Podcast Episode

In this episode, Peter Singer explains why ethics and joy belong together. He offers a moral wake-up call as he shares his now-famous “drowning child” thought experiment: if we saw a child drowning right in front of us, we’d act without hesitation. So why do we so often fail to act when suffering is farther away?Peter challenges the idea that ethics is about rigid rules or self-denial. Instead, he argues that living ethically is a path to a more joyful and meaningful life. This conversation explores how generosity, purpose, and even activities done purely for pleasure—like surfing—can all be part of a good life.

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Key Takeaways:

• [00:02:31] Ethical obligations in everyday life.
• [00:06:45] Helping those in extreme poverty.
• [00:10:46] Happiness and moral responsibility.
• [00:11:45] Moral progress in civilization.
• [00:16:12] Saving children from malaria.
• [00:21:02] Measuring happiness effectively.
• [00:25:02] Happiness and money connection.
• [00:27:43] Personal identity and change.
• [00:32:00] Spiritual path and personal satisfaction.
• [00:43:05] Enjoying non-competitive activities.

Peter Singer, is an Australian moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book Animal Liberation, in which he argues in favor of vegetarianism, and his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, in which he argues in favor of donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he announced in The Point of View of the Universe that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. He is the author of many books, including Ethics in the Real World: 90 Essays on Things That Matter.

Connect with Peter Singer:  Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Peter Singer, check out these other episodes:

Purposeful Living: Strategies to Align Your Values and Actions with Victor Strecher

How to Create a Life Strategy for Meaningful Change with Seth Godin

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Episode Transcript:

Have you ever walked past someone in need and wondered, should I do more? In his book, The Life You Can Save, today’s guest, philosopher Peter Singer, shares a haunting thought experiment. If we walked by a child drowning right beside us and we did nothing, we’d rightly feel like monsters. Yet every day there are children all around the world who are suffering and dying, even though we have the means to help. This story has really unsettled me in the time of preparing for this conversation, forcing me to re-examine my own morals and values. Peter Singer’s groundbreaking ideas invite all of us to reconsider our ethical obligations, not just theoretically, but in how we live every day. I also managed in this conversation to put my foot in my mouth in a truly epic way. We discussed the joys of doing something for the sheer enjoyment of it, in this case surfing. This was a really powerful and thought-provoking conversation for me, so I hope you enjoy it. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. Hi, Peter. Welcome to the show. Hi.

Peter Singer:

It’s good to be with you.

Eric Zimmer:

I appreciate you coming on. I’m excited to talk with you. You are widely considered by a lot of people to be perhaps the most famous living philosopher. And you are also somebody who seems to stir up controversy nearly everywhere you go. So I’m looking forward to not having a controversial conversation, but really exploring your views and how they lead to live in a good life.

Peter Singer:

Okay. That’s a really important question to talk about.

Eric Zimmer:

So we’ll start, though, like we usually do at the parable. There’s a grandfather who’s talking with his grandson. He says, 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 grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? and the grandfather 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.

Peter Singer:

What the parable means to me is that whether you’re a good person and whether you enjoy your life and find it rewarding or whether you’re not such a good person and perhaps you’re eaten up by Jealousy or envy or even hatred depends a lot on how you cultivate your own personality and your own mind and your own acts through your life. It’s not just something that happens to you. It’s not just that somebody was born mean and nasty and twisted, but it is to a large extent the way you look at the world and the way you try to cultivate the better sentiments in yourself And when I say better, I mean not only better for others, but also typically better for you.

Eric Zimmer:

So you are known as a utilitarian philosopher. Could you explain what that means?

Peter Singer:

A utilitarian is somebody who thinks that the right thing to do is the act that will have the best possible consequences of all the options open to you. Best possible consequences in the long run. and for everyone, or indeed every sentient being, affected by your actions. And by best consequences, typically utilitarians mean best consequences for the well-being of all of those affected, which in the eyes of many utilitarians means for their happiness and the reduction of suffering. There are different views of exactly what well-being consists in among utilitarians, but broadly you could think of it as best consequences in terms of promoting happiness and reducing misery.

Eric Zimmer:

Yeah, you’ve said that the unifying theme of all your work is preventing unnecessary suffering.

Peter Singer:

Maybe not quite of all of my work, but of a great deal of it, and particularly the practical and applied ethics. I’ve looked at areas where there seems to be suffering going on that ought not to be too difficult to prevent. So, you know, there are some instances of suffering, maybe that it’s very hard to do things about to prevent it, but there are other cases where it just seems we could change social arrangements relatively easily and there would be a lot less suffering in the world.

Eric Zimmer:

One of the things that I was struck by in reading your work And I’ll just read what you said because it’s probably better than I would say it is. You say, too often we assume that ethics is about obeying the rules that begin with, you must not. If that were all there were to living ethically, then as long as we were not violating one of those rules, whatever we are doing would be ethical. That view of ethics, however, is incomplete. It fails to consider the good we can do to others less fortunate than ourselves. And also saying that not aiding in certain cases is the same as harming.

Peter Singer:

Yes, that’s right. And then those obviously go together. Uh, I think that in a different era, perhaps it was most important to think about not harming others because we were living in smaller societies. We had little knowledge of other societies further from us. We had little ability to help people in those other societies. And so the idea of not harming others, meaning not harming others in your society, was perhaps the most important thing that you could emphasize. And it’s still important, certainly. But given the world we live in today, where we have some people, and you and I and probably most of your listeners are among them, who are extremely fortunate to be really at a level of affluence and comfort that has not existed throughout most of human history or prehistory, that is something fairly new in the world. And on the other hand, there are also a lot of people at least 700 million people who are living in what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty. People who cannot be sure that they’re going to have enough food to eat all year round, who cannot get even minimal health care, may not be able to send their children to school, and we can make a big difference to their lives. That’s why I think for people now in our situation, Just saying, I’m not going to harm others is not enough. Um, we ought to be doing things to make the world better and to help others too.

Eric Zimmer:

And how do people draw that line? Right? Because on one hand you could say, all right, you know what? I need to help others and I’m going to give everything away except living as a, as a pauper. And then there’s the flip side. which is I’ve got a million dollars and I’m not sending any of it to someone. Those are two extremes. How for normal people do you think about finding a ground that seems moral but also reasonable?

Peter Singer:

It’s very hard to draw lines in those situations because people do have different commitments and different responsibilities. So I have varied if you look at my writings over the 40 years or so I’ve been interested in this issue. There’s variations at one stage I suggested the traditional tie that people should give 10% of their income if they are. middle class or above and living in an affluent country, 10% of your income seems a reasonable thing that most people can do. Of course, some people could give much more than that. Perhaps for other people, 10% is still pushing it a little bit. On the website that I’ve set up, the lifeyoucansave.org, there is now a sliding, a progressive scale, a bit like tax scales. It’s not a flat percentage. The more you earn, the higher the percentage. For people not earning so much, it starts off very low. It starts off around 1%. I think it’s good for people to get started even if they don’t have a lot of money because hopefully, later on, they will do better. Anyway, getting in the habit of giving something, this is maybe about the wolf you feed, getting in the habit of giving something and helping others. makes you feel good about that, and then maybe when you do have a little bit more, you realize, you know, well, look, I could actually do more than this, and I’d like to do more than this, because this is an important part of my life. This is an important part of who I am, that when I have abundance, I share some of it with others.

Eric Zimmer:

We talked about living a good life, you’ve referenced well-being, you’ve referenced happiness. What is the role of morality in our own lives? What role does morality play in us experiencing those things that we just talked about? Because we tend to think of morality as, here’s how I should act towards others, and I’m inverting that into the sort of selfish, right? Like, what’s in it for me? But I am just curious how you’d answer that question.

Peter Singer:

I don’t mind people thinking what’s in it for me if what they’re thinking about is what’s in it for me in terms of helping others and then they realize, well, maybe there is something in it for me. Maybe it actually helps me to feel more satisfied with my life, to feel more fulfilled, to feel that I have a purpose beyond just accumulating more consumer goods and generating more trash in the world. I think there is quite a lot in it for people. There are some moralists who think that unless you’re miserable and in sackcloth and ashes, then what you’re doing can’t be morally good. But I don’t think that that’s right. I think that I like people who are happy and enjoy the fact that they’re helping others. That seems to me to be quite an important thing to be doing.

Eric Zimmer:

Is there any morality to how happy we are? Is striving for our own happiness in your mind a moral thing to do?

Peter Singer:

Other things being equal, yes, it is. Because as I said, I think that what we ought to be doing is what will have the best consequences for all of those affected by our actions. And we are one of those affected by our actions. So doing what will have the best consequences for me, if it doesn’t harm anyone else, and preferably, of course, if it also helps someone else, is in itself a good thing. I can’t. I’m not the kind of person who thinks I mustn’t give any weight to my own happiness. What I do think is I shouldn’t give more weight to my own happiness if possible. This may be a little too saintly, but if possible, I should try not giving more weight to my own happiness than I give to the happiness of others.

Eric Zimmer:

One of the things that you wrote recently was that the belief that we are progressing morally has become difficult to defend. However, I think I’m one of those people that does think we’re progressing morally and as a civilization. How would you argue that point, that indeed we are?

Peter Singer:

I would invite people to look at the progress that we’ve made in a lot of important areas. I mentioned that there are 700 million people living in extreme poverty as the World Bank defines it. That figure is a significant drop over previous decades and particularly if you take as a percentage of the world’s growing population, it’s quite a remarkable drop. In fact, it means that the number of people living in extreme poverty today is fewer than 10% of the world’s population. That’s probably the first time ever since our species evolved and separated from other primates, it’s probably the first time ever that fewer than 10% of human beings are in a situation where they are not reasonably secure about having enough to eat, not just today, but over a longer future. Of course, things like health care and education and so on were not even issues for most of our evolutionary history. Certainly, if we talk about more recent centuries, again, it would be the first time that 90% of human beings are are able to have access to some education for their children or some healthcare. Rates of literacy have been increasing as well. So I think there are signs that the world is getting to be a better place. One other thing that I should perhaps mention is that the chances of any individual human being alive today meeting a violent death at the hands of other human beings, those chances are smaller than they’ve ever been. And a lot of people might question that because we read every day about terrorism, don’t we? But of course, terrorism is responsible for a tiny proportion of deaths. And even if we increase that and talk about, say, gun violence generally, which certainly in the United States is a much larger proportion of deaths or road accidents. it’s still much less than the general murder rate was if you go back a couple of hundred years. So I think there are ways in which we become a more peaceful and a better society.

Eric Zimmer:

It seems that way to me too. And when I look at things like torture or slavery or gay rights, not that there’s not still battles to be fought on those fronts, but it really does seem like by and large, most people would say, hey, torture is a bad thing. or, you know, it just seems like we were, we’re making progress on those fronts where there’s more people starting to say, wait a minute, like that isn’t, that isn’t the right way to, to behave. Do you think that is a one directional thing or it could very easily reverse?

Peter Singer:

I think it’s a longterm development, so I don’t think you would easily reverse, which is not to say that it can’t reverse in some particular times and places. And obviously, It has. So I think, for example, the movement that you’re referring to in relation to torture and cruel punishments, that goes back to the 18th century, at least that goes back to that 18th century enlightenment in Europe, which started to object to some of these things that were previous to that pretty routine, pretty standard. But if you look at the history of the world since the 18th century, you would say, oh, yes. But then, you know, what about what happened in the Nazi concentration camps or in the Gulag or other places like that? Dreadful things happen. There’s no doubt about it. But. Again, they were exposed and condemned and generally speaking, at least certainly in the German case, people involved were punished. I think that was a kind of an aberration and it may occur again in particular places, no doubt it has and will, but taking the world as a whole, I think it’s much less widespread than it used to be. My expectation is that we’ll continue to be much less widespread.

Eric Zimmer: 16:01

Certainly one of the things that you’re most known for is trying to reduce extreme poverty, trying to save lives in developing countries. And you’ve come up with a illustration that sort of shows why maybe the way we think about people on the other side of the world is wrong. And you say, if I’m walking past a shallow pond and I see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. And you equate that to the fact that today there are children dying that we could be saving. and that we are not, and that those are equivalent. Why do you think that we don’t react in the same way? Because I think most of us would pull that child out of the pond. And yet, by and large, most of us do not do very much to help people on the other side of the world.

Peter Singer:

That’s right. And the idea of the parable, if you want to call it that, of the child drowning in the pond is that most of us would pull that child out and therefore to raise the question and why wouldn’t we save a child who is drowning or perhaps more likely going to die from malaria because the child is in a malaria prone region and the child’s family does not have a bed net to protect the child from mosquitoes. Why wouldn’t we contribute to an organization that’s protecting children from malaria? That’s one of many demonstrable ways in which we can save the lives of children. So I think there are psychological explanations for why we would pull a child in front of us out in the pond. We’ve got an identifiable individual in front of us. In the case of the appeal to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, which is one of those effective organizations that is providing bed nets. We don’t know which child we’re going to save. It’s more anonymous. It’s more like a statistic. So I think that that’s a significant factor in terms of why people are not giving to those more distant cases. Some people also may have doubts about whether the money will actually do what it’s supposed to do. Every now and again, some story gets in the media about a charity that turned out to be a scam or wasn’t doing what it should. That’s why it’s really important to know the charities you’re donating to. That’s one of the things that www.thelifeyoucansave.org was set up to do, that is to be able to recommend charities that have been thoroughly researched and shown to be highly effective in terms of the work that they were doing and highly cost effective as well.

