
I’m excited to talk with you. You have a new book of poems called the Unfolding, and we will get into that in a moment. But before we do, we will start in the customary way, which is to read the parable of the Wolves. And it goes like, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. And they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:30 – Rosemerry Trommer
All right, So I brought it up knowing this was going to happen. I brought it up last night with my husband and daughter while we were eating dinner, and they weren’t any help. I thought, oh no. So this morning in the kitchen, I was thinking about times when I wasn’t actually able to feed anything myself and how in those times, all of us have had a time when we feel like we can’t do anything. Like whether that’s because of grief or because of fear or Whatever it is, something’s taken us over.

00:03:05 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Illness.

00:03:06 – Rosemerry Trommer
Illness.

00:03:07 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:03:08 – Rosemerry Trommer
And someone else comes and helps us feed. And I think that that’s important. I think about who has come to help me in those times and how, you know, with them offering, I think almost completely the wolf that’s longing for goodness and generosity. I guess I’m just thinking about how important a community is and how when we’re not able to feed ourselves, how important it is then that we have those people around us. I guess maybe I’ve been lucky enough to have people who were feeding this wolf that was full of graciousness, generosity, goodness. Less so. People who would come in and complain and say everything was wrong. And I can imagine that if that’s the community you have, that’d be a very different circumstance. But so just thinking about how important our community is.

00:03:54 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, this idea of the type of community we have around us, because there are people who can say things that are profoundly unhelpful at times. Right. And so being blessed to have that community is really wonderful. I want to talk about grief, because you mentioned grief as one of these things that takes us over. And I assume for you that’s the one that’s most present. Because your book, you say early on, the poems in the Unfolding were all written since 2021, the year in which my son Finn chose to take his life and my father died of kidney failure.

00:04:32 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, that was a tough year. And very much, you know, I was in that state of I can’t do anything and very much felt as if I was carried through that difficult time by friends, by family, and, honestly, Eric, by love itself. Which sounds sort of strange, I suppose, to say, but I was very aware of love carrying me and doing the work that I couldn’t do.

00:04:59 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. So why is the book called the Unfolding as the title of the book?

00:05:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
Glad you asked. I had, I suppose, a vision of a flower, and it was just opening and opening. And do you know what a ranunculus is?

00:05:17 – Eric Zimmer
I looked it up after you had that phrase in your book. And I’m glad you just pronounced it because I didn’t know how to say it. I probably still can’t say it because that is more than two syllables, which is beyond me. But they’re a beautiful flower that sort of opens up very wide.

00:05:30 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yes. They have so many petals, and they’re actually kind of small, but they’re peony ish, I suppose. And you can just imagine that this sense of more and more petals Opening and opening and opening. And in this kind of vision, they continued to. And it was just like as if the heart itself or our lives themselves are like this. This continual unfolding and thinking, too, then of the universe. Right. And how our universe itself is continually growing, expanding. So this kind of sweet connection between the soul and what’s happening cosmologically, There is this kind of opening and opening and opening, never endingly.

00:06:06 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting. I had an experience one time when I was doing tonglen meditation. I don’t know if you’re familiar with. It’s considered a giving and taking practice where you visualize that you’re breathing in, like, someone else’s pain in the form of, like, black smoke. And I had this experience where at first it feels like, well, I’m breathing this smoke into this small container. Where that’s a bad thing to do. Right. The smoke is in here. All of a sudden, I just had this vision of the back of me being the universe, as expansive as the universe. And that smoke just dissipated into absolute nothing out there. And so I have a connection also in my spirit, to this idea of the universe in its vastness and the way it continues to expand.

00:06:55 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, I love that story. And that sense of the whole universe holding you Right. As you’re breathing in all this other toxicity.

00:07:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:07:04 – Rosemerry Trommer
Beautiful. What a vision.

00:07:06 – Eric Zimmer
The book has a lot of themes, but I would say the core theme is how grief and joy can sit near each other. You say early on I’ve been surprised by what’s emerging from a broken and ransacked heart. I love that ransacked heart. A growing fluency with love. An ever evolving intimacy with the sacred. A sense of communion with others who have also faced loss.

00:07:32 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, I mean, I think that grief is certainly. There’s no way I wouldn’t be writing about it, I guess, just because it’s been so present for me in the last three years. And the thing, I suppose, that anyone who read the book would see is that this is really a book of praise. That in almost all of the poems, that there is some opening to what’s sacred, what’s beautiful, what’s mystical, what’s love, what’s connected. And I was so grateful this book came out because Mark Burroughs, who’s my editor, called me one day and said, hey, we’d love to do your next book. And I said, fine, sure. Let’s think about it. And I started pulling things together. And he’s the one who, when I finally submitted it all, said, Rosemerry, this is a book of Praise. I was so glad, Eric, that he saw that, because that’s, I think, where I would want to focus. To know then, that even though it’s a book that’s very much steeped in grief, that there is also this. I guess the way that I like to think about it is that if grief is the basso continuo, like there’s this baseline of, you know, this hurts, or this is heartbreaking, but that the melody itself is the melody of praise, that it’s a wonderful thing to be alive, that it is an incredible gift to be alive. And these two together inextricably. I like the way that the book brings them both in.

00:08:58 – Eric Zimmer
I was going to ask about that because in almost all of the poems, as you said, at least the ones that are talking about grief, there is a turning point in there where there’s a little bit of light that comes in. And poems are a reflection of our experience, but not a direct reflection. And I’m curious, in your own experience of grief, is that always the way it happens? Or are there times where it’s just grief and grief and grief and some more grief before the light or the turning or the praise comes in?

00:09:34 – Rosemerry Trommer
Interesting. So in a linear way, I like that you use this word turn. Turn is a poetic word that we use. Right. You know, it could be. It’s hard. It’s hard. It’s hard. And then the turn and it’s beautiful. I’m taking this question really to heart, friend. I want to be really honest. For me, it is almost always very hand in hand. Eric. There have been moments where it was an unbearableness that I couldn’t see out of. They didn’t last long. I can think of, honestly, just a handful where I was so destroyed. I remember reaching out to a friend both times. And is even that reaching out is the reaching out itself knowing, you know, that there’s something there? I wasn’t not able to reach out?

00:10:20 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:10:20 – Rosemerry Trommer
For me, and maybe it is because of poetry, because poetry itself wants to always touch what is difficult and what is beautiful at the same time. Poetry itself loves paradox. And a poem wants to do that. And I think that it’s possible that a practice of sitting down every day and wondering what’s here and being open to this much larger potential, doing it with a page, I think has a way of allowing it to be possible in any given moment over time. Right. We’re talking about a 20 year habit.

00:10:51 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:10:51 – Rosemerry Trommer
It’s not something I started last week or, you know, I’m wondering about that because I don’t know that I’m unusual in this, but I do know that this is what’s true for me.

00:11:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yep, I think you might be unusual in that. I think that there is a human tendency to view our experience monochromatically and not notice, to use your phrase, that the underlying bass note is this. And there may be a melody that has some other things going on, but not to not be paying attention to it and to describe our experience along that monochromatic baseline. And the thing I’m always cautious of on this show is being, what would I say, overly aspirational. Meaning I don’t want people who are going through a difficult time and aren’t having the same experience to feel bad about themselves because their experience is different.

00:11:50 – Rosemerry Trommer
Right.

00:11:51 – Eric Zimmer
That’s kind of why I ask. But I do agree with you that this is the reason that long term investment in creative practice or personal growth or awareness practice or all these things I think pays real dividends. Because I went through something it’s been about a year ago. It was really difficult. A lot of grief, a lot of fear. It just really sort of shook me up and it was really hard. And there was a pervasive sense that ran right alongside it that I was okay. And I think that is from 30 years at this point of some degree of. I never know what to call it. Inner work, whatever you want to call it, that did predispose my mind to look for both to look for the difficulty, but also to look for what could be good in it without getting rid of the difficulty. And I think that’s what your poems do so well is it’s not that the light is a way of turning away from the difficult. Right. It’s not a way of making it go away, it’s a way of existing with it. There’s the great pain and then there’s the joy goes with it. I’m going to say one last thing, then I’m going to shut up because I’m talking way too much and you’re not talking enough. And the reason that I think monochromatically often is because I’ve had depression at different points over my years. And that is a complete blankness, right? There’s no up, there’s no down. But it makes me think. And I can’t remember who said this. Joan Didion, maybe. I don’t know that, you know, sadness is that everything matters too much and depression is that nothing matters. Right. And what you’re describing is an experience where everything matters, not even too much. But so Much.

00:13:40 – Rosemerry Trommer
That was so beautifully said. That’s exactly it. It’s that everything matters, right? It’s not trying to be okay and push away the sorrow. It’s saying, here is the sorrow and here is the beauty, right? Here is the loss and here is the love without trying at all to push it away, without trying to pretend it’s not there, without trying to fix it. And I feel like a huge part of this is self compassion, Eric. I feel like that’s something that is really evolving in me over the last few years, is not beating myself up for having a difficult time, for just really knowing, oh, yeah, this is what we do because we’re human. We have a hard time. It’s just not easy. It isn’t easy to be alive knowing that. How do we also see that at the same time, there’s something wonderful here. And I feel like self compassion is the peace that allows for that. Can I write a poem about that.

00:14:39 – Eric Zimmer
Please, from the book? Yeah, it’s about time for a poem. So. Nice segue.

00:14:43 – Rosemerry Trommer
So the book is in four parts, and each of those four parts are words that I made up for praise. And it was in part, I think, because, Eric, of what you’re talking about, that we tend to think monochromatically. Certainly our word praise is, you know, yay, things are great. And so I thought, okay, if this is a book of praise. But the word praise doesn’t really seem to touch it. It’s a little too monochromatic. So the four words are words I made up because they’re more nuanced, more complex expressions of praise. For instance, the poem I’m about to read comes from the second chapter, which is Sarome, which comes from sorrow plus om. And the idea of it’s the kind of praise that can only rise out of the most difficult moments. The kind of praise that only comes when we’re in it, struggling, wrestling, being wrestled by life. And in that moment, there’s this. Oh, and this too. So this poem comes out of that chapter with astonishing tenderness. When in the middle of the night you wake with the certainty you’ve done it all wrong. When you wake and see clearly all the places you’ve failed. In that moment when dreams will not return. This is the chance for your most gentle voice, the one you reserve for those you love most, to say to you quietly, oh, sweetheart, this is not yet the end of the story. Sleep will not come. But somehow, in that wide awake moment, there is peace. The kind that does not need everything to be right before it arrives. The Kind that comes from not fighting what is real. The peace that rises in the dark on its sure dark wings and flies true, with no moon, no stars.

00:16:55 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a beautiful poem. It’s one of the ones I was going to ask you to read. And there’s a few lines in it that really jumped out at me that maybe we could discuss for a second. The first is this is not yet the end of the story. Like, this poem would fit perfect in the chapter I’m working on for my book right now. Because I’m talking about this tendency we have to take an event and then end the story there. It’s a bad thing. And boom, without seeing the way things will unfold because we don’t know. And so it’s hard to. But just that recognition. Often this is not the end of the story can be so healing. Just that.

00:17:36 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, yeah. Thank goodness. Right? It really does go on, you know. And I think there’s another poem in the book in which I remember I put on my son’s crocs, which are still sitting outside our door. And I put them on and I kind of walk around and I’m like, life went on. And I just look, you know, here I am wearing his shoes and his body didn’t go on. Although in some ways, in many ways, I feel his spirit goes on. But I just look at all the blooming all around me at, you know, the trees and how green they are and the river and how it keeps on flowing and the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing and I’m still here too. And life went on. Life went on. It does. The story isn’t over.

00:18:40 – Eric Zimmer
That’s initially so jarring. I think when you’re like in the beginning stages of being wrecked, looking around and seeing that the world is going on almost feels like the world is cruel.

00:18:53 – Rosemerry Trommer
How could it do that?

00:18:54 – Eric Zimmer
How could it go on? Right. But over time, my experience is that moves from something that’s painful to something that feels good, which is, oh yeah, life goes on. As do I. As do I.

00:19:06 – Rosemerry Trommer
As do I. Yeah.

00:19:08 – Eric Zimmer
I want to go back to another part in that poem where you see clearly all the places you’ve failed. Because we were talking about self compassion a minute ago and you were talking about the self compassion you needed to give yourself to not feel bad that you felt bad. But I think there was another huge dose of self compassion you had to give yourself. And we talked a little bit about this last time around blame of. I have a son who took his own life and what Role Do I or did I play in that? How have you worked with that? Because that’s the sort of thing that can be crushing, Eric.

00:19:46 – Rosemerry Trommer
I don’t know why I have been so blessed on this one. Well, I guess I have some idea. For me, the blame hasn’t been a big part of it. When Finn died, we could say that it was not a surprise in that things had been very difficult for a long time. And I had been very actively putting all of my energy into doing everything I could to keep him here, I suppose, but to help him, to open him, finding him mentors, finding him, help going, you know, taking fencing classes with him and taking him on, you know, whatever. I mean, I was so, so active in about every possible arena. I think that that helped me. For me, there was no doubt in my mind that I had given this boy all the love I could give him.

00:20:33 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:20:34 – Rosemerry Trommer
If this had been some other person, I would have thought maybe, what else could I have done? But I knew the truth of it was that if there was anything I could have thought of to do, I had done that. I think that helped with the blame and regret, that part. That part for me. There’s this beautiful story that I heard not too long ago about the second arrow. You’re probably familiar with this story, but for people who aren’t, just very briefly, there’s the pain that you have that you can’t get away from. My son died. That pain is absolutely inescapable. But then there’s a second pain that comes from blame or shame, and that pain is avoidable. And I think I was so lucky that it became almost immediately clear each time I’d find one of these places where this kind of second arrow would come in, you know, like projection. That was one that maybe I had to work a little bit harder on, you know, oh, I’ll never see him, you know, get married. I’ll never meet. If he had a baby. I’ll never be a grandma to his kids. And it was so incredibly apparent that that pain, that was so much. I was like, oh, I don’t need to do that.

00:21:45 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:21:46 – Rosemerry Trommer
It was a really conscious choice when it would come up. Okay, stop, stop that.

00:21:51 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that that’s the power of that idea, is that that second layer of pain is. And I say that people who do this to themselves, we all do, right? I’m saying this self compassionately, but it’s self inflicted, meaning we are doing it to ourselves, which the good news means then we can stop doing it. And I’VE joked before that, like, everything that I teach is just about how not to make things worse.

00:22:19 – Rosemerry Trommer
Right.

00:22:20 – Eric Zimmer
Which is not a great marketing slogan. But when we think about how much of our lives is that second layer of pain. Yeah, it’s a lot of it. And if you cannot do that, your life is immeasurably better because we make everything worse. With blame, with shame, with all the things I shouldn’t be feeling this. What’s wrong with me? I’m also really happy for you that blame wasn’t such a big part of it and that you were able to have that feeling. Like, I’ve done everything that I knew to do. Right. And I think that’s, to me, a sign of some degree of emotional maturity when we can look at situations and go, okay, this was not the outcome I wanted.

00:23:05 – Rosemerry Trommer
Well, there it is.

00:23:05 – Eric Zimmer
Like, I did the best I could. And that’s gonna have to be okay.

00:23:09 – Rosemerry Trommer
I did the best I could. Which is different from, you know, like, I didn’t do everything right. I’m not saying I was the perfect mom. I’m just saying that, yes, if I could think of it to do, I did it. Like, I’m sure I screwed up all over the place, Eric, but that’s because I’m a human. But I knew. I just. There was no doubt. There was no doubt that I’d done whatever I could to love him, to help him, to nourish him. Yeah. And not just, you know, not just in those last few years. Like, I really did throw myself utterly into motherhood from the beginning.

00:23:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. There’s another line in that poem, the kind that comes from not fighting what is real. And that is a theme in the book a lot. And if I go back also to. I mean, I see it in a lot of poems, self portrait is a tuning fork, as if struck by the great hand of what is true. You talk in other places about the invitation to say yes to praise what is. And I love this idea of really turning towards befriending and welcoming what actually is.

00:24:13 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. I mean, that’s where it’s at.

00:24:16 – Eric Zimmer
How do you do that?

00:24:18 – Rosemerry Trommer
Well, I. You know, one of the other words I made up, Vera Luya, is really exactly this. Right. Veritas. Which means the truth. Alleluia. So just putting those two together, Vera Luja, is this idea of the praise that comes when we meet the world as it is, instead of the way we wish it would be. How do we do that? I mean, poetry is amazing for this, Eric. It really is, because it invites again and again and again, a curiosity. What is here? What is here? I think that when we sit down, whether it’s, you know, to sit down with a pen and paper or to sit down with painting, I’m pulling out the arts because I really do think that the arts are incredible for helping us meet difficult moments and helping us find something generative and creative out of heartache. Well, out of anything, for that matter. It doesn’t have to be heartache. You can find something wonderful, creative and generative out of. Out of a northworm or out of tree bark, you know, I mean, it doesn’t have to be heartbreak, but it can be that too. And I also think that practicing when the stakes are really low, when we have a practice of showing up and wondering, what is here? What is here? What is true? What’s true now? What’s happening outside, what’s happening inside? And by outside, I mean what’s happening in the world around me and what is happening in the world inside of me at the same time, wondering these two things. So maybe that’s part of it, right? When the world inside of me is saying, everything is heartbreak, heartbreak, heartbreak. And then I managed to make that leap and look outside and see, oh, and the world outside me, there’s a bunny hopping across the yard. And I can just fall in love with this little lump of bunny. And that’s all it takes, right, to realize, oh, it isn’t all heartache, is it?

00:25:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:26:00 – Rosemerry Trommer
Although it’s not saying that the heartache isn’t there. Of course it is. It doesn’t go away. And there’s the bunny.

00:26:08 – Eric Zimmer
I mean, it’s a real revelation that you can feel multiple things at once. Right. I mean, it really is like that we are capable of that. And I do agree with you that I think poetry can be really helpful in this regard. Now, I am not a poet. I occasionally sketch a few words down. But what I’ve tried to cultivate and what I like about poetry, the reason that reading poetry is beneficial to me is I think it teaches me how to see. It trains my ability to look a little bit more closely and to see. And it shows me that even in the most mundane moment, that moment seen through a certain lens is magical. I’ll see a poet describe the same scene out my window that I’m seeing. And I’m like, all right, whatever, you know? And then I read this poem. I’m like, yes, it is absolutely beautiful. I had no idea. I just didn’t see it. And I think that’s the gift that poets like you bring to people who are less inclined that way is. It’s a training for me to see.

00:27:15 – Rosemerry Trommer
I think it’s a training for anyone. I had written poems for years before I started a daily practice. But I remember that was the biggest part of the daily practice, was that it required paying attention in a new way. And I was very aware of that because, boy, do I know what it’s like to. I’ve always called them the busy blinders, where we’re just running from one thing to the next thing to the next thing, and we’re not paying attention. You know, I have a tree, this gorgeous ponderosa pine at the top of my driveway. And how often do I see that tree? So seldom. And this is. I laugh at myself for this. Right, right. Like, I go by that tree almost every day. I don’t always leave the house, but every day I leave the house, I go by that tree. How often do I notice it?

00:27:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:27:57 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:27:57 – Eric Zimmer
And it’s human nature to some degree. Right. Like, that’s the way the brain is designed to work. If you’ve seen something before, the brain is sort of like, okay, don’t need to pay attention, because there might be things I haven’t seen that I do need to pay attention. It’s why the brain is drawn to novelty. Right. There’s a survival element to it. So it makes sense. And I’m glad that the brain can do that. But to your point, when that’s all the brain does, we miss our whole lives.

00:28:26 – Rosemerry Trommer
Right? Right. That’s beautifully said. I don’t think we need to be poets, by the way, to do this practice. I think it helps. I mean, you don’t have to be a poet to want to pay attention. It does take maybe this, though, a longing to see what’s here. Like, I think it does take that. I want to see what’s here. Gosh, I was so aware, Eric, after Finn died, especially then, I had this constant prayer. Open me, open me, open me. I wanted to stay open and to feel it all. I wanted to feel every bit of that pain. I wanted to feel all of it. I didn’t want to run away from any of it, and I didn’t want to numb out. And I think that longing, that willingness opened me. Open me. That is what it takes. Maybe whether you’re writing. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a poem, but to have that longing to.

00:29:14 – Eric Zimmer
Be open, that’s a great way to think about it, Is the desire I’m always about. Is there something Simple I can do here. And I don’t think that this practice is simple because I think it’s an ongoing practice of deepening this. But I do think a simple question that I often use. What have I not seen before in this scene? You know, like, I’ve looked out this window. There’s no window in the room I’m in. But let’s say I was in a room with a window, my old studio, There was a window, it looked out, and I looked out that window a million times. I’m exaggerating, but I would look out and I say, what have I seen? What have I not noticed? And to me, that’s a very simple thing that I can just ask myself anywhere.

00:30:00 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, that’s a great question.

00:30:01 – Eric Zimmer
I think what we’re trying to do, in many ways, is outsmart that part of the brain I was just talking about, because in a neuroscience way, in a very real sense, what many neuroscientists believe is happening is. You may already know this, but the two things are happening. Our brain is predicting what it expects to see, and our senses are transmitting what is actually seen. If those things match, in a very real sense, what we see never gets to certain parts of the brain because the brain just says, I don’t need to know. I expected to see X. X is what’s coming back. Get out of here. Right. And so what we’re trying to do is just. At least what I’m trying to do is force the brain to actually see, look again, bypass that prediction mechanism, and look again.

00:30:53 – Rosemerry Trommer
That’s a fabulous practice, and I love the brain science behind it, because you’re right. I mean, how much do we not see? Because we just predict it and move right past. You know, it’s the reason we don’t hit the furniture in the house in the dark when we’re walking through. Right. We already.

00:31:07 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:31:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
We already know. I have a poem about this longing to be open. Could I read that one, please?

00:31:13 – Eric Zimmer
Your timing’s impeccable. I was just about to say, I think we need a poem.

00:31:17 – Rosemerry Trommer
Okay. So this poem is called the Prayers. And it reminds me of when I was a very young mom and my kids and I were playing in the sand, and I’d been going through a very difficult time separately. And I was distracted while my kids were playing in the stand, and I was writing with little rocks in the sand. I wrote the words, open me. And I remember telling my spiritual teacher that I had done that, and she.

00:31:47 – Eric Zimmer
Said, oh, be careful.

00:31:50 – Rosemerry Trommer
That’s a. That’s a Big prayer. Yeah, the prayers. When I asked the world to open me, I did not know the price. When I wrote that two word prayer in the sand, I did not know loss was the key devastation, the hinge, trust was the dissolution of the idea of a door. When I asked the world to open me, I could never have said yes to what came next. Perhaps I imagined the waves knew only how to carry me. I did not imagine they would also pull me under. When I asked the world to open me, I had not imagined drowning was the way to reach the shore. The waves of sorrow dragged me down with their tides of unthinkable loss. The currents emptied my pockets and stripped me of my ideas. I was rolled and eroded and washed up on the sand like driftwood softened. I sprawled there and wept, astonished to still be alive. It is not easy to continue to pray this way. Open me. And yet it is the truest prayer I know. The other truest prayer, though sometimes I long to reject its truth, is. Thank you.

00:33:28 – Eric Zimmer
That’s beautiful.

00:33:29 – Rosemerry Trommer
After he died, I remember getting help from lots of people and all kinds of modalities. Reiki and acupuncture and massage and just talking to people. And I remember, you know, when people would say, how can I help you? I would just say, keep me open, make me open, help me stay open.

00:34:11 – Eric Zimmer
I wrote a song years ago and one of the lines in the chorus was that, you know, a broken heart is an open heart.

00:34:18 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:34:19 – Eric Zimmer
And that an open heart can be a broken heart. Also, it goes both directions. And that’s kind of what you’re saying here. By being open, I’m more open to the difficult things that come as well as the good. But that seems to be to me, a bargain.

00:34:33 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Well, you’re saying I’ll take it all.

00:34:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:34:36 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Who would want it all? But really, don’t we desperately want it.

00:34:39 – Eric Zimmer
All most of the time?

00:34:42 – Rosemerry Trommer
Okay, I’m with you. And this is what. This is what I said in the poem too. I’d never say yes to that. I’d never say yes to that.

00:34:48 – Eric Zimmer
Of course not.

00:34:50 – Rosemerry Trommer
No, of course not.

00:34:50 – Eric Zimmer
I think what’s harder to say yes to, at least for me, sometimes the thing that’s hardest for me to say yes to. I’m not going to make equivocal statements. Is the. Is mundaneity a word, the mundane nature of day to day existence. Right. Like even that. I have to be willing to open to.

00:35:12 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yeah.

00:35:13 – Eric Zimmer
That’s what I don’t want to open to. Because I want every moment to be this open. Like wow. I’m seeing everything. But a lot of life is just sort of like, you know, just rolls along. And for me, that’s the one I’m working most on opening to and just going, that’s okay.

00:35:30 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:35:30 – Eric Zimmer
You don’t need to go make every moment spectacular or every moment peaceful, or every moment insight, or every moment poetry, or. Some moments can just be whatever sort of plain old moment they are. And that’s the one that’s hard for me to open to.

00:35:48 – Rosemerry Trommer
The mundanity. We’re in the business of making up words today, Eric, so we’re going to go with mundanity, I think. Yeah.

00:35:55 – Eric Zimmer
It’s funny, you referenced a book that I had never heard of until recently, but I bought because when I heard it, I was like, I must have this book. And it’s. What’s it called? The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

00:36:05 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yes. By John Koenig. I love this book so much. My master’s is in linguistics, so I’m a word lover. Right. I just love language. And I love what he’s done with his book. If anybody doesn’t have it yet. It’s such a joy because you read these descriptions he has. You see yourself in all of like, oh, there. Oh, there I am, too. And he just finds these very complex, beautiful moments of what it is to be alive. And it’s not poetry, but that book is completely poetry. I love that book.

00:36:37 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. I mean, it’s actually a very good teacher of what many psychologists think is an incredibly important skill, which is emotional granularity, the ability to be more precise and nuanced in what you feel. And that book is a great example of it. And the title is just. It’s too good. The minute I heard the title, it was, I’m ordering this book sight unseen.

00:37:01 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yeah. I hope you love it.

00:37:04 – Eric Zimmer
Speaking of the mundane and opening to it, I think you have a poem that speaks to this.

00:37:11 – Rosemerry Trommer
I do. This one is actually the last poem in the book. And it goes right to that mundane place. Eric. Today’s sermon was a single drop of melted snow that clung to the tip of a tight red bud at the end of a naked branch. It didn’t have to shout or sing to make me fall in love with the way the afternoon light gathered inside it. Such a simple pulpit, such humble gospel. This radiant preacher, this silence in which the prayer is made of listening.

00:37:49 – Eric Zimmer
It’s a beautiful poem. And what it brings up in me is the longing to see. Like that. If I’m going to be even more clear. I think the thing that I have a difficult opening up to is the emotional mundaneity.

00:38:08 – Rosemerry Trommer
Mm. Yeah.

00:38:10 – Eric Zimmer
It’s the times where I feel like. I know that that bud coming out on the tip of that branch should be beautiful or moving or something, but it’s not doing anything.

00:38:23 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Yeah.

00:38:25 – Eric Zimmer
That’s the hard part. I think I’m gonna go off and think about what you said, because what I can connect to in that moment that I do think is beautiful is that longing. That. That longing is connected to the knowledge of the beauty that’s all around me.

00:38:39 – Rosemerry Trommer
You know, Eric, I love that you bring this in, then this. Yes, I know it’s there. And there are those moments where we’re just like, I don’t see it and actually don’t want to see it. Is that part of it?

00:38:48 – Eric Zimmer
It’s. I don’t see it, or I don’t feel it, or I don’t feel it. It’s like, okay, yeah, I know it should be beautiful, but it’s just. Nothing’s happening inside me. It’s not stirring me. I’m unstirred.

00:39:00 – Rosemerry Trommer
I’m not being stirred. Right. I am unstirable. Yeah. Which is, I guess, even different from the other place I was thinking of. I don’t want to be stirred right now, which just yesterday, I was at a most beautiful, heartbreaking gathering where my beloved friend who has brain cancer is going to die. Today, she has a death with dignity. And we all gathered. And I won’t go into that, I suppose, but as I left this most sacred, incredible, holy space, I wanted to not be there for a while anymore. And I told myself, okay, sweetheart, you don’t have to right now. You’ll come back.

00:39:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:39:44 – Rosemerry Trommer
So right now, you don’t have to feel it. You just don’t have to. So I think, isn’t that interesting that there’s all these. You know, I’m stirred. I don’t want to be stirred. I would like to be stirred, but I’m not stirred. All these.

00:39:57 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right.

00:39:58 – Rosemerry Trommer
All these ways meet a moment.

00:39:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. And it does all come back, ultimately, to say yes to the world as it is, to praise what is, not what I wish it was, but what is. To me, that’s the lesson of a lifetime. Right. That’s a lesson that takes my entire life to learn. I’ve gotten much better at it. Being a Heroin addict at 24 shows my attempts to not say yes, to control everything. Right. Like, I don’t want that. I don’t want that. I’m going to adjust it. I’m going to fix it. I’m going to change it. I’m going to change it. Right. And so since then, it’s just been a work of like, okay, what is say yes to it.

00:40:36 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. And I really didn’t want to do that either. You know, I spent almost all my life trying really hard to not say yes to the world as it is. Yeah.

00:40:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And I’m sorry about your friend.

00:40:45 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yes. Well, it’s been quite a path. You know, we sang together for 30 years.

00:40:51 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, my goodness.

00:40:52 – Rosemerry Trommer
And then at her gathering, it wasn’t a memorial. Right. She was right there.

00:40:57 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right.

00:40:58 – Rosemerry Trommer
So it was. I’ve never been in a situation like this. You know, there were 70 of us gathered, and four of us who’ve sung with her for decades sang songs that we’d sung with her. And I could hear where her voice wasn’t, you know. Yeah. It was very, very beautiful. Very moving. She smiled the whole time, Eric. She smiled the whole time. And it was beautiful how at peace she was. She had such a peace about her that allowed for such wrestling with me to know that here it is again. Right. What is here? I was really sad. And what else was here? She was so full of peace.

00:41:42 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:41:43 – Rosemerry Trommer
So thrilling for her and her peace and also, you know, meeting my own heartbreak. Heartbreak. Yeah. At the same time. And of course, singing and crying ends up in gurgling. It was, you know, at least it was sincere. It was certainly not a performance.

00:42:02 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. No one’s gonna doubt your sincerity. That’s. That’s funny. You know, that death with dignity thing is really. So I’ve said this before on the show, like, if I was going to get heavily invested in a cause, I think that might be the one for me, because I haven’t had the fortune to go to the sort of event you’re describing, but I’ve heard of them, you know, what a beautiful thing to celebrate your life while you’re actually still there.

00:42:29 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:42:29 – Eric Zimmer
And in a place where you’re capable of appreciating it. I’ve seen the death without dignity a number of times now, and it really is, you know, undignified. There’s a great Jason Isbel song called Elephant, which is a heartbreaking song, but he talks about this idea that no one dies with dignity, but we have the chance to give people the ability to do that, and it infuriates me that we don’t in a lot of places.

00:42:56 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, yeah. Colorado Newly does. I think it’s only three years old now.

00:43:01 – Eric Zimmer
We are near the end of our Time here, but I thought we could. Have you read one last poem, which is the Grand Quilt.

00:43:09 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, I’m glad you picked this one.

00:43:11 – Eric Zimmer
I think this is a nice way to sort of take us out.

00:43:15 – Rosemerry Trommer
So this is a poem in a section that’s called Some Union. Sum is a proto Indo European root that means to sing and union. And the poems in this section really are the praise that comes when we understand how deeply connected we are with everything, including the things maybe we’d rather not be connected with. So this is the grand quilt. I don’t believe we can stitch together only scraps of beauty, squares of light. I don’t believe in a quilt that doesn’t also have patches of sorrow, blocks of ache. Such pieces are, of course, much harder to want to stitch in. But it matters that we do not exclude them. It matters right now that we don’t pretend they do not exist. It matters that we sew every piece into the grand cloth. It matters, too, how we sew these pieces in, perhaps using our finest silk thread, perhaps with an elaborate stitch our grandmother taught us. Or perhaps we must use a stitch we make up, because no one ever taught us how to do this most difficult task. To meet what at first seems unwanted, wrong, and to incorporate it into the whole and to do this for as long as we can stitch. That’s how long.

00:44:45 – Eric Zimmer
That’s beautiful. I love this idea of it matters how we sew these pieces in, not just that we include them, but how we go about doing it. And that some of doing that we may have been taught we’ve seen other people, and there are plenty of times for different people where no one modeled for us how to do this difficult, emotional stuff. We’ve never seen it.

00:45:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Right. So we get to struggle and make it up.

00:45:11 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:45:12 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, this didn’t work. Okay. Yeah. No, I think that’s a big part of it. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if we did have role models for all of this? And to some degree, I think they do exist if we look for them. I’m thinking now of Mirabai Star, who is just such a lighthouse for all of us, really, especially in this realm that we’ve been talking about, of everything matters, of showing up with what’s most difficult and what’s most wondrous, and being both grounded and ecstatic at the same time, you know? And I think that we do have to figure it out. Even if you sit at the feet of Mirabai Star every day, you’re still going to have to figure it out for yourself.

00:45:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Yeah. I got to go to Taos recently and interview Mirabai in person as part of a trip out there, and it was. It was lovely. But I’m happy that you brought up role models because I actually think that what you’ve done in your last book, in this book, is a role model for other people. And I’m going to reach here, but I don’t think it’s a huge stretch. Your work to me, what you’re doing here. And Mirabai does this also with her grief, is a little similar to me to what Viktor Frankl did for us. Right. Because I think the reason that we’re often drawn to people like Viktor Frankl, at least I am, is that he shows that these ideas about how we can live a better life apply in even the most dire of circumstances. They’re good in your day to day life and they’re good in the most extreme human circumstances. And I think what I love about your work is this showing in one of the most extreme circumstances, besides being in a concentration camp, is losing your child, how to do that with some degree of openness and grace. And so thank you for that.

00:47:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
Thank you, Eric. Thank you. I’m thinking now too of the poets who are writing, you know, in Gaza right now and doing the same work, which is a horror I can’t even imagine.

00:47:19 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:47:20 – Rosemerry Trommer
And I think it’s true that we will all come to opportunities in our lives where we are asked to wonder, like you say, what am I not seeing? What did I not see here? Or, you know, my maybe have my prayer open me, you know, even though it’s insanely painful to be opened.

00:47:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:47:40 – Rosemerry Trommer
We’ll all get those chances.

00:47:42 – Eric Zimmer
And I think it sort of takes us back also to where we began. Which is what in these moments where you can’t, you know, others can and. But to flip that, which is that we can do that for other people too.

00:47:56 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yeah. Thank goodness. Right? I mean, I feel like this is what you’re doing. All right. That’s what this podcast is about. It’s what I hope the poems do.

00:48:05 – Eric Zimmer
Well, thank you so much for coming on again. It’s always such a pleasure when I talk to you. I’m just really glad we did this.

00:48:13 – Rosemerry Trommer
Thank you, Eric. Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be with you again.

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  01:37

Hi, Catherine, welcome back.

Catherine Gray  01:40

Hi, thanks for having me back.

Eric Zimmer  01:41

I don’t know if this is three or four for having you on, but it’s been a good number, and you’re always one of my very favorite people to talk to, so I’m happy to have you back. We’re going to be discussing something new for you, which is a novel instead of a non fiction book, and it’s called versions of a girl. But before we get into that, will start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life and in the work that you do. I love

Catherine Gray  02:37

the parable and for me, so whenever I had my daughter, I became a parent aged 42 two years ago, and something happened which really made me think about the parable a lot in that my bedtime routine became completely disrupted. And for many, many years now, every night, before I go to sleep, I write a list of gratitudes, and a lot of that is to counter the fact that I have such a negatively biased brain as most of us do, and left unattended, my brain will become, you know, a doomsayer, a nihilist. It will focus on everything that’s going wrong and everything that could go wrong. And I found it was actually a magical cure for my insomnia. This writing of all the all the positive things that were happening, um, could potentially happen. And, yeah, as I say, when I had my daughter that just fell on the classroom floor because of tiredness. And you know, it all goes out the window. And for six months, I became very, very negative and irritable towards myself. So it really does make a difference what you feed your brain. And for me, I need that nightly diet of positivity. Otherwise, my brain goes to a dark neighborhood, and yeah, I have to really call it back. So that’s what it means to me.

Eric Zimmer  03:56

Lovely. Did you experience any postpartum depression, was that part of the irritability and all that? Or how was that time for you? Because I know it can certainly be challenging.

Catherine Gray  04:07

I definitely felt the hormones. I’ve read that the hormonal surge that you received during pregnancy and also thereafter, which apparently lasts about two years, is akin to feeling premenstrual all the time. Now, when I’m premenstrual, I don’t get teary like a lot of other people do, but I do get very irritable, even sometimes murderous. I have not murdered anybody yet, so I didn’t experience sort of postpartum depression. I experienced what is a lesser known offshoot of it, which was postpartum rage, and this wasn’t directed at anybody in my life, apart from potentially myself, right? And the items in my fridge. So I found myself doing things like throwing peppers at the. Which do not do that, it creates an almighty mess, and also a tub and permits, which, again, really bad thing to throw. Yeah, yeah, that’s completely settled down now, but I’ve really struggled with it, and also the tiredness and just everything that you can’t predict is going to happen to your life happens. And, yeah, it was a tough period, but I’m through, and I’m out and I’m okay, and all I’ve murdered is some peppers,

Eric Zimmer  05:26

good. I’m glad that that’s been the extent of the damage. You know, a couple thoughts come to mind there. I mean, I do think the first couple years after having a child can be very difficult, just the sleep, all of it, and I think it’s a beautiful time, but it’s a very trying time for many people. The other thing is you were talking that I thought about was this is interesting, because in men, depression is often diagnosed by irritability. Interesting. That’s the way it manifests. So for me, my depression manifests as general deadness and irritability, very rude, just irritable with every little thing for no good reason, right? It’s the sort of stuff that you know, at least I know I’m like, there’s no reason to be irritated by this, but yet I am,

Catherine Gray  06:18

yeah, and it’s one of those emotions that you really tend to beat yourself up about because you’re like, I should be better than this. I shouldn’t I shouldn’t be irritated by this, and yes, I am. So what do I do? So it was a really hard time for me. The only time I can liken it to would be early recovery, although the emotions were different, because in early recovery, I didn’t feel like that. But yeah, it was. It was a similarly challenging time, I would say, yeah.

Eric Zimmer  06:45

So this latest book is a work of fiction. Your previous books have been memoirs about recovery. How are they described?

Catherine Gray  06:55

Well, they’re often described as a hybrid, because they’re not just memoirs. So my story does feature in them, then I go off and explore journalistically, all of the research, talk to experts, and also weave in lots of self helpy tips and tricks. So it’s like a hybrid between those two. And yeah, so I’ve done four of those now, and this is my first fiction. It’s my debut novel.

Eric Zimmer  07:22

I think we may have only talked about three of those. We must have missed one. I don’t know which one, but we’ll sort that out off air. But the fiction is, I told you that I think the book is amazing. I was captivated from the very first sentence any book that basically says, in a way, she’s looking forward to prison as a place of starting is so good. Like, I’m like, Well, okay, I have to know who is she and why is she going to prison, and what’s wrong with her life, enough that she actually is looking forward to it. It’s a great start.

Catherine Gray  07:54

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I love a bit of crime in any novel. Yes, I love somebody to die and puzzle, you know, sorting out who did it and why, and, you know, what happened. So for me it was a really key linchpin that sort of crime aspect. Although it’s not a crime novel, it’s coming for age more than crime but I guess it’s a blend of the two.

Eric Zimmer  08:18

It’s a blend. I mean, there’s definitely a whodunit in it that runs through the whole book, right? Yeah, there’s a character who is murdered, and you don’t know who through most of the book, and it seems significant. So I would say, yeah, it’s kind of a mix of two, but the heart of the book is really about, why don’t you describe the coming of age and the split between Fern and flick? You’ll do better than I will. Okay,

Catherine Gray  08:42

so the book opens on a 14 year old girl. She’s called fern. She spent equal years with each of her parents. Her parents are divorced. They’ve been separated for a long time, and her parents are very, very different. Her father is a hell raiser. He lives hand to mouth in California, in motels. He’s a borderline genius. He means well, but he’s mostly a disaster. Her mother is this ex ballerina who lives this gorgeous life in a London townhouse. Her biggest concern is what you think of her. She’s more of a helicopter parent and an unexpected visitor comes along and throws Fern, the main character, a dilemma as to whether she stays with her father in California or goes back to her mother in London. So it’s an exploration of how your dominant parent and how your dominant home life can shape your future trajectory. The story splits, and then we follow both versions of the same character over the next 21 years and see how they unfold and how they’re shaped differently, and how they shape similarly as well. So I wrote the first draft when I was pregnant and I was obsessed with nature versus nurture, and this is what came out. So I think it’s. Really an acceleration of the kind of parent that I want to be and the kind of parent that I don’t want to be. I would say if you boil the book down to one central theme, it’s the parent and child relationship. I think that would be it, because there’s lots of different examples in the book of how that dynamic unfolds. And what’s interesting is the parent in the book that arguably commits the biggest crime in inverted commas is the one who comes off probably the best because of the way that they deal with what they did. So, yeah, it’s childhood. You know, character shaping, addictions in different forms, recoveries in different forms. There’s lots of juicy topics in there that will be fun to play with, especially with the dual timeline narrative.

Eric Zimmer  10:43

And what age remind me the two of them sort of splits. How

Catherine Gray  10:46

old 1414?

Eric Zimmer  10:48

So up till 14, they’re one person. They’ve lived the same life. At the age of 14, one decides to go back to London to see her mother, who she’s not seen in a long time, and the other, at the last minute, decides not to get on the plane, and at that point they’re two separate stories. Exactly what I find fascinating about that is that it is nature versus nurture, but what you’ve got is both, right? Yeah, you’ve got someone who’s got the same genetic makeup, someone who had the same formative year experience, but yet, at the age of 14, they go different directions, and their lives unfold very, very different. And it’s just interesting to think about as a parent. I think you always think about like, how long does what I do as a parent matter? And there’s a lot of research out there that shows like it’s the first few years, those are so formative, right? Yeah, but what I love about the book is, yes, those first years are formative, but it also shows that that influence does not end at 14, even though it’s less than it was when you’re young. These two girls take very different paths from the age of 14 largely based on the environment there.

Catherine Gray  12:03

Yeah, I think everything that is coming out recently says that the first three years are the most key. And if you get those right, it’s almost like you’re fine. But I also think that launch into adulthood those years of I would define it as 14 to 21 especially with so many young adults living at home now. I mean, I Rick showed back to my home many times over my 20s and even early 30s. So it’s so important that the way that you’re sort of finished and pushed into the world, and the messages that you get in adolescence, when you’re figuring out who you are and also how you know romantic relationships come into play, and also your use of substances come into play as well. Yeah, and you know, we often do what our parents do rather than what they say we should do. So it was really fun to play with, and also because the same set of characters in each timeline are doing different things, and there’s that butterfly effect. So in the timeline where Fern stays with her father, who’s wrestling with a savage addiction to alcohol, because she spends a lot more time with him, the effect on him is different than in the timeline when she leaves right and he becomes famous in the other timeline for his music, because he’s really talented musician, and that has an impact as well. I really wanted to explore also the idea that money doesn’t necessarily solve things. Yes, in many ways, it can make being okay harder, because you have the money to numb the consequences and pay to get yourself out of trouble, almost, and if you’re surrounded by yes people as well, that can have a delayed effect on any sort of self realization and improvement that you want to make. So I wanted to play with that as well. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  14:03

it’s really fascinating the way that unfolds. And I think what you said there is really important about adolescents in that we put into action what we’ve learned about romantic relationships. Yeah, and again, by and large, that’s when substances, you know, drugs, alcohol, come online for us. And what I think is interesting about the two characters, and you mentioned this in an email to me, is, you know, thinking about their attachment styles. We’ve done episodes before about attachment styles, anxious attached versus avoidantly attached versus securely attached, right? And neither of the girls is securely attached, and that happened early, right? That’s when that forms. It forms early on. And so neither of them had a life that would have been securely attached. But it is interesting that in those adolescent years, their attachment styles, avoidant and anxious, come to the play. They each have a different one. And so I think it further shows this. Idea how? Yes, a lot of things are formative in those first few years, but they’re not definitive. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  15:06

there’s a fourth attachment style that often people don’t read about. It’s disorganized attachment, which basically means that you’re both. I love

Eric Zimmer  15:15

that phrase too. I mean, you could just call it like both or dual attachment styles, but the fact that it’s called disorganized, and I think I have that one cracks me up, like just disorder, like, who knows what’s going to happen could

Catherine Gray  15:30

go either way. Yeah, basically, I think the easiest way of thinking about it. So John Bowlby, who, I believe, came up with the theory of attachment styles and did a lot of ground breaking work on it in the 60s, he theorized that it happens in the first five years of life, and ultimately, if you have a secure, consistent, safe relationship and home life, then you are likely to grow up to be securely attached, whereas, if you do not, then you are likely to grow up to be either anxious, avoidant or both, which is disorganized, and I definitely relate that mostly I skew anxious, but that is because I’m very attracted to avoidant people, and so therefore that tweaks my anxious side, whereas when I have dated Secure people and also anxious people, I skew avoidant, but ultimately, what your subconscious is trying to do in this awful recreation of your early years is to stop you being stable and to almost keep things unstable, because that’s what you’re used to, and we repeat what we don’t repair. And so it’s almost if you do find yourself in a secure relationship, I will burn things down. I will blow them up. I will find a way to make them unstable. But the awareness of that is the key to changing it. So that’s why the two different versions of Fern, one of them skews anxious and one of them skews avoidant, because of the relationships that they’re in. And that was really fun to play with as well, and really made me think about myself. I think while I was writing the book, I did actually realize I am both, and before that, I would have told you that I was anxious because I really related to the avoidant character as well.

Eric Zimmer  17:15

Yeah, you more or less described the way I am in relationship, if I’m not bringing a lot of consciousness to it, which is, if you are attached to me, I’m going to run away. On the other hand, if you’re not attached to me, I’m going to chase you. But there’s going to be a certain amount of distance between us either way. And, yeah, right, just whichever way you move, I’m going to move the opposite way Exactly. It’s just perverse. I guess, perverse makes it sound like it’s a willful thing. It’s just baked into me. Now I’ve become very conscious of it, and I’m better able to work with it than I used to be. But that pattern, you know, haunted all my relationships until this one, yeah, if somebody

Catherine Gray  17:52

was really into me and they were like, I want this, you know, I want to get married and have kids with you, that there was nothing more likely to turn me off. I’ve had some psychologists describe it to me really brilliantly, and she said it’s like a box dance where you know, like you said, you always maintain that distance, so if somebody steps towards you, you step away. Yeah, and that just carries on and on and on and on until you finally break the pattern by being aware of those urges and impulses and trying to counter them. And I’m now engaged to a long term partner. We have a child together. We have a house, and he skews avoidant, and I’ve just sort of accepted that’s my fate. You know, I am destined to end up with avoidance. But thankfully, he is aware of being avoidant, and I’m very aware that that tweaks my anxious side so but it doesn’t mean that it’s not without challenges. It presents many challenges as dynamic, so we have to work with that constantly and be aware of it.

Eric Zimmer  18:53

Yeah. I think what’s interesting about that is, as you said, you know the pattern. I know my pattern, it doesn’t stop the feeling coming up, yeah, of wanting to pull away or wanting to grasp that still emerges within me. It’s just, as you said, I have most of the time enough awareness to go, Okay, hang on. That’s just, you know, an old pattern, and it’s similar to how we learn to work with not drinking early on, right? The desire to drink emerges, but we learn how to handle it differently, although I will say it is different in the sense that, at least for most people who are in long term recovery, the desire to drink or use just disappears, kind of vanishes, but the feelings that caused us to want to do that don’t, yeah,

Catherine Gray  19:40

that’s absolutely true. I think what happens is you just learn to deal with them in other ways. That’s maybe why it fades into complete obscurity, because you’ve actually just assembled a whole new toolbox of things that you do instead of drinking. And I’m now 11 years sober. I just turned 11 at the weekend. Yes, and I honestly never miss it, crave it, want it. It doesn’t even occur to me now, no matter what is going on in my life, like when I was talking about that postpartum rage that I experienced, my hand never itched for a drink, because that’s just not part of my coping strategy toolbox now, so I have just so many other ways that I deal with that. And yeah, it does fade, and it’s lovely.

Eric Zimmer  20:24

Yeah, yeah, I’m in Amsterdam right now, and I was a heavy marijuana smoker in my using days. I loved it. It was up there with alcohol. And I’ve been getting used to this over the last few years, as it’s become legal in parts of the US also, because with alcohol, I just became immune to it, because it was all around me all the time. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  20:47

it’s omnipresent. You literally can’t get away from it. That’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about how the legalization of marijuana could affect people who are in recovery from addiction from marijuana, yeah,

Eric Zimmer  20:57

because all of a sudden it’s showing up. Yeah, again, in a way that it hadn’t before. It also has the allure of, sometimes what a new drink will have to somebody who’s in recovery, like, oh, I never got to try that drink, right? It’s like, oh, there’s all these different types of weed I could try, and I could just go shopping for it. So even with that, though, my point in bringing that up is I walk by pot stores all the time here in Amsterdam, and it smells like weed outside of all of them. And I just have, it’s a flicker. It’s just a flicker of a like, Hmm, I used to like that, and then it just kind of dies away, you know? And it’s so minor, but it’s weird to see it occasionally brought up. I imagine it’s what would happen to me if suddenly they start selling heroin on street corners. I’d probably that that long dormant part of me would probably be like, Well, hold on, you know, like, I still won’t watch any sort of, like, needle being used in any way in a movie or on me. I, you know, close my eyes. I just, I don’t want to see it because it’s triggering. Yeah, that’s

Catherine Gray  21:57

so interesting. I’ve never thought about that. And that’s perhaps one of the reasons that with alcohol, you do have to become immune to the constant marketing and presence of it, because it is just everywhere. Even, you know, every single social event is the centerpiece of it, yeah? And so you’re sort of thrown into the fire. I’ve never thought about that, yeah, what an interesting way of thinking about it.

Eric Zimmer  22:41

We talked about nature versus nurture a little bit earlier. Let’s talk about nature versus nurture in the creation of addiction. Well, I

Catherine Gray  22:53

have done a lot of research on this for previous books, so I’m just going to quote you some of the studies that I’ve seen and things that experts have told me, but it’s quite commonly known that if one of your parents is addicted, then you are four times more likely to grow up to encounter addiction yourself. And what’s less commonly known is that the chart topping predisposition to later addiction is a traumatic childhood and when we think of trauma, we think of very extreme events, but actually childhood trauma includes things like just being routinely insulted by A caregiver, or moving house a lot, or bearing witness to a caregivers addiction, whether it’s a step parent or your actual parent. And so a lot of us would actually qualify for childhood trauma, and we don’t think we do. So there’s a test. It’s a really interesting test. It’s the A, C, E test, right? Yep, that you can look up and find out if you would fall under that umbrella. And so that seems to suggest that nurture, more than nature, is the thing that sort of activates addiction within and I think it often takes grip in adolescence, which is one of the reasons why I made phone 14, because I think that’s when it’s activated that because that’s often when we pick up alcohol or whatever other drug we later become addicted to, and that’s when it really sort of get teeth and claws into us. And there’s also very compelling evidence that shows that if you pick up young, which I did I was 12, so if you pick up before the age of 15, I think it is, you are again four times more likely to later become addicted. Because it makes sense. Our brains aren’t fully formed until we’re 25 so if we are drinking routinely to medicate anxiety or whatever other emotion. In our early teens, then we’re going to become more attached to it,

Eric Zimmer  25:03

right? We just have more time for our brain to alter in the negative ways that alcohol or drugs alter the brain. Yeah, and I know this question was of particular interest to you as you were about to have a child, and it certainly was of great interest to me, unbelievably, 2526 years ago, that my son was born because his mother and I were both heroin addicts. So it was this, like, are we birthing a destined to be an addict child? So talk to me about that for you, you know, from a personal sense, well,

Catherine Gray  25:38

that was one of the reasons that I arrived at motherhood so late, because in my 30s now I know so I thought I don’t want to have a child. So from the ages of 33 to 39 if you’d asked me, I would have said, No, that’s not for me. But when I had a lot of therapy around my own childhood, I realized that the reason I didn’t want to have a child was because I thought I was going to be a terrible parent and B that I was going to birth a child that was pre destined to become an addict, and therefore I would be subjected to that terrible ordeal of watching the person love the most go through what you’ve been through, and knowing that you can’t really do anything to help until they ask for help. So a lot of that research is what informed my decision to then become a parent. And I was very lucky that I was able to in my 40s, and now I feel much more at peace. My daughter does have a higher chance, but it’s not as simple as you’re just four times more likely to become addicted. You inherit characteristics that can predispose you to addiction, so things like anxiety, introversion, but also spontaneity and extroversion, I believe. So those characteristics you can inherit them, and therefore it depends on the home environment as to where those characteristics lead you. So that’s the way I see it now, and I’ve made all these promises to her that she’s completely unaware of because she’s doing in that I will always endeavor to make her feel safe. That was the word that my research kept coming back to, was feeling safe. That is the way that you can give your child the best possible start. And that doesn’t necessarily look like a nuclear family that stays in one town forever more with a white picket fence and a Labrador, you know, right? That doesn’t necessarily look like that, but certainly so if you look at my childhood, we moved seven times before I was 18, and I was adjacent to three very acrimonious breakups, and so that didn’t make me feel say, yeah. And so there’s lots of things that, but it doesn’t necessarily like I say mean that I will stay with my partner forever, or I will stay where I live now, it’s just that I will be much more conscious of the impact that it could have on her, that inconsistency. So no matter what I do, I will try and provide an environment that isn’t hostile, because that’s something that I experience and but I’m not going to be perfect. That’s another thing you just have to reconcile. Yeah, life is going to throw me all these curveballs, and there are going to be choices that I make that are imperfect as a parent. That’s just how it is, but as much as possible, I want to point myself in that direction.