Eric Zimmer:

So those are some of the reasons why we don’t, and I think they’re good reasons, but you argue that that isn’t, maybe this isn’t the way you’d say it, but those aren’t good excuses.

Peter Singer:

Yeah, that’s right. They’re psychological factors, but when we stop and think about, is that a morally relevant, a morally important thing, a difference between the thing, then I think most of us can say, no, you know, Even if we don’t know the child, we can’t identify the child, it’s still a real child. Every child is a specific individual and it’s just as much a real child as the one in front of us. So yeah, I don’t think that’s morally relevant. As I said, the idea that charities may be scams is often an excuse because the people who say that don’t then go online and do the relatively simple amount of research that they could, which would enable them to see which charities were definitely not scams.

Eric Zimmer:

You’ve also said that some of it might be evolutionary because we evolved in small face-to-face societies. So we evolved to respond to the child that’s right in front of us, but we’re not at the place where we really understand how to think about children on the other side of the world. That’s not hardwired into us in the same way.

Peter Singer:

Yes, that’s right. You know, we have evolved as social primates living in small societies, perhaps 150-200 individuals. That’s what most evolutionary theorists think about most of human existence. So we have those reactions. We have the reactions to respond to somebody in front of us. We don’t obviously have the reaction to respond to someone we can’t see or we can only see on our TV screens because in terms of our evolutionary history, they’ve only existed for microsecond and evolution takes longer to work than that.

Eric Zimmer:

One of the things that it was in your recent book of various essays was about this movement in certain nations or across the world to measure happiness or to measure well-being. What are the things that we’re using to measure those things and do you think that they are the right way to look at it?

Peter Singer:

So I think we’re starting to get better. The science of measuring happiness is a relatively new one, and it’s more complicated than the science of measuring gross domestic product or some of those economic measures that have been used to show progress. But I do think that we’re getting better at understanding what’s going on. Most of it is done by asking people questions, and it turns out that it makes a difference how you ask the question of course, if you ask people how satisfied are you with your life, you get somewhat different set of answers than if you ask people questions relating to how happy are you right now, how are you feeling, what’s your mood, those sorts of questions. You get a different sort of answer and that’s interesting and of course needs interpretation. What should we be more concerned about, whether people are satisfied with their life or whether people are enjoying their lives, basically, on a moment-for-moment sort of basis. I think that there’s some evidence that asking people how satisfied they are with their life, though it sounds like a good question, may take into account some adjustment that they’ve already made to difficult circumstances so that people who seem to be having very tough lives may still say they’re satisfied with their life because maybe they’ve just adjusted their expectations downwards. So perhaps really asking people how much they’re enjoying their lives is giving us a better answer because it gets them to focus more on their mood and their present than some sort of evaluation of their life.

Eric Zimmer:

That raises interesting questions around some of the science that shows that maybe as people we tend to have sort of a pre-wired happiness level, like that you might be wired to be happier than I am based on, you know, just the way our brains work, the way the neurochemicals work, And that’s why I think obviously the definition of happiness gets so much scrutiny because it’s so very hard to say like, what’s, what’s the measure of a good life?

Peter Singer:

Yes, that is hard. But on the other hand, I think when people are suffering, that is much more related to their circumstances. I mean, again, people may be more depressed. There may be some sort of hardwired, um, more depressed sort of personality, but, uh, For a lot of people who are not in that category, external circumstances can cause them to suffer just something like you start getting a severe toothache. Imagine in the age before dentistry or people who still today have no access to dentistry, you can imagine how much of a negative impact that has on how happy they are. at that moment. That’s why you said early on in this discussion that I focused on reducing avoidable suffering. Although I do think it’s interesting to think about increasing happiness above the neutral level as well, I do think that it’s probably, at least at this stage of our knowledge, better to focus on reducing avoidable suffering. That’s something we can know more about and we can probably do more effectively than we can to make people who are not suffering more positively happy than they are.

Eric Zimmer:

As I was reading your article and it was talking about the ways that we measure happiness for these things, I was struck by a couple of things. One is there tends to be a thing, particularly in, you know, what I’ll call like the self-development movement or whatever that says, you know, well, happiness isn’t really tied to money. And That was very clearly in some of the things that predict happiness and well-being, not a true statement, right? And then secondly, there were things beyond the conditions of people’s lives, so beyond the economic and financial conditions of their lives that also did contribute to happiness. I’m just curious your thoughts on that.

Peter Singer:

Yeah, I think we need to be a little more specific about the link between happiness and money. It’s certainly true that when people have very little, then adding to their wealth or income does make them happier. But once you get to a certain level, which roughly say in United States income terms would be perhaps $70,000 a year, then adding more to their income makes only a modest difference to their happiness. It doesn’t make zero difference. particularly that question of how satisfied they are with their life, that does continue to go up though much more slowly. But in terms of their mood and how much they’re enjoying their life, it actually seems to make no difference or a negligible difference. So you need to be able to have a level of comfort. But once you get to that level, and a lot of Americans are beyond that level, then putting all your effort and energy into acquiring more money, at least for its own sake, you know, not to give away, but just to just have for yourself is probably not going to really be the most effective strategy for making you feel happier.

Eric Zimmer:

And then what are some of the other things when they’re measuring happiness that show up as important beyond your economic condition?

Peter Singer:

So having a good circle of family or friends or both is really important. That shows up all the time, that feeling that you have close family and friends that you can talk to and spend time with is a really major contributor to happiness for most people. Another thing that’s really important, and it gets back to what we’ve been talking about, is having values that you feel you’re living in accordance with and feeling that your life is in some way meaningful or purposeful. I think that makes a difference, and it’s interesting that it makes a difference to people’s health, that when people feel that they have some purpose in life, tend to live longer and have better health into old age, which is one of the reasons when people who work very hard for a company and then suddenly retire are at high risk of having heart attacks and keeling over. I think that the values are relevant here to how happy and satisfied you’re going to feel with your life.

Eric Zimmer:

Excellent. Recently, you wrote an article or perhaps it was a eulogy for a philosopher, Derek Parfit. Did I say that correctly?

Peter Singer:

Correct. Yes, absolutely.

Eric Zimmer:

And you talked about him writing about a lot of different things, but the one I’m interested in talking about is personal identity. In this article, you said, whereas we commonly take the distinction between ourself and others as an all or nothing matter, Parfit argued that our identity changes over time as the psychological connections between our earlier and later selves alter. Can you talk with me a little bit about this personal identity or the idea of the self?

Peter Singer:

Yes, and it is sort of philosophically controversial and I greatly admire Parfit as a great philosopher, I think a very clear thinker and somebody who thought more deeply about some of these philosophical problems than most people do. I’m not sure whether I totally agree with his view on personal identity. So if I think about myself, now I’ve just turned 70, and I can think back some of my really early childhood memories, I can identify with that boy, and I can think, yes, that was me in some sense. So there is this sort of psychological continuity just because of the fact that I have preserved these memories all of my life. But at the same time, that boy was a very different person. had different values and could have ended up quite differently. It was in no way preordained that I was going to end up as a philosopher. I originally planned to become a lawyer. My interest in ethics has certainly developed and grown a great deal. There’s a sense in which I have evolved and that child is not exactly me. You could also think about this in a forward-looking way, particularly if you’re a younger person than I was, right? You can say, okay, so now I’m, let’s say I’m 20 and I have lots of ideas about how I want to change the world and live differently and do things differently to the way my parents did. But suppose somebody says, well, yes, but probably you’re going to get more conservative as you grow older. Many people do. And by the time you’re 50 or 60, you’re not going to have those values anymore. Well, um, the 20 year old might then say, okay, but then I don’t really identify with that person. Even if, you know, biologically that is the same me. And even if I have some memories of my radical self at 20, I don’t really identify with that person. And in a way, perhaps I don’t care that much whether that person gets what he or she wants another 30 or 40 years down the track. Um, or at least I care just as much about other people’s wellbeing as I care about me in thirty or forty years so is this idea of the constantly changing and developing self that has argued that it’s over something that’s relative to the extent to which i have the same views and i have the same thoughts i have the same personality I did. And some people have seen parallels between what Parfitt says about the self and the Buddhist doctrine of the impermanence of the self, which also talks about change and the idea that the self is not really a single constant I. And Buddhism also can use that in a way of encouraging people to be more concerned about others, to extend their compassion to others, because the difference between I and you or I and they becomes less sharp if there’s also a difference between I today and I in 20 years.

Eric Zimmer:

Yeah, it’s a topic I’m fairly fascinated with and a topic that We have had Buddhist teachers on and other non-dual teachers where we’ve explored it from that perspective, but I also like exploring it from, you know, all different angles. And it’s one of those things that on one hand is very obvious, like, there is a self, here I am, and yet it’s not as solid maybe as we think. And there does seem to be some benefit to being less attached. I guess maybe that just is in general. the less I’m attached to my own wants and have those running the show, the better off I am in general.

Peter Singer:

Yes, I think that’s right. And I think that’s consistent both with Parfit’s views and with Buddha’s teachings about thinking, trying to get your mind into a different place where you’re not so fully attached to yourself and you can think about others. And many people do say that it makes them happier. There’s an interesting book by Mathieu Ricard, the Buddhist monk of French origin, called Altruism. He’s also written about happiness, in which he talks about the way in which being less attached to yourself and meditating and training your mind to think about others and to really feel what others are feeling has made his life both more rewarding and more fulfilling and happier.

Eric Zimmer:

And I think that’s how most people end up on, we’ll just call it a spiritual path, is some sense of dissatisfaction. and this desire to feel differently. And then, ideally, lots of other good things can kind of tie along with that, but it seems to come from that very basic, like, I don’t like how I feel. 

Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of, I can’t keep doing this. But I valued everything I was doing, and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call the Still Point Method. A way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had 8 years ago so you don’t have to stumble towards an answer. That something is now here and it’s called Overwhelm is Optional, tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have, taking less than 10 minutes total a day. It isn’t about doing less, it’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out Overwhelm as optional. Go to oneufeed.net slash overwhelm. That’s oneufeed.net slash overwhelm. 

I wanted to explore the idea with you of the public good as a value and then individual liberty as another value and how you see those things interacting and how your thought process comes to balancing those things out.

Peter Singer:

Obviously as a utilitarian, I’m very concerned about the public good. I think it’s important that we should try to maximize good generally, and therefore social policies that will improve the good of the public as a whole are important. And that’s one of the reasons I support, for example, social policies about universal healthcare. And I think it’s deplorable what is happening right now to healthcare in the United States, which, you know, even with Obamacare, was lagging behind every other developed industrialized country in the world in terms of the universality of its provision of that public good of health for everyone. But at the same time, I think that there are other ways in which sometimes legislatures and governments overreach and deny individual liberty where there is no public good resulting from that. Often they do it on, what you might say, moral grounds that are not based on consequences or well-being. The classic example of this is I think prohibition on physician assistance in dying or voluntary euthanasia, if you want to call it that. which seems to me pretty clear that if somebody is terminally ill or incurably ill and they judge themselves that their condition is so bad that they don’t want to go on living, however much longer they could go on living, then provided we’ve taken various safeguards to ensure that they’ve thought about this carefully and that is a firm decision that they’ve reached, not just a temporary whim, I don’t think that there’s any loss in allowing them to act on that decision. And of course, if they’re capable of killing themselves, then it’s not an offense for them to do so. But if they’re not capable of killing themselves, they’re not capable of killing themselves in a way that they consider acceptable, then in some jurisdictions, the law prohibits that. No longer in California or Oregon or the state of Washington in the United States or Vermont, but it still does in most of the United States. I see that as simply imposing harms on people who in those circumstances would prefer not to live out that last period of their life. I can’t see any public good in that. In fact, there’s a public negative in terms of probably the public is going to pay more whether it’s through higher insurance premiums or through Medicare is going to pay more for their medical treatment. I don’t think it’s true that other people who don’t want to die are going to be pressured into dying. No evidence of that in many jurisdictions that have not done this for many years. So it seems to me to be a both pure individual liberty that ought to be recognized and a public good as well.

Eric Zimmer:

Is the US an outlier in that? Where’s Europe, Australia, different places? I’m not really aware of those policies worldwide at all, like where we sit in comparison.