Eric Zimmer  28:39

Yeah, it’s a beautiful intention. My son is, as I mentioned, much older, and I guess that you know, you never know. But up till now, he shows no signs of addiction that the way I describe it, he doesn’t have the desperate personality I did, right? Yeah, even my teen years before I started using, there was just a desperation about me that he’s just never seemed to have, and so I think we hopefully did okay. But his mom and I split when he was two and a half, right, like she fell in love with somebody else. I mean, I ended up being far and away the stable parent, which blows my mind that anybody would apply that to me, given the fact that, you know, when I had him, I was three years off being a heroin addict. So for now, he seems okay. That must be so satisfying to see it is. And, you know, I think the satisfying thing for me is I don’t believe by any way, shape or form, I did it perfectly. There’s some things I can look at and be like, Oh, boy. I wish they could do a do over on some of that. And I know that at every age I’ve looked at him, I’ve been able to say he is more mentally and emotionally well than I was at that age.

Catherine Gray  29:50

But you are modeling for him that a person can be very happy without any drug, yeah, of any type. So that has a. Massive impact on a child, and something that I try and do with my daughter every night, I’ve read this research that says it’s really good for them to do we have a dance party. And when I was teen, I would describe myself as very buttoned up. I was very tense and very anxious. And when I discovered alcohol, I was like, this is the answer. This is the magic solution to my constant feeling that I’m almost locked within my body and I can’t let go and I I’m really quiet, and I can’t express myself, and I can’t dance or talk to people that I fancy or whatever I wanted to do when I was a teen. And I try and model that with my daughter by throwing myself around the kitchen like a total loon to try and show her and to encourage her to have that lack of inhibition that made me feel like I needed something in order to disinhibit. Yeah, yeah, your son has had the most incredible role model in that in

Eric Zimmer  31:01

some respects, the other thing that we did is his mother and I, you know, started talking to him as early as it seemed like he could actually understand what we are talking about, about the fact that we were both addicts, and how destructive it was to our lives, and the fact that, given that he is the child of that he is more predisposed to it, and so he should approach substances with more caution than the average person would. Yeah, I don’t think it stopped him from experimenting, but I do think there was an idea in his mind of like, okay, I need to be a little more careful here.

Catherine Gray  31:36

Yeah, I think that’s so important. I do remember having a chat with my father along those lines as well, but it was too late by that point. Yeah, and I was 17, and I remember us going, I remember it so clearly as well. I was going for a walk on the beach, and he clearly clocked that I had a growing addiction to alcohol already. I was so shabby, hung over, I could barely talk. And he said to me, you know, 20 or so, or whatever he was at the time actually would have been more like 10. And so you have a greater likelihood so just to be aware of that, you need to be careful with alcohol. But by that point, I was fully in Yeah, and I thought, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You know, it will be different for me.

32:27

I will be able to outside it, unlike you. And no,

Catherine Gray  32:33

yeah, yeah. So I think it’s great that you got that message in early, and I will allow my daughter to read my books whenever she’s you know, probably very young

Eric Zimmer  32:46

as we look at the two girls, they have their own different set of problems. You alluded to this a little bit before, but the one who takes on the name flick grows up in a very wealthy London home, and I find it interesting because you talk about how self obsessed she becomes with her appearance, which she gets largely from her mother. And it was just striking how well you wrote about how uncomfortable that is.

Catherine Gray  33:17

Yeah, I think that’s something that a lot of women of my generation grow up with. But again, it’s everyone, isn’t it? You know, everyone’s surrounded with images of perfection, and that’s now being countered by a lot of different sorts of images. But I certainly I remember taking two hours to get ready for college. I mean, that’s and if I was having a bad hair day or a bad skin day, I just wouldn’t go even though I was obsessed with learning the type of college student that would hand in extra essays. And my tutor was like, What are you doing? I don’t want to mark these extra essays. We’ve got enough to do that. Something that was paramount to my self esteem was looking perfect or as perfect as I could, and so I poured a lot of that into flick, because I do think that relates to that whole love addiction, anxiously attached feeling like your outsides have to be as flawless as possible in order to be accepted as a person. Oh my gosh. I do not miss those days. I mean, I constantly carried around this little magnifying mirror and would check my face before I met anyone, just in case there was anything in their teeth or anything out of place. And now I couldn’t be more different. I just basically only put makeup on for press events or whatever. So it’s so nice when you break free of that.

Eric Zimmer  34:38

Yeah, I interviewed somebody recently. She wrote a book called boy mom, and it was about raising boys, and she takes a similar approach to how you described your books, which are, there’s a thread of memoir in it, and then there’s a lot of journalistic research, right? And one of the things that she found was that more and more boys are taking on that. Oh, I can imagine which I mean, for me, I mean, I feel like I had it from the very beginning. I said to her in the interview, you know, comic books I used to read had the Charles Atlas comics in them. Charles Atlas was a bodybuilding system, and basically it showed like this skinny kid on a beach getting beat up or pushed around, and then he goes and buys the Charles Atlas comics gets big and bulky and strong, and now all the women love him. And so, I mean, even for a boy that was marketed so young to me,

Catherine Gray  35:29

yeah, now I’m thinking about all the superhero stories, and with boys, it was often if you have muscles, then everything will be solved. Yes,

Eric Zimmer  35:36

yep, yep. It’s a thing we all wrestle with, and it is good to see more body positivity things coming out. I still think it’s a long way to go, but it’s some progress. There’s a particularly telling part in the book where you’re describing Fern slash flick, the one girl who split into two her mother, and in the story, her mom kind of gives her up at like, age four. Is that about the time it is, or age seven,

Catherine Gray  36:05

six and a half? Seven? Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  36:07

yep. So she just basically says to her dad, here, take her and the book starts to explore her experience up to that point. Yeah, definitely, the mother’s experience. And there’s a particularly telling part where, in my notes, I title it the mother Inquisition, which you write about, like, did you have a natural birth? Did you have pain relief? Are you breastfeeding? You know? Are you swaddling enough? Are you reading to her? All these ways that we like interrogate mothers to make sure they’re doing the right thing. Where did that come from? Personal Experience

Catherine Gray  36:42

entirely, because I found that when I was pregnant, and also, I would say it’s fallen off now, but I’ve curated my life so that I’m less exposed to it. I’m not in touch with any sort of NCT group or anything like that. NCT is in the UK. It’s something that you go to when you’re pregnant, and you meet lots of other parents, okay, also in the same stage of the process as you now, I actually ended up because I did feel there’s just so many messages when you’re pregnant that your body is no longer your own, and people feel entitled to a pine all over your pregnant body, and you’re told to do things and not do other things, and eat this and don’t eat that, and stop running or keep running. And you know, everyone seems to have an opinion, and that then continues into the early years, where lots of people interrogating you as to how you’re doing it and whether you’re going to use baby rice and start weaning it four months, or whether you go up to six months or, you know, and often the only right answer is the answer that you give that matches how they did

Eric Zimmer  37:54

it exactly, exactly. So

Catherine Gray  37:57

I did some things that were potentially controversial, like I co slept once my baby was big enough, and I breastfed for a lot longer than some people would. I did it until she runs. I’m still doing it and she’s over two, yeah. So I really found that in order to stay sane, you just have to detach from all of that, which is one of the reasons why I actually ended up leaving the NCT Whatsapp group that I was a part of, because I really felt myself being drawn into that. And you just have to go off instinct and make your own decisions and say, okay, yeah, thanks for the advice, and then do whatever you want to do. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  38:36

yeah. There’s so much of it. There’s so much of it. I remember we parented Jordan similarly, the way you’re describing like he slept with us and he breastfed for much longer. And people told me over and over, you’ll never get him out of your bed. He’ll never learn to sleep, right? You know? And there just came a time where all of a sudden it just seemed like it was the right natural time, and he went off to his own bed, and everything was fine, yeah. And you made the joke there, and you made it in the book, which is the only acceptable answer is the one that you did. You know, like when you’re asking somebody, because I think we’re all insecure about the choices we make as parents, and so when somebody’s doing something different, we read that as, oh, I didn’t do it right, yeah, which we then turn on its head and make it you’re doing it wrong in order so that we don’t feel wrong. Yeah, we

Catherine Gray  39:23

like people to match us, and so whenever I’m talking to parents to be or new parents, I try my absolute best to just keep my mouth shut unless they ask me directly for advice. Yeah, then I will give it, but I will very much positive in the context of this worked for us. Yeah, every parent and every child is different, so that seems to be the way around it is to remember that you are an individual who had a very individual experience, and everyone’s going to have a different way. Thank.

Eric Zimmer  40:18

That advice giving or thinking that the way you did it is the way everyone should do it also applies to recovery, right? Yeah, we see this again and again. Unfortunately, it most often comes out of people who are in 12 step traditions, insisting that everybody do it their way, although there is an equally large group of people who insist that 12 step programs are garbage. But it’s this, here’s how I did it. It’s the only way to do it, which is patently insane. Yeah, I know

Catherine Gray  40:46

that rhetoric, and I think it comes from all paths of recovery, the you know, this is how I did it. So this is the right way, and that’s why I actively rail against it in all of my writing about addiction and recovery, I just say there is no one way, and you just need to try everything and work out what fits you best. It entirely depends on you as a person and your internal beliefs. Like for instance, I discovered having left 12 step that one of the reasons it didn’t fit with me, even though I learned a lot there in the six months that I was there, I innately knew that I would need to move away from it in order to continue was because I have something called an internal locus of control, and I’ve since been told by a therapist, and that means that I don’t feel comfortable when I’m sort of making things dependent on external influences, even though I know that the higher power doesn’t necessarily have to be a theistic, you know, bearded God as you know it can be a god as you understand them. I literally don’t believe in any sort of like force of good out there, which is a bit depressing, actually. I literally believe, you know, we’re bored, we die, and that’s it, and there’s no sort of unseen force looking after me. So I found that I continually butted up against that aspect of the program, and I was having to contort myself quite a lot to sort of fit in with it. And so I just found other ways and but I would never presume to tell anyone that My way was the right way, because I really believe that every recovery path is different, even if it does follow a traditional mode. I do believe it’s always slightly different, even if it looks the same. And so, yeah, people just have to find their own way. There is no one way, right,

Eric Zimmer  42:41

right? There absolutely isn’t. And I think we’ve gotten to a place where more and more people are acknowledging that thankfully, you know, I ran into some of the same challenges in AA, although it saved my life twice, so I’m extraordinarily grateful to it where I eventually felt like the contortions I was having to do to translate everything just got to be a bit much for me. There were some other challenges I had also that had to do with how what being an alcoholic meant to me and what it seemed to mean to a lot of people in 12 step programs, and those increasingly diverged as I got better. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  43:19

I found that too things like I would no longer refer to myself as an alcoholic. Now I do if I’m in circles where that’s the term that everyone uses, but about four years sober, I let that term fall away, and I did it very quietly, because I was a bit scared to be honest, I had internalized the belief that if I did allow that turn to fall away, then I would slip into denial and start thinking I could moderate again. But for me, two things co exist. I no longer believe I’m addicted to alcohol, but I also believe that if I were to pick up again, I would very quickly become addicted to alcohol. And so I approach it in a very neuroscientific way. So I believe that the path in my brain that was addicted to alcohol does still exist, even though it’s disused and, you know, overgrown, and it’s more of a trail that’s been forgotten through some woods, whereas once it was a six lane highway, yeah, yeah, but it does still exist there. So I will never drink again. I will never believe that I couldn’t moderate because I don’t believe I can. But equally, I do not feel like I am currently addicted to alcohol. So it doesn’t feel right for me to call myself an alcoholic these days, that I’m 11 years sober.

Eric Zimmer  44:37

Yeah, I think I still refer to myself as an alcoholic and addict, but I do it because it’s just a shorthand for me of saying something similar to what you just said, Yeah, I clearly am not addicted to alcohol, because I haven’t used it. I haven’t used a mind altering chemical in 15 years, so I’m clearly not addicted. I like the neuro scientific thing, because the other. There danger. This is the thought that sometimes gets in my brain, and it is the one that says, Well, sure, you use drugs and alcohol because you didn’t know how to cope with the world, but now you know how to cope with the world. So perhaps, and that’s what got me, after eight years of sobriety, back to drinking. It was that exact line of thinking. You’ve done all this work, you’ve done all this recovery, you make good decisions in all aspects of your life. I make sure it’ll be fine. And of course, it wasn’t. And so for me, I just basically stay with a risk reward calculus, which is the reward, if it went right, would be that a time or two a week I got a slight buzz on that would be the reward at best. The risk is everything, right? The risk is my entire life, and I’m just like, well, that’s a crazy trade. Like, I wouldn’t do that for anything else. If somebody was like, Well, you know, twice a week you could come here and you could play this game and you’d be happy for an hour, but you’re betting at the same time that if that doesn’t go right, I’ll take everything you own. I’d be, like, that’s a crazy bet. Like, no, like, that’s not, that’s another terrible so that’s kind of where I am. But I love your neuro scientific idea too, that that pathway still exists. And yeah, because that was my experience after being sober eight years and picking up and using again, was it wasn’t immediate. I didn’t immediately go back. I never went back to using heroin, but over the course of a couple years, I ended up just as sick as I had been in the first place. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  46:37

and I really do believe that would happen to me, and what you were just saying about the risk reward analysis really reminds me of that recovery saying that using or drinking is temporary fun with permanent consequences. Oh, yeah, I love that, and I think about that a lot. And also it’s the addictive voice. So I also use something called addictive voice recognition back in the early years now. Now my addictive voice is non existent. I don’t hear it. But if that voice were to pipe up, the voice saying, but you’re, you know, it’s been 11 years, surely you could just maybe have one or two. I’d be like, No, I know what that voice is, and that is just my addiction, yeah, in a different form, because it will take so many different, wily, conniving, you know, there’s that thing about it being cunning and powerful it is. So I would shut that down immediately. There’s a nuance there. Even though, in the right circles, I would use the term addict and alcoholic, yeah, because I’m not against those terms. It’s just that ordinarily, I would describe myself as an ex at it that feels more accurate to where I’m at. Yep,

Eric Zimmer  47:43

there’s a line in the book where flick, which is the version that moves to the rich London home, has a friend named Sita. Is that how you would pronounce it? Yeah, that’s right. And Sita accuses her of being manipulative. And flick says, Well, what do you mean? Manipulative? And she says, you know, massaging the narrative for your own means, and I’m reading what you said. Flick didn’t understand why that would even warrant comment. Wasn’t that what everyone did, wasn’t that just being good at life.

Catherine Gray  48:14

This came directly from my own experience, because I recall I was probably one year out from sobriety, one of my friends saying that I had become very, very manipulative. And similarly to flick, I didn’t even understand what the word meant. I couldn’t wrap my head around the word because I just had assumed that everyone did, that everyone manipulated the narrative, and tried to control how other people saw them, and tried to get the best results for them. So I’m still manipulative. Now I know that I have that in me, because it was so much a part of me first 33 years of my life, and I do often have to stand back and think, Okay, what am I trying to gain here. Am I withholding parts of information in order to make people think about me a certain way? And I really have to pull myself back and just be straight down the line, and, you know, counter that manipulative urge that I want to go with all the

Eric Zimmer  49:16

time. Yeah, the problem is that if none of that is as straightforward as just drink or don’t drink, right? Because we all are, to some degree, even without knowing it, controlling the narrative that we tell ourselves. I mean, the way we present to the world, like that, is kind of baked into us, and there’s a subtle form of it that I recognized in later years, right? There was the obvious manipulation, where I’m manipulating something to get what I want, right? Yeah, but there’s another type of manipulation, which is that I’m trying to control your emotional response. That’s

Catherine Gray  49:53

it that really hits the nail on the head. I think for that reason, sometimes I will. Protects. And then I will delete it, because I know that I am trying to admit a certain response from the person that I’m texting. And then I will bring it back, and I will remove information that is, you know, designed to evoke pity or admiration or whatever it is, you know, my manipulative author he has come up with, and I just keep it as straight as possible, for want of a better word, and that’s how I fight against it. Yeah, I do think all of us have the capacity to be manipulative, and being aware of it is just half of the battle, really.

Eric Zimmer  50:38

As you were saying that, it made me laugh a little bit. I was thinking in my mind like this being thoughtful means that I have to retype texts and emails over and, oh, like, you know, I write it out, and I’m like, hang on, let me I need to think about, you know, it’s just funny. But the subtle nuance of this that I even realized was that I was manipulating people with quote, unquote good intentions, because I would think they can’t handle what I’m going to say or what I’m going to say to them, is going to make them upset, and I don’t want them to be upset. Yeah, it’s a whole nother level of withholding honesty, which in certain situations, I think actually makes a lot of sense. And in other situations, if you’re trying to be intimate and close with people, is a terrible idea.

Catherine Gray  51:27

Yeah, it really is, because that leads to resentment. Because if you’re not being honest with people how you feel, then you’re running the danger of nurturing resentment. So it’s really hard, though I know exactly what you mean, and I like to be as nice as possible. But also have people think, well, of me, yeah,

Eric Zimmer  51:47

of course. Yeah. So there’s another great line in the book where you’re talking about flick where she realizes she’s a people pleaser, like she desperately wants to please people, but she has the unfortunate habit of displeasing people. Time, yeah, personal experience, yeah, definitely,

Catherine Gray  52:05

personal experience. I promise the entire book is an autobiography. Just the lines that you’re plucking out are really, are really just things that I’ve experienced. That is one of the things that I think is so true of people who come into recovery, and just people in general, is that so many of us intend to be or are driven to people pleasing, and then we accidentally end up people displeasing, because actually, it doesn’t really work. It just ends up going very, very wrong. And so that’s something that I fight against on daily basis as well. It’s a lifelong battle there.

Eric Zimmer  52:41

What I’ve found is the longer I sort of, I never know what to call it. I don’t really like the phrase, the longer I’m on my journey, or the deeper I go into trying to be the best version of myself, maybe that’s the best way to say it. The deeper I go into that, the more subtleties I see that 10 years ago, I would never have seen, I never would have thought of that way in which I am, you know, not being the best version of myself. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  53:07

it’s so true. And I continually have a problem with my relationship with the word no, and I really have to work on that, especially with from a work point of view, because I want people to like me, and therefore I say yes to far too much, and then I burn out. So it’s something that I do battle with very regular basis.

Eric Zimmer  53:31

I wrestle with this a little bit too, and some of it is that I don’t want to say no to people. The other thing that drives it, and I don’t know if this is part of it for you, but when you’re like you, you’re an author, right? You make your living by people buying your things, right? So when people ask you to do something, it’s often the reason you do it is because you’re getting your stuff in front of other people. And so there’s certainly a I don’t want to say no to people, but then there’s also, in my case, a fear, like, I can’t turn down any opportunity. Yeah,

Catherine Gray  54:01

a fear of becoming irrelevant. Yes, yes, they’re all going away. Have to go and work in tefca on the counter. You know, every creative has that fear, because they’ve often worked so hard to get where they are right, and spent so many years. I mean, I’ve spent many years doing second jobs and scrambling to get by, and it’s only really in the last few years that things have really come together. So there is a constant alarm, but it might all disappear overnight just because you’ve said no to coming on one event.

Eric Zimmer  54:37

You didn’t go to that one place you were asked to speak where there were six people and it just it tanked your entire career late in the book. This quote from Carl Jung that goes something like, we are not what has happened to us comes up and one of the characters reacts fairly strongly to that idea. Say more. Yeah.

Catherine Gray  54:58

So the exact quote is. Something like we are not what has happened to us. We are what we choose to become. And I take some serious umbrage to the first part of that quote, that we’re not what’s happened to us, and so does the character in the book flick, because I think that’s naive, right? I really don’t think that you can erase the first 18 years of your life or whatever, and start afresh and decide who you’re going to become now that you’re an adult, and you’re supposedly sort of free of your childhood and your parental influence, because I just don’t think that ever the case. I mean, we now know. We now know so much more about it. We know that the body stores early experiences and the nervous system reacts before we do consciously, and that’s why often we have outsized reactions to things, because they remind us of the childhood wound and all that sort of thing. So I do really think that in order to move past that and start to be able to choose who you become, you really have to go deep and do the work at the risk of sounds like a cliche. Otherwise, if you don’t have the awareness of why you say, for instance, react in an outsized way, if somebody delays responding to your message and knowing why that hurts, you can’t choose your reaction. So I do see it in so many people that I think in our 20s, we often just sort of ricochet around in reaction to our childhood and often repeat our parents mistakes, or go too far the other way and go the polar opposite. And it’s only really in our 30s, 40s and beyond that, we begin to be able to choose who we’re going to become, and make more conscious decisions about the person we want to be and how we want to parent. So it was something that I really wanted to sum up in the book, and I feel satisfied that I have, yeah, I

Eric Zimmer  56:57

think so. I was walking down the street the other day and I saw a quote on a card from Jack Kerouac, and I don’t remember it exactly, but it said something like, nothing behind me and everything ahead of me about being on the road. And I was like, Well, no, not exactly. Like, no, we are a result of the countless causes and conditions that have come together to make us who we are today. Yeah, you can’t unwind that far enough, right? Even if you start to go, Well, I think I might be this way. We’re just making it up to a certain degree. Am I that way because my mom did this? Or am I that way because Johnny in third grade punched me over a juice box? Or do I think that because some musician I loved when I was 14 said, I mean, it’s just this. Can’t sort it out. Yeah, you can make some attempts to see what some of the big things were, but we never really know fully. No,

Catherine Gray  57:48

we don’t, but I think there is a middle ground to be found. So something that I do tend to do is I’ve been in and out of therapy. I’ve done therapy really three big times in my life, but I’ve always had an end in sight, and for me, I don’t want to stay in forever, because I do think that there is a happy medium to be found between it’s that bumper sticker don’t look that you’re not going that way. You do need to look at that, but then you also need to go that way. Yes. So I think both can be true, that what has come behind us, you know, we’ve already been through, doesn’t form where we go. But then also that there is a point where you’ve done enough work on it that you can really start to choose your own trajectory.

Eric Zimmer  58:36

Can we use the line near the end of the book to sum that up, or is that too much, I

Catherine Gray  58:41

think we can So towards the end of the book, this isn’t too much of a spoiler, because there’s plenty in the book that isn’t surprised with lots of twists and turns, you know, the murder mystery and another big reveal. But towards the end of the book, one of the versions of her flick rewrites that Carl young quote, and it becomes we are what had happened to us, but now I choose who I become, and if anything could sum up my motto for life, it would be that I think that’s

Eric Zimmer  59:09

a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Catherine, it’s always such a pleasure to have you on I can’t recommend the new book highly enough. I’ve loved all your writing, but this novel, I was so excited I just read it, and was one of those I didn’t want to put it down, kind of books from start to end. So bravo.

Catherine Gray  59:25

Thank you.

Episode Transcript:

00:02:06 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Ruth, welcome to the show.

00:02:08 – Ruth Whippman
Thanks so much for having me on.

00:02:09 – Eric Zimmer
It’s nice to have you back on. We had you on maybe four or five years ago and I remember really enjoying the conversation, so I’m glad we’re getting to do it again. We’re going to be discussing your latest book, which is called Boy Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchildren and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear and the grandchild stops. Think about it for a Second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:03:03 – Ruth Whippman
First, thanks for having me back on the show. And so this parable, I think it speaks to the fact that we are all complex beings. We are all both good and bad. These qualities exist within all of us. And there’s no point denying that. There’s no point pretending that we’re all virtue and there’s nothing wrong or that we’re sort of better than everybody else. But I think it also points to the fact that we have some agency in our lives, that we don’t have full control and the other wolf will always be there, but we have some choices around how we live and what our values are.

00:03:37 – Eric Zimmer
I love that, you know, these things are in everyone. And I think that’s relevant to your book because it’s a book about masculinity, but you can’t really talk about masculinity without talking about femininity. Right. They exist on a pole. And as I walked away from your book, the one thing that sort of landed on me, and it’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the years, is that the ideal person really has a blend of those characteristics. They’re not all masculine, they’re not all feminine. And to force ourselves into being all one way is damaging to us.

00:04:13 – Ruth Whippman
I agree. And I think also I’d rather see us moving away from labeling qualities and traits with a gender. So whether we’re talking about bravery or courage or strength or physical toughness, which are associated with masculinity traditionally, or nurturing, caregiving, empathy, emotionality, which are traditionally feminine coded traits, in a way, I’d rather see a world where we’re all able to embrace all of those things. They don’t have a gender. Exactly.

00:04:41 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. That’s an interesting way to think of it. It’s so deeply conditioned to think of things that way. And obviously those didn’t get made up in a vacuum. Right. Over the millennia that there have been humans, there’s been observations made, and it said, hey, more men seem to have this and women have that. But I agree with you that maybe taking them out of a gendered context makes them more applicable to everybody.

00:05:05 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. And more accessible to everybody. Because I think, and I just want to state here, there’s nothing bad about masculinity and there’s nothing bad about Femininity. They’re both associated with all kinds of wonderful things. It’s just that when we use that as a framework for, you know, a standard that we have to meet in order to be worthy, I think that’s where the problems come in. Whether that’s. If you’re growing up as a boy and you feel you have to be, you know, tough and strong and invulnerable and not show your feelings and not be like a woman, you know, that’s quite an exhausting and kind of debilitating, an unhealthy standard, really, to try to meet, or whether you’re a woman who has to feels they have to be demure and submissive and not have agency or pretty or, you know, like an ornamental kind of object, and that is the standard you feel you have to meet. I’d rather that we just allowed everybody to embrace whatever sides of themselves they would like to.

00:05:58 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. So the book is a deeply personal book because you are sort of trying to balance a couple things inside yourself, Right? One is your deeply held feminist values, and the other is the fact that when you start the book, you have two boys and you’re pregnant with your third boy. So there’s this moment trying to embrace these feminine ideals. I’ve got boys. The culture is changing in such a way that some of the problems with masculinity around me too, movement and all that sort of coming out, and you’re trying to figure out, like, how do you raise boys in all of this? So it’s a deeply personal book. As you walk through it, it’s also deeply personal in the chap that you’re having with your boys.

00:06:42 – Ruth Whippman
The book is a mixture of memoir and reporting and analysis. But the memoir part of it opens in 2017, when I am eight and a half, nearly nine months pregnant with my third boy. And the MeToo movement is just, like, exploding all around us. So, you know, Weinstein’s been exposed, and it kind of, you know, as I write in the book, it seems to go within, like, a few days from Harvey Weinstein as a sex offender to every man on the planet is a sex offender. You know, it’s just like one after another after another, this, like, horror show of bad news about men and, like, the whole conversation about men and masculinity and the kind of harm that men have inflicted on the world takes on this, like, very new and very different flavor and kind of a scary flavor and especially a scary flavor if you’re about to give birth to your third boy.