Peter Singer:

This is a movement that is still developing, I think. The countries that have had legal volunteers in Asia for the longest are the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg. They’ve had it for quite a long time. Switzerland as well has had physician assistance in dying. And then as I said, that Northwest corner of the United States and now extending all the way down the West Coast of the United States and across to Vermont. And very recently, I think Washington DC also legislated for this. Australia does not have it at present. It had it briefly in one territory, but it got overruled. There’s likely to be a move where I’m speaking to you from now in the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is the major city. The government has said that it will introduce legislation by the end of the year. I think this is something that is moving forward and is probably moving forward in many jurisdictions as well, certainly being talked about elsewhere in the world. It could, of course, if Trump appoints Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and perhaps other justices as well, it may start to move backwards in the United States because Gorsuch has said, has written that he doesn’t think that it ought to be permitted. He thinks it’s actually not just that further states should not legislate for it or that it’s not a constitutional right, but actually that the constitution, he thinks, prohibits states legislating for physician assistance in dying, which is a pretty extreme view. You know, very few other legal minds have defended that doctrine.

Eric Zimmer:

You are one of the leaders of the animal rights movement early on. And I think you’ve said that we’ve made some progress on factory farming. I’ve been a vegetarian for three years now. And You know, I try to be a vegan, but I fail more often than I succeed. Where do you think the animal liberation movement is today? And what are the steps forward, do you think?

Peter Singer:

I think the movement is obviously a lot stronger today than when I first started thinking about this when it didn’t really exist. I mean, there was a kind of an anti-cruelty movement focused mostly on dogs and cats and perhaps horses, but there was really almost nothing talking about factory farming, which is where the vast majority of the suffering of non-human that we inflict on non-human animals occurs, I believe. So that movement has built up strongly over the last 40 years. It’s achieved significant Changes in some jurisdictions. This is an area where Europe is definitely ahead of the rest of the world. The entire European Union has banned those small wire cages for egg-laying hens. It’s banned individual crates for breeding sows and for veal calves as well. Those things seem to be on the way out in the United States. They’ve been banned in California as a result of a referendum they had in 2008. and also in Massachusetts as a result of a voter’s initiative that they had just in last November. So I think they seem to be on the way out, but they still exist on a large scale. The most exciting development for animals at the moment though is the idea of more plant-based foods that will be closer to meat in texture and taste, and that hopefully will persuade more people who currently eat meat to move to the plant-based foods, it would be so much better in terms of reducing animal suffering, but also so much better in terms of reduced environmental impact, reduced fewer greenhouse gases, less pollution, and so on.

Eric Zimmer:

By not eating animals, that seems to be sort of a, you get to kill two birds with one stone, right?

Peter Singer:

That’s the wrong metaphor to use.

Eric Zimmer:

You’re right, it’s absolutely the wrong metaphor.

Peter Singer:

We do get to do a couple of good things at once.

Eric Zimmer:

Yeah, you avoid the climate change and the suffering of animals, but yes, you’re right. That was a poor metaphor choice. One of your other essays recently talked about surfing, and I’m curious, there just seemed to be something a little lighter, a little out of character, but I’m just interested in what it means to you, what surfing gave to you that you thought was important enough to write about.

Peter Singer:

Yeah, well, in terms of being out of character, I don’t sort of sit and think or think and sit and write all the time. I don’t think that that is a healthy existence, and I don’t think it would be a good one for me. When I am not doing that, I do like to do things that are physically active. I enjoy that. It makes me feel better. It makes my body a little bit fitter, I suppose. I suppose the two major things I do are hiking and surfing. I think that is part of me. Surfing is something that I didn’t take up early enough in life, unfortunately to get really good at, but, um, uh, I’m been doing it for, uh, about, I don’t know, the last dozen years or so. Um, and, uh, I really like it. I mean, it’s sport where you don’t need any kinds of motors or anything like that to, um, to get you going very much. You just, carry your board down to the water and paddle it out in the water, and then you use the power of the wave to get you moving forward. So I like that. I like the beauty of the sea and the waves and being out there. It’s very peaceful. And yet it can be quite physically demanding. Paddling the board against a heavy set of waves is not easy. Paddling it fast enough to pick up some of the waves takes some effort. So it’s good physical exercise and you’re developing a skill. You’re developing a skill in getting up, controlling the board, staying on the wave, tackling different waves. Every wave is a little bit different. So yeah, it’s something I really enjoy as a complete break from what I might be doing otherwise.

Eric Zimmer:

Yeah, I didn’t mean that surfing was out of character, I more meant it from your writing, it seemed to be a little bit, it stood out from some of the other things in the book.

Peter Singer:

Okay, sure, it’s not trying to argue for something, it’s trying to describe something that I find important in my life, but obviously won’t be for everyone.

Eric Zimmer:

Yeah, and one of the things I think that you drew out in the book was how, it’s okay to do things later in life, and it’s okay to do things that we’re not gonna be great at. And to do things just for the pleasure of it. And I think so many of us get hung up on that.

Peter Singer:

Yes, that’s true. You don’t have to be really good at everything to enjoy it. You don’t have to get the best wave that’s out there. Sometimes there’s a surfing etiquette about, well, if somebody is already on a wave, you leave that wave to that person. But that’s okay, I don’t mind. And the other thing I mentioned in that piece I write is that at least the way I do surfing, it’s completely non-competitive. I mean, maybe I’m trying to improve myself, but there are some sports where there isn’t much point unless they’re competitive. You can’t really play tennis against yourself. I guess you can hit a ball against the wall or something like that, but yeah, it gets a bit dull. But this is something that is non-competitive and yet is great. clearly a sport, it’s clearly a physical recreation you’re at there. So I like that aspect of it as well.

Eric Zimmer:

Excellent. Well, Peter, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and I really enjoyed getting to spend some time with you.

Peter Singer:

Okay, it was good to talk to you, Eric.

Eric Zimmer:

Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that’s you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

In this episode, Michelle Chalfant explores how to quiet the inner critic and finally get unstuck. She has spent 25 years developing practical tools for working with what she calls the other wolf. Michelle explains why most of us are making decisions from the emotional age of about 13. And she’ll give you the exact process for transforming triggers into growth. Her motto “I will let nothing or no one disconnect me from myself.” and by the end of this conversation, you’ll know how to make that your reality too

Discover the six hidden saboteurs that quietly derail your best intentions—like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, and emotional escape. Download our free guide to uncover what’s getting in your way and learn simple strategies to take back control. Get it now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook.

Key Takeaways:

• The internal struggle with inner voices, represented by the metaphor of two wolves
• Negative self-talk and the journey towards self-compassion and self-acceptance.
• Emotional age and how it influences decision-making and behavior.
• Techniques for regulating the nervous system and creating space for conscious responses to triggers.
• The importance of recognizing and working through emotional triggers as opportunities for growth.
• Distinguishing between healthy anger and being stuck in a triggered state.
• The significance of owning one’s reality and the discomfort that often accompanies this process.
• Developmental model of the “Three Chair Model” (Child, Adolescent, Adult) and its implications for personal growth.
• The five pillars that support personal transformation, including owning the good in one’s life.
• Practical tools and scripts for managing emotional patterns and the inner critic.

Michelle Chalfant, MS, LPC, is a licensed therapist, holistic life coach, and author committed to helping individuals break free from limitations and discover their true selves. As the creator of The Adult Chair® model, she combines simple psychology with grounded spirituality to inspire personal transformation. Her podcast, The Michelle Chalfant Show – Life from The Adult Chair, has over 10 million downloads, offering practical tools and relatable insights for overcoming life’s challenges. Michelle’s new book is The Adult Chair: Get Unstuck, Claim Your Power, and Transform Your Life. Michelle leads transformative events, retreats, and courses through The Academy of Awakening Membership and trains others in her model via The Adult Chair® Coaching Certification Program where she is creating a new generation of coaches. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, People, Well + Good, and HuffPost.

Connect with Michelle Chalfant:  Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook

If you enjoyed this conversation with Michelle Chalfant, check out these other episodes:

How to Tame Your Inner Critic with Dr. Aziz Gazipura

How to Overcome Overthinking with Jon Acuff

How to Harness the Chatter in Your Head with Ethan Kross

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Episode Transcript:

Michelle Chalfant 00:00:00  Many, many people get into relationships and it could be with a partner or a parent or a friend. Where we want people out there to validate us. No, no, that’s the cherry on the Sunday. We got to learn how to do it for ourselves first.

Chris Forbest 00:00:20  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:05  What if I told you there’s a script for dealing with that voice in your head? The one that beats you up, keeps you small and disconnects you from who you really are.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:14  Today’s guest, Michelle Chalfont, has spent 25 years developing practical tools for working with what she calls the other wolf. Michelle is a therapist and author of The Adult Chair, Get Unstuck, Claim Your Power, and Transform Your Life. And she’s going to explain why most of us are making decisions from the emotional age of about 13. And she’ll give you the exact process for transforming triggers into growth. Her motto I will let nothing or no one disconnect me from myself. And by the end of this conversation, you’ll know how to make that your reality too. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michelle Chalfant 00:01:55  Hi, Eric. Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:57  I’m excited to talk with you about your book, which is called The Adult Chair. Get unstuck, claim your power, and Transform Your life. But before we get into the book, I want to start like we always do with the parable. And 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:19  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 by. 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.

Michelle Chalfant 00:02:48  It’s a great parable. I have to say. I love it because it’s so true. And what I love about it though, is that it’s true. But what’s hard about it is I don’t think a lot of us know that everyone has both wolves. I think that people look outside of themselves and they think, well, they don’t have that mean wolf inside. It’s just me. Yeah, right. Yeah. I’m doing a course right now on, the voice of the inner critic and what you do about it and how to really banish that voice, or at least learn how to work with it.

Michelle Chalfant 00:03:20  So that is one of the wolf voices inside that I think about the first part of my life. I let the wolf that was really the mean wolf inside really was a very big voice in my life. And I’m going to say part two of my life is the more compassionate, loving wolf. And I’ve learned now how to work with the other wolf. And it’s a game changer when you learn how to work with that other wolf. And that’s honestly a big part of the book.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:45  Well, before we get into the book, I’m going to pull something from the very end of the book that I thought would be a way of starting and at the very end of the book you have a little motto that you use, which is I will let nothing or no one disconnect me from myself. Talk to me about that.

Michelle Chalfant 00:04:03  Yeah, I was just thinking about that when you were reading that. That was a journey. I mean, that was such a big part of my life journey is that I started to have this awareness, and I worked with a lot of teachers and mentors over my whole entire life, honestly.

Michelle Chalfant 00:04:17  But and of course, all the reading that I’ve done, all the spiritual reading and what I realized was I was my own worst enemy. That wolf inside of me was the enemy, and it was no one out there. And when I learned how to regulate my nervous system and how to work with that inner wolf, the one that’s negative, the one that beats up on me those voices, it completely changed my life. And I started having experiences where I know this might sound crazy, but it really felt like this to me, where I’d be given opportunities. And I mean that that word is important opportunities to make the choice between which Wolf was going to. I’m just going to use that analogy. Or if we can, like which Wolf was going to step forward for me. And I started I started realizing there is a choice like which which one do I choose in this moment? And again, part one of my life. You know, most of my life growing up, I didn’t know there was a choice.

Michelle Chalfant 00:05:11  And as as I learned the work that I do now, I realize we have a choice in every moment. And we get to choose. Do I want to look at this through the eyes of compassion and stay connected to myself? And what I mean connected to myself? That means I believe that we are connected to something bigger than us. Call it God’s source, universe, whatever you want to call it. And it’s like a big giant river that’s moving through us at all times. And the moment that I get pissed off, angry, judgmental, whatever those thoughts might be on that end of the spectrum, it cuts me off from that thing that we would call God source, universe, whatever. Not that God doesn’t have. You know, anger and all that. I think it’s all of the things. But I realized I didn’t feel connected to that thing when I got angry. Right. When I chose the wrong wolf or the other wolf. And, I started having opportunities that would come to me and and I.

Michelle Chalfant 00:06:07  And I know this sounds crazy, but time would literally slow down. And I remember having these experiences of, what are you going to choose? Are you going to get angry right now, Michel? Or are you going to slow down and look at this thing that’s happening in front of you and not let that thing outside of you disconnect you from who you really are from source? And I started choosing compassion, love. staying connected to myself. I chose myself over anyone or anything out there. And that’s when my life really, really started to change. And it continues to change every time I choose myself. And it’s not a selfish act by any means. It’s a I’m choosing to stay connected to source over anything else. That’s that’s what that means. And I have a million examples I can give you. But it was really a game changer for me as far as like emotional stability, joy, happiness just started going up, up, up, up, up because I was not disconnecting myself from that thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:07  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There’s the famous Viktor Frankl quote about between stimulus and response. There’s a space. There is. And what I’ve noticed over the years by doing a lot of different things. You have a lot in your book about recognizing some of what happened to us as children, the patterns that emerge, the roadmaps, as you call them, that get ingrained into us by learning to, meditate by all these different things. The primary thing that I feel like they have done. Yeah. Maybe not. Maybe I won’t go that far. One thing they have done is they’ve increased that space between stimulus and response. You talked about time slowing down. To me, the experience is more like there’s just there’s more space there for me to consider. What? Okay, what do I what do I want to do with this? And that’s really, really valuable. Because if we if we can’t start to disconnect our immediate reaction from the stimulus, then it’s very hard to make any real progress.