00:07:34 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:07:34 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. And so it was this very conflicted moment for me, both politically and personally. You know, personally, I’m there going, how do I raise a good son? Are men just hopeless? You know, is it just that whatever I do, you know, it’s inevitable that he’s going to end up as being either some kind of predator or a school shooter or a, you know, rapist or something like that? You know, that’s the kind of angsty state of mind that I was in. But then, like, politically, I’m like, I’m a feminist. I believe that so much of this is socialized and we can do something differently. But there’s part of me that’s, like, very exhilarated and happy about the me too conversation. It’s like, finally, women have a voice. We can call out this bad behavior. We can finally speak to it, and people are listening for the first time ever. You know, I feel like pretty much every woman feels like they’ve been saying this stuff for millennia, and nobody, nobody has been listening. So finally, people are listening. Finally, women have a voice. But at the same time, you know, the mother part of me is like, I’m raising boys. I feel defensively. I don’t want to think of them as being toxic or terrible or inevitably going to cause harm. So it was this very conflicted, very defensive, very complicated moment that the book opens and it carries on. You know, the memoir part of the book lasts for the next five years until my youngest son goes off to kindergarten. And the whole time, we’re in the kind of shadow of this wider cultural conversation about masculinity, toxic masculinity. What is it? How do we do differently? How do we do better? And where are we going with men and boys?

00:09:07 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. And I think that what you do such a great job of in this book is you said it’s complicated. Right. You keep the complicated in it because this becomes sort of a political issue. Right. And each side, I often think, lacks the nuance to have conversations that are actually useful. And that’s as true of the way that I lean politically and the other side. And you do a very nice job of keeping that in there and the struggles with it. I thought maybe we could move into asking you about the title. Right. Reimagining Boyhood. But it’s the last part of the title I’d like to get you to say something about, which is impossible. Masculinity. What do you mean by that?

00:09:55 – Ruth Whippman
So this was a really interesting process coming up with that title, because what are we saying here? And Actually, the British version of this book, they chose to replace the word impossible with the word toxic. And I didn’t like that choice. I preferred the impossible masculinity framing of this rather than toxic, because I feel like masculinity has become impossible from all sides. So on the one hand, like all of the old pressures of masculinity, you know, the man up, be tough, be strong, don’t express your emotions, don’t be vulnerable, don’t be a wuss, don’t be a pussy. You know, those pressures are still very much in circulation for boys. They still have to subscribe to that. They still are living in fear of, as I think many men are of, like being exposed as feminine or as not a real man. You know, there’s this standard that they feel they have to live up to. But now there’s this sort of voice from the left or a sort of newer voice which is, you know, boys, you’re toxic, you’re harmful. You know, your very being is. You know, you’re just kind of like a predator in waiting. Whatever you do, you’re wrong. And it’s also, it’s time for you to shut up. It’s everybody else’s turn. Don’t speak to your pain, don’t speak to your experiences, because men have been listened to for so long and it’s time for everybody else to have a go. So I think many men and boys are in this moment of just feeling like this is impossible, you know, from all sides. You know, where do we go with this? You know, on the one hand, we’re supposed to be so privileged and powerful, but we don’t feel that way. We still have all of these old problems that nobody’s really addressing or seeing, and nobody really has any empathy. Like, it feels like we have run out of goodwill for men and boys completely. We’re done. And so I think what I wanted to capture with the idea of impossible masculinity was just, it’s kind of impossible from everywhere. We’re in this moment in the culture wars where things are very complex and boys and men just don’t really know how to be. And I prefer that to toxic masculinity. I think there’s something about the phrase toxic masculinity, and I believe it was a really important phrase in its moment. I think it really spoke to a very specific phenomenon which is really important to call out. But I think for this generation of boys who weren’t the ones doing this stuff, I think they just see it as so shaming and so shutting down of conversations rather than opening them up, that I kind of didn’t want to perpetuate. That.

00:12:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, the book resonated with me in a lot of ways as a man, because I don’t think the pressures you’re describing are new. And what I mean is I believe that. And my generation might be the generation that first, I think, started to really face this a little bit more, my dad’s generation, a little bit, but not as much where, if you were paying attention, you started to realize that the Be a man story that was the traditional one, was problematic. There was a lot of encouragement from. And again, I think this does start a lot on the liberal side and in communities that are more psychologically informed, spiritually informed. And I don’t mean maybe not Christianity, but alternative spirituality, this idea that that way of being a man isn’t right, and it’s problematic, so you should be different. And so that tension I have felt my whole life. Right. I grew up, in a sense, my father was very angry, very manly, and I grew up with a I will not be like that. But that’s a reaction to the standard. Right. And it’s still a way of, like, being in the box, so to speak. Right. It’s just a slightly different box. So I just really resonated with a lot of that. I was surprised by how much I resonated with some of the incels. We’ll get to that in a second. A really powerful book because I think I have wrestled for a long, long time with what does it mean to be a man and what do I do with these characteristics that, again, maybe we get to a day where we don’t gender them, but that are traditionally thought of as male, Those are in me, I feel them. Those energies are there. To shove them away is problematic, but to let them just run wild is also, you know, can be very problematic.

00:14:22 – Ruth Whippman
Right. You know, one thing that I found when I was reporting and researching this book and talking to a lot of boys is one thing that I think is really hard for men and boys is that they don’t have a very good vocabulary or sort of, you know, just a good language and a good framework to really talk about this stuff. And I think that there’s all these ways in which men are sort of subtly socialized, not to really talk about their pain in different ways or not to really talk about their issues. And so it’s like, I think a lot of boys are feeling like, I don’t know how to be. I hope everything feels wrong. But I don’t really have the framework to talk about it. And I think that we have done as a society a pretty good job over the last few decades of giving women and girls a vocabulary to talk about the issues that face them. So it’s not that those issues have gone away, but I think, like, pretty much any fifth grade girl, say, has the ability to, like, look through a book or look through a magazine and be like, that’s sexist. You know, to call it out. This is wrong. This is oppressing me. You know, I think these girls are so savvy to this stuff, and I think we’ve done a good job of giving them that framework to think about it and to call it out. Whereas I think with boys and men, it’s just they feel something’s wrong, they don’t feel like they have permission to talk about it, and they don’t really have the tools to talk about it or the language. And so this is what I was trying to do in the book, was just give it a framework, give it a name. Name the problem.

00:15:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. So let’s start with a core idea that is in the middle of all this, which is sort of gender essentialism, meaning boys have certain traits, girls have other traits. And in the book, you say very clearly that it’s possible to read the same research and come to two different conclusions, that there are characteristics that are, you know, built into boys and there are characteristics that are built into girls. And you can find the research and read research and walk away completely convinced that that’s true. And you can come to the exact opposite conclusion. And even if you’re actually trying to get to the tRuth, which a lot of people just want to be confirmed of what they believe. But even when you’re open to finding the tRuth, good Lord, it’s confusing.

00:16:33 – Ruth Whippman
It’s really confusing. And I think also, as I write in the book, I think that the whole thing becomes a kind of proxy for a different fight, which is like, you know, when we’re talking about, is it nature or is it nurture? You know, are we really trying to find out about that, or are we using this research to further an agenda that we already have?

00:16:51 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:16:51 – Ruth Whippman
And that happens on both sides. I think there are people with very traditional gender beliefs who go through that research, and they’re like, look, it’s all innate. It’s natural. There’s nothing we can do about it. Women are like this, men are like that, and women should stay in their place, you know, and men should stay in their place. And you know, it’s a way to justify sort of regressive things. And on the other side of things, you have feminists who are like, this stuff is all socialized. It’s all just, you know, the only reason why that men and boys behave the way they do is because we socialize them into that, and if we socialize them differently, we’d have a totally different outcome. And I think, you know, I read through this body of research many times, and I feel like, honestly, anyone who’s really approaching it in good faith would say that this is a mix. You know, it is a mix of nature and nurture. We will never know in exactly what proportions. And these are. Are always group level differences. You know, they don’t necessarily apply to any one individual. So, you know, it’s like height. You know, most men are taller than most women, but you will find women who are six foot tall and you will find men who are five feet tall. And that’s true. But at a group level, there are differences, I think. And also, nature and nurture sort of aren’t really distinct. You know, there’s the field of epigenetics. So what genes get turned on and off by how we socialize people. But what I ended up feeling was that, yes, there are some elements of this which are hardwired biologically or tendencies which are biologically hardwired. But actually we use that. We use the idea that, you know, boys will be boys or that, you know, boys are just wired this way as an excuse to kind of not do anything about it, you know, to do less parenting, when actually those traits should encourage us to do more, you know, to step in more to help boys find and girls, you know, to help everybody find new ways to be.

00:18:41 – Eric Zimmer
You tell a really compelling story near the end of the book about something you observed when you took Abe to his first day of kindergarten.

00:18:51 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah.

00:18:51 – Eric Zimmer
You want to tell that story?

00:18:52 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. So this is like a very, very tiny story. And I think, you know, I’m always slightly hesitant to tell it because it’s the kind of thing that people dismiss and be like, so minor, so nothing. But I think what I was trying to convey is that these kinds of very minor things add up. You know, it’s a million, million examples of the same thing. So what I noticed, I took him to K kindergarten. He’s this tiny little kid. He’s very anxious. It’s his first day of school, and we’re going through the gate and there’s this, like, big guy there. I think he might be a Teacher or a volunteer? I’m not sure, but so right in front of my son in line, there’s these two girls. And the guy says to the first girl, hi, sweetheart. You know, this little sweet voice. And then the next girl, hi, sweetheart. And then my son walks through and his voice goes down an entire octave. And he’s like, hey, buddy. And gives him a high five.

00:19:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:19:43 – Ruth Whippman
And it’s like he has communicated in this tiny way that these girls are vulnerable, they’re in need of protection and nurture, and that they have a right to be scared, they have a right to be anxious, and that adults are going to respond to that. And he’s communicated to my son that he must toughen up, that he’s a man now, that he’s in the system of masculinity. It’s not really okay that he’s scared and vulnerable and he has to kind of toughen up and get through it. And it’s this tiny little moment and it’s very well meaning. And the guy was a lovely person. He’s not trying to do anything wrong. But it’s just having boys, you notice that, like right from birth. And there’s a lot of research to support this, that we kind of masculinize them in all these subtle ways that we project these masculine qualities. We see them as sturdier, we see them as tougher, we see them as less in need of nurture and protection, and we give them less nurture and protection as a result.

00:20:36 – Eric Zimmer
And I think that’s what the process of conditioning is. It’s little things that add up. It’s a thousand little experiences that grow into something bigger. So I found this, you know. Yeah, it’s very little. And I think your point is important. The guy there was a kind, good person doing the best he could.

00:20:54 – Ruth Whippman
Right? Yeah.

00:20:55 – Eric Zimmer
And yet there is a message encoded in that. And it’s interesting because we tend to think of boys as being stronger. But you say that boys are by almost every measure more sensitive, fragile and emotionally vulnerable. Explain that, because I think it’s easy for us to see. The boys could be more aggressive or rambunctious. Right. Those boy things. But in what ways are they also sensitive, fragile and emotionally vulnerable?

00:21:25 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. This was one of the biggest surprises to me. And it’s actually really well established in the literature. It’s not like some controversial thing that I’ve plucked out of nowhere. What is really surprising is that a baby boy is born with his brain. And when I’m talking about the right hemisphere of his brain, which is the part that deals with emotions, emotional self regulation, attachments, relationships. He’s born with that part of his brain about a month behind a baby girl in development. So a baby girl is born naturally, more emotionally resilient and independent and with less need for a caregiver. And so you see that boys at birth are, like, a little fussier, like, they find it harder to calm down. They’re more stressed by difficult events like being separated from their mothers. And you can see that actually any sort of bad thing that can happen to a baby, like any adverse event, like, you know, that the mom has postpartum depression and doesn’t bond properly, or that, you know, he’s neglected, or that he’s abused, or he grows up in poverty. All of those things have been shown in the data to have a bigger effect on boys than they do on girls. Boys brains are just naturally more vulnerable to disruption in those early years. And that carries on. But I think what happens. So boys actually need a little more care and a little more support right from birth. But because of our stories about masculinity, we believe that a boy is tougher and sturdier, and he needs less care. And you see all this research about how parents, like, handle baby boys differently. They roughhouse with them, they jiggle them, whereas they tend to give girls more of this kind of caretaking touch, you know, and they talk to girls more about their emotions. They use more words, they use more language, and, you know, they just treat them in a slightly more nurturing and emotive way. And so I think this, like, combination, boys need more, but they get less, really leads to some problems down the line.

00:23:41 – Eric Zimmer
You quote somebody who works in this space as saying, you know, we have an epidemic of uncared for boys. No wonder we’re seeing all this toxic masculinity when they grow up. The other thing that we’re seeing is, and again, this is not controversial, this is very clear in the data. Boys are not thriving in the world today. Young men are struggling in many ways. Tell me about some of those ways.

00:24:05 – Ruth Whippman
So young men are struggling in education. They’re falling behind girls in pretty much every measure from kindergarten to college through postgraduate degrees. They’re enrolling in college in fewer numbers than girls. They’re much more likely to drop out of college. Unemployment rates amongst young men are rising faster than in any other group. Boys and young men are not socializing as much as young women are. They’re spending far more time on screens and far less time socializing in person. So the Suicide rate for young men is about close to four times the rate for young women. Even though we see in the data that young women are more likely to report that they’re depressed. So boys and men are like holding this stuff inside until it’s way too late. They’re not seeking help. There’s a serious mental health problem with young men at the moment, but they’re not getting help for it and they’re not able to articulate it. So all these different ways, boys are not doing well.

00:25:06 – Eric Zimmer
And so I know there are a lot of theories about why this is, and you probably don’t have an answer, but what are the theories that make most sense to you?

00:25:16 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. I think, you know, there’s this voice from the. Mainly from the right, which is like, boys don’t have enough masculinity. They just need to toughen up what we need to sort of toughen them up more. And back in the good old days, they were tougher and stronger and they were doing better. But I think that is a misreading of everything that’s going on. Personally, I think that what’s going on with boys at the moment is a combination of an old problem and a new problem. So the old problem is the old story that we’ve had for generations and generations, which is, you know, the toughen up that boys are under cared for in those sort of emotional and nurturing way that they’re meant to squash their emotions. And these things can lead to quite a psychologically unhealthy mind. So all of those old pressures of masculinity, I think are really unhealthy for boys and men. Men used to rise just because they had privilege. You know, it used to be that they would rise to the top just because everybody else was kept down. But now we’re taking away the barriers for everybody else. We’re starting to see that the way that we’re raising boys is actually really unhealthy and that, you know, without privilege they’re just kind of crumbling. Also, I think there are sort of more modern pressures which are like things like screens have given boys a real kind of option to avoid the real world in a way that they never really had before. And so I think that it’s easier. For example, you know, it’s never been a more fraught time to have sex and relationships as a boy or young man. And it’s never been easier to get your phone and just watch porn, for example. And it’s very fraught for boys Socializing in the real world, they don’t know how to be. It’s never been easier to just get on a video game and, like, live out your heroic, masculine fantasy. You know, one expert that I spoke to in the book characterized it as a kind of combination of fear and ease. So it’s like fearful being in the real world, and it’s easeful being on a screen.

00:27:12 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:12 – Ruth Whippman
So that’s one part of it. And, you know, there are also economic reasons. I think that the types of jobs that boys used to go into are in decline, you know, all of those kind of manufacturing roles. So I think it’s a combination of all different kinds of things that are all coming together in this cultural moment that we’re at.

00:27:30 – Eric Zimmer
And when we talk about this, you know, you can’t talk about it without talking about privilege. Right. That men have had over time. There was something in the book, though, that genuinely shocked me, and it was that black girls, by many measures, are doing better than white boys.

00:27:48 – Ruth Whippman
Yes. And that was really surprising to me as well. This was in the chapter about education specifically. So when it comes to success in high school, rates of going to college, rates of postgraduate degrees, on most of these measures, black girls are doing better than white boys. And so all of our understanding of systems of privilege, you know, of race and gender, are being turned on their head. You know, if privilege leads to success, then you would think that white boys would be doing better than anyone because they’ve had every type of privilege, you know, racial and gender privilege. And black girls, you know, you have to hand it to them. You know, it’s amazing. They have the same limitations, the same structural obstacles, the same underfunded schools, the same lack of opportunities as black boys, but they’ve managed to overcome all of those and, you know, overtake white boys. And so I think what we’re seeing is that something about the way we are socializing boys, and particularly when it comes to education, is really harmful. One thing that I would say about this sort of modern moment that we’re in is that, you know, we’ve got all the old pressures of masculinity that all our fathers lived with and our grandfathers, but also, like, this kind of flavor of masculinity is changing as well. So it used to be this kind of. We had this model which was like, be a tough guy, suppress your emotions, but also be a family man, be a breadwinner, be a provider. And those stories were also, like, really part of masculinity. But our kind of model for masculinity is becoming like more of a kind of cartoon action hero kind of masculinity, you know, a kind of muscle man. You see, these kinds of masculinity influences are all kind of doubling down on this model. So it’s like taking all the seeds of the old model, but just turning it into a cartoon. It’s basically, you know, muscles and guns and cage fighting all the way down. And so that is creating even more pressures around masculinity for boys in this moment. I think, you know, it’s even more ridiculous and even more hyped up than it ever was in many ways.

00:29:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And it’s interesting. My son and I have talked about this. My son is 26, so he’s a young man. And we’ve talked about how there is lots of resources for men right out there, but they are overwhelmingly right wing and. Or very, very Christian, which, again, that’s not necessarily bad. Unless you’re neither of those things.

00:30:16 – Ruth Whippman
Right. And then where do you go?

00:30:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah. And that is the question him and I’ve talked about is it just doesn’t seem that there’s places to go to talk about what being a man is or masculinity is in a time where the social pressures around that are changing very rapidly.

00:30:33 – Ruth Whippman
And I think boys are very fearful to talk about it, and rightly so, for being called out, for being over privileged or being entitled or mansplaining or taking up too much space, you know?

00:30:43 – Eric Zimmer
Exactly. And yet it’s critical. Right. You talk about this idea. You say we don’t experience our lives or emotions as part of a political class, but as individuals. So the fact that men, for as long as we can go back, have been privileged and have had power is all true. And some of that trickles down to young men of today. Right. It’s not that there’s not some inherited benefit there, but I know that around young people today, in a lot of spaces, I think being a straight white man is possibly the lowest social category. It is just a category that nobody, like you said, nobody wants to hear from. Shut up. Right. We’ve heard from you for long enough.

00:31:26 – Ruth Whippman
Right.

00:31:27 – Eric Zimmer
And that’s not tenable as an individual.

00:31:29 – Ruth Whippman
Right. And these boys who are growing up now, they haven’t lived that context, you know, and that context is real and it’s important. And we have to remind boys and men of it. And so it’s really complicated. My friend was telling me this story the other day about how her son, who’s I think eleven was at school and they had an affinity group for every sort of identity category. So it was like the black students affinity group, the lgbtq, the girls affinity group. And the one that they didn’t have was for boys. And it’s like, well, boys have already had power, you know, and this is meaningless to an 11 year old boy. They don’t feel powerful in their own life. They have nowhere to process it. And the thing that kind of compounds it is that, yes, it is true that patriarchy has given boys and men access to power. That is a very real thing. But even in that system, boys and men have been deprived of some really important things, which is emotionality, intimacy, human connection. So as I say in the book, you know, under patriarchy, boys and men have everything except the thing that’s most worth having, which is human connection, access to human intimacy. And so even under patriarchy, it’s not that men had all benefit and no harm. Patriarchy harms men and boys.

00:32:47 – Eric Zimmer
Precisely.

00:32:48 – Ruth Whippman
And so there’s no way to talk about that. We’ve focused because so heavily, particularly, there is a rich tradition within feminism of recognizing that patriarchy harms men and boys. But it’s like we’ve forgotten it all, you know, in this moment post. Me too. It’s just like, you’re privileged. You get everything. You’re lucky. Shut up. And that is not a healthy way for any young person to live or to grow.

00:33:10 – Eric Zimmer
Right. And there’s a couple different points in the book that you make this point that, you know, what we’re doing is, or trying to sort of push men down instead of sort of get everybody to the same level. That doesn’t really work. And you say, you talk about this because what we’re talking about, and you put it in one sentence, it’s hard to square male privilege with male vulnerability. You have both those things happening at the same time. Men have had privilege, do have privilege to a certain extent. And yet men as a whole, younger ones in particular, are extraordinarily vulnerable right now to many different problems. And so I think you do a great job of walking through this. I wanted to turn a little bit now to something that I didn’t really know about. I had heard the term incel, but I didn’t honestly even know what that really meant.

00:34:05 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah.

00:34:05 – Eric Zimmer
Before we go into it, share with me what that is.

00:34:08 – Ruth Whippman
Okay, so the word incel stands for involuntary celibate. So it’s a group of generally pretty young men on the Internet and often adolescent boys as well, but pretty young men who believe that they have been Excluded from sex and relationships. They can’t have sex, they can’t find a girlfriend or a partner. And they’re extremely lonely and usually profoundly depressed and often have pretty toxic politics. Not always, but often have pretty toxic politics. So they are misogynistic. There’s sort of links between incels and like white supremacy and all kinds of like really repulsive ways of being in the world. Not all incels are like that, but. And they have all these theories about, you know, they believe that it’s a kind of genetic inevitability that they will never find women. They believe that women are terrible and they’re shallow and they’re only interested in men for their looks. And they congregate in these online communities. And at their most extreme, they have this kind of violent fringe. So the incels and sort of incel adjacent men have been associated with. With several acts of mass violence, including mass shootings. Some of the very prominent school shootings have been traced back to men who have been associated with this movement. And it’s a really complicated and scary and also fascinating and sad phenomenon. And in the book I spend some time digging into this community. So I spend a lot of time in their spaces online, in their communities and forums. And I go pretty deep interviewing a few of them. Two of them end up in the book. Two of these interviews that are really quite lengthy and detailed with these two guys. Yeah, it was really quite an eye opening experience in a lot of different ways.

00:35:56 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. What I find interesting about it is there are many people who believe that you shouldn’t even give these people any air time, that they’re not lonely, sad men, that they’re toxic, dangerous people. So that you’ve got that view of the world Now. I tend to be of the view that generally that, you know, that phrase hurt people. Hurt people, Meaning that like if you’re hurting somebody, it’s because you are damaged. Right. In many ways. And looking at the incel community was difficult for me because a lot of these men are feeling like they’re not attractive enough, they’re not tall enough, they’re not strong enough for any women to desire them. I was a scrawny child and a short child, and it took me really till high school before I was able to really have sort of any success with women. Is that even a useful phrase anymore? Did I just say something that people are gonna be like? You can’t say that.

00:36:51 – Ruth Whippman
But I don’t know, I mean, it didn’t like for me, but you know, who knows? It’s all moving up probably before I.

00:36:56 – Eric Zimmer
Could have any relationships and go on any dates. Right, okay. So a lot of reading them with their complete belief that because of their physical looks they would never find a relationship was really saddening. And the thing that was most sad about the community, to me and you talk about it, is just the deepest hopelessness in the whole thing. It’s this belief that nothing could get better for them.

00:37:23 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. And this sort of is in contrast to a lot of what we have come to call their manosphere, which is like the, you know, all of these sort of masculinity people online, the masculinity influencers, the Andrew Tate’s, the sort of quasi self help masculinity groups on the Internet. Because most of that sort of manosphere is predicated on this idea that there is a thing called an alpha male and that if you work hard at it, you can become that. So they sell this like they sort of prey on these vulnerable boys by saying, we know that you already feel insecure about your masculinity. Yes, there is an alpha male. Yes, this person is going to get all the women and all the success and all the status. And I can sell you exactly the model to get so pump iron. And. And the difference between those guys and the incels is that the incels, they believe all this stuff. They believe there’s an alpha male, they believe there’s a hierarchy, they believe in this system, but they’ve given up hope of ever climbing that ladder themselves. And what’s so interesting about them is that so on the one hand, there’s some of the most like it is toxic masculinity central over there. You go on those boards, there is misogyny that you just wouldn’t believe. There’s talking about raping and torturing women. There’s like some of the most repulsive views that you could ever imagine on those boards. But what there also is is this like deep sense of vulnerability, belonging and connection, like brotherhood. It’s almost that because they’ve kind of given up on ever climbing the masculinity ladder that they’re freed from all of its pressures as well, so they don’t have to man up and be tough and strong and invulnerable. And they can actually express their emotions and their sort of love for one another in a way that, that most men can’t. So it’s like both the worst of masculinity and this kind of freedom from masculinity there, which is really interesting.

00:39:35 – Eric Zimmer
You say that the Irony hit me hard. I’d spent all this time searching for a space in which boys and young men felt they could disregard masculine norms. And I thought I might find it in some kind of feminist affinity circle or a therapy group run by a soft spoken vegan. But instead I’d found it right here at the heart of manosphere in toxic masculinity central. It’s fascinating. You say incels are generally deeply preoccupied with their appearance. And I think this is interesting because the narrative that has been going on most of my adult life is that we have a culture in which women are body shamed and women are held up to these impossible standards and 100% true. I also believe that men have been.

00:40:20 – Ruth Whippman
Too, and it’s more socially acceptable.

00:40:22 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I mean, when I was reading comic books as a kid, right. One of the ads was the Charles Atlas ads. And in the Charles Atlas ads, he was a weightlifter. There was a little scrawny kid on the beach who was getting sand kicked on him and none of the girls would look at him. He orders the Charles Atlas stuff, does the weightlifting and comes back and takes over the beach. Right. I mean, that was being marketed to young boys 50 years ago and it only ramped up.

00:40:47 – Ruth Whippman
That pressure has been exponentially worse on boys.

00:40:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And so I think that that is an important part of the story that often isn’t told. Right. Or another way in which men suffer that isn’t talked about often. Because. Because if I were to sort of say that sort of thing generally to females, they would be like, yeah, but nothing like we were not to the degree we were. And I don’t know whether that’s true or not. Right. I think measuring degree doesn’t matter because the level of suffering was great for me.

00:41:17 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah, absolutely. And I think those pressures on boys. So it’s like the muscle man, you know, the online fitness influencers. You know, you can see it. The sort of ideal body shape for men has like ramped to this like ridiculous proportions in the same way that the ideal body shape for women has kind of shrunk to the part where, you know, if Barbie was sized up to a real person, she’d have a feeding tube and not be able to walk. You know, there is no human that can look like the CGI superheroes and you know, the online fitness influences. And that culture has really changed. But yeah, I mean, one of the incels was talking to me about short shaming of men, for example. And you know, yes, body image pressures on women are terrible. You know, I grew up with diet culture. It’s a generation of women have been damaged by that or several generations of women. But it’s like at this point I feel like I would never talk about somebody as having like a fat girl complex, you know, it would just be unthinkable. But like to talk about somebody as having a short man complex is completely fine, you know, and, and this incel, who was very short was telling me that, you know, online there are women telling short men to kill themselves that they would never have a short boyfriend, that they were shaming boys for being short. It’s something they can’t do anything about. And it’s like, you know, somehow we’ve got this notion that if we shame boys and men, you know, that we’re kind of punching up with a joke. We have this idea that it’s like okay to punch up and it’s okay to rib somebody who’s powerful and you know, whereas punching down is not acceptable. But at what point do we need to stop and say is this really punching up to like body shame? Like whatever he was at the time, 18, 19 year old boy, you know, who has serious mental health problems, no financial or social capital, you know, these incels are like profoundly depressed, marginalized, you know, is it really punching up to call him short to shame him for that? I believe not. You know, and I think we really need to look at that. You know, it’s a blind spot. And I think we need to stop body shaming. Boys and men.

00:43:25 – Eric Zimmer
Agree. I mean, we shouldn’t body shame anybody, right?

00:43:27 – Ruth Whippman
Anybody, of course.

00:43:28 – Eric Zimmer
But I mean, I remember clearly an incident in middle school of like girls laughing at me because I was too skinny. And again, these things aren’t new. I’m not a young person. Right. So I just think there’s this sense that you’re not punching up to that. You know, anytime you’re shaming anybody or making fun of anybody’s appearance, you’re being mean.

00:43:50 – Ruth Whippman
You’re being mean and you’re harming that person.

00:43:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:43:52 – Ruth Whippman
There’s no punching up in there. And I think again, this starts to get back to the thing we were talking about, which is like, do you experience your life as part of a political class or as an individual? You know, yes, men have had power, but that makes no difference when you’re body shaming somebody who’s, you know, anybody for anything.

00:44:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And you say this might be inching us closer to equality, but it doesn’t feel like progress right in the. That like now men are being shamed at A level that women are. That’s not progress, right?

00:44:21 – Ruth Whippman
Exactly. We’re not doing things better, and we should be learning from what we did with women, what we got wrong. And I think also because things have historically been so bad for women in that area, we have now, like, a really robust, like, body positivity movement. We have, like, language to describe it. We know how to talk about body shaming. We know how to call it out. We know how to, like, fight back. And I think the boys and men just didn’t know how to even start to fight back. And they felt that when they did, they were shamed for, you know, well, back in your box, you’ve got too much privilege. You know, women have suffered worse from you. Don’t. You don’t call it out. And this insult was telling me, you know, he wanted to go to therapy and to find a therapist. I mean, partly he couldn’t afford it, which is a huge problem, but also he was scared because he felt that if he articulated his problems to a therapist, they would shame him and say, you know, well, women have had it far worse than you. Now, I believe that a good therapist would never do that. But at the same time, the fact that he’s fearful of that speaks to something very real.

00:45:22 – Eric Zimmer
It speaks to something very real. And it also speaks to the cultural messaging that he’s getting from other men. Right. I mean, as I was reading about the incels, the layer upon layer of mistRuth or misunderstanding was painful to read. And one of the things I was thinking about is, like, there’s a mistake that’s being made there. And there’s often something in psychological literature called the three Ps, and it has to do with how you explain things. Right. You take things to be permanent. You think they’re personal and you think they’re pervasive. Right. And what these poor boys are doing is they’re taking the fact that some women only want tall men. And that is true. That is true to mean all women only want tall men. They’re taking these things to be pervasive. And that’s the big mistake, I think that’s happening. There is. It’s not that they’re not right some of the time. They’re not right all the time, though. I mean, and that’s just a general thing I think we do across the board is we just take an incident of a person on the left acting badly and we say, that’s the left. It’s pervasive, or somebody on the right doing that, and it just doesn’t do any of.

00:46:31 – Ruth Whippman
I think that’s true. And I think we’ve just got to the point where we’ve just lost empathy for anybody. You know, it’s just like, yes, I was talking to these incels and there was just layer upon layer of pain and trauma and terrible messaging and half tRuths and, you know, all of these things and these people are really suffering. And I think the more we say we’re not going to talk to them, we don’t want to humanize them. You know, this is a whole thing, you know, we don’t want to humanize these people because. And there’s this argument which is like, if an Arab Muslim commits an act of violence, we call him a terrorist. But if a sort of white man, we say he has mental health problems. And there’s tRuth in that.

00:47:13 – Eric Zimmer
For sure there is.

00:47:14 – Ruth Whippman
But what we’ve decided is that we’re gonna do about that is this race to the bottom. So it’s like, okay, let’s dehumanize everyone rather than trying to humanize the Arab Muslim and see, well, what’s going on for him and how did he get to this place and why does he want to. And he’s a real person who probably got into terrorism through poverty and terrible messaging and terrible ideas about masculinity as well. Actually, let’s just dehumanize the white guy as well to like, you know, And I think that is just this terrible mistake. It’s a race to the bottom.

00:47:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. The other thing that you mentioned, I thought was very interesting was that you say a wide body of research shows that it’s not masculinity itself that makes men violent, but the sense of shame that they are masculine enough.

00:47:57 – Ruth Whippman
Oh, yes.

00:47:58 – Eric Zimmer
And wow. And I actually resonate with that personally also. Not that I’m violent, but I can share a little bit about that in a minute, but say a little bit more.

00:48:06 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah, this was really fascinating to me. And it’s one of those things that you see in the research and it feels so profoundly true when you hear it. You’re like, yes, of course. Because there’s this impossible standard for masculinity that boys and men feel that they have to meet. And there is always going to be inadequacy built into that. No human man can be the kind of superhero, you know, the model that they’re expected to be. So they will always fall short, but some fall more short than others, you know, and some people are more successful in this system than others, but it comes in with built in Shame. And the research shows it’s this measure called masculine discrepancy stress, which means that when a man believes that he falls short of the standard for manhood, he is far more likely, you know, when he feels shame about his inability to live up to masculinity standards, then he’s more likely to commit pretty much all kinds of violence. Sexual violence, domestic violence, you know, what they call intimate partner violence, assault with a weapon, assault of all kinds. And you can see it. It’s that anger, it’s that shame. It’s this shame cycle that just keeps going and going and going. It rang so true. And this is why, you know, we talk about all these extremes, you know, the incels, the manosphere, you know, the sex offender and everything. But I think this is so built into the culture at every level. We give boys, right from the beginning, this kind of superhero myth about who they’re supposed to be. So all boys are operating with this impossible pressure, this impossible standard. And so I think, you know, we really need to look at what we’re asking of men and boys. And that’s why I don’t like this masculinity framework. You know, even when it’s positive, even when we’re talking about positive masculinity, we just keep on reinforcing this idea that the most important thing is to be masculine.

00:49:56 – Eric Zimmer
I just am very nonviolent by nature, so I’m lucky in that way. But I resonated with this because again, this is mostly stuff as a young man, you know, I wasn’t, you know, quote unquote, masculine enough, right, that what I just did was I just got in lots of trouble. That was my way of being tough, is I’m in trouble, right? I’m not afraid of the law, you know. And again, it wasn’t violent, but it certainly wasn’t, wasn’t pro social behavior. You know, it didn’t help me or society. And it was this, I can see it now, this semi conscious attempt to be like, but I am tough to compensate, right?

00:50:33 – Ruth Whippman
And so that’s a sort of very minor and, you know, relatively healthy example of the same thing that you see with, say, school shooters. You know, when you read the manifestos written by these guys, it’s this, like, utter shame. They’ve internalized this message that they’re supposed to be this kind of glorious masculine hero. And then the shame of, like, falling short and then something like a school shooting. It’s like this very obvious, splashy trope of masculinity. You know, you get a gun and you shoot a bunch of people. It’s like a way of reclaiming this masculine status. And that’s like the most tragic and awful example of it. But you see it, you know, you see lesser versions of it everywhere.

00:51:14 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Well, I think this is a good place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue talking in the post show conversation because we just didn’t get to at all what ways this has caused you to parent your boys differently. And so I’d love to take this into some actual practical examples. Listeners, if you would like to hear this post show conversation and many other post show conversations, which some people tell me are the best conversations, as well as ad free episodes and to support podcasts that you care about, you could go to oneyoufeed.net join and become part of our community. Ruth, thank you so much for coming on. I thought the book was so well done. I mean your last book was too. You’re just. You’re great.

00:51:58 – Ruth Whippman
Oh, thank you. It’s been such a pleasure to get to talk to you again. So thank you.

Episode Transcript:

00:01:56 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Peter, welcome to the show.

00:01:58 – Peter Kim
Thank you, Eric. It’s great to be here with you.

00:02:00 – Eric Zimmer
We’re going to be discussing your book, which is called How Trust the Science of How Relationships are Built, Broken, and Repaired. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:46 – Peter Kim
I think the parable speaks to a fundamental truth about human nature. And it’s interesting how well that parable sums it up, because this duality that we have in us is something that has been shown in neuroscience that we have a primitive brain that’s very instinctual and then, you know, a higher order area of the brain that can override those instincts. Different areas of psychology talk about the same thing. If you get to Freud, you know, he talks about the ID superego and ego, and the ego regulates those two. Battling wolves. Evolutionary psychology talks about what is morality. And there’s a view that morality is about overriding our genetic predisposition. And for me and the book, there too is a duality which is that we have a choice in how we view the world and how we view others and ourselves. And there’s one choice that is very automatic and very easy to make. And then there’s a different kind of choice we can make that leads to a more deliberative process that can hopefully lead to a better assessment of others than ourselves.

00:04:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I agree with everything you just said there. And your book really does get into some of the defaults we have when it comes to trust and some of the common mistakes that we might make when it comes to trust. But before we get into all that, let’s start off with why is trust important to ourselves, to our society? Why care?

00:04:22 – Peter Kim
Trust is the fundamental ingredient in society that makes it work. Our ability to interact and work with others depends on the expectation that others are worth it, that we can make ourselves vulnerable to them and do things with the expectation that they will follow through on their end of the bargain and that that expectation will be fulfilled. And if we don’t have that, then everything falls apart. How can we even walk out the door if we don’t trust others to follow the law, to not take advantage of us? The level of trust is so important for society that it’s even been shown to have an implication for national gross Domestic Product. Right. The success of nations has been correlated to the level of trust in that nation. It really is the Greece that makes all the wheels turn in society. It really allows us to work with one another, to cooperate. Cooperate and to work for things that are beyond our immediate self interest.

00:05:26 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things that you start the book with, and it’s a little bit counterintuitive, is that we tend to actually have a high level of initial trust in people. There’s that phrase like, you know, you have to earn trust. Some of your research shows. Not necessarily.

00:05:42 – Peter Kim
That’s right. The default assumption for ages has been trust starts at zero and only builds gradually over time as we get to know one another. There is an element of truth in the sense that the more we know others, the more we Have a sense of how much to trust and so on. But it turns out that when we first meet other people in the world, we also rely on a host of cues that tell us whether or not someone should be trusted. Things like, did we live in the same town, go to the same school, share the same interests, and have the same affiliations more generally. So all of that can tell us whether or not someone. Someone is like us. And we tend to trust people that are more similar to ourselves. And then things like, you know, reputations, credentials. There are all sorts of cues that are out there that give us an indication of whether someone else is trustworthy. And all that helps us to work with others and interact with others right off the bat and essentially make ourselves more vulnerable than we would have if trust really did start at zero. Because if it did start at zero, all the wheels would stop turning.

00:06:53 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Right. You say there’s a problem because that high initial trust that we’re talking about is also very fragile. What do you mean by that?

00:07:02 – Peter Kim
It’s precisely because that trust is based on these superficial cues that we get into trouble. We presume someone might be trustworthy simply because of how they look, what they’re wearing, where they’re from, and that may not necessarily be a good indication of how trustworthy they will be. And so that’s where we are often in a situation where our evaluations of others are very fragile. Yeah, they can be changed dramatically based on the additional cues we get within the first few minutes of that interaction, a day later, and so on. And so it really is about how we hone that trust, that initial provisional trust over time, as more information comes our way about the other side and about the situation. So that’s the journey that we’re all on. How do we navigate the start where trust is high, to a sustained level of trust in someone as we get to know them further.

00:08:06 – Eric Zimmer
Are some of us more naturally trusting than others?

00:08:10 – Peter Kim
There is a predisposition to trust. So some of us are more psychologically inclined to trust others. That has been reported in the scientific literature. And, you know, the nice thing about that is that we’d like to think, you know, based on the assumption that that might be foolish. You know, we’d like to think that they’d be taken advantage of by others quite readily, but it turns out that that’s not the case. Those who are inclined to trust wind up better off, according to the evidence. They wind up happier. They are sought after by others as desirable partners. And so it turns out that when we trust Others, that tends to be an expectation that’s fulfilled and that we wind up in a much better place.

00:08:58 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I’ve often thought about that basic idea around an orientation to whether we trust others generally or not. And I think we all know people, some of whom are far more trusting, and other people who are just far more suspicious of everybody kind of right out of the gate. And I agree. I think some of it’s probably inborn. And then like anything else, it’s conditioned by countless experiences. And I also think there’s an element of agency in it, too, which is, what orientation do we want to take? And I’ve often thought I would much rather think the best of everybody and occasionally be disappointed than think bad about everyone and very occasionally protect myself from some downside. And I think it gets to kind of what you were just saying there, that people with a higher trust orientation tend to have a better level of happiness.

00:09:49 – Peter Kim
Yeah. Also, it gives us those who are more trusting have more opportunities. They have more opportunities to build relationships. They have more opportunities to have fruitful collaborations and a host of other possibilities open up. And that’s where, yes, there will be a subset of those opportunities that will turn out well. But on the whole, the evidence indicates that you are going to be better off as compared to someone who is not trusting, who is always suspicious and forecloses those opportunities and they’re safe. They’ve mitigated the upside. But what they’re not aware of is that they’ve mitigated a lot of upside, too. And part of that upside is created merely by the decision to trust, because it turns out that when we trust others, they don’t see this as an opportunity for exploitation in general. In general, what they see it as is they see it as a precious resource to preserve for the future. They want to prove you right. So if you trust me, I don’t want to say, well, you are a fool. I’m really actually an untrustworthy person. I think I’m trustworthy, and I want to fulfill that expectation that you have in me. And that’s the general tendency that people have. And so that’s part of the reason why trusting others can be a good strategy.

00:11:13 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about two really powerful determinants of trust that are different, the first being competence, and then the second being integrity. Can you explain what you mean by each of those and maybe give us an example of what we’re talking about here?

00:11:30 – Peter Kim
Competence concerns the sense that others will have the skills and knowledge to fulfill a task. So it’s a Very straightforward, you know, consideration that we have when we work with others or rely on someone to do something for us. Integrity is the sense that others will adhere to principles you consider acceptable. So that gets to, you know, do they share the same values? Will they, you know, prioritize the same things as you in life, for example? And so those are the two basic dimensions that have been found to be consistently the most important in determining trust. Trust in others across all sorts of situations, whether you’re evaluating peers, leaders or subordinates, and so on. So it’s been a pretty robust finding across all sorts of contexts.

00:12:24 – Eric Zimmer
So can you give me an example of a violation of trust and whether we would see it as a matter of competence or integrity?

00:12:35 – Peter Kim
Sure. So some of the studies that I’ve conducted with a bunch of collaborators has essentially given a different explanation for the exact same event. So in these studies, we would have someone interviewing for a job at an accounting firm, and it turns out that this person had misfiled a tax return at that job. And then as that’s being discussed, the candidate either explains it as a matter of not knowing the tax code that was relevant to that situation, so that would be a competence related issue. She just lacked that knowledge, or she had misfiled that tax return intentionally in order to please an important client. So that was a deliberate choice to fudge the numbers or do something a little bit shady for the sake of making someone happy. And so that would be one way of making that distinction. Another way of thinking about the distinction is to think about it as a difference of intent. So if you had done something unknowingly or you just screwed up somehow, that would be a competence related violation. If you did something knowingly, intentionally, then that would be more a matter of integrity. It would be a reflection of them not sharing the same values as you and committing the violation as a result. And so that’s the high level distinction between those two ideas. But one of the things I delve into further in the book is what does integrity even mean? Because on the one hand, we can say integrity is about whether others will do things like we would do them. Right? They adhere to principles we consider important. But in the real world, things get really messy on that front. And that’s where what integrity means is far more complicated than most of us presume.

00:14:34 – Eric Zimmer
Right. I mean, I think it gets to intention to some degree in conversation about harm. These days we talk about intention and impact. And I think your book argues that both those things matter, that both those things are actually important.

00:14:50 – Peter Kim
Right. So I think the impact element gets to whether or not harm was created, whether a violation occurred. And then there’s this element of intention which gets to why, why did this happen? And that’s the part that, well, it gets to the two wolves parable that you brought up at the start of the podcast. We are inclined to believe that when something goes wrong, the other side had done this intentionally, they meant to do it, or they were intentionally negligent and so on. But there is this alternative explanation which was they didn’t know, they didn’t have enough information about what would be appropriate in the situation, or they lacked the perspective necessary to make the right choice. And that too can be just as legitimate an explanation for what happened. And the choice we make about that attribution can lead to very different reactions in the eyes of the perceiver.

00:15:52 – Eric Zimmer
Makes me think of a phrase I’ve heard somewhere, don’t attribute to malice. What could be explained by incompetence. Basically sort of saying exactly what you’re saying here, which is, first assume like that somebody was trying to do the right thing and just didn’t know how or made a mistake. And then, you know, from there you can kind of move on to where they are. You keep using the word attribution. And one of my favorite, I think it’s considered a cognitive bias is called the fundamental attribution error, which states that when I make a mistake, I look at all the circumstances around it. You know, if I kick the vending machine, it’s because I didn’t get enough sleep last night and I’m under a lot of pressure. But if you kick the vending machine, it’s because you’re an angry person. And so you’re talking about attribution a lot in this book. Say more about it.

00:16:40 – Peter Kim
Yes. So that is part of what affects our inclination to make this decision, that the act was intentional. Due to a lack of moral principles, we often lack insight into all the forces that might be at play that might explain why something happen. So an example that comes to mind is the Wells Fargo scandal that occurred a few years ago where, you know, the bank was accused of opening these fraudulent accounts for their clients. A number of workers at Wells Fargo had been involved in doing this. And our initial explanation for why this has happened is that these bank employees were, you know, just trying to get ahead by, you know, doing a fast one, taking liberties with the power that they had to create these accounts on behalf of these clients. So that was very much an integrity based attribution. It turned out related to the fundamental attribution error that what they were doing was largely due to a system of incentives and pressures that were created by Wells Fargo as a whole. They created a pressure cooker where if you did not open enough accounts, you were essentially fired or Passover for promotion. There were all these consequences. And so here was a situation where they didn’t have full control over their actions. They were being induced to behave in a certain way. And so that provided a very different lens onto the same situation. Maybe we wouldn’t necessarily put it into competence 100% as an attribution, but it gets closer to that. It’s not necessarily something they would have done on their own if given the choice.

00:18:51 – Eric Zimmer
And you say that we are more willing to forgive competence based breaches of trust versus integrity based breaches of trust.

00:19:01 – Peter Kim
Yes. And it gets to some odd asymmetries we have in our mental basement. So we are predisposed to view negative information about competence as less informative than positive information about competence. So if you were a baseball player and you hit a home run, you’re considered a home run hitter, even though you might strike out afterwards. That one instance of positive information is considered very diagnostic in our minds. And it’s because we believe that only people who are super competent can perform at that level. And that’s the bias that we have in all sorts of domains when it comes to matters of competence. You can only really be successful at something if you’re truly competent. And even successful people might fail sometimes, or not do well because, for example, you might have an injury, or you might be really distracted, or you may lack the motivation to perform well. So the negative information about competence is just not considered very informative because there are lots of explanations for why that might happen. But when it comes to matters of integrity, that bias is reversed. We consider negative information about integrity much more diagnostic than positive information about integrity. So if you get caught cheating on your spouse once and you say, well, I didn’t cheat on you yesterday, that’s not going to work so well. Right. Because that negative information is considered so diagnostic. And why is this? It’s because we believe that only people who lack integrity would do something like that. Whereas there are lots of occasions where unethical people won’t behave badly, for example, if they think they’ll get caught, or if the incentives aren’t high enough for them to break the rules, or so on. So that’s where that asymmetry arises. We just don’t see that positive information about integrity to be very helpful because bad people can avoid doing bad things on a given moment for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with their values or ethicality.

00:21:12 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s talk about apology a little bit. And I think it’s important to make a distinction about what we’re talking about in this book because we’re talking about trust and the repair of trust, not necessarily forgiveness, for example. Say in what ways those are different.

00:21:30 – Peter Kim
They’re different in the sense that forgiveness can occur even if you don’t intend to ever interact with that person again. So there are many instances when real harm was done and people who have been harmed choose eventually to forgive the harm doer as a way of getting past what happened so they no longer ruminate over what happened. They are able to move on as a result of that forgiveness. So forgiveness, it’s a one sided action that can be very beneficial. You can forgive as a way of letting go and moving forward. Trust, on the other hand, is always a two sided decision because it involves the decision to make yourself vulnerable to that person again. And so that becomes a thornier issue. It requires the expectation that the other side will redeem themselves if they’ve done something bad. And that is not necessarily something that people will believe depending on the attribution that they make. And this gets to your point about apologies. Apologies are, well, they’ve been considered sort of the gold standard for addressing these kinds of incidents. And in many situations they can be quite helpful. But the problem with apologies is that they’re double edged in nature. They are helpful in the sense that they signal a desire to do better. It signals regret and remorse. And so by extension it indicates that they won’t do this again. But apologies also do something else which is not so great. And that’s. It confirms guilt. You apologize when you’ve done something wrong. So you’re saying, yes, I did something wrong and then I’m going to fix this in the future. It really conveys these two signals and the question becomes, well, which signal becomes more important? Do we focus on these positive signals of redemption or do we focus on these negative signals of guilt? And it turns out that that’s where the biases that we’ve been just talking about with regard to competence and integrity play a huge role. So for matters of competence, we’ll focus on the signals of redemption rather than the confirmation of guilt. Because we don’t consider that negative information about competence very diagnostic. We consider positive information about competence much more informative. But if we see the same violation as a matter of integrity. We’re going to focus on the confirmation of guilt, that negative information of integrity that’s been confirmed by the apology. And we’re going to dismiss the positive signals that the person is going to fix this in the future. So that’s where the choice of attribution can make a huge difference in whether or not you’re willing to trust the other person. Again, after the exact same response, they have the same apology.

00:24:31 – Eric Zimmer
And so what could we take from this when it comes to making apologies in our own life? Right, because you said apologies are a double edged sword. On one hand they express a desire to do better in the future or a desire to repair the situation. And yet they also admit guilt. How is that different in maybe a corporate setting where a company by apologizing is sort of admitting to to guilt versus in an individual setting.

00:25:02 – Peter Kim
One of the important lessons of this distinction is that we as apologizers need to be aware of what attribution the others, the perceivers are making. So most of the conversation that occurs after a violation has occurred is about whether or not someone is going to apologize or not. Right. So it’s the type of response that’s the focus and what we ignore. Something that’s as if not more important is the attribution we’re making for why the incident happened. So one of the problems that occurs when you know, someone might commit a violation and they are being pressured to apologize is that they might do so based on a self serving view that this was a competence related issue. Right. In their view, in their own world, they would not have done this. Again, this was a mistake in their minds. But they’re not taking the other side’s perspective. If the other side is framing this exact same incident differently, then that same apology that they think will be very successful will turn out to be very ineffective. And so that’s where the, in a way a different discussion has to occur simultaneously. In addition to whether you apologize or not, it is about what is the interpretation of this incident. And that is something that needs to be addressed as much if not more so than this issue of how you respond.

00:27:10 – Eric Zimmer
Let’s take an example here and see if we can sort of bring all these things together in an example. So let’s just say that there is a couple and person A in the relationship is unfaithful. So we’re talking now about attribution, which is why did person A act that way? And I think what you’re saying is person A is going to want to interpret it as the person who did the thing as a one time mistake. I did it because. And I would have my reasons for it and they would be more sort of competence based, but that their partner, person B is thinking it’s because they’re a bad person or they’re fundamentally untrustworthy person, and so they’re attributing it to integrity, not sort of a competence based situation. And I think what you’re saying is that while person A who was unfaithful, can and should apologize in this case, that if they don’t find some way to have a conversation about the perceived lack of integrity on their side, that apology may be ineffective.

00:28:24 – Peter Kim
Yes, I think that’s true. With a caveat.

00:28:26 – Eric Zimmer
Okay, please. Yeah, correct me where I get it wrong. I’m just trying to sort of put it into an actual example here.

00:28:32 – Peter Kim
Sure. So I would just temper it a bit in the sense that there are probably some violations that are clearly matters of integrity, and there are certain violations that are clearly matters of competence, and then there are violations that are in a gray area. And so to the extent that you’ve done something that’s clearly a matter of integrity, I don’t know how much you can do to resolve that situation.

00:28:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:28:59 – Peter Kim
You know, the person who committed the violation may still see it as a matter of competence. Just because we’re so good at, you know, construing the world in a way that will make us feel favors us.

00:29:11 – Eric Zimmer
Yep, yep.

00:29:12 – Peter Kim
So this matter of an affair, people will have different views about this. You know, I’m sure the person who commits the affair. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say. I’m sure, I’m sure they’re. There’s times when someone who commits an affair will see it as a mistake. Right. And you’re right there. Like the person who might be affected by that affair, the spouse will more likely see it as a matter of integrity. And that will be a major disconnect. It will be a reason why the apology won’t be so successful in that instance. I will also reaffirm your point that, that in that kind of instance it is still important to apologize. Because if you’re caught red handed, if you’re really guilty, I mean, the counterpart knows that it doesn’t really help to deny this. Right.

00:30:03 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:30:03 – Peter Kim
Yeah. So if your hand is caught in the cookie jar, this matter of guilt is not in question. The only real question becomes, will you redeem yourself in the future? And I think there, what I’m reminded of is a response that I find really interesting that people use sometimes, which is it was an error in judgment. What does that response entail? It entails that you had intentionally done it at the time, but now you know better. Right. So you are in a way recasting that same incident as a matter of competence. You have more knowledge about the repercussions of your actions now, and as a result you would not do that again. And so that kind of framing can be helpful as a way of giving the other side the view that no, it’s not a matter of you lacking moral principles, of you being a bad person, it’s because you just didn’t know any better at the time. And so to the extent that you can make that change in attribution, you’ll be better off. But with that said, there is another problem, and it’s that perceivers are not blank slates. They won’t just buy whatever story you tell them, especially since they know that you as a violator, have an incentive to tell them something that will get them off the hook. Right?