Michelle Chalfant 00:08:12  Oh, gosh. Yes. And I was someone again. And I might call act one of my life for the first part of my life where I didn’t realize there was a space at all. Yeah. And yeah, it literally Eric I mean, it completely changed my life. but I want to say even maybe before that, just realizing. Wait, I do have a choice. I’d be like, wait, you have a choice. Stop. Pause, Michel. Pause for.

Speaker 4 00:08:37  A pause. I’m like, I don’t have a choice.

Michelle Chalfant 00:08:39  Yes you do. And, you know, alongside of of all of realizing there’s a choice. I also was doing a lot of nervous system regulations, practicing slowing down, inserting what I call micro moments throughout the day, which means 1 to 5 minutes of just pausing or stopping. And I’m very much I love what I do, I love working, I love, you know, so I go all in all day and my ego would say, you don’t have time, don’t stop.

Michelle Chalfant 00:09:06  But I started pausing and that’s when I started realizing, oh, there is there’s that space. Yeah. Who knew? Who knew? You know, when I was slowing down enough to recognize there was a space, that’s where everything started to change. Because if you would have asked me ten, 20 years ago, I would have said, there’s no time. It’s just an automatic response that I have and it’s not. There is a space and it grows.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:30  You talk about chapter one and chapter two. What was chapter one like and what what was the thing that caused chapter one to end in chapter two to begin?

Michelle Chalfant 00:09:38  You mean like act one? In my life, I was not a joyful. Although if you if you would have met me, you know, in college or after college, and in my 20s and 30s, I looked really happy and joyful on the outside. I was married, I had two kids, I looked fine, you know, I could dress the part. I was in supper club when my kids were little.

Michelle Chalfant 00:09:58  All this and, inside of me, I want to. I like this parable that was the wolf that was in charge. And that wolf was not happy. It created a lot of thoughts that were negative, beat up on myself on a regular basis, never feeling good enough, low self-worth, all of those things. So that was act one of my life. And I realized while growing up, I came to this conclusion based on the negative thinking that I had. I must hate myself because nobody in their right mind would talk to themselves in this way if they love themselves. So again, this is the beginning of my life. And again, on the outside I was smiling. You would have never, ever, ever guessed this. But I made that conclusion. And probably when I was 21, I started. Then this is back before there were, you know, there was an internet, by the way. I was at the library and thank God I had just what I call, you know, earthly angels that would come and say, you need to read this book.

Michelle Chalfant 00:10:59  Why don’t you do this and come to this class with me? And I started learning about how we love ourselves, how we build our self-worth. And so when I started that journey, it led to again this act two, if you will, which was, instead of Michelle, just living by this default, thinking I’m not good enough, I hate myself. I’m damaged goods. all of the negative thoughts. Everything started to slowly shift and my awareness started to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow with all the thoughts I was having. And I started realizing, wait, I’m choosing new thoughts now. All these things started shifting and now the negative thinking I now I know what to do when that happens, when the inner critic comes up, or the judge or whomever comes up, and I can work with that very quickly and easily now. And now my life is really, I live more from the other wolf. The life of compassion, the life of grace. It’s okay to make a mistake.

Michelle Chalfant 00:12:03  We’re human. Oh, really? Because when I was in my 20s and 30s, I didn’t know that I thought there was something wrong with me because I made a mistake, you know, and I was bad on all these things. So that was like how act one was lived. And then just learning. And my awareness continued to grow. And I’m a I am a lifelong learner. I think I’ll keep learning till the day I die. I just love to learn and grow and just the different mentors and teachers that I had, just like all came together. Eric just it was this perfect storm of the perfect people at the right time, right? Were showing up and I could just feel this pivot inside. And I started feeling not so bad about myself. And everything started to get better and better and better and better and better. So.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:44  So it sounds like it was a very gradual thing. You mentioned starting to read these books in your early 20s, but still having some of those voices in your 30s. And so it sounds like just over time, all this work you were doing started to accumulate and started. You know, there may be a point where you can identify a pivot, but if we were to actually watch the moment by moment thing, we would see just little by little you changed 100%. Or were there points along the way that felt really big?

Michelle Chalfant 00:13:14  I wrote about this in the book, actually. I remember the day that I was over visiting my sister. I lived in Nashville for many years and I was here in Charlotte. My sister was here and my cousin was over, and we were just hanging out, and I did something that was very codependent, which that was my that was something that I did live with for many, many, many years and it still pops up every once in a while. But I was deep in it, and I said something to my sister and my cousin and they giggled and they said, we love your co-dependency. And I said, well, you know why I have that? It’s because mom became my very best friend and dad leaned on me and I had to take care of everybody and blah, blah, blah.

Michelle Chalfant 00:13:52  And then they laughed again and they were in a loving way. They said, you know, that’s a story that you can tell so quickly. Michelle. They said, what, are you going to drop that story? And I turned to them and I was like, I didn’t know it was a story. I remember I was I was probably 40 years old and I thought, wait, what? That’s a story. That’s true. And they said, yeah. And I remember the awareness that I had was it’s time to let that go and put it down because it wasn’t helping me at all. That was a big moment that I that was that was a huge moment I would have to say in my life. And I realized again, it’s what we started out talking about today. We have a choice. Yeah. And that was the moment I realized, wait, I am choosing to tell the story over and over again. I’m choosing to stay here. And it wasn’t that I was choosing codependency.

Michelle Chalfant 00:14:40  I was choosing to carry the story around of why I lived the way I was living with a lot of codependency and people pleasing. And in that moment, there was that space. And I said, I’m going to put that down. And I remember when I had a private practice, I would talk to my clients about their stories, okay? And I had in my office a little suitcase. I filled it with bricks, and I called it the cement suitcase. That represented the story that we carry around with us because they are heavy. They weighed us down and we don’t even realize it in the moment. I decided to let that story go. The reason that I’m codependent is because mom did this and dad did this, and if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be the way I am today. And I said, I’m done with that story. So that experience was life changing. I can see it like it was a day ago, and it was many years ago. and I thought, wait a minute, I felt lighter.

Michelle Chalfant 00:15:33  I felt hopeful everything in my future seemed like it was going to be about to change. And it did. Just because I let that story, I drop the suitcase, I put that story down. So that was one of the many, many moments in my life. I have to say that really was a pivotal moment for me.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:49  That’s a great story. Let me ask a question, because I think there’s a there’s some nuance here that I’d like to talk about because a big part of the book, at least the early part, is recognizing that we were patterned as children 0 to 6 for for a bunch of different reasons. We can go into that a little bit. So there’s that. But those are stories to a certain degree. So how do we work on recognizing what happened, allowing it to be a truth that we work with, but not carrying it around in the way that you’re talking about? Because the way you described your mother being, you know, your best friend is probably true on one sense, right? There’s a reality behind that.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:35  And that did shape you to a certain degree. And continuing to carry it didn’t serve you, but your book does encourage us to look at those stories.

Michelle Chalfant 00:16:44  This is why something I’ve said for many, many, many, many years. I say triggers are a gift because triggers help us to identify the programs or patterns or stories. They’re all the same thing to me. They’re ingrained in our unconscious mind. So how in the world are we supposed to find them now? When we’re aware, really aware, you can grab it. In that moment at my sisters, it was like sitting in my awareness and I thought, whoa, I got to make a decision here. But what I found over all the years of doing again my own, my own work and teaching this to many, many, many, many people is that when we’re triggered, these varied programs rise up to the surface. So when we’re triggered, it’s our stuff. It’s our program that’s getting activated. Even though what we want to do is blame the person out there for making us feel bad, what we want to do instead is flip it around and say, wait a minute, what’s coming up for me? What belief about myself or about the world is coming up right now because I’m very activated.

Michelle Chalfant 00:17:47  So I’m going to look at that. And when we look at that, that is where everything starts to change. That’s where everything can change when we’re able to look at what is triggering us. So that is one beautiful way. It is free of charge. There’s you don’t have to go pay anybody, but you’ve got to be willing to look at what’s coming up and realize it’s coming up for you. Now, I want to clarify one thing because people say to me, well, what if I’m just angry? Can I just be an angry person? Or if I’m angry if someone hurts me? Absolutely, yes. So how do you tell if you’re angry versus triggered. And you’ve got a program, an old program or an old belief that is rising up. When you carry it with you, you’re still thinking about it after 30 minutes to an hour and you’re still thinking about it two hours later, three hours later. That’s a trigger. Because when I’m angry, I love anger. Anger is a great emotion.

Michelle Chalfant 00:18:43  I’ve taught more people how to feel their anger. We need to feel all of our emotions, especially anger. Most people suppress it down. So I’m not opposed to anger at all. But if you are angry because someone steals a parking space, let’s just say you’re waiting for the parking spot. Someone comes and takes it, you get angry and you go in the grocery store. You start grocery shopping. If you’re still thinking about that person that told you that stole your spot when you’re leaving the grocery store, that’s a trigger. And what we want to do is instead turn towards self and say, okay, hold on a second, so I’m mad or whatever. Fill in the blank, whatever emotion it might be. I’m frustrated. I’m pissed. I’m whatever. That person took my parking spot. How does it make me feel? Well, I sat there and I was waiting for my spot, and that guy just came in and ripped right in and pulled in and stole it from me. Well, how does that make me feel? It made me feel invisible.

Michelle Chalfant 00:19:34  Oh, well, how does invisible make me feel? And you just keep going down, down, down down, down. You want to get to the root? Well, when I feel well, it made me feel invisible. Yeah, I felt well. When I’m invisible, I feel like I don’t matter. Okay, well how does I don’t matter feel. And then you keep going down. And then what we find is, oh my gosh, this is how I felt when I was growing up. You may or may not have that association with childhood. It doesn’t matter. But we know when you hit the bottom because you can’t go any further. It’s like, nope, that’s about it. I just feel like I don’t matter. Does it resemble anything from childhood? Yeah. Gosh, when my sister was born, when I was five, I didn’t matter anymore. I got no attention. Great. Can you feel it? So we feel into whatever that might be. Feel the emotion of I don’t matter.

Michelle Chalfant 00:20:16  And that’s why when we’re triggered, we want to call our friend and be like, can you believe so-and-so said that to me. They made me feel bad. Then our friends will validate us, and that trigger then drops back into the unconscious mind. So we want to not do that and instead say, how does what that person out there, what they did, how does it make me feel? We dig into it and we find that that belief is ours, and then we flip it. When we after we feel into it, we say, so what else is true today? Is it still true that I don’t matter? Is it still true? Well, no, I do matter. My dog loves me. My partner loves me. I have a child that loves me. Whatever I might be, my best friend loves me. Okay, so how does that feel? And then we move back up the spectrum. So we go. We take it from the top to the bottom, then bottom, and we rebuild into a new emotion or a new belief.

Michelle Chalfant 00:21:03  That’s how you work with triggers. And I speak from experience right here. I was someone that was triggered a lot. I had emotional dysregulation is what I would call it in my 20s and even my early 30s. I do not live like that anymore. Not at all. So yes, I did a lot of personal, personal work, but I also worked like crazy on these triggers. That is how you update your programming from childhood. It is a lot easier than we actually think. When you have the right tools. It’s an easy process. It doesn’t feel good, but you work through it and all of a sudden it’s like, whoa! In fact, in the adult chair book, I have a whole trigger script. It’s like, this is how you work through a part. It’s in the it’s what I’m talking about, the inner critic. It’s such an important part of how we all need to learn how to live. And it’ll change lives. It does change. Change lives. I’ve worked with thousands of people on this and they’re like, oh my God, this has changed my life.I’m like, it does if you have the right script, if you have the right tools.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:24  Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career. Two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call the still Point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago, so you don’t have to stumble towards an answer. That something is now here and it’s called overwhelm, is optional tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have. Taking less than ten minutes total a day.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:20  It isn’t about doing less. It’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to one you feed overwhelm. That’s one you feed. Overwhelm. I know a lot of people listening might be thinking, I’m telling listeners what they’re thinking. What I’m thinking is that yes, what you described is valuable. And it seems like my experience is it’s not a one time thing. It’s an ongoing process. And I’m and I’m curious if you think the actual script, like having a process is what makes the difference, because I know a lot of people who have figured out that this triggers me, because this thing in my childhood and some insight is useful, but still feels like the the trigger is still hooked up, right? Right. So you have the insight I feel this way. Like the example I always use is when I’m around men of a certain age, I get mildly intimidated.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:38  Right. And I know why my dad was angry all the time. I was afraid of him. And so when I’m around my dad. So I get it right. Okay. So that’s the insight. Now let’s talk about what sort of script you would use for. Well let’s just use that as an example.

Michelle Chalfant 00:24:52  Sure. Do you want to do the work right now? Sure. Okay. So you said when you’re around men.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:57  Of a certain age.

Michelle Chalfant 00:24:58  Of a certain age of a certain age, you feel intimidated. Okay. Sorry. I’m writing it down. Okay. So intimidated.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:06  This would be interesting to try. I kind of feel like I have worked through this a large degree, but let’s use it as an example.

Michelle Chalfant 00:25:12  Yeah. Why don’t we see where it goes? Okay. We’ll see. Maybe another part will pop up. Who knows? Or another belief I don’t know. So intimidated. What does intimidated feel like in your body? Where do you feel it? Imagine a guy of the certain age right now, nearby or in your awareness, and you’re starting to feel intimidated.

Michelle Chalfant 00:25:33  It’s coming up in your body.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:34  I can’t quite get to that. What I can get to is there is a shrinking.

Michelle Chalfant 00:25:40  Great.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:41  Shrinking. There is a shrinking in all aspects. My awareness starts to shrink. My my desire to do anything starts to shrink. Shrinking is the main feeling.

Michelle Chalfant 00:25:52  Awesome. So shrinking. So I feel myself shrinking. And you feel your. Do you feel your body just kind of shrink and tighten up a little bit? You feel that? Okay. And then if you were to go below the word shrinking when you feel like you’re shrinking, it makes you feel. What if there was an emotion below it? What? What might it be? Or thought or belief?

Eric Zimmer 00:26:13  Well, I think it’s fear.

Michelle Chalfant 00:26:15  Okay. What I’m curious about. And here’s the thing. Yeah, I know, you know. I’m going to speak from my adult chair language. We know things. Chin up. So we very much know, like you even said, I know it’s my dad.

Michelle Chalfant 00:26:29  I was intimidated, blah, blah, blah, blah. So here’s one life experience we have from chin up. I’d like to invite you to go chin down, which is in the body. So go like waist to chin. That’s a different reality. It can be. So what I want to invite you to do is to drop down below your chin and, and instead of answering quickly from here, which, you know, and you said you knew it, it was intimidating. But it’s interesting because we started doing the work and you said, well, it’s not intimidating, it’s shrinking. I could feel your energy drop down your body. It’s a different response. So when you go below shrinking, and I would love to invite you to get really curious about under the chin. If you could let your heart answer, or that little kid inside of you answer whatever that I don’t need you to even have a visual. Allow the answer to rise up the response to my question. Okay. Does that make sense? Okay, so feel shrinking again.

Michelle Chalfant 00:27:23  So imagine this person out here, you feel your body kind of shrink. Everything shrinking. Got it. Okay. What’s under shrinking? Go with the first thought that comes to you, and it’s going to rise up.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:37  It’s afraid.

Michelle Chalfant 00:27:38  Afraid. Perfect. Perfect. Okay. Is there anything under. Afraid?

Eric Zimmer 00:27:46  Alone?

Michelle Chalfant 00:27:47  Yeah. Beautiful. Is there anything under alone?

Eric Zimmer 00:27:54  Not that I can detect.

Michelle Chalfant 00:27:55  Okay, great. So if you could just take a very slow, deep breath, and you’re doing great. So you got alone. And when you. When you tune into feeling alone, One. Is there an age that pops up for you? First thought or no, it doesn’t have to. Who feels alone?

Eric Zimmer 00:28:14  Back up in my head.

Michelle Chalfant 00:28:16  Okay. That’s okay. So take a breath. Feel your feet on the floor and breathe down in your belly. Right. Your belly button area. Just feel your belly coming in and out. It’s okay. We’re not exposing any part. We’re just getting really curious.

Michelle Chalfant 00:28:31  There’s some part of you that feels alone. Who is that?

Eric Zimmer 00:28:40  I guess I’m going to go with teenager, but that’s because I don’t. I have so few memories of being anything under 16. Yeah, so there’s almost nothing there for me to access. So intellectually, I think. Of course, this started earlier than that. Yeah, but but if I have to, if I go back to like, what I can remember.

Michelle Chalfant 00:29:06  I don’t want you to. You won’t. This is going. Chin up again. I was talking about like. Chin up. You is trying to remember. Chin down. There’s a difference between remembering and knowing. It’s an automatic knowing. So a number is going to. It’s going to rise up. Sort of like it’s coming from underneath the ocean and it rises up to the surface. It’s like, well where did that number come from? And we don’t even have to go there. That’s okay. But if you can go back to the feeling and you’re doing so great here of alone, where do you feel that feeling of alone in your body when you say, I feel.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:40  It’s all along the midline from throat to stomach.

Michelle Chalfant 00:29:43  Throat to stomach. Perfect. From throat to stomach in the midline. Perfect. And then do you actually see a visual of when you say the midline, is there a color or how do you know it’s in the midline. You just feel it.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:58  I just feel.

Michelle Chalfant 00:29:58  It. Yeah, yeah. So can that part it’s a part of you. It’s just an energy. It’s just. It’s just an energy that’s kind of lighting up for you. Can it hear you right now? Or us? Yes or no? What’s it say?

Eric Zimmer 00:30:19  Back up into head again. Yeah. You know, it’s it’s hard because I know, you know, I’ve looked at internal family systems. I’ve done inner child work, I’ve done all this stuff. So I kind of have this. My brain keeps saying, here’s the answer. Right. So it’s hard for me to access what it was like before I did everything right. Because it’s easy to fall back on.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:40  Well, when I did this ten years ago or 20 years ago, this is what it was.

Michelle Chalfant 00:30:44  And the work I do. I’ve never been, even though I’m a therapist and coach and all, I’ve never been trained in ifs. I’ve done parts work for 25 years, but it’s my own version. It’s very spiritual parts work, it’s very energetic. It’s different than ifs.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:58  It is. But there’s still a similar idea of asking whether that part can hear you, whether you know whether you have access to it. It’s similar in that way.

Michelle Chalfant 00:31:07  So we could go much deeper, and it would take a little bit longer than we have today. But if I could just summarize this for you. Yep. But wait, there’s another part before I say that. Hold on. So can you just do just one more thing? Sure. Put your hands where that. midline throat to stomach, wherever that would be on your body. Just put your hand there and breathe and let that part of you know in your mind.

Michelle Chalfant 00:31:29  You can say it in your mind or out loud, but like I’ve got you, I see you. What was. What did you need when you felt so alone? Don’t answer from your head. Go below. What comes up for you? What did you need when you felt so? When you felt alone?

Eric Zimmer 00:31:46  Comfort.

Michelle Chalfant 00:31:47  So with your hand on your body. Right there in that midline. Let that party you know in your mind. Just like I’ve got you. I’m here to comfort you. It’s me, it’s Eric and let it know how old you are today and that it’s 2025. Whatever word you might need to say to it, that’s what you want to say to it.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:10  Okay.

Michelle Chalfant 00:32:11  And what happens now with that mid-line?

Eric Zimmer 00:32:16  It lessens. Yeah. It eases.

Michelle Chalfant 00:32:18  What’s it need? Ask it. What do you need? What do you need from me. And let it know how old you are today. What do you need from me? I’ve got you. I’m here.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:31  In my head again? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:33  I’m having a hard time disentangling. Yeah. This work from the fact that I’m in the middle of a podcast interview. Yeah, from the fact that I did.

Michelle Chalfant 00:32:40  This helpful.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:41  Before. Yeah, yeah.

Michelle Chalfant 00:32:42  That’s okay. It’s helpful for people even listening to this because this is the natural human experiences that we go. Chin up, chin down, chin up, chin. You know, and what we want to learn how to do is live. Chin down. We want to learn how to start making a new connection with our bodies. That’s where we resolve triggers when we do parts work. And I’ve worked with people for 20 some years doing my kind of parts work. I can nail anybody, anybody I can work with and get them back into their body and help them work through that. But that’s the key, is the being in the body. I know it doesn’t matter to me what your head says because we’re so great at. I mean, it’s the to me it’s the ego. Like the, the ego needed and the ego’s not bad, by the way, but the ego needed to make sense of your life and our lives when we’re growing up.

Michelle Chalfant 00:33:30  It needs to be there to do that for us to make sense of our reality. And it has an incredible ideas and theories about who we are when we’re growing up, and how we turned out the way we did. But we’ve got to learn how to disconnect from that part and drop below the chin. And I would promise you this, the more you do that again, do it off air. I would continue this this work. There’s I don’t remember it’s in the trigger chapter, I believe. In this book it is page 190. In the book, if you have the book, you have.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:01  The book. I have an electronic version of it. Yes.

Michelle Chalfant 00:34:03  I will send you a book. It walks you through how to do this work. But you’ve got to be you got to be in the body. The body is where the magic happens. That’s where we’re able to update these things very, very, very quickly. And I’ve done this with people for so long in their lives start changing very rapidly.

Michelle Chalfant 00:34:20  but something that you said is, wait a minute, why does it keep coming up? Sometimes we will clear a belief and it comes up. They reoccur less when we’re below the chicken in the body. Number one. Number two, oftentimes there are layers of the issue that we’re dealing with. So we’ve got to sometimes okay so I did one layer and that’s like how the hell is this back again. Did I already work on this. It’s like yeah, this is a different angle slightly. So we got to work on it again. But what I have found is when we do it the right way. They do not come back in the same way you can because it’s an energy. We have to remember what we’re actually working with. It’s an energy that we are clearing from the energy field. That’s what we’re doing. And it’s not even clearing it. It’s like it’s transforming it. So it’s going from a belief that was more of a negative one that’s turning into a positive one. So it’s going from that light to dark kind of thing.

Michelle Chalfant 00:35:18  But it doesn’t mean there aren’t fragments. But I also have found that when we take down one really big belief and really transform, that it’s like a tree falling over in the woods, and it takes down 4 or 5 other trees as well. So the same goes with these beliefs. So we might clear one and be like, well, wait, I’m not triggered by that or that anymore. That’s really weird. It’s because you took down a whopper of a belief or a program. Yeah. Thank you, Eric, for volunteering though. That’s big stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:44  You’re welcome. Let’s very quickly now talk through the the three chair model that you have your books called the adult chair. Explain what you mean by the adult chair and what the other two chairs are.

Michelle Chalfant 00:36:14  Sure. So the model itself is basically a developmental model that we every single human walks through. Every human is born. Then we move into what I call the child chair, which is ages 0 to 6. This is where we learn about emotions.

Michelle Chalfant 00:36:29  This is where we learn about our true needs. Like, what do I need? And I don’t mean I need a lollipop. It’s. I need a hug. I need to know that I’m loved. I need to know that I’m lovable. I need to know that I’m worthy. So these are a lot of our emotional needs. They’re all again, it’s like our parents sprinkle the seeds for the rest of our life when we are in the 0 to 6 age timeframe. this is where we learn about spontaneity and creativity and fun, all of these amazing things. And this is again where we talked about where the roadmap gets laid for the rest of our lives, which to me is mind blowing. So the issues that we have today are from 0 to 6. The way that we love another person today is from 0 to 6. It’s like the the foundation of who we are is from 0 to 6. It’s a very, very important time. It’s called the child chair. Then around the age of seven that it’s again, metaphorically, it’s like we take this roadmap and we hand it off then to the ego part of us at age seven, and then that part goes, I got it from here.

Michelle Chalfant 00:37:33  I’ll keep you safe. I’ll keep you alive. I’ll use this roadmap. I got it. And then that part continues to develop what it thinks our identity should be so that we get accepted, loved, included in groups. So it’s like, I’ll change who I am so that you like me. I want to be on your soccer team when I’m ten, so I’m going to be or do exactly what you think I should do or who I should be. And we continue to grow. And then we go into high school and we’re teenagers and. Oh, you drink a lot. I’m going to drink a lot, too, because I want you to like me. I want you to be in my group or, oh, I need to sleep with you. Because that that is what all my friends are doing, and I want to be in that group. So it’s always about including ourselves in groups. So this is what the ego does. It’s like, well, if I’m in your group, then I’m safe and I’m alive.

Michelle Chalfant 00:38:18  It really overlays who we are and it creates this false self, this new identity for us. And then around the age, and this is what we call the adolescent chair. So it really includes pre adolescence adolescence post adolescence. This is where the inner critic is born. The judge for narcissism. All of that stuff is happening during that phase. This is the part of us that also says I can only live in the past or the future. I cannot live in the present moment. It’s not safe. I’ve got to always be on alert. Like, wait, what do I need to do? How do I need to change myself? All that kind of thing. And then around the age of 25, if we had role models that were healthy, that were in their adult, healthy adult self, then we naturally just slide into this adult self, this healthy adult self, which is what I call the adult chair. This is where we live in the moment. We set healthy boundaries. We know how to feel our emotions.

Michelle Chalfant 00:39:16  We are strong. We are compassionate toward others and self. we are able to speak up for ourselves with no problem. we go after what we want in life, all of that kind of thing. So it’s not the perfect chair, but it’s a healthy chair. And this is this is where we live the rest of our lives. Unfortunately, though, most of us did not have that type of role model or those role models. So we default into growing up physically, but we live off of that old outdated roadmap from the child chair, which is kind of crazy again, but from this lens of the adolescent chair. So we all are growing up from this adolescent structure instead of from this adult chair. So the book is about teaching people how to slide over into their adult chair out of that adolescent chair, no matter what age that you are today. So yeah, so that’s the whole model in itself. And it really teaches people like who they are today and how they got this way without judgment or shame or blame of anybody.