00:31:30 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:31:30 – Peter Kim
So there is going to be pushback by the perceiver because they will have a vested interest in their own worldview and maintaining it. And so that becomes the battleground. How do you shape these worldviews? To a degree that it helps the violator address the incident and repair trust that is easier in some contexts than others. And this is where motivation comes into play. So this choice between competence and integrity, there is this element of these integrity attributions being easier and more automatic. But there’s also a motivation that we have to make one kind of attribution or another. So if someone commits a violation and that person is a dear friend, and we want to maintain a relationship with that person, we are going to try much harder to see this as a matter of competence. But if that same violation occurs, it’s done by a stranger or someone in an out group, someone we see as sort of like the enemy, we will clearly see that as an integrity based violation. So we have a vested interest in making one attribution or another. And so that’s another thing that affects the choice.

00:32:46 – Eric Zimmer
So, for example, what you’re saying is if a politician is accused of sexual impropriety, if that politician is the side that we root for, we’re going to want to believe it was an error in judgment or a temporary mistake or whatever it is, Right? But if that person is in the other political party, we’re going to want to attribute it to just they’re a bad person and they’re another example of what people like that are absolutely.

00:33:19 – Peter Kim
And you have just explained a large part of our political divide that we have in the world.

00:33:25 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Well, it gets back to this fundamental attribution error a little bit that I was talking about, which is, what do we attribute the reasons that somebody did something? I always think it’s one of the places that as humans we get into the most trouble is when we think we know other people’s motivations or reasons.

00:33:47 – Peter Kim
Right, right.

00:33:48 – Eric Zimmer
I see this in relationships over and over and over. It’s like, you didn’t take out the trash. And so thus what that means is you don’t care about me. And that’s the attribution I’m making. Right. Whereas it could just be something completely different. It could just be that somebody’s very forgetful. As soon as we start attributing reasons to things, we can be on slippery ground, I think is where we get into trouble. And yet we can’t not do it. We are always trying to make meaning out of what occurs.

00:34:21 – Peter Kim
Right. So the fundamental attribution error provides additional nuance to the story because that’s really about whether you consider the person responsible for what happened versus the situation. And then the choice between competence and integrity. You know, the person is still responsible, but was it because they just forgot or was it because they just didn’t see this as important enough to do? Right. And so in your example about the trash, the fundamental attribution error could be, well, they didn’t do it and it’s because they either decided not to do it or forgot. A third explanation could be there was an emergency that pulled them out of the house and they just couldn’t because they had to attend to some work emergency or, you know, the child at school, you know, had some sort of incident and so you had to rush there. So all of that can be involved in the attribution process. And the more we attend to those things, the better off we are in really coming up with a comprehensive understanding of that situation. And I think one of the points of the book is that we never really put much time into understanding all those forces, all those possibilities. We make the automatic knee jerk interpretation, which is quite often wrong.

00:35:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, you talk about four guiding lessons that we can take from your work here. And I thought maybe we could walk through those and you could explain them. The first is most of us want to be good. Say more about that.

00:35:57 – Peter Kim
This is based on the fact that the evidence indicates that when people are trusted, they don’t see this as an opportunity for exploitation. And so it is A challenge to the prevailing assumption that’s been out there that, yeah, you make yourself vulnerable, then they’ll try to exploit that vulnerability. And there’s certainly people who will try to do that. But for the most part, people in the world, they don’t want to say, you’re a sucker for trusting me. They want to say, you are right in trusting me. I am a good person. And what it speaks to is that a lot of the violations that occur in the world isn’t because someone is deciding to be bad. It’s often because of almost a miscommunication about what constitutes goodness in a particular situation. And so it really speaks to the need to clarify what would be good in the situation and help people get there. So an example that relates to my own line of work is as a faculty member at a university. You know, I have to give assignments all the time and, you know, there’s always the temptation to cheat. Well, part of what I have to do, my responsibility based on this guiding principle, is to clarify expectations about what’s acceptable and what’s not. The use of AI, for example, in assignments, you know, so that’s a big question mark. So what is my stance? How should they navigate the situation? So to provide clarification based on the expectation that people want to be good and I just need to help them get there, help them maintain that desire and that reputation in this very messy world that we have.

00:37:46 – Eric Zimmer
Excellent. And then the next is the complexity of truth, which I think we’ve kind of been talking about this idea that the reasons people do things is usually far more multifaceted than we think.

00:37:59 – Peter Kim
I think that’s a really important point that I try to stress throughout the book. You’re right. And I think what it gets to is that we’re not predisposed to look at that complexity. We want simple stories and we want to have these very quick determinations about what happened. And we need to be aware that we as perceivers have a responsibility to put in the time to really understand why things happen. Because honestly, we will all be in positions where we’re accused of something at some point, and we will want others to engage in that same kind of thoughtful deliberation about us rather than have those knee-jerk reactions.

00:38:43 – Eric Zimmer
The third guiding lesson is you call the upside of intent. What do you mean by that?

00:38:49 – Peter Kim
So much of the book sort of underscores the problems when people make these attributions of low integrity. The idea that you will try to pull a fast one on them, that you will be opportunistic that guiding lesson is really about. Well, we shouldn’t necessarily be so defeatist about that bias that we have in our heads, because what it tells us is that one of the things we should be striving for is to make that attribution less likely. And how do we do that? We can work harder to convey the sense that we are doing our very best to do the right thing for the people around us, for the people who might be judging us. And the more we do that, the less likely people will be to make that automatic attribution that we have low integrity. And in fact, the more it seems like we’re looking out for them, the more invested they’ll be in the relationship and the more motivated they will be to see any failing as a matter of competence rather than integrity. Because they won’t want to make that negative attribution of integrity that can be so destructive to that relationship.

00:40:09 – Eric Zimmer
And then the last lesson is the need to walk through doors. What does that mean?

00:40:15 – Peter Kim
This was something that came out of an interview of someone that I write about in the book. His name’s father, Greg, and he started this organization called Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles. And it is an organization meant to help former gang members rehabilitate and reenter society. And one of the lessons he learned was that he can’t impose this program on people. They have to make the decision that they want to rehabilitate, otherwise it doesn’t work. The program that is very successful, it won’t work in that kind of instance where it’s not a choice by the person who might be enrolled. That speaks to this distinction between forgiveness and trust that we talked about earlier. We can forgive people. That can be a one sided action. Another thing that the book talks about is we can try to do things that reduce our vulnerability. So we can implement all these protective mechanisms and enforcement mechanisms to keep people from doing bad things. But that actually doesn’t improve trust because, you know, if they’re behaving well afterwards, we are inclined to see this as the result of the laws and enforcement mechanisms we put in place, rather than because they were trustworthy. So the need to walk through the doors really gets to the idea that it’s not a one sided action. We have to depend on the other side to do their part, regardless of whether we’re the perceiver or the violator. Right. We each need to do our part to help navigate this quagmire, the complexity of truth, to really get at a view that would give a person the opportunity to redeem themselves.

00:42:04 – Eric Zimmer
Excellent. Well Peter, this is a good place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you and really enjoyed the book.

00:42:13 – Peter Kim
Likewise Eric. It’s been a real pleasure.

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  01:57

Hi, Kathryn. Welcome to the show.

Kathryn Mannix  02:00

Eric. Hi. Thanks for inviting me.

Eric Zimmer  02:02

I’m really excited to talk to you today. We’re going to be talking about a subject that is heavier than most, but not maybe as heavy as we make it out to be. I’m hoping as we go through this conversation, because we’re going to be talking about death and we’re going to be discussing your book, which is called with the end in mind. But before we do that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I

Kathryn Mannix  02:59

love this parable, and I’m struck by it often in my work. So in my life, I think it’s easy for us to catch ourselves out feeding the needier Wolf, and often that’s the bad wolf. That’s the wolf that comes from pesters. So sometimes it’s really important to notice that this thing that I’m doing to make myself feel better is actually feeding my fear. Is feeding my worry and concern, and it’s moving me away from being confident that taking courage and feeling the fear and doing it anyway, will, in the end, prevail, and I think if we do that cycle often enough, I hope what we do is we start to wear the footsteps past the bad world store and towards courage and towards healing and moments and holding life in a way that’s trusting, that’s

Eric Zimmer  04:00

beautiful. It makes me think of the idea of avoidance, right? When you avoid what you fear, you strengthen it. You’re subtly sending the message to yourself. I can’t handle this.

Kathryn Mannix  04:12

Yeah, right. And so in my work, of course, I meet lots of people who are maintaining their peace of mind about the fact that their death is approaching by using the really, really helpful, or is helpful technique of complete denial. So if you don’t believe the thing is true, you don’t have to feel any of the difficult emotions. And it’s almost a point of equipoise, I suppose, between the wolves, because it’s so easy to slip sideways into fear and despair in one direction, and yet, if you’re able to open the little denial just enough to say if there were little bit of this that I could deal with today, then you’re stepping up in courage and you. Are stepping out, perhaps, towards the arms of other people who are prepared to help, to hold you and to help you to face the difficult place. And so maybe one of the other things to think about with the metaphorical rules is that wolves work impacts and that we live in community, and the people who are facing years of their lives, sometimes tragically, are alone, but that’s really ran mostly. There’s a small group to an army of well wishers and supporters who confronted by the person’s denial don’t know how to be by enabling them to start a conversation that requires courage but requires tenderness, and I’ve written separately about that. Then we move them into a place where the pack is surrounding the wolf and moving them in the direction of their good wolf, their courage, they’re facing their fear. They’re having more information, because information, in the end, is the light, isn’t it, that shines into the dark place and says, Okay, that’s what it looks like, right? Okay, how do we do this?

Eric Zimmer  06:12

So you have a wonderful story in the book about denial, but I don’t want to go there just yet. I kind of want to start at the beginning a little bit. You say that we all bring our own ideas and expectations with us in any encounter with the big questions, whether that’s birth, death, love, loss or transformation, we frame things through the lens that we see it. We see it mirrored to us, and we think that’s what it’s like, and you say that death has sort of fallen out of the big questions, right? You said it’s become increasingly taboo. Yeah, I

Kathryn Mannix  06:48

think this is really interesting, because it’s not that we don’t think about it, it’s that we didn’t talk about it. And the taboo is almost the thought police that if there were a third person with us now, we might now be worrying that they might be uncomfortable if we pursue this conversation, or we might be watching really carefully in case this is going to be triggering for them. So often it’s a kindness that we’re being careful with each other, and sometimes it’s an overridingness. So I remember our colleague coming back to work after the death of her father, and I bumped into her in the little hospital kitchen where we used to go to sneak a little tea break in between really busy clinics or whatever. And it was tiny. You could only fit three people in at a time when we had to move very carefully around each other to get to the hot water boiler or the cupboard at the mugs in or whatever. So I’m welcoming my colleague back and saying I was really, really sorry to hear that your dad died, and it’s great to have you back at work. And you know we’re here if you want backup, you tell us, don’t let us push it. And she said, thanks. And she left her kitchen area, and there was a third colleague hovering at the edge, somebody who worked in a slightly different discipline from us. And as our bereaved colleague left, she came into the kitchen, she hissed me, I cannot believe you said the word dead to her when her father has just died, and I’m thinking, hang on, it’s the thought police here. My bereaved colleague and I have just had a perfectly okay conversation. We’ve acknowledged her loss. We’ve used a word about the loss. I didn’t say he passed or passed away. I acknowledged that he died. She acknowledged receipted the message that she can call on us if she wants support, but we’re not going to, you know, crowd her. We’re done here. But a different person is now policing my language, a person who wasn’t engaged in that conversation. And I think we see this all the time, and we see it also in the media, so on the news, if you look out for it, in print media, in TV news, very often the announcement that somebody has passed that somebody has passed away. Now, in certain parts of society, there’s a deeper transcendental and spiritual meaning to the language of passing of passing away and passing on. But largely, we’ve grabbed onto that language to be euphemistic and gentler, but it also avoids using the language of the end of life, of the approach of death, of the doing the dying, of the being dead, of enduring, being bereaved. And so we lonely, find people by not having the courage to mention the most obvious, most difficult thing that they’re currently dealing with, and it’s partly because with the UK, with the language, and it’s partly because we powerful eyes dying itself. The understood, it recognized it, saw it frequently three generations. Years ago, I’m going to say now it’s something that we don’t see. It’s being medicalized, as you can, kidnapped into hospital, into escalating and increasingly futile medical care. So I don’t see ordinary dying happening with any regularity. We certainly don’t see it often enough to recognize that it’s a pattern. To recognize that it is recognizable that the patterns of paces are similar from person to person, that they can pace our way through it. They can realize what’s happening to the person who accompany you. Good symptom control, which isn’t rocket science, by the way, with good symptom control. The process of dying can be incredibly peaceful and comfortable enough to be bearable. And frankly, you can’t always say that about the process of giving birth, which often is, you know, it’s parallel in having recognized more phases than stages. And we can, you know, name it and accompany it. But giving birth, unless you really well, anesthetize is not a comfortable process, and dying with proper symptom management is not an uncomfortable process.

Eric Zimmer  11:12

Yeah, it goes back to what I said earlier about avoidance, right? If we avoid a topic, we can’t say death, we empower it and make it harder to say it. You also make the point that we end up saying things like, you know, you mentioned that they’ve passed, or you’ve lost someone, instead of saying died or dead, and that we’ve started to talk about the dying process in terms of warfare, saying somebody lost their battle, right? Which is a defeatist way of talking about this. Say a little bit more about that. I think

Kathryn Mannix  11:47

that’s a really interesting thing. And I think it might be Ronald Reagan who was culpable in the first place saying it, you know, declaring a war on cancer. And it was about cancer, and it’s largely cancer that the battle metaphor is used about and for some people who are having treatment for cancer, battle actually is quite helpful. So we mustn’t throw the baby out with the baffle water here, right? But for a lot of people, they are not battling cancer. They are living with cancer. Their life is not cancer. They’ve got some cancer in their body. It’s affecting their life, but it becomes everything about them, for some people in their key relationships. And the truth is that we will all die. And I know you interview that I really enjoyed listening to. You interview them, the wonderful ala wa Arthur talking about exactly this, that the fact that we’re going to die is given. We can pretend for most of our lives, and we do pretend for most of our lives, that it isn’t so. But at the end of our lives, we will not have lost in battle. We will simply have finished our lives, and we have to die something. It’s interesting that the battle metaphor isn’t used so much for the other things we die from. So communist cause of death in older people now in in high level income countries, in older people with dementia, right? Okay, and we don’t talk about losing your battle with dementia or losing your battle with heart disease, and it’s offensive to dying people to be criticized for not fighting hard enough to win the battle for what? For immortality. Did anybody win that battle yet? So we need to be more cognizant that there is language that is helpful and there’s language that is hurtful, and a really good rule of thumb is to ask people how they like to talk about it. They’ll look a little bit surprised to be asked, but also they’ll appreciate it.

Eric Zimmer  13:53

And you mentioned that many times the elderly, the people who are closer to death, want to talk about death. They want to talk about their preparations. They want to get their affairs in order. But very often, the younger people, quite often their children, don’t they say, No, Oh, Mom, you’re fine. You’re fine, mom, or you know, that’s a long time down the road. Dad, yeah, we’ll talk about that later. And you say that you’ve seen again and again people see death in a sense, almost sneak up on them, meaning they thought they had time to do that. They thought they had time to have the meaningful conversations. They thought that there was more they would be able to do, and once the person starts entering a dying window, they are less. I don’t know if this is how you would say it less, here with us, there’s

Kathryn Mannix  14:43

an interesting thing. So the trajectory of dying is it’s slightly different in different conditions, but for most of us in our lives, there’s a period in our lives when we’re well and we’re healthy, and our life expectancy is measurable in decades. And even though I am now in my. Haven’t Bucha. You know, I still go out running slower. I don’t go as far. My times get worse, gradually, gradually. But it’s showing me that my body is slowing down at a rate of decade to decade, rather than year to year. There’ll come a phase, perhaps when the illness or the illnesses that will eventually end our life declare themselves, when we start to notice that the trouble with my heart, all my lungs, or the cancer I’ve been having treatment for, or whatever it is, is starting to limit me now, and I can notice the difference from one year to the next. And so now we’re measuring life expectancy, probably still in years, but not probably in decades. And as time goes by, that kind of failure of energy and difficulty doing things is noticeable within one year. It’s a noticeable month by month. We’re measuring now in months, perhaps in a month to make a year or so, and gradually that trajectory changes. And always, people think there’s more time than there is. So given that we’re all mortal, I think it’s really, really helpful to start talking about dying long before we need to, because our families generally are not upset that our death is imminent if we start the conversation earlier, so my family know what kind of funeral I’d like and what kind of language I’d like, and much more importantly than my funeral preferences, my living while I’m Dying, preferences, where and who the important people are, and what are the important things to have completed by then, what the noises around me should be. Some people may end up my playlists. I’m a fan of thoughtful silence. A lot of times I don’t want nursing staff that I don’t know to play their radio tunes at me while I’m in that important time of my life, you know? So these are the sorts of things for people to start to think about when they gather for a family gathering, and there’s a really lovely game. And I wish I could remember, and if I can remember us, then it’s even the show notes I came for somebody in the USA, which was a Thanksgiving dinner, to ask the people around the table three questions, and it was their desert island probably not. Doesn’t translate across the Atlantic. We have a show called Desert Island Discs, the

Eric Zimmer  17:31

seven. No, it does. Yeah, it’s an American

Kathryn Mannix  17:34

desert desert island, right? So their desert island books or discs, or whatever, they’re absolutely favorite dinner and their favorite pizza topping. Yeah, and everybody, this is the gathering of the people who are closest to us in families. They get each other’s answers, and they never get each other’s answers right. And then you turn the questions over, and the questions are those ends of my care questions? And you think, if people don’t even know each other’s paper at Pizza toppings, how are they possibly going to guess the answers to these questions? And so it’s an invitation when the family is gathered. And because it’s a little bit funny that we’ve all got this question so wrong, to just maybe take two or three of those questions and have a think about the answers, not because we need to, but because we actually, right now, thank goodness don’t need to, but it’s a gift to each other that we have. It’s interesting,

Eric Zimmer  18:33

because when I think about death, the question to me would be, well, you want to be buried, you want to be cremated. You want, and I usually say like I could care less. However, you make the point that there’s a lot of time up towards death that I may care a lot about. So for example, in my case, since I have misophonia, aversion to sounds, no one should be allowed to chew in the room where I’m dying. Eat your food in the hallway, I can’t move, and I’m just, you know, I’m tormented by by sounds like that. You say in the book that there’s usually little to fear about death and much to prepare for.

Kathryn Mannix  19:15

I think that we fear it so much that we don’t start the preparations. And it’s absolutely the other way around that, actually. So first of all, the intention of the book is to de catastrophize dying and re familiarize people with its predictable and relatively gentle processes. And then to start to think about, well, if that’s what’s going to happen. Now you know that it’s likely to be like that. Let’s think about where might that be able to happen. Doesn’t have to happen in the hospital. It doesn’t have to happen in an intensive care unit. You might no longer be able to manage the stairs in your home, but you might really love snuggling down in your big sofa. Or you might envisage that actually, when I get to the end of my life, I’m going to go and be careful. I’m. My daughter, really, have you discussed that with your daughter? Because the last time I looked your daughter had three dogs, two cats and five children under the age of 10. How’s that going to work for you? Or where’s the bathroom in your daughter’s house relative to the bedroom that you would use? Which of the kids won’t be able to use their own bedroom for the duration of the time that you’re living in their home? Yeah, and it’s just meant to stop people from making assumptions and instead to help us conversations. And if you know the process, then you can work out, okay, how much of that process could I actually live, just in the place that I normally enjoy living, have control over my life? What extra help might I need? Where could I get that help? Is it going to be from friends and Vegas? Can I afford come from services I hate? From what will the state privilege for me? Lots and lots of things to think about. And then that particular thing that you’ve said about the soundscape around us, or about the way we touch, or the way that we’re held, there are people for whom touch is really triggering, that they’ve had experiences in their lives that have been terrible for them, and they’ve perhaps spent a lifetime mending as best they can from that other people they have the ability to understand that and how they are to be touched, people who obviously this is an absolutely Great example of something you would never guess from having conversations with a person, although, if you’ve lived with them for long enough, though,

Eric Zimmer  21:26

people in my life know your guys really know Yeah, and so do hundreds of 1000s of podcast listeners. But

Kathryn Mannix  21:33

you see, because I didn’t know I was drinking tea with the microphone open, that’s fine, but it didn’t occur to me, and it would have occurred to me had I known so these things aren’t they? Of thinking about, what do I need to know about this person is that there’s a psychiatrist in Winnipeg in Canada, Harvey chocchinov, internationally famous for his work in palliative and ends of my care for Dignity Therapy, and he has this question, what do I need to know about you as a person? Can or does that I can give you the very best care that matches your needs? And that’s the conversation in which each of us would discuss some things that would be very, very similar for a person to person. And then those individual things with it. Oh, right, okay. I was gonna unwrap my cheese sandwich and sit next to Eric so that he didn’t feel lonely while he was waiting to go in for that scan. That’s not a good plan. I’m not going to do that now. Or, you know, for a Kathryn lying in that room and it’s completely silence like the grave. I must be terrified there. I’m going to put some cheerful music on know, what do You need? Not? What do I think you need? You?

Eric Zimmer  23:00

Hair. One of the things that I think is hard about this planning is it seems relatively straightforward to decide what you want to happen once you die. My partner, Jenny’s mother passed coming up on two years now, amazingly, from Alzheimer’s, and we took care of her for about six years, and one of the kindest things she did for us was when she was diagnosed, she took me to the funeral home, and we did all of it. It was just done. You know, we just said to the funeral home, come get her and do what she said. You know, we had like, two decisions to make. So that seems straightforward to me. What does not seem straightforward. And I’ve got an aging mother, 81 years old. And what makes the planning hard, I think, is I don’t know what’s going to happen. I understand what’s going to happen in the last weeks of her life. I understand that we’ve had Barbara Carnes on who does the sort of thing you do here. I think she’s here in the US, and so I recognize the patterns of the dying process. It’s that time before that. Is she going to have a stroke and need to be in a nursing care? Is she going to get dementia and that’s going to be a different thing? Is she going to just, I don’t know what it means to die of old age when they say that. I’m like, What does that even mean? But that’s the planning that’s hard.

Kathryn Mannix  24:21

You’re absolutely right. And I think that if we think about planning as a list with tick boxes, the list would be open, it wouldn’t it. So I think we can turn the conversation a different way. We can say, at this stage in all of our lives, what matters most to us? Where do we get our joy? What brings us peace of mind? What are the conditions that help us to feel satisfied and calm and at peace during and by the end goal each day, what matters most? And we can have those conversations. And actually, there’s delightful conversations to have, because they’re about the things that bring us joy. They’re often about the people. Whom we love, whom we’re thrilled to see or to hear, their voices if they’re far away. And that means that in the future, there’s some kind of medical event that makes it difficult for the person there to express their wishes, like they have a stroke. For example, instead of, I’m your mother’s doctor and she’s had a stroke, heaven, COVID, instead of saying to you, what did your mother say she would want to do about sheep feeding, having a ventilator, living in a rehabilitation facility? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can say she explain to me what math isn’t seen, because then I can talk with you about all the treatment options we have, and what we can do is we can wrap the treatment options that are most likely to match what matters most to her. We can wrap those around the care that we give her. So it might be, for example, I have I looked after a lovely, very elderly lady with terrible respiratory disease. It was on oxygen at home, and part of my work was to be a cognitive behavior therapist. And originally, I’d seen her because she used to get para systems of panic when she lost her breath. She always thought this was the time going to die, and she learned to use cognitive therapy skills to manage her panic. She was gorgeous, and I loved her, and she came to my clinic one day, and she always had this attitude that doesn’t really matter how long I live now and I’m aged, it’s the quality of my living what matters most to me. And that’s an important question. Is it quality or is it length of time? What would you be prepared to put up with, to eke out extra time compared with what you wouldn’t be prepared to put up with, because it’s the quality of living the most. And she said, you know, what a wonderful thing is going to happen. My granddaughter in Australia is going to get married, and I want to go to the wedding. And I knew that this woman who was using oxygen just soon, helped her to walk from her living room to her bathroom at home, on the level, she is never going to, you know, to tolerate flying at 32,000 feet that that is not a possibility. So how are we going to bring the joy of the wedding into her life when she can’t be in Australia for the wedding? But the important part for our discussion here is she’s changed the parameters of what she wanted. It’s not a once and for all decision. She was wanting quality of quantity. Now she wants quantity. She put up with any treatments to be still alive when the wedding happens. So she is still alive when the wedding happens. And this is, I can’t remember now, the 20 early teens, long before COVID, wrong. Skype was the thing we all used to talk to each other. So she Skyped into this wedding. It’s stupid. O’clock in the morning in England. She’s got her lovely clothes on. She’s got her grandma’s and wedding hat on. You know? It’s fantastic. So she comes in the next time I see her, and she’s gone back to had the wedding. I’m going back now to it doesn’t matter how long I survive. I just want good quality of life. And so it’s flipped. And then the next time I see her, and she’s noticeably more frail, the granddaughter is pregnant. So now, right? I want to, I want to see this baby born now, actually, she clearly now she’s deteriorating month by month, we can see that she isn’t going to live long enough to meet this baby. But again, what can we do to bring the joy of that and the knowledge of that and the grannying of that, or the great granny of that, into her heart and soul of life and into her family’s life? So she gets knitting, and she’s knitting Fast and Furious for the time that she’s still able to so there’s this bunch of baby clothes going to be posted halfway around the world to this great grandchild that she’s never going to meet. But every time her granddaughter takes out, you know, pair of mittens or middle cardigan or whatever. She’s getting her grandmother’s love out of the draw at the same time, her grandmother’s investment in her and in her child who she’s never going to meet. So if we’re honest about the conversations, and if we focus the conversations on what matters most, we can use those as the stepping stones for the incidents that actually happen that we can’t prepare for in detail. But once they happen, once an illness declares itself, once there’s a critical treatment decision about, do we do this or do we do that? And the person’s not well enough to say, the information you need isn’t it checklist or pay would definitely want this, or them definitely not want that. It’s which of the decisions that we can make best matches what matters most to

Eric Zimmer  29:50

this person. That makes a lot of sense. And can I request you to be my palliative care doctor? Now? Can I make that request? I. Oh,

Kathryn Mannix  30:00

Eric, you’re very sweet. And sadly, I stopped work to do this work, I took early retirement some time ago now, to do something about public understanding of dying. There was a particular incident. I talked about it in the book of meeting a family with a very, very elderly dad with masses of medical notes for people who are listening to us. My hands are maybe 12 inches apart. Just so many things wrong with him in his 90s. Had they had none of these conversations, and he was blue lighted into hospital having CPR almost dead, and we had to have that conversation, and they had no preparatory conversations at all, and I don’t know how many dozens or more times I’ve met families like that, but this was the family that broke me. This was the family where afterwards, I mean, we gathered things together, and that dad was looked at beautifully, and he died very gently, but they stay with me. Somebody’s got to do something about public understanding of dying. Somebody’s need to do something about the way Hollywood portray thing. Somebody needs to do something about the fact that the newspapers pick up the rare, the unusual, the difficult. They’re true, but they’re the exceptions. And now, because we don’t understand dying, we grasp those exceptions and think that’s the normal and gradually over the course, I would say, probably six or eight months, it dawned on me that I have many, many stories to tell about ordinary lying. Storytelling is our ancient way of giving each other insights and I knew that it had to be stories, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to tell stories without even some discernment time. So I stepped out of medical practice to make the space to think about how that could happen. And I miss being heart of my fantastic team, and I miss meeting those fantastic families at that really poignant time in people’s lives. And yet this has been such a rewarding new way of working.

Eric Zimmer  32:10

So I have a couple questions of curiosity, I think, maybe more than anything else, but I’m going to indulge myself here. When we say someone dies of old age? What do we mean? Just something critical gave out, but it didn’t have a diagnosed disease before it gave out. That’s such a great

Kathryn Mannix  32:29

question. And around the world, I don’t know, it’s not always legal for a doctor to say that a person died of old age. Sometimes they’re required to give a medical diagnosis. In Britain, it is legal in England and Wales, which is our area of jurisdiction, to give a diverse old age, provided it’s given by a doctor who’s known the person for a considerable amount of time. And so the queen, Queen Elizabeth, the second death certificate, is given by her general practitioner insult them as old age. So old age is a death from a condition called frailty. Now they use the word frail in common parts. It has a particular meaning in this and it’s usually that this person who may be aged or who may be young and just unfortunate, has collected enough mini diagnoses, enough things, not long enough with them to kill them, but the accumulation of those things now is a burden on their energy and on their well being. And I have a colleague who describes this a little bit like paper boats. You get a piece of paper and you do those special Origami Folds that we can all do to amuse a small child, and you end up with a tiny little paper boat, and it’s got crisp folds, and it’s got flat paper, and it sits up, and you can stick it on a bathtub, or you stick it on the river nearby, and it sits up and it’s crisp and it’s clean, and it looks great as soon as it touches the water. As soon as our little bit of water gets over the lip into it, it’s weakened. And gradually the weakness spreads through it, and maybe there’s a big ripple. Maybe you put it on the sea on a calm day, and then somebody throws a pebble in nearby, and a big splash lands on it, and it disintegrates. So it has a sense of looking whole, looking complete, and looking strong. If you try to tear an origami folded paper boat, it’s really hard to tear it, but when it’s on the water, it’s completely vulnerable, and the water is life, and it’s the next thing that comes along is the pebble that throws the water onto the little paper boat, and whichever is the weakest link now disintegrates and allows the other. Things all is sequenced to unravel. And if it had only been one thing wrong, that would have been recoverable. Had only been two maybe three things wrong, it could have been recoverable. But there are so many little bits of us not quite working well anymore that we’re not well enough to recover. And so it’s interesting to notice that over the age of 80, if a person falls over and breaks their hip, their life expectancy on the day they break their hip is shorter than if they’d been diagnosed with lung cancer on that day. And it’s not because they’ve broken their hip, it’s because they fell and they couldn’t write themselves and they couldn’t catch themselves as they went down, and it’s because of the way they landed. And that’s all about the muscle strength and their bone strength and their coordination. And once they’ve suffered the injury, it’s about the way their blood clots or doesn’t clot. It’s about whether their lungs are strong enough to be able to sustain them for the anesthetic they’ll need for the operation to correct the fracture or replace the hip joint. It’s all of those tiny little things that mitigate against them. So if a person is striding out across the road in the hip like a car when they break their hip, that’s different, because they didn’t have the fall. But there’s something about the cumulative effects of aging in the body, where the whole thing holds together until there’s something that happens, and then it just can’t work any longer. So it’s really interesting. There are photographs of the Queen at Balmoral seeing off the old Prime Minister and welcoming the new prime minister. And when it was announced that she was going to accept the resignation and receive the new prime minister at Balmoral, when that was announced, I said to my husband, she’s going to do 10th in six weeks because she can’t risk going back to London. She hasn’t got the energy to go to London and get back again. This is an absolute sea change in her behavior, and we’d seen a change in her behavior for some time. She’d been gradually delegating, always predictably started walking with a sick had the massive hit of her husband of out of Illinois, 60 something years they’ve been married, but then she started to delegate at the last minute to send apologies for things that she was actually fully expected at. So you can see that the rate of change in the predictability is starting to shift. And then she didn’t go back to London for the change of Prime Ministers. And for those of us who’d been watching, the queen had been dying in clear site for about two years, but newspapers covered it as though the death was a Surprise and was quite sudden it wasn’t at all you

Eric Zimmer  38:17

that leads us into The idea that there is a predictable pattern. We’ve talked about it a little bit, but I’m wondering if you could walk us through in just a little bit more detail what the predictable pattern of dying looks like. I found this really helpful when Jenny’s mom passed from Alzheimer’s. Even though Alzheimer’s is different than other things, the actual dying process was exactly as people sort of laid it out to be. And it was really helpful to know, oh, here’s what’s happening, and then this is going to happen. And so I’d love to give listeners that information. Okay,

Kathryn Mannix  38:54

so what we’re talking about now is that very last part of living, the variety of roots, of getting to there. Maybe the frail person whose paper boat just unfolds over the previous week after looking okayish for a long time, maybe somebody who’s been gradually struggling more and more with heart problems, lung problems, a cancer diagnosis that seemed really well held by treatment until relatively recently, that has now escaped whatever it is, but we’re now talking about the end game. I suppose this is the equivalent of giving birth rather than what the pregnancy was like beforehand. So when we’re down to the last few weeks and days of life, there are some consistent things that we see. We see that people lose interest in the outside world. They become more and more focused on the people investing those to them, the state of their own selves, and often the kind of retrospect about their lives and what it’s all been about and have they are doing the reckoning how. They live their lives according to their standards, and that might be the standards of a faith or religious legal environmentalism, whatever the thing that matters to them, the things that matter to them, we see people losing interest in food, and that’s really hard for families, because we show people we love them by feeding them. All around the world, we do this. People who really have no appetite left because their gut is starting to feed just slow down. It’s not doing digestion effectively anymore. So if they try and eat that meal that their daughter has laid for now to make it’s just going to sit like a lump, and they kind of feel uncomfortable and so hard, but we see families trying to sway people to eat.

Eric Zimmer  40:47

Can I ask a question about that part of it? Yeah, because that stopping eating is kind of a common thing, and the worry that I’ve had when I’ve been around somebody dying is that they’re starving. And I mean the psychological condition of feeling like you’re starving, yeah, and it sounds like you’re saying that’s not really the experience that it seems like they’re having no

Kathryn Mannix  41:10

it’s fascinating. What seems to happen is that they have a failure of hunger, and they no longer desire to eat. And when you face them with a meal, they can look at it. They can see it’s beautifully presented, and maybe it smells delicious, but just I already feel as I’ve eaten, I just don’t want that. So the wisdom that I give to families is go for the volume of a teaspoon, tiny tastes that are just for pleasure, because people don’t in the main die because they’re not eating. They’re not eating because they’re dying. And it’s one of the signs that the process is evolving. So very often, their taste buds will still appreciate just tiny taste of things that they’ve all those loved. So just in case you happen to be in town when it’s my turn, it’s going to be baked rhubarb, please, no ginger on it, but lots of sugar or elder flour, cordial and vanilla custard, proper, vanilla custard. Okay, that’s my teaspoon. That’s my tiny taste. Something for pleasure.

Eric Zimmer  42:17

I think I want Mikey’s late night, sliced pizza with a little bit of crushed red pepper on it and Ginny’s banana cream pie.

Kathryn Mannix  42:24

Okay, so that’s clear. So you’re allowed two teaspoons then, because that’s very specific, and they’re not going to taste together on the same spoon, very good. No, those

Eric Zimmer  42:31

are going to be different events. So

Kathryn Mannix  42:33

gradually, the body is showing us that it’s changing less appetite, less energy, and the energy failure is the really interesting bit, because the bit that replenishes lost energy now isn’t eating and drinking, it’s sleep. Fascinating. Who knew? So you will see that the person will drop off to sleep. Now, for people who are listening to us, who like their afternoon nap, mine one of those. I’m not talking about the nap that you’ve planned and you’re looking forward to. This is a kind of nodding off in the middle of a conversation that is just irresistible. And the person will sleep for a while, they’ll wake up, they will recharge their batteries, they’ll have a bit of energy to do something for a while, and then they’ll fall back to sleep again, so that it’s almost like, you know, a mobile phone with one of those old batteries that didn’t used to hold its charge of it like that. And as time goes by, the periods of time spent sleeping last longer, and the periods of time awake that they buy last shorter. And also, it’s important for people not to be frightened by a thing that isn’t uncommon, which is people getting a little bit stuck between sleep and awake, which has happened to all of us really deeply asleep, and your alarm goes to waiting you can work time, or particularly, it happens when you know you only got an early flight, and you set your alarm so you don’t miss it, so you’re waking at a different time from usual, and in your dream, the noise, that’s real, that’s the alarm, becomes a feature of the dream. So you start to dream about fire engines, and there’s a fire somewhere. And then as you wake in, you realize, oh, I was dreaming, but there’s a fire. Where’s the fire engine? What’s going on here? There’s a fire engine in my room, and then you waken in there to say, No, this is my alarm. I can turn it off. But there’s that moment of being trapped between the things that are real in the room, the noise and the things that are not really in your head, which is the dream about the fire engines. And we call this muddledness dindirium, and there are lots of causes for it towards the end of life, but very commonly it’s just being a bit stuck between sleep and wake. And if it frightens the family and they start to be agitated, then the agitation communicates itself to the person, so they then think there’s something to be frightened about. So they then become agitated. Too. So being able to say, Oh, Dad, you’re kind of talking to people in your dreams here. That’s okay. It’s fine. It’s lovely to see them, isn’t it. We’ll have another cup of tea. Your voice stays calm. Your de Nina stays calm. It doesn’t wind his father. So as time goes by, we find the person is sleeping more. They’re awake less, and very often that might mean now that they can’t wake up at times when they would have been taking medications for you know, some people have symptoms like pain or breathlessness. A lot of people towards the very end of their lives have no symptoms at all. And it’s really important to say that dying doesn’t cause discomfort. The illness that they’re dying from might cause discomfort. Towards the very end of somebody’s life, they’re not just asleep anymore. They’re actually dipping in and out of unconsciousness. They don’t know they’ve been unconscious, but we might notice it because a visitor came, or it was medicine time, and we couldn’t waken them. And when they wake up later on, they come back up from deep unconsciousness through sleep, back to being awake again. And we say, Oh, we couldn’t awaken you at all. And they say, Oh, you listen to tried hard enough. So being unconscious is not something that we realize is happening to us, which is the clues in the name, I suppose, isn’t it? So towards the very end of people’s lives, they’re not awake, that they’re not asleep, they are unconscious, and it’s really important people understand that, because otherwise they’re afraid to go to sleep a time, and sleep is your most important ally for keeping you as well as you can be under the circumstances when the brain lapses into complete unconsciousness, there are only two things instantly. One is it can still hear sound. I don’t think whether it still responds to it. With misophonia, that’s an interesting thing to speculate about, but we know that people do still hear sound. How we observe that people often look more rested when the right voices of the room, or get a little bit agitated when the wrong voice is in the room, and we’ve seen people synchronizing their breathing to deliver the music being played in the room. So that’s really interesting, that in this state of deep unconsciousness, hearing is probably still connected to our emotion system and our sense of calm. So you will see nurses talking to people dying people, people who have head injuries or strokes and Deep Field cultures, and the nurses are still talking to them. That’s why. And then the other part of the brain that’s still working is part that controls our breathing, and it’s now doing something that we’d normally never see, which is, instead of kind of breathing that you and I are doing, where we’re not really thinking about start reading, except now we’re talking about, of course, we are now thinking about our breathing. We’re managing our breathing so we’re both thinking into microphones, so we’re being aware of not taking big, hissy, sucky breaths as we do that, we’re taking sufficient breath to speak a particular length of praise before we pause, take a breath and say the next phrase, and people who are listening to us are properly managing their breathing so their breath sounds aren’t obscuring our voices coming into their ears. So during normal life, we take breathing for granted. We don’t really think about it, but we do manage it. Now in deep unconsciousness, the brain does primitive reflex breathing cycles, and they look and sound peculiar. They go backwards and falls between very deep breathing, that can be sighing, it can be coming out through the vocal cords, so there’s room noise, and faster but shallower breathing, which can look as though the person is breathless. So if you’ve never seen that before, then you need somebody who has seen it before to say to you, you know this breathing is completely normal, your dear person is deeply unconscious. This breathing tells me that they’re beyond feeling distress from symptoms in their body. They’re completely safe. They’re dying, but they’re safe, and that this is hard of ordinary dying, and it’s the last part. So once the breathing is changing like this, then we might be down to the final hours. Sometimes it’s days, sometimes it’s really short. So this is the time if you want to be alongside the person to sit down. Bring yourself a book. Bring yourself a newspaper. Bring your slippers with you. Be a good visitor. So at home in our houses, we don’t normally sit locked tight next to the person, eyeball to eyeball, looking at them, stroking them. Not in my house, we kind of ignore each other in a loving kind of way most of the time. So. How do you help families to feel peaceful around the death as you remind them that actually here we are, they can hear you. So why not chat to each other? Think about some of the funny things that have happened in the past. Think of some of the important things that happened in the past. Just tell them they’re safe, that they’re loved. They’re doing okay. You’re doing a great job of creating the safe space that this person can leave their life from. What’s really fascinating is how often, despite the fact that this family’s had a Rota, there’d be two or three people in the room the whole time. It’s the 1/32 interval where everybody got called away at once that the person stops breathing. Why does that happen? We just don’t understand it. But it does seem to happen more often than can happen by chance. Sometimes the person carries on doing this terminal breathing for a very long time, and then the person they’ve been waiting to arrive from around the world. They arrive, their voices in the room, and within minutes, everything is just very gently, slow, because there’s nothing special about the last breath. It’s not Hollywood. During one of the periods of slow breathing, usually shallow breathing, there’ll be a breath out just now, another breath in afterwards. So people don’t suddenly sit up and, you know, tend the family secrets or whatever. It’s much, much more gentle than that. There are occasional times when a person will rally unexpectedly for a few hours to a day, very closely before death that again, let’s not leave those important conversations waiting for that time. That’s called the rally, because it doesn’t happen to most people. Let’s have the important conversations first. So we seem to have a little bit more control than we can understand about the moment of dynasty. It seems to be possible to wait for the morning. It seems to be possible to wait till the room is empty, to be able to wait until the important news is broken, until the right person has arrived. But not everybody can wait. And sometimes you’ve dashed around the world only to arrive and it’s just a few minutes too late, but usually the family have said, you know, Susie’s on her way, dad, and just knowing that Susie’s on her way has been a helpful part of the consolation at that time. So there isn’t a right way or a wrong way of doing this. I’ve seen families sitting around beds, telling jokes, ribbing each other the way they always have, reminding each other of childhood fights that their dad told them off about while dad’s peacefully dying. I’ve seen families singing souls. I’ve seen families using whatever other sacred scriptures of their tradition because that’s the way their dad would have wanted it, or that’s what their family tradition is. I’ve seen families who just sit in silence, maybe with her favorite show tunes in the background. There isn’t a right and wrong way of doing it, but always, there’s a sense of something very powerful is happening in that room, that there’s a huge amount of love in that room. Also, of course, the difficult things are also in that room. No family is perfect. Every family’s got those times that were difficult. They haven’t gone away either. And so coming back to our wolves, we can feed that anger into the Bad Wolf, or we can say, Okay, this has lasted long enough. We can let that anger go and we can feed the Good Wolf even the SED Well,

Eric Zimmer  53:36

I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. That was a very nice ending on your part, you and I are going to continue to talk a little bit in the post show conversation. I want to talk about palliative care, because palliative care is more than just hospice care, and I want to explore that. I think this is a really useful thing for people to know about. Listeners, if you’d like access to the post show conversation, ad free episodes and the chance to support something that matters to you. Go to one you feed.net/join Kathryn. Thank you so much for coming on. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Heavy as it is, it’s been a treat. Thanks so much for inviting me. You

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  03:10

Hi Yoni, welcome to the show.

Yoni Ashar  03:12

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer  03:14

I’m really excited to have you on we’re talking about some really important work that you have been a researcher on and involved in. It’s detailed in a book called The Way out a revolutionary scientifically proven approach to healing chronic pain. And I’m particularly interested in this one because obviously, I know a lot of people who have chronic pain, but one in particular is my mother. And so I’m really excited to share this episode with her when we get done. The book is written by Alan Gordon. However, I think I got the better end of the deal here because he describes you in the book as the man who ran the show, a 32 year old wunderkind with the mind of Aristotle and the effortless cool of James Dean,

Yoni Ashar  03:56

don’t believe him mature.

Eric Zimmer  04:00

Alright, we will get into pain reprocessing therapy here in a moment. But let’s start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always in battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it second, and looks up at their grandparents as well which one wins, and the grandparents says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Yoni Ashar  04:36

Now, I love that parable. And I think it’s very relevant to the work we’re doing with chronic pain here. There really are two worlds that can feed chronic pain. There’s a fear Wolf and the more that wolf is active and hungry and feeding, then the bigger and the bigger the pain will get any of the wolf of Something like safety or ease that eventually, you know, can lead to the large reductions, or even elimination of chronic pain, which you may not believe me quite yet. But hopefully at the end of that conversation, I’ll make a case for that. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  05:16

you guys actually use the parable in the book. And there’s a funny line at the end, which says, you know, we might call it The Tale of Two neural pathways, but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. You know, I used to say, when I was talking about this early on, I would say, you know, in Buddhism, we talk less about good and bad, and we might say, skillful and unskillful. But I was like, you know, a skillful and unskillful. Wolf is in a very good story, right? It just doesn’t, doesn’t capture the imagination. Right? So let’s talk about the core of your work. It’s really around recognizing that I guess, correct anything I say it’s incorrect. It’s certain types, or even maybe a lot of chronic pain is what you guys would call neuro plastic pain. Can you describe what neuro plastic pain is?

Yoni Ashar  06:03

Yeah, you got it, right. So there has been a revolution in our understanding of chronic pain that’s been unfolding over the past several decades, due to advances in medicine, in neuroscience and in psychology and other fields. And what we now know is that a person could get injured, of course, they’ll have pain, you know, surrounding the injury, but then the injury can heal, and the pain can persist for years, or decades beyond that, and at that point, the pain is no longer caused by the injury because the injury is long since healed. And there are other factors, particularly, you know, factor processes in the brain that are causing the pain to persist. And this is called neuro plastic. Pain actually goes by many names. It’s also called primary pain, and no sit plastic pain. But that the main idea here is that the pain is not due to physical, structural biomechanical factors. It’s not due to like tissue damage. And we think that, you know, this might be a really large portion of chronic pain, actually,

Eric Zimmer  07:19

now, what you’re seeing here, I think there’s nuance to this, it’s important, because, you know, we’ve all heard the, it’s all in your head thing, right, which is a way of sort of dismissing something, it’s all in your head. And what you guys are saying is the pain is absolutely 100% real, it is there. It’s just that what’s causing it is loops in the brain, not signals from the body.

Yoni Ashar  07:45

That’s exactly right. And it’s so important to emphasize the pain is real pain is always real. And this view of You’re making it up or you’re exaggerating, really upsets me, I find that really offensive, you know, to all of us who have had any kind of chronic pain. It’s especially been used to marginalize people like groups like women or other groups that have been written off as hysterical or exaggerating. And it’s not true at that level now, from the total flip perspective, while the brain is in the head, and we now know that all kinds of brain processes that can amplify or inhibit pain, that those are very important, and they’re no less real in any way.

Eric Zimmer  08:30

Yep. What are some of the things that have happened, neuroscience wise, that have caused us to start to uncover this? And for us to be able to start to tell the difference between say, what is neuropathic pain versus other types of pain, you talk in the book about short term versus chronic pain and how that’s in different parts of the brain share some of that science with us? Sure,

Yoni Ashar  08:53

there’s been a lot of research in both animal models of chronic pain, particularly in rodents, where they kind of create chronic pain conditions. And in people who have chronic pain, there’s one study that comes to mind in particular, that was, at least for me, a kind of lightning bolt moment, like, Whoa, this is really a big deal. So this is a study from the aperion lab at Northwestern that came out five or 10 years ago, and they recruited people who have recently injured their back. And these people had back pain because they have recently injured their back, and they scan their brains. And what they saw was that the pain lived exactly where you would expect it to be. That pain processing parts of the brain. This includes somatosensory cortex, cingulate insula, these are brain regions that any neuroscientists would say yep, that’s where the pain belongs. That’s the part of the brain that does pain processing. Then they follow these people for a year out and then half of them the pain resolved, right the injury healed they went back live as normal, it’s kind of like typical course yeah, you pulled your back now everything’s better. And the other half, the pain persisted. And now this is a year after injury and the back still hurts. And when they scan their brains, they found that the pain was now associated with a totally different set of brain regions, it was associated with medial prefrontal cortex, and with the amygdala. And those are brain regions that have a lot to do with learning, and memory, and emotion and meaning. And what they basically did in the study was they caught on camera, they using the brain scanner, they caught on camera, this transition of pain, to moving to these different brain circuits where it can now, as you said, like live on loop in a way relatively independent of any injuries in the body.

Eric Zimmer  10:55

That is absolutely fascinating. That really is amazing to be able to show that transition and what those different parts of the brain tend to be more involved in.

Yoni Ashar  11:06

And there’s been Eric, this other kind of surge of research that’s also been looking at not clinical research, I would say, but it’s trying to understand what is pain, fundamentally, because the old view of pain was that pain was a direct readout of problems in the body. So this is like, you know, you stub your toe and your toe hurts, because that’s letting me know that something happened in your toe, that’s true pain can be that. And we now know that pain is much, much more complex. And one of my favorite ways of thinking about pain is as a learning signal for guiding behavior. So the job of pain is to keep us safe and healthy, keep our bodies intact. Now, in order to do that job, well, the paint system has to be predictive, it has to be always thinking ahead about how damaging some action or activity might be, that way you can keep us safe, the paint system are always just reactive, but I’ll be dead if the One Step Ahead of the lion. And once you know, we understand that pain is predictive, that opens up a whole host of thorny problems, because prediction is really challenging. Like, it’s really hard to, you know, to tell the future. And there can be mispredictions. So for example, a person injures their back, they’re bending over, that’s not good, that’s for the injury. So So pain is created. But now the brain, you know, will start to predict pain when bending over and even if the injury is healed, there’s a prediction that’s present in the nervous system, not consciously in any way, just kind of in the brain is prediction is there and that pain will be generated, because it’s been associated with that motion in the past, and it can be a misprediction

Eric Zimmer  12:47

you guys also reference another study, which I think is also Northwestern about researchers ability to predict pain, you know, like who’s going to have pain, and apparently, they were accurate 85% of the time. So what was going on there?

Yoni Ashar  13:01

That was actually the same group of subjects and what they did, they said like, Okay, so these are the changes that happened with people, as the pain went from, you know, post injury, pain to chronic pain. Now, let’s look at the brain scan from right after the injury and see if we can predict who’s going to get better and who’s going to develop chronic back pain. And what they found was that patterns of brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens was able to predict who would develop chronic pain and who would resolve and that’s really important for at least two reasons. First, those two brain regions are very involved in learning processes. So it suggests that there’s a learning about the pain that’s happening in the brain and once the pain becomes learned, it can basically become a habit can become a pain habit. Again, not an intentional habit, no one’s choosing to be in pain. No one’s like, you know, wanting that but it can recruit the same circuitry. The nucleus accumbens is actually really involved in you know, so like addiction. I was just listening to your last episode. Yep. Yeah. The second reason that’s really important is because when you look at like a scans and MRIs of the back, you know, if someone injures their back, those are completely non predictive of who’s going to recover and who is going to get worse. So it’s really striking that a brain scan but not a back scan can tell who will get better and who will not.

Eric Zimmer  14:24

Yeah, that is just amazing that the brain is more predictive than the back. Even though we’re the pain is in the back. The injury is in the back. What I love about what you guys have done here, and the way you’ve brought this together is I mean, this is not a brand new idea, right? There’s a guy Dr. John Sarno, who’s been around a long time who’s advocated similar ideas, but there’s way more actual science here. And there are differences. I’m not trying to tie your work to his I’m just saying that there are similarities, which is saying that there is a clear mental element to this and I would even say Based on your work and others, there’s a clear mental and emotional element to what we have with chronic pain. So yeah, I mean, I guess one of the big questions would be how does somebody know? Is my pain neuro plastic? Or is it still real signals from the body? Yeah,

Yoni Ashar  15:18

so there are some indicators that can really be helpful in sussing this out. And I want to give credit here to my friend and colleague, Dr. Howard Shubin, er who in my mind has really helped develop these methods, as well as you know, many others in the field. But I must have learned from him. So he’s my guru when it comes to assessment. So two components of figuring this out first is the rule out, you can see a doctor see a relevant specialist try to, you know, get clarity, is there anything clear and physical in the body, that’s no a clear cause to the pain, I note of caution there is not to go overboard. If you see enough specialists, one of them will find something wrong, I guarantee it. So but you know, do basic due diligence to rule out any obvious medical problems. The second component is the rule. And And here’s where I think there’s actually a lot of value in juice for a lot of people to try to figure out what kind of pain is this. So if any of the following are present, these are indicators of neuroplastic pain, one spatial spread of pain, pain started on my shoulder, and now it’s spread down my arm injuries don’t travel. But right, but sensations spread. And we actually now know, thanks to the work of Bob Coghill, and others, some of the neurobiological mechanisms of this, they’re these neurons called dynamic wide range of neurons in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord that sensitize each other and cause spatial spread of pain. Just something that that, you know, happens in our nervous system, if one area hurts, it’ll sensitize neighboring neurons and cause other signals coming will sensitize neighboring areas and cause spread of pain. Okay, second indicator, spatial variability. So like sometimes the person the left leg, the hurts on the right, again, that really suggests the brains involved here, because the brains are really good at kind of moving things around in the body. Three temporal variability, no, some days, the pain is 10 out of 10, you know, the next day zero out of 10, that, again, does not sound characteristic of like an injury, if you have a broken foot, it’s not gonna, it’ll hurt every time you step on it, you’re not gonna have 10 out of 10, one day zero out of 10, the next day, it doesn’t have to be quite as dramatic as 10 to zero, it can be not eight to a three, and that’s still quite large swings for presence of multiple chronic pain or no somatosensory syndromes, you know, in the person’s history. If you have a history of headaches, and stomach aches, and sound and light sensitivity, and you know, now your hip is hurting. So it’s possible that you have a stomach problem and the hip problem and the head problem. But it’s also, you know, even more likely, that there might be something in how the brain is processing input from the body that is causing this gain of signal, this volume, inflammation. And that can be an explanation for these multiple symptoms. Oh, another one that’s really important here is when the pain is really contextually sensitive. And so what they mean is they have pain in some context, but not in others. And it doesn’t make any like sense from a kind of biomechanical perspective. So for example, when I had, you know, years of chronic back pain, my back would always hurt when I stood, but it never hurt when I ran, and I could run for, you know, miles and my back felt great. And then I would think I’ll stop at the end of the run, and my back would start hurting. And it just like, what’s going on this? That’s kind of something’s a little fishy here. Like, why would that be and I later understood when I got into all this research that I had developed a conditioned response, that my brain, you know, had paired, standing still with pain. And so whenever I started, that was started to create pain, just like Pavlov’s dog has learned to link a bell to food, you know, we can link a certain position to pain, even though that position isn’t objectively more dangerous, or putting our body at risk than like running or some other position is,

Eric Zimmer  19:25

is it possible that you would have both that you might have say, you’re an older person, and you have some arthritis, which you know, is probably actually causing some pain. So you might also have neuroplastic pain. Is there a place where it’s not one or the other?