Michelle Chalfant 00:40:15  It’s just it is what it is. You know, some of us had healthier childhood. Some of us didn’t. We’re somewhere on that spectrum. Every human is. But, I mean, I’ve worked with people over so many years that just said, I just wish I could set boundaries or why am I relationship so unhealthy? Or why do I live with chronic anxiety or depression? What the heck’s going on? It’s like, read the book. To me, this is the book I wish we all had, probably when we were 13 years old or 18 years old before we left the house and really learned how to navigate life in a healthier way. So that’s the three chair model.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:48  Excellent. So you have the three chairs, but you also then have sort of five pillars after that. Yeah. And I’d like to walk through a few of those. We actually kind of did walk through one of them, which is pillar four, which is, you know, owning our triggers. Yeah. Let’s start with the first one, which is to own my reality.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:08  And I think we probably hit on this a little bit too, when we talked about your, the story you were telling about codependency and your mom, right, that you had to own your reality. Meaning like, yeah, that probably all is true to a certain degree. And it’s my responsibility. I’m the only one that can unwire this.

Michelle Chalfant 00:41:25  Yes, absolutely. And the way that I found the Five Pillars was, again, I was in private practice for probably, I can’t remember, 23 years probably. And what I found was I kept teaching my clients the same thing over and over and over, and their lives started to change. And that’s what these the five pillars were, the five things that I taught my clients over and over and over. So you’re right. So the first pillar is I own my reality. And what I realized was that when people would come into my office and they would say, I don’t know, I just want a different life. I’m just not happy. Tell me about your life.

Michelle Chalfant 00:41:58  And they would tell me everything except the big purple elephant in the room or the pink elephant. I’m like, what’s the. What’s the pink elephant in your room that you don’t want to talk about, that you don’t want to own? And sometimes people knew what it was. Sometimes people didn’t. But a lot of people would come in and say things like, and yes, that example that you said was spot on. I really struggle with codependency and I need to stop caring that suitcase around. Absolutely, yes. But it was also things like, people would come in and say, I think I want a divorce. I don’t think I’ve ever been happy in my marriage or I think my child has ADHD. I have heard from the teachers for five years and I don’t want to admit it. I don’t want to say it out loud because that makes it real. But I’m going to tell you, Michele, I’m like, okay, well that’s fine. Or people would come in and say, you know, I’m getting high every single day and now it’s twice a day, I think I have a problem or I’m drinking too much.

Michelle Chalfant 00:42:46  Can you help me? Or you name it. It’s all the things that we do and sometimes even a daily basis. And we, we there’s this sense again, we’re living chin up. So we’ve got to learn how to feel our reality again. And there’s something about it that doesn’t feel quite, quite right. But we don’t want to admit it. The way we change anything is we’ve got to name it and we’ve got to own it. I worked with several people with cancer, and this lady would this woman would come in and she’d say, well, that thing, that thing that I have and da da da da da. And I said, I remember saying to her one day, I said, listen, I’m all about Law of Attraction. I’ve taught it for a year. I get it, and I understand. But you are creating it more by pushing against it. Let’s own it and you will move through it. Because when we own our reality, different ideas come. Inspiration, intuition, downloads of what my next step is.

Michelle Chalfant 00:43:43  But when we don’t want to own what’s right in front of us, we are putting up a wall to the solution. Yeah, so you’ve got to own it. So she said, I don’t want to say it out loud. I don’t want to say it. I said, say it out loud just once with me right now so we can move through it together. She says, I have the stage for cancer. I said, okay, take a breath. And she says, wow, why does it feel lighter? I said, we don’t have to talk. We’re going to just figure out a plan now for how to navigate it. And she loved it. So there’s a huge power in owning our reality and not being in denial of what’s sitting smack dab in front of us. Yeah, it actually moves us through it. But that’s the first step.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:24  Yeah, and it’s an uncomfortable step because we have to then allow ourselves to feel it to some degree. right? Yeah. And that is difficult.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:36  It’s it’s difficult to recognize to feel. Okay. I really do want a divorce. Now I have to feel that. And that feeling is actually part of the energy that drives change, right? It’s something inside feels really wrong about this. That’s part of the energy that drives the change. It needs to be there. It’s why, you know, I’m a recovering alcoholic and addict and, you know, in the in recovery circles, they talk so much about like, you know, hitting a bottom. And I don’t like that word very much. But but it points towards there has to be a certain amount of uncomfortableness. Yeah. That drives the change. And we have to be willing to go into that discomfort to a certain degree in order to change. And that’s kind of what you’re talking about with owning it. But owning is very often very uncomfortable.

Michelle Chalfant 00:45:26  You’re absolutely right. And here’s the thing. And again, I heard this so often, like, I don’t want to say this out loud, but I’m going to say it to you, Michelle.

Michelle Chalfant 00:45:33  I’m like, okay, go ahead and say it. And what the ego or what we do in our adolescent share is blow up a story or assumption that it by owning it. And what’s on the other side of owning it is going to be the worst thing ever, you know? So, for example, and here’s a great example, I remember working with a woman that she came in and she said, I think that I want a divorce. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. I’m going to say it to you. I said, okay, great, let’s talk about it. And she cried and she was feeling it like you’re saying. And when we feel it, the emotions or the energy replace that word with energy start to move again. I want to give you an analogy. I think about our human body system. Like a big, beautiful, flowing river. Think of you yourself. Because quantum physics has proven that we are energy being so. Think about yourself like a beautiful river when and then a log, which is a thought or something that scares us or doesn’t feel good, or a thought like I want a divorce, right? Or I’m drinking too much, or whatever it might be.

Michelle Chalfant 00:46:31  Is in the river, and it’s trying to move through this river. When we say, I don’t want to feel that, I don’t want that. And we stop that log. Another log comes and another log and another log. And before you know it, it’s like a big beaver dam. It’s a big dam in the middle of the river. Because we’re not willing to feel it when we feel it. All those logs can move through. Does it feel good? Sometimes, no. Sometimes there are tears and anger and frustration and all of those things. But here’s what I also learned about feeling emotions. They do move through. In fact, without a story, without the story they move through in 90s. Grief is a little different, but they do move through. And what what we do, though, as humans is we start to feel an emotion, and then we go back to the ego. And the ego builds a story about why we’re feeling that emotion. But if we can just feel the emotion, it’s an energy that moves through no different than a log moving down a river.

Michelle Chalfant 00:47:26  Let me go back to my example. So this woman came in and said, I need to tell you something. I think I want a divorce. I’m not happy. I haven’t been happy in years. my husband. I don’t remember what was going on with him. Something was going on. If he worked too much or an alcoholic or something like that. I said, okay, tell me more. And she started talking about it. I said, okay, well, I remember inviting her. I said, have you shared any of this with him? Well, no. That would be hurtful. And I said, let’s start there. Let’s start with just sharing your reality with him. And she says, well, that’s going to be uncomfortable. It might hurt his feelings. I said, yep, that’s okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:06  But not as much as walking out next week. Right. Unexpectedly.

Michelle Chalfant 00:48:11  Right. Well, again, I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but she came in every week, and I, we came up with a plan of how she’s going to speak up, which, again, that’s a boundary.

Michelle Chalfant 00:48:20  That’s just a boundary is not only, teaches other people how we want to be treated, but a boundary oftentimes is just speaking up. It’s a simple request. So anyway, I worked with her on that and I said, let’s tell him high level what’s going on in anyway. So we came up with it. We’d go talk to him that she’d come back, what she learned how to do after admitting, I want a divorce again, you got to think about it like this too. Our ego doesn’t want you to be in pain, doesn’t want us to be in pain. So the solution that the ego is going to come up with, which, by the way, that’s the adolescent chair, which we all live from, is the average emotional age of a 13 year old here that that’s where we live from. Even though my body is older, however old you are on the outside, we are making decisions from an emotional perspective of about a 13 year old. Okay, so in her mind she said, I want a divorce because she wanted the pain to stop.

Michelle Chalfant 00:49:16  I taught her how to set boundaries. How do you speak up? How do you feel your emotions? We went through all of the things in these pillars and guess what? They learned how to dialogue together. He eventually came in with her. Their marriage became stronger because she was willing to own her reality. So they learned how to have a new relationship, but they had to talk about it. And that’s another thing that I worked with people on a ton. Like, we don’t know how to communicate as healthy adults, so we just avoid instead. I did a whole course on that. It’s called the Relationship Reset course because I said people just don’t know how to communicate in relationships, but you got to do that from your adult. Yeah. But that happened time and time again with all kinds of different things, whether it be, you know, partnership issues or again, like that person that came in and said, I and I’m drinking too much. I don’t know what to do. Okay, let’s talk about it.

Michelle Chalfant 00:50:06  You gotta own it. So owning is powerful. It starts changing everything.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:11  In this section where you talk about owning things, you’ve got sort of this three step piece. And I’d like to ask, we sort of talked about one and two here. Honest with yourself. Get honest about your past. But the third step is own the good. What does that mean?

Michelle Chalfant 00:50:25  Yeah. So what’s what is good? You know, and this is the thing the ego looks for what’s not good. The ego looks for what’s wrong and wants to fix it. But we want to own the good of what’s going on in life, too. And people, they don’t see that. So for this, let’s just use this woman for an example. I said, I’m really proud of you for speaking up for yourself. You’re owning your reality. This is really good stuff. What else is good? You know, from our adult. We have to look for what’s fact and truth in the very moment right now, in this very moment.

Michelle Chalfant 00:50:54  And I remember saying to her, tell me about what’s good about your relationship with your husband because she was so focused on what was a negative thing. I said, we got to own all that stuff, too. So there’s that. The other way that we own the good is we just don’t look for what’s wrong. Again, we’re looking for what’s right. So I don’t want people to think, oh, I’m just owning the bad stuff. We’re not great at owning what’s good because again, the ego is looking for what’s wrong? Where is. Where? Is something out of place? You know, all of that kind of thing. So we want to look out into our world and become our best cheerleaders and go, well, maybe I’m not so bad. And maybe this is like, for me. Okay. Yep. I’m going to own that. I have all these codependency tendencies and I’m still a good person and I’m going to work on it. I’m really proud of myself. Good for me.

Michelle Chalfant 00:51:44  We’re not great at doing that. I’ve said this time and time again, you must become your best cheerleader. You must do that for yourself first. Many, many people get into relationships, and it could be with a partner or a parent or a friend, or we want people out there to validate us. No, no, that’s the cherry on the sundae. We got to learn how to do it for ourselves first.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:06  Yeah. If we’re talking about owning our reality, our reality is nuanced, right? That’s what reality is. It’s nuanced. It’s not simple. It’s there’s good and there’s bad all the time. I just did a project with the Tao Te Ching, and I mean, that’s one of the core underlying things of that entire book is you don’t get good without bad, you don’t get high. Without low, you don’t get light without dark. So reality is to own reality is to, in a sense, see the whole of it all. And so if you leave out the good, you’re missing a key part of reality.

Michelle Chalfant 00:52:42  Yeah. When I work with people on building their self-worth or their self-esteem, I’m like, what do you do that’s really good in one day? And they can’t see it? And I said, did you do you make the bed, start making your bed every day? Let’s just start there. And I love for you to praise yourself every day. Like good job making that bad. You killed it. Do you get up and you take your kids to school? Oh yeah, but who cares about that? I’m like, no, you take your kids to school. Good job. Do you get up? And you, you know, so I go through this little tiny things. Do you feed your dog? Yes. Great. Good. Good for you. You’re not, you know, starving your animal. Like it sounds so silly, but we take for granted all the stuff that we do that’s so good every day. And we just go, Who cares? No no no no it’s not.

Michelle Chalfant 00:53:23  Who cares? It’s like you did a good job. Claim and own it. Celebrate it.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:29  100%. Because I think when we do that, we can also reflect on what is the value that is underneath that. And then we connect to it and we feel like we’re whole. Oh, I one of my things that I value is, is, care. Well, look at all these instances of care because we often think we need to do more. Whereas what you’re saying, and I agree is yes, sometimes more is required. But I also think another way into well-being is to own the good that we already do, and learn how to feel it and see all the ways in which I am making choices that reflect who I am in a positive way.

Michelle Chalfant 00:54:12  100%. Yeah, yeah. You’ve got to own the good. You’ve got to look for it. Yeah. Look for it and then claim it. What I mean by that is, again, it’s owning it. Like, wow, I’m really good at podcasting.