Yoni Ashar  19:41

Yes, so it’s a spectrum. And it could be anywhere along the spectrum. For more, say peripheral tissue causes there’s something in the body that’s really driving it to centralized central nervous system brain causes. So people can be you know, what we call mixed pain, or there’s both of those That being said, I think some of us suspect more and more that a fairly large portion is centralized or primary pain, neuroplastic pain, for example, Eric, like arthritis is not necessarily painful, no severe arthritis is painful, but mild to moderate arthritis is often not painful. So if you have arthritis, you can have arthritis, and you could have pain. But the arthritis might not be the cause of the pain, for example, exact numbers alluding to something like 80% of pain free next have a bulging disc in them. So tons of people who have no pain at all have all kinds of anatomical finding, if you go and take 100, healthy pain, free people off the street and scan their bodies, you will see a wonderful symphony of bulging discs and herniations and protruding this and tears on this tendon and this ligament, and they’re typically not painful, or they’re often not painful. And so knowing that you might have one of these findings in your body is, is you know, great. Now, is that the cause of pain? Yeah. Does that explain you know, if there’s spatial variability if the pain is moving around? Well, gosh, that’s not so consistent with like, you know, this one injury this one site, or if the pains are variable, I mean, is the injury moving? You know, from day to day? Is the disc bulging one day and not the next? Right, there’s probably something else going on.

Eric Zimmer  21:50

Pain has multiple components to it, right? If I were to think of my back pain right now, right? Okay, I’ve got a physical sensation that I would ascribe to it. Right? And then there are a couple other elements, right, that are very obvious, if you sort of watch your mind element one is just my overall resistance to it. No, no, no, I don’t want it. My resistance, my amplification, my all that. And then the third is all the stories I start saying about what this pain might mean. Yeah, you know, mine is if my back hurts like this at 50, what will I be like it at? Will I be able to do this. So there’s all this stuff that goes on. And so I’ve talked about that with various people on the show. And when I was reading your work, you lead into the primary thing that drives the neuroplastic pain engine is fear.

Yoni Ashar  22:40

Yeah, this is really important, Eric. And it also gets to a way that our work is potentially different than some, you know, current framework. So everyone agrees that there is this whole layer of resistance, and storytelling and unhelpful narratives that can be on top of the pain that can make us miserable and make things worse, and everyone would agree that limiting that or reducing that will be helpful. What I think is really provocative about our work, is suggesting that mind brain processes could really be at the root of the pain. And by changing some of these processes, you can eliminate the pain, it’s not an added layer on top that you can remove, and now you’re left with no pain still there but not as bad. You can actually eliminate the pain by changing some of these mind brain pathways, put it slightly differently. If the pain is due to mind brain processes, then the solution might lay there as well. And we could eliminate the pain by changing those pathways.

Eric Zimmer  23:45

Yeah, I think that’s an important point. And using my analogy, you’re saying not only can you take away element two and three in what I just described, you actually might take away element one, the sensations themselves that are there, bingo. And what’s interesting, though, is that, and I want to get into your method, it seems to me that these approaches, even if you start by targeting two and three, you may very well just by that very nature of doing it be working on one also because targeting two and three is the same mechanism you’re talking about, which is basically becoming a little bit more present to the pain and a little bit less afraid around it. So let’s move into your method. Well, actually, before I do that, I want to hit a couple other quick things. One is in the book, it says this shows up over and over again that there are sort of three habits that are seen again and again in patients that trigger fear and aggravate neuroplastic pain. They’re worrying, putting pressure on yourself and criticism or self criticism.

Yoni Ashar  24:46

So I think of two broad categories of fear, pain related fear and a general kind of fear or threat and when I say fear, I’m thinking You know, threat or a sense of there’s something threatening. So there’s fear and sense of threat about the pain of the cost, like you were saying, element two and three, the pain so bad, and you know, it’s going to get worse. And then there’s these other general patterns of putting our brains on high alert mode of thread, this worry and pressure on ourselves and self criticism that could be completely unrelated to the pain, it can be about how we’re performing work, or it could be about you know, beliefs we have that we have to keep everyone else around us happy. And if someone’s unhappy with us, then that’s the problem. Or that, you know, uncertainty about the future is dangerous and have to eliminate all uncertainty. So there could be all these habits and these driver rain into high alert mode. And that will take the whole pain system and just turn up the volume, you know, any sense of threat. So, pain is the appraisal of threat or danger. Pain is our brains way of saying this, something dangerous here. And if there’s a more global sense of threat, or danger, like no, like, some kind of pressure on themselves, like I’m not good enough, whatever the flavor is, then that’s gonna, you know, add that sense of danger, and amplify the pain.

Eric Zimmer  26:16

Yeah, you describe a one point neuroplastic pain being a false alarm, in essence, right? Yeah. Which I think speaks to that. As I’m hearing you say all this, you know, in my brain, I’m thinking, Man, that sucks, right? Like, it sucks that if you’ve got excessive amounts of self criticism, worry, and you know, put an extra pressure on yourself. That’s miserable mentally and emotionally. And now on top of it, I’m driving a physical pain engine potentially, that doesn’t

Yoni Ashar  26:45

matter. Boy, I’ve a lot of compassion that comes up. Yeah, yeah. It seems to me like it’s kind of like a culturally like, contagious thing going around right now. Like, you know, I just saw this, there was a survey that went out, you know, were you in a lot of stress yesterday, a Gallup poll, and over half of Americans said yesterday that they’re in a lot of stress yesterday, and like, that’s, that’s very Son.

Eric Zimmer  27:10

Yeah, it is. I want to get to the method. There’s a couple other places I could go. But let’s let’s go into, you know, the broad strokes of how you work with somebody, we think it’s neuroplastic. Right? We think that’s what’s going on here.

Yoni Ashar  27:23

So that’s step one. And that’s actually I don’t want to glide over that because it’s really important, because this is a huge mental shift. For many people, I need to like, emphasize like, yeah, and I research, I just did a study where I asked people tell me, in your own words, what do you think is the cause of your pain, this was back pain, because that’s the most prevalent pain condition. So it’s the easiest to study. And what people said, 90 to 95% of people were saying, old age, an injury, herniated disc, so by and large, many, many people are thinking that the cause of their pain is something on the structural biomechanical level. And so shifting from that to saying, Oh, the cause of my pain is neural pathways, and fear is a major shift that happened. So step one is kind of assessing that, you know, you know, as a clinician, you would assess that. And then step two is getting that the person in pain on board with that assessment. And for that, it really helps to have evidence, actually, this is not any leap of faith or asking anyone to take this is a scientifically grounded, evidence based process where you can look through your life. And if, you know, when I was earlier, listing the indicators of neuropathic pain, if you’re sitting there going Check, check, check. That’s a list of evidence right there. You know, and on the flip side, what’s the evidence that there’s actually something wrong in your body? And don’t say, Well, my back hurts? Because we know that’s not evidence that there’s nothing wrong in the back. Yep. That’s just, that’s what the sensations are felt in the moment. But how do you know that something actually wrong there? You know, what’s the evidence for that? Maybe there’s strong evidence, maybe there isn’t. And what’s the evidence that? No, it’s neuro plastic pain. And in the book, the appendix has a more detailed elaboration of all these factors I was mentioning earlier. So we call it building the case. So building the case that this is really what’s going on. For me, there’s a really major first step.

Eric Zimmer  29:21

Yeah. And you talk about different barriers in the book to overcoming that. And one of them, you know, is indeed medical diagnoses, right? And, you know, I know from being involved with people who had chronic pain, taking them to doctors, you could see a doctor and you’re like, I’m in an incredible amount of pain. There’s a lot of pressure on that doctor to go well, this. Yeah, like to come up with something, right? I know, in those experiences, it’s been like, you know, you start to go when one doctor is like, it’s this and the next doctor is like, it’s this which is a different thing. And then they both disagree on the way you treatment. You should do physical therapy. No, you shouldn’t do it at all. I mean, You start to go wait a second. Yes. Nobody really knows why I hurt this bad. Yes.

Yoni Ashar  30:05

And that is another great positive indicator for neuroplastic pain, getting different or contradictory stories from multiple different providers. I mean, they don’t know. Yet even if they sound confidence, is it possible

Eric Zimmer  30:17

to have neuroplastic pain in one part of your body and go through a normal healing process with pain and another part of your body. So for example, you have, let’s make the assumption we’ve gone through the process, we’ve done assessment, we go, you know, your lower back pain neuroplastic. That same person breaks their arm, they’re in pain, but then the arm heals and the pain goes away. So in that case, they went through a normal pain cycle, right body was hurt, body healed, pain went away. There, I’ve still got neuro plastic elsewhere, is that possible?

Yoni Ashar  30:55

You can have that. And you can also have what we call secondary pain, or like structural biomedical like this, the pain is secondary to some injury. You could have that in one body site and neuro plastic and another body site. Got it, you know, it’s really based on evidence and really hold any explanation you might get from a provider, including from what I’m saying, like, hold it up to the evidence, does this hold water? This doctor says, Oh, I’m having this pain because this is pushing on that nerve. And like, alright, well, you know, what’s the evidence for that being the cause of pain?

Eric Zimmer  31:28

Yep. Okay, we’ve gone through the work of really sort of gathering the evidence trying to determine is this what I have? If I arrive at the conclusion, by myself or by working with a clinician, I arrive at the conclusion that at least some portion of what’s going on here is neuroplastic pain? Where do I start in unwinding this?

Yoni Ashar  31:49

So we view neuro plastic pain as the brain’s no misperception of threat to the body, so that we want to start to unwind this misperception of threat and the way that you unwind, misperceptions of threat is with no perceptions of safety, actually, that this kind of antidote, there’s a particular technique that we have developed that seems to be quite, you know, to our knowledge, one of the most effective techniques for changing this perception, we call it somatic tracking. And it’s a particular way of paying attention to the sensations. And it has three components. The first is this element of mindfulness. So becoming a bit, you know, like interested in curious about the sensations are watching them the way you might watch clouds fly through the sky, oh, the sensations, you know, kind of tingly and moving a bit, you know, towards the center of my body. Second component is safety reappraisal, and this is as you’re paying attention, telling yourself, there is nothing wrong in my head, while I’m watching sensations, my hip is healthy, my hip is safe, my hip is intact. These sensations are being caused by my brain, basically, literally saying those things to yourself while you’re watching the sensations, you know, being genuine about it seemed like oh, there really is nothing wrong, because I’ve done this assessment. And then the third piece of somatic tracking is bringing some fun and some playfulness, we call it positive effect induction in the science world. Because this sense of fun and playfulness, and humor will cut the threat appraisal, right when you’re having fun when you’re being playful, and you know you’re in a good mood, it’s much harder to feel afraid. So that can really pull the rug out from under this feeling of threat,

Eric Zimmer  33:51

and is somatic tracking, it’s got these three components, it sounds a little bit like the sort of thing that might be helpful to be guided through is that some of the work that a clinician will do is guide someone through that are there guided quote, unquote, meditations for it, it strikes me as the sort of thing like a lot of types of mindfulness that you can get really lost in and having somebody to sort of guide you through and bring you back and do all that can be really helpful.

Yoni Ashar  34:20

Exactly having a guide. You could Google it, and you’ll find some examples. And there’s clinicians and apps that can also, you know, guide people through it’s very important for me to emphasize that somatic tracking is not mindfulness. Mindfulness is one piece of it. Yep, mindfulness can help with pain. Actually, one of the first if not the first study, like scientific study of mindfulness was in chronic pain with Jon Kabat Zinn back in the 70s. Yep. But mindfulness alone is not likely from from the data. We see. Mindfulness alone is pretty unlikely to get someone out of pain. It’s just one piece of the puzzle. For unlearning vain, or if you think you have a mindfulness practice, and that’s like all you need. There’s more to it. Yeah, that’s probably not quite enough. Yep.

Eric Zimmer  35:08

Right, because the other two components that you mentioned are this creation of safety. Right? Yeah. And then you know, the positive effect. Exactly, yep. You talk about a couple of mindsets that can help with doing somatic tracking more effectively.

Yoni Ashar  35:27

Yeah. So this is like a light and useful state of mind, that can be really helpful, there is a strong tendency that makes so much sense to like, when we pay attention to the pain to tighten around it to clench around it, like you said earlier, to resist it, to fight it, or to be like laser focused on it, like, oh, no, what’s it going to do next? Is it gonna get worse. So the mindset of like, you know, ease and safety, and mindfulness and relaxation and doing it because it feels good? What’s really amazing to me, and what I’m super interested in as a scientist is that, you know, sometimes, I would even say many times during somatic tracking, as people start doing this practice and paying attention without fear, the sensations start to shift, and often to diminish, and sometimes even disappear. We’ve even had, you know, sessions with clients where they’ll do somatic tracking, and then the pains gone 10 minutes later, and they’re like, oh, my gosh, it’s the first time in 18 years, I haven’t felt any pain, we just did a little exercise, you know, 10 minute exercise. So that’s a really good sign that you have neuroplastic pain, you know, if you change how you’re paying attention to the pain and the pain goes down, guess what, your brain is playing a big role we just proved that.

Eric Zimmer  37:16

You guys talk about when you’re doing this, you know, turning down the intensity and trying to be outcome independent, which is really hard to do, right, when what you’re trying to do is get rid of pain. But Alan described several times in the book, when he’s talking about specific clients, you know, that there’s a natural tendency to be like, alright, this is going to fix me, and I’m going after it, right? Like, you know, there’s a mindset that says, like, Okay, I’m going to do somatic tracking, like, 100%, I’m going to nail it, right. And that is the clenching and tensing around it. And so it strikes me a little bit, as we talked about in Zen, you know, trying not to try exactly, you know, which is a little bit of an art

Yoni Ashar  37:57

total art as really hesitating, whether it’s even mentioned that sometimes the pain goes down during somatic tracking, because then people will listen and be like, Oh, I’m gonna go do this thing to get rid of my pain. And that, unfortunately, is going to backfire. Because as soon as you’re trying to get rid of your pain, you’re reinforcing the idea that pain is a dangerous problem and a threat that needs to be gotten rid of. Yep, and actually, so that just gonna, you know, add fuel to the fire. Really, what we’re trying to build is this attitude of pain is something we can be curious about and be unafraid of. And so we can somatic track, to kind of get to know it a bit better and to welcome it in because it’s not dangerous.

Eric Zimmer  38:33

Yeah, we talked about this mindfulness communities, meditation communities, but Zen talks a lot about this, and I’m a Zen practitioner. And you know, one of the ideas that I found really helpful in that regard is that outcome oriented focus is sort of necessary for you to do the practice at all, like otherwise, why are you going to do it? Right? Nobody’s gonna do somatic work. So you want to get rid of the pain. So you’re going to do somatic tracking. But then, and a spiritual teacher said this to me why he said, your wills good for getting you to the meditation cushion. Yeah, at that point, you have to shift. And you have to let go of that. And that’s kind of like we’re saying here, like, okay, yeah, of course, you want the pain to go away, that’s gonna get you to the front door of the symmetric tracking session. At that point, we have to try and let go and become more outcome independent. That’s exactly. It’s kind of knowing which tool to apply when you know which mindset to apply when

Yoni Ashar  39:31

that’s very helpful. Thanks for that. I’m gonna use that with my clients.

Eric Zimmer  39:35

So we’re doing somatic tracking, it’s got these benefits. You say at another point, if you want to overcome any fear, and we’re saying that the fear is kind of the engine of this thing. Exposure to the thing you’re afraid of. Yeah. Is important curves. So say more about the role of that in this process,

Yoni Ashar  39:52

super important. So this is starting to engage in the things we’ve been afraid to do because of the pain if It’s sitting down, starting to set effects, biking, starting to bike, so starting to do these activities, but definitely not overdoing it. And what’s really important is the quality which we bring to the exposures. So something we call white knuckling. This is when you’re doing exposure, but you’re white knuckling your way through it, you’re like intensely gripping and holding on. And internally, you’re tight and constant, terrified. That’s unlikely to be a helpful exposure, it’s unlikely to be something that you learn something helpful from, we want to do exposures, where we can learn that our bodies are stronger and healthier than then we believed. And so doing somatic tracking during an exposure is a important piece of this approach. So using the same tools to bring attention to the sensations, while you are doing the thing that’s been feared, remembering a client I worked with who, you know, we must have we stood up, we probably did, like 100 times in a row, just bend over, stand up and over, stand up, just watching the sensations like you’re the watch, no water flowing down the waterfall, because, you know, as we were bending over that was kind of the image and just watching the sensations and like, oh, look what happened. When you bend over, look what happened when you get up, you know that bending over is totally safe. There’s nothing dangerous, bending over is great for your back, it’s not the interest for your back in any way. It’s actually really good for your back to bend and, and cracking some jokes. And, you know, she had a lot of pain that the you know, first few times we bend over and buy a number 100, it would didn’t hurt at all.

Eric Zimmer  41:36

Yeah. And you guys talk in the book very well about not doing this, as you’re saying, like, when you have a high level of pain. That’s right, if you’re in a high level of pain is not the time to be doing somatic tracking and exposure, it reminds me of my coaching work with people. And we talk about some of these skills that we practice to deal with difficult thoughts or emotions. You don’t want to practice those on the hardest thing in your life, it’s not the time to do it, you know, you want to start practicing at a place that’s manageable. You know, you can’t practice if there’s none. So as you guys say, you can’t really do this if you don’t have any pain. But you want to look for those medium to low level times as the time that this exposure and somatic tracking can be most effective

Yoni Ashar  42:24

100%, that’s so important to emphasize to, you know, start using these sorts of skills when the pain is in the low to medium range. Yeah. And

Eric Zimmer  42:33

what I really like is you say, you know, if your pain is really high, then don’t try somatic tracking, use your avoidance behaviors. And so I love how it’s not saying like, avoidance behavior, bad somatic tracking, good. Yes, depending on the scenario, avoidance behaviors are perfectly good thing to do. If your pain level is really high, it’s when it’s at a lower level, that’s the time to work on somatic tracking and exposure.

Yoni Ashar  42:58

Exactly, because we want the exposures to be corrective learning. So an exposure from which you you learn that the pain is not dangerous. And when the pain is super high, it’s gonna be very hard to get that takeaway, if you encounter it, when the pain is raging, you know, it’ll be very tough. And so at that moment, just anything that’s kind of can help bring it down, you know, ice packs, cold packs, laying down for a bit, until it becomes more than a manageable range, and then get back on the horse and do the exposures, the somatic tracking, which is an internal exposure, really to the sensation,

Eric Zimmer  43:31

and is that the primary tool in the method by doing somatic tracking, by having exposure to the pain, which causes what you guys are calling a corrective experience, describe corrective experience for us, so that I can tie all this together,

Yoni Ashar  43:47

a corrective experience is learning that the sensation is not as dangerous and threatening as you thought.

Eric Zimmer  43:55

So this strikes me as similar in ways to exposure therapy in other domains, right? Where the idea is expose yourself to the feared stimulus and a manageable dose, you learn that it’s not so frightening. And you’re able to handle more and more. So there’s a corrective experience here. I want to talk a little bit about some of what this path looks like if you get on it. And you start to have some healing because there’s like any path, there’s some ups and downs that can occur. And I’d like to hit a couple of those. But I definitely want to hit also the study that you guys recently published. So tell me about that.

Yoni Ashar  44:33

So this was the first trial testing PRT, we took 151 people and we randomized them to one of three groups course of PRT, which was nine sessions over the course of a month, or there was a placebo control. They got this placebo injection to their back, and then the usual care control group of people who kept doing whatever they usually did to care for their back whether it was acupuncture higher. After medication, and we asked people to tell us how much pain they were in before and after, and how much fear of pain they had and what they thought was the cause of their pain. And we also scan their brains before and after. And what we found was very large reductions in in back pain for people in the PRT group as compared to the control. So people in the control groups, seven came in, on average, about four out of 10 pain. And in the controllers, people left with about three out of 10 pain by in the peer teager people have one out of 10 pain on average. And it was a really large reduction. And what was especially striking was that a number of people were pain free. At the end of the study, they had zero pain, you have to put some numbers on it, we found that two thirds of people were paying for your nearly so at the end of PRT as compared to 20% in the placebo group and 10% in the usual care group. And this is really striking cuz you just don’t really see psychological treatments, making people pain free. So this is part of what this kind of conceptual framework that PRT is coming from that that is different than some of the existing psychological approaches to pain where, like we said earlier, they target mostly elements two and three, but it really goes after element one, the pain itself.

Eric Zimmer  46:32

And PRT is pain reprocessing therapy, which is your guy’s method. I just think it’s a case any listener didn’t didn’t catch that

Yoni Ashar  46:38

side for that. Okay, yeah. And we followed people for one year after no treatment ended. And the gains were largely maintained. So one year out, half the people are pain free or nearly so even though they had received no treatment in that intervening time. And when we looked at the mechanisms to try to understand well, how does PRT work, what we found is that people who had the biggest reductions and fear of pain had the largest pain intensity decreases, and that people had the biggest shift and how they think about the causes of their pain shifts from you know, structural mechanical causes to mind brain causes. They have the biggest reductions in pain as well. And we also saw is really interesting changes and how people’s brains are processing pain when we put them in the brain scanner, as well.

Eric Zimmer  47:31

Tell me about that last piece a little bit what shifted? Yeah, so

Yoni Ashar  47:34

we saw reduced activity for purity versus control in these three brain regions as people were processing or experiencing back pain. So we put people in the brain scanner with this back pain. evocation device is basically this inflatable pillow that went under people’s backs while scanning. And when we inflated it, it causes back pain, it might sound nice to have a pillow under under your back. But this was not the way we positioned it in a way rather than flat and people did not like it, it was hurting. And what we saw was, when we expose people to the same stimulus, post treatment and the PRT group, there was less activity in the anterior insula, the mid cingulate, and the anterior prefrontal cortex. And these are bringing regions that do many things. But one of the things they do is track, threatening stimuli. And the more threatening stimulus is the more activity you’ll see in those brain regions. And so the reduced activity we observed in those regions is consistent with this idea that treatment helped people see the sensations as less threatening.

Eric Zimmer  48:42

Did you screen people before the study to see if you thought they had neuroplastic pain? Or did you just take a bunch of people as back hurts?

Yoni Ashar  48:50

Yeah, we had some criteria for trying to get neuro plastic pain, we excluded people with leg pain worse than back pain, because that’s a sign that there might be radiculopathy, there might be a disc as bulging onto a nerve pushing onto a nerve that’s causing leg pain. Leg pain is not necessarily neuro plastic or not necessarily structural or mechanical adjust diagnosis can be a little more involved there. So we screened that out. And there was a couple other criteria. But on the whole, we aim for pretty broad inclusion criteria. Now if someone has scoliosis, and no problem, history of back surgeries, no problem 10 herniated discs, no problem, that those are all welcome. Got it. Got it, because those are often just not the cause of the pain like scoliosis. Not necessarily painful. It could be painful, but you need to do a thorough assessment to see, you know, you might have painful scoliosis, or you might have pain and scoliosis, but the two aren’t connected.

Eric Zimmer  49:48

And is it possible that with a lot of these conditions, there was an initial burst of pain from that condition, and then the body adjusts to it and heals and Stop sending the pain sensations. But at this point, we’ve learned, you know, to use the term used earlier, we’ve learned the pain. Yeah,

Yoni Ashar  50:07

it reminds me so much of, you know, PTSD or a person will go, you know, seems like a classic example of like military PTSD, personal being a very dangerous context or loud noises could mean you’re being attacked. And they’ll come home, and they’ll still respond to the same noise as if there’s a threat. But actually, the threat resolved long ago, once you you know, left your deployment, the threat is not there anymore, but you’re still responding as if the threats present complete parallel to this injury healing model where the threat was there, but there’s no longer a threat, but your brain responding as if it’s still there.

Eric Zimmer  50:43

I’m curious in this maybe extrapolating out multiple steps from where you are, but is there a thought of trying to measure psychological well being as well as pain reduction? Do you think that you perhaps kill two birds with one stone so to speak,

Yoni Ashar  51:00

that chronic pain can be a really like, shitty, you know, snowball of depression, anxiety, insomnia, pain, it’s the pressure faced with anxiety, which leads to insomnia is the payment against like cycle. And if you can take out one component of that cycle, and everything else can also start to come down as well, you start sleeping better, you start feeling better, you start getting more active over exercising more Well, that’s good for depression. So it’s all interconnected. And conversely, we know that, you know, depression, anxiety and insomnia, they’ll amplify pain as well. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer  51:35

And if the method brings down these three types of thoughts that you guys say, really trigger fear, worry, pressure and criticism, if your method is actually helping with a reduction in those areas, you know, the benefit continues and continues. Yeah, what

Yoni Ashar  51:50

you know, people in our study told us was that, you know, beyond bringing down pain, people are saying, like, oh, I learned to listen to my feelings. For the first time I got in touch with myself, I’ve realized that was such a bully to myself. So me, I’m putting so much pressure on myself, and I’ve stopped doing that

Eric Zimmer  52:08

that’s really important and meaningful really is. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation, I really enjoyed the book, I think the work you guys are doing is incredibly important. I get a lot of requests for people to be on the show, I get a lot of pain stuff. And a lot of it to me looks really like that seems a little sketchy. But when I saw the work that you guys were doing, I saw the studies that were behind it, I felt like this is a really important thing to try and put out there. So thank you for the work you’re doing.

Yoni Ashar  52:41

Thanks, Eric, there is a big shift happening in the field. And yeah, the way a lot of us are thinking about chronic pain is shifting to really appreciate everything we’ve been talking about our mind and brain processes can play a bigger role and just narrowly looking at you know, problems below the neck are unlikely to really work as an approach for most forms of chronic pain.

Eric Zimmer  53:04

Yeah, I mean, I think anything that sort of tries to divide the mind from the body, you know, we talk about the mind body division as if it’s a thing and in my case, it’s not I mean, like they’re, they’re pretty clearly connected in any anatomical diagram I have seen like, like, I’m not sure where we got the idea they were separate.

Yoni Ashar  53:24

But nonetheless, thanks so much for having me on.

Eric Zimmer  53:27

Yeah, thank you so much.