Michelle Chalfant 00:54:28  I’m really good at asking questions. Hey, I wrote a book. I’m really proud of myself. If nobody bought this book, I’m proud of myself. Yeah, right. I did it, and I’m so proud of Michelle for writing this adult chair book. Go, Michelle. I don’t have to put that on social media. I don’t have to tell another living soul. I’m telling myself because I am proud of myself. We have to learn how to become our, like I said, our biggest cheerleader, but our best friend to 100%.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:54  I’m a little bit further behind than you in the book process, but the book’s entering copyediting with a publisher, and it’ll be out next April, and it’s really easy to get caught up in all the things that need to happen in order for this to go right. But a friend of mine told me, and I try and think about it often. He’s like, you already won. Like they paid you money to write this book. You already won. You’ve written a book.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:21  And that’s really, you know, that’s a version of taking on the good. And that’s something I try and do a lot is like, literally I wrote the book like I’d work for 30 minutes, I’d take a break, I’d work for 30 minutes. At the end of each 30 minutes, I would try and give myself a very small but still distinct, like good job. Yes. Right. Because every time I did it was was valuable and important.

Michelle Chalfant 00:55:44  That’s exactly it, Eric. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. And I’m glad that you did that. A lot of people wouldn’t do that. Yeah, I took so many weekends out of my life for probably the last to write the book, maybe a year and a half. And sometimes I would go on a writing trip for a week or two somewhere. When I was done, I’d say, good job. Look at you go, girl. Like, good for you. Again, I’d at the end of it. It takes so long to get the book on the world.

Michelle Chalfant 00:56:08  I’m like, I don’t care if anyone buys this thing because things. I was so proud of myself, and I know that the people that do read it are going to be the ones that feel drawn to it because, and they’re ready to change their lives. Those are the people that will read it. But whatever. I’m really happy about this book. I’m proud of it. So congratulations on yours. It’s exciting.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:26  It is exciting. Like I said, you’re a little further along. I could see a book behind you. So congratulations to you. As we wrap up, I want to ask you a question. One of the things we talk about on this show very often is little by little, a little becomes a lot. And I’m curious, like, what’s one little by little way someone could put something from your book to work today? What could somebody do in five minutes today?

Michelle Chalfant 00:56:51  Yeah. When you are, I say you to anyone that is listening, when you feel overwhelmed or sad or depressed or anxious, whatever the heck it might be when you’re having a bad day.

Michelle Chalfant 00:57:02  We can generalize that by just saying when you have a bad when you’re having a bad day, ask yourself what is fact and or truth. Right now, in this very moment. And it’s got to be 100% fact and truth. And that’s how you move over into your adult chair. So it could mean I’m looking out my window and I see trees, okay. Or the sky is blue. Great. It also could mean, wow, I have this book right here in my hand. Isn’t that great? The adult chair book. Here it is. It could be that. Because what happens is when we go into anxiety or depression or overwhelmed or oh my gosh, my kid’s not going to do this or whatever it might be with our window in our lives, when we can anchor into the moment of the now, it’s a game changer and everything starts to change. But often because we’re human, not because anything’s wrong with us. But this is most humans. We fall into story or assumption about something that may or may not ever happen.

Michelle Chalfant 00:57:57  And I remember, I wish I could remember the where I read this, 97% of our stories and assumptions don’t come true. They do not manifest. So all the things we worry about, they don’t happen. So if we can anchor into the moment, it is a true game changer. What is fact and truth right now? Not what is probably going to happen, but what is fact and truth right now in the moment.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:20  Excellent. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’ve enjoyed talking with you. And we’ll have links in the show notes to where people can find you in your book.

Michelle Chalfant 00:58:29  Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:31  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:50  And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

In this episode, Lyanda Haupt shares her journey from divorce to discovery and nature’s wisdom for life’s transitions. She challenges everything you might think you know about hope, about walking barefoot on the earth, and about what it actually means to feed the good wolf.

Discover the six hidden saboteurs that quietly derail your best intentions—like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, and emotional escape. Download our free guide to uncover what’s getting in your way and learn simple strategies to take back control. Get it now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook.

Key Takeaways:

• Psychological concepts related to change, addiction, hope, disappointment, and self-efficacy.
• The complexities of addiction and the distinction between harmful behaviors and positive attachments.
• The challenges of personal change and the forces that resist it, including fear of disappointment and existential anxiety.
• The concept of “fear of hope” and its impact on motivation and willingness to change.
• The importance of social support and community in the recovery process.
• Critique of current addiction treatment models and the need for a more compassionate, harm reduction approach.
• The role of context in shaping an individual’s ability to change and the limitations of individualistic approaches.
• The significance of incremental change and the value of small steps in personal growth.
• The importance of respecting resistance to change as a form of self-love and preservation.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt is an award-winning author, naturalist, ecophilosopher, educator, and speaker whose work explores the beautiful, complicated connections between humans and the wild, natural world. Her writing is acclaimed for combining scientific knowledge with literary, poetic prose. Lyanda is a winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Nautilus Book Award, a finalist for the Orion Book Award, and a two-time winner of the Washington State Book Award.  She has created and directed educational programs for Seattle Audubon, worked in raptor rehabilitation in Vermont, and been a seabird researcher for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the remote tropical Pacific. Her newest book is “Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit”

Connect with Lyanda Haupt:  Website 

If you enjoyed this conversation with Lyanda Haupt, check out these other episodes:

How to Find Joy, Wisdom, and Wonder in Nature with Mark Coleman

How to Find Healing in Nature with Ralph De La Rosa

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Episode Transcript:

Lyanda Haupt 00:00:00  I don’t want to be walking around without having to be attentive. With movement that doesn’t involve my mind, my intelligence, my imagination.

Chris Forbes 00:00:16  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:00  What if the relationships that end. Aren’t failures, but completions? I’ve been thinking about this idea ever since my conversation with today’s guest, and it’s completely shifted how I view my own past marriages.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:14  You see, we live in a culture that only calls a marriage successful if someone dies first. But we might be getting this wrong. What if recognizing when we’ve grown apart and choosing a farewell is actually completion? Today’s guest, Linda Haupt, an award winning naturalist and author of Rooted Life at the Crossroads of Science, nature and spirit, is going to challenge everything you think you know about hope, about walking barefoot on the earth, and about what it actually means to feed the good wolf. Fair warning this conversation might change how you see your own story. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi Lyanda. Welcome to the show.

Lyanda Haupt 00:02:01  Hi, Eric, I am so happy to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:03  We’re going to be discussing your book called Rooted Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature and Spirit. But before we do that, we’ll start like we always do, which is with the parable. There’s a parable where 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  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 they think about it for a second, and 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.

Lyanda Haupt 00:02:45  Thank you Eric. You know, thinking about this before speaking with you, I went back in my mind to the very first time I heard that parable. It’s been out in the world for a while, and there are a lot of thoughts about it, but the first time I heard it was maybe 10 or 12 years ago at a huge venue, like probably a TEDx talk or something. So there’s thousands of people in the room. Most of us haven’t heard this story. And when the speaker gets to that lie, you know which one is going to win.

Lyanda Haupt 00:03:12  With thousands of people, there’s always kind of a hum of conversation or just a little background noise, even if people are being basically quiet. And at that question, there is this hush. And when the speaker said, the one you feed, you heard this palpable kind of kind of a gasp of recognition, you know, it just landed. Never heard. It was like, we know what that means. And we have that wolf right in this moment, all of us in different ways. And so since that time, I’ve heard this parable deconstructed and interrogated and complex and non-dual and, you know, all this stuff which I think is fascinating and valuable. But I just wanted to go back to that beginner’s mind that just thunk. I know what that means. You know, and for me personally, right now, I am in a transitional moment. A year ago, my now former husband and I decided to complete our 25 year marriage. And we just signed the papers on that really a couple of weeks ago.

Lyanda Haupt 00:04:13  So I’m in this sort of shedding of a certain kind of skin, a certain molting of feathers that leaves when raw and open. And for me, in this time, I’ve been struggling with a little bit of acedia, that kind of fear and uncertainty that leads to a listlessness with regard to the choices we make. And so for me, feeding the good wolf is right here, Eric, I’m in the very most basic things, like putting my yoga clothes at the end of the bed. So I get up. You know, having that already so I don’t even have to make the choice to do yoga before going into the sort of over Cultural productivity day, literally keeping good food and, you know, holy basil tea and blueberries in my fridge right now to nourish body and mind and spirit. Just all those little basics that move me into, you know, brightness and awakening and aliveness and also turning to some of the Earth based practices in my book. So the way that manifests in my work life is on not so basic a scale.

Lyanda Haupt 00:05:17  That idea of drawing people through connection to the ecological whole into their truest, most alive selves from which they can be in service to the earth and community.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:31  It’s interesting the way you put completed your 25 year marriage. I love that phrase, and even with that, I will offer my understanding of how difficult that period is. And I love how you’re doing the very simple things when life feels difficult, because that’s the way we get through these things. So maybe we could explore that word completion, because that is a very different word than we ended our 25 year marriage. We’re getting a divorce, which is technically what’s happening, but I’d love to know a little bit more about the use of the word completion and how that helped you in the process, and maybe how it helped you and your husband’s relationship in the process.

Lyanda Haupt 00:06:13  Right? Well, I don’t want to sound overly enlightened. The mediation process of the last year, you know, was hard, and it does not bring out the best in anyone.

Lyanda Haupt 00:06:24  I pictured myself being, you know, this sweet Bhodisatva like being during the process seeking both of our higher good, but fell off that way again now and then, as did my former partner. So. But that’s okay. It’s part of the process. But that language completion, I thought was really meaningful because the cultural language around divorce and ending marriage is the language of failure. And we talk about failed marriages and people have always even said that to me. Oh, I never thought your marriage would fail. And I think, what are you talking about? It didn’t fail. We lived together for 25 years. We created a beautiful household. We raised this daughter to completion. Eric, you and I both have a 24 year old offspring. And she’s radiant and wondrous. And I’m proud of everything we did. That is not a failure. You know, in our culture, the only successful marriage is one in which both partners, you know, just kind of limps along until someone dies.

Lyanda Haupt 00:07:24  I mean, maybe they do really well until someone dies, but one person dying, right, is what a successful marriage is. And I’m thinking we have to reframe that and bring back the honoring of, you know, the families and the homes and the lives that we create. And then recognizing when we grow apart, that what’s best for our journey might be a farewell. It might be a certain kind of closure, a completion, a different framework for being family. And so I want to rethink that language of failure.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:55  Yeah, I love that idea because it assumes that the only metric of a successful relationship is its permanence. Right. And I, like you don’t think that’s really true. I think there are lots of different ways to think about relationships, and I have had two, if we call them that failed marriages, but I don’t think of them as failures. I think I learned a lot from them. And like you, I’ve got a 25 year old child who was part of both of those marriages, and I’m so grateful for how he has turned out.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:25  And, you know, we just we never know what the past would be. And so I really like that way of thinking of sort of completing something and transitioning into a new way of family. And my thoughts are with you as you go through that, because it is a big change and can bring up some strong feelings.

Lyanda Haupt 00:08:41  Right. No matter how right it is, there’s still some grief around. Yes. You know what you had imagined? Loss of a certain kind of identity.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:50  Yep. Yep. So let’s pivot now into talking about the book. And I’m going to start with where I thought you might go with the Wolf parable, which is to talk about Francis and the wolf, because I don’t know if that story has ever been told on this show. And if it has, it’s been once, sometime in the distant past. So I love Saint Francis. That prayer of peace that’s traditionally attributed to him is such a beautiful piece of writing, and was so instrumental to me early in my journey of sobriety.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:24  So I’ve always had sort of a warm feeling for him. So tell us the story about Francis and the Wolf.

Lyanda Haupt 00:09:28  Okay. And you’re right. There are a lot of wolves in my book. And I pondered that, but I still went back to that original telling. But there is the wolf that little Red meets in the forest. There’s the literal wolves that are, you know, clawing for continuation as climate changes and as they continue to be reviled as predators. And then there’s this beautiful story about Saint Francis. So as the story goes. So it’s the 1200s hillside town in Italy called Gubbio. And the mayor calls on Saint Francis because he has a reputation for being peaceful and maybe being able to speak beyond, you know, the human species boundary. He’s known for giving sermons to birds who come to perch and listen. So he calls upon this wild Saint Francis, and he says, you know, we have this problem. This wild, hungry beast, ferocious wolf is surrounding our town, eating our shepherds, carrying away children.

Lyanda Haupt 00:10:29  You know, soldiers go out to kill the wolf, and they come back either dead or their sword is snapped and everyone’s living in fear. And, you know, the more these tales are told, the more ferocious and horrible the wolf becomes in the people’s imagination. Now they’re all just staying indoors and inside the gates of the city. So Francis arrives and he says, well, I’m just gonna seek out this wolf and see what I can find out. So he finds her and he speaks with her, and he listens to her story, and she tells him that she has been injured. She’s separated from her own pack of wolves. She’s struggling to find sustenance. She’s starving. She hates killing the villagers. It is not what she wants, but she has no other way of sustaining herself and the cubs that she is about to bear. It’s the only thing that she can do. So Francis goes back and he reports this to the villagers, and they listen, and they figure out a way to offer the wolf food so that she can sustain herself.

Lyanda Haupt 00:11:28  And she, for her part, leaves the village alone. So the interesting turn that I want to make on this story is that in almost every telling, the title of the story is Saint Francis tames the wolf, tames the wolf as if he makes it subservient to human wants and needs. And what I get from this is that he hasn’t tamed the wolf. He just listened to the wolf in a way that allows her continued true wildness.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:57  Yeah, I love that story. And I’m like you, I think that the parable hits immediately and you immediately get it right. It’s like, boom, right? But the interpretation of it that I get more and more from people as we begin to learn more about our trauma responses, as we begin to learn more about how our circumstances have shaped us and all these different things, is that we do want to listen to the bad wolf. We want to understand what’s happening there, right? You know, we don’t want to starve it. And so that story speaks to that so much because it really shows that, you know, the wolf was acting a certain way for a reason.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:37  And when the wolf was given other options, it chose to do the less destructive things. And I think that is often so true in our lives, is that these things we would call the bad wolf when we give it different options, when we give it what it needs in a healthy or less destructive way, it will often, you know, turn into our good wolf in many ways. And so I love that story, both because I love Saint Francis. And I like that way of thinking about these darker sides of ourselves.

Lyanda Haupt 00:13:08  Right. And I love, too, that it’s not just a story about giving the wolf options, but realizing that from the side that is afraid of the wolf, understanding the fear from the other side is, you know, a form of integration. And I think so often in your wolf parable, the so-called bad wolf becomes conflated with things like our anxiety or our fear of death or our grief, you know, pushing those things down. And as you so often discuss, that’s not what’s bad.

Lyanda Haupt 00:13:38  That can be part of the good side. What’s bad if we want to use that word is are the actions that remove us from bringing those things into wholeness that keep us in isolation and disconnection?

Eric Zimmer 00:13:51  Yeah. I interviewed somebody yesterday and she had a line in her book, which is just a very simple statement of a very obvious truth, but one that we can all hear, which is emotions are not bad, but the behaviors that spring from emotions can be bad, you know? And I think, you know, that’s certainly been very true in my life. And there’s another line from one of the first probably 15 podcasts we did that just came into my mind. It does periodically because it hit me so hard. And the basic idea he was saying was, when our behavior is under control, we are safe to really feel our emotions. Yes. And that really hit me because once upon a time, strong emotions caused me to go into just deep, deeply self-destructive behaviors that were nearly fatal. But now that I know that’s not going to happen, I have a whole lot more window to say, okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:44  I can feel the emotions that are coming up and now I know how to work with them in a far more skillful way.

Lyanda Haupt 00:14:49  Just yesterday I was thinking about it in terms of this parable the idea of food, you know, and what the feeding and food is in the story. You know, as a writer, I’m cognizant of not wanting to over torture the metaphor, but I was thinking because I fed my cat, you know, when we’re feeding our cats or our dogs or ourselves, our own bodies, we don’t wait, you know, meal by meal to go, oh, mealtime. I have to go out and get some food, you know, to feed the cat or myself. We have a stockpile. And so I was thinking for myself in this sort of marriage completion. Acedia. What is the stockpile? Yes. It’s literal good food. It is the yoga clothes. It is the meditation practices. It is the nature connection practices in terms of our seeking to deepen our connection as members of the Earth community.

Lyanda Haupt 00:15:38  You know, all of the practices of rootedness that I explore in the book and life, you know, of putting our bare feet on the earth, of being in communion with trees and every day weather and wildness. Now having that stockpile of practices and things that bring positive physical comfort, just a kind of literal food. I sort of like that idea of having all these things in the cupboard so that when the wolves are there, we have the right food for the right wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:07  Absolutely. As we move into the book, I’d like to talk about a theme that shows up in this book and in several of your other books, also around the idea of hope. And I just want to read something that you wrote to sort of set it up. You say hope is our positive orientation towards the future, a future in which we simultaneously recognize difficulty, responsibility and delight. Hope is not relative to the present situation, nor is it dependent upon a specific outcome. It’s not an antidote to despair or a sidestepping of a difficulty, but a companion to all these things.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:42  Talk to me about hope.

Lyanda Haupt 00:16:44  We live in a time where hope is presented, I think so often as a shiny ideal and expectation that things are going to go well and look better in the future. And there is alongside that, the sense that the reason that we participate in the unfolding of the future, the reason that we create selves that are able to be responsible activists and artists in the world is because we are creating a future that is going to look better. And I hope that that is true, but I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know. I mean, we look at the science around climate crisis right now. We look at the things that we know we are. No matter what happens or unless something very extreme happens, we know that we’re not going to be able to turn so many things around and that there are things very, very difficult unfolding in our ecological future. Does that mean that we throw up our hands and say, well, I’m not going to do anything because there’s no hope? Or that we act only because we think that we can absolutely turn that around and create an eco topia.

Lyanda Haupt 00:17:55  No, I just think we have to absolutely decouple the rightness of our actions in the world the acting with love, the acting with compassion, the acting with an eye towards the unfolding future, whatever that may be, has to be absolutely decoupled from. It’s hard to speak about this without using the word hope, with a hope that is going to look a certain way that it does in our imagination. I mean, we just can’t wait for that, because if we do, we will either become mired in an inability to go forward, mired in a kind of paralysis, because we’re scared that it’s not going to work. You know, if all we’re hoping for is a certain outcome and we see how difficult that is. I think part of us just want to, you know, go in a cave and eat pizza and drink red wine. And, you know, we act in hope just as we act in love. This is kind of a difficult metaphor, but I’m thinking if we have a loved one who is very ill and who may not survive, we don’t just go out the door and say, oh, well, you know, they’re not going to make it.

Lyanda Haupt 00:19:01  Now what do we do? We go by the bedside, we hospice, we hold the hand of our beloved. And in a sense, that’s what we’re doing in this earthen community. Maybe not. Maybe there are still many, many things that can improve. But we show up with that love no matter what.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:20  I love that idea. And there was a ecological writer and I cannot remember her name right now, which is a shame. But I saw her speak in Atlanta, Georgia, and she was talking, you know, she was alluding to Hope a little bit, and I was working on a workshop around Hope. And so I just asked her, I said, you know, given everything you’ve said about the climate crisis and all the fears and how bad things are, is hope an appropriate response or do you have hope? And what I remember from her response was basically she just focuses on love. And when you love something, you take care of it. I think that’s a great analogy with someone in our family.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:54  It’s not like we give up caring for someone if we don’t know whether they’re going to make it or not, because honestly, none of us are going to make it right. At the end of the day, right. So that’s not how we orient to so many things. We orient out of care and love. And that is a way of, I think, relating to most all challenges where we can sort of get out of this hope or despair element, but it is hard to stay that way. I mean, I think I saw yesterday that maybe the hottest day ever on record happened yesterday or the day before, anywhere, you know, and you hear that and there’s just a part of you that just feels like, oh, you know, inside, just like. Oh. And so I think some degree of hope is important in moving forward in our lives. But I think, like you said, sort of turning it away from hope in a specific outcome. I know in my own life what I tend to have hope towards is when I’m looking at my own challenges, is my ability to find a way through them.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:57  You know, like, I don’t know what the outcome is and I often don’t even know what the right outcome is, but I know I can find my way through them. You also say elsewhere I chose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen, but we make space for whatever it is and realize that our participation has value. And then you have a line that I love. This is grown up optimism. That is a phrase I love. Grown up optimism.

Lyanda Haupt 00:21:23  Grown up optimism means we know that we’re not necessarily going to get our way, and yet we act from our highest self anyway. I think about the work that Joanna macy is doing in the world that honors both our love and our hope in terms of our ecological connection and our ecological responsibility, but recognizes further that our grief has to be part of that. That, I mean, we’re kind of going back to that parable again, right? The integration of that parable that our grief has a place in our love, our optimism, doesn’t outweigh the recognition of the depth of our grief and the love that both of those things stem from sorrow and optimism.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:04  Yeah. Use a phrase in the new book. I don’t know if I’m going to pronounce it right. Adsum

Lyanda Haupt 00:22:09  O, adsum

Eric Zimmer 00:22:11  Adsum.  Okay. Yes. Any sort of word that needs pronunciation like that, you can be fairly certain I will get it wrong. So add some talk about that.

Lyanda Haupt 00:22:20  Right. So I have a friend who is a monk in a Benedictine monastery. And actually the process by which they make their profession of vows is usually really sacred. But he spoke to me about it one night and told me this one part where they are asked to commit to this life of psychological wilderness. Basically, it’s when you’re committing to a community, but you are also committing to a certain kind of solitude and psychological depth and exploration, which in a sense is the life that we all lead. You know, where we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re asked to commit wholeheartedly to it anyway. And that Abbot says, Will you do this? And the monk who is professing says, assume it’s Latin.

Lyanda Haupt 00:23:10  It means I am here. And I talk about that in the book in relation to I think I have a section called the I am here of hope. Tyson. Like we look at all this tangled complexity, we turn our ear to the other beings, to the beyond human world, to the voices of the trees and the birds and the earth. And we hear the call to presence, to service, to meaning. And we just kind of go, well, what do I do? The first thing is just that response. Adsum,  I am here. I’m listening. I’m here.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:17  I’d like to change direction a little bit and talk about attention and being with things in our world in a different way. You quote. Here’s another name I’m going to mess up Paul Ellard.

Lyanda Haupt 00:24:32  I think that’s good.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:33  Yeah. Oh, yeah, that was close. Okay.

Lyanda Haupt 00:24:35  I actually don’t know any better than you, so let’s just. All right. Let’s go with that.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:38  Let’s go with it. All right.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:39  Paul be forgiving. He says there’s another world, but it is in this one. And you also talk about, you know, believing in the power of sacrament, not as a Catholic, but as a human who’s open to the truth that something can be made sacred by the attention we grant it.

Lyanda Haupt 00:24:55  We live in a time, I think, where, especially with a lot of the health based approaches to nature, you know, where we’re looking at the natural world and thinking, oh, if we go outside, we feel better. Oh, when we go outside, it activates our parasympathetic nervous system. And so we are going out looking for something for ourselves. You know, I spent 20 minutes in nature, I feel better, I’m thinking I want to be very, very careful in this time where literally the earth is burning because of, in large part. Commodification in terms of, you know, our extracting our resources for our use and human consumption. I want to be really careful when we’re using these beautiful new sciences that connect our health, the health of our bodies and spirits to nature, that we don’t flip that into another form of commodifying nature.

Lyanda Haupt 00:25:44  And so I’m getting around to your question, which is what we bring to that then, is the idea of reciprocity. Not when I walk into the world, what can I get? But we will receive. But in that receiving, what do we offer in return to make that circle continue to spin and spin and what we offer? It doesn’t have to be huge. It doesn’t have to be, you know, the creation of a new non-profit organization. It can be attention. It can be witness, simple witness. It can be gratitude in the form of praise. And I mean that very expansively, a kind of honoring and recognition of beauty. Just taking that in and loving it and offering gratitude for that. That is one of the kinds of attentiveness that is most important to me. Just like offering our deep, sweet, quiet witness to this earth that offers us so much. And it’s one of the things that we have to offer in return. So often, too, we just impose our own story upon the natural world like we think animals are like, or what they want or what things need.

Lyanda Haupt 00:26:48  And it’s also that attentive listening that can bring us into a deeper communion, where we can respond from the truth of what the natural world is speaking rather than what we impose on it in terms of the human story.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:01  Yeah, I always love that idea of the reciprocity and of recognizing that when I am in nature, as you said, there can be a way in which you could think of me as consuming nature, you know, or I’m paying attention to nature, but it’s also paying attention to me like it knows I’m there. You know, when I say it, I mean, I don’t mean in a in a grand sense. I mean, like, the squirrel knows I’m there. The various creatures, the birds, they all, they all. There is a two way relationship there where they know I’m there. And I love to think about that, that there’s this interplay and, as you said, sort of reciprocity. And I also just love the idea of attention. I don’t know if it was in your book or on a podcast interview, but you talk about the Zen tradition of bringing yourself wholeheartedly to everything that you do.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:49  And as I was reading that line about There’s Another World, but it’s in this one, it made me think of one of my favorite phrases by a Zen teacher. I’ve been a Zen student for a long time is from Zen Master Dogan, who says enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And I love that idea that the more we’re intimate with the things around us, you know, the closer we get towards quote unquote enlightenment or awakening. It’s that attention to something that’s not just ourselves that is that opening.

Lyanda Haupt 00:28:20  Absolutely. And as you speak, I’m thinking about the ways that our modern kind of over culture way of being in society is one that contrives to separate us from that intimacy. You know, just the we are so isolated in our work right now. We’re so removed from the natural world because we are so dependent upon the built environment. There’s a statistic that says that 93% of our modern human lives here in North America are spent inside buildings, and most of the other 7% is spent walking between our cars and buildings.

Lyanda Haupt 00:29:01  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:01  And that does not surprise me.

Lyanda Haupt 00:29:03  Right. And so it’s no wonder that we are suffering this sense of disconnection and isolation. In large part, we’re struggling with a sort of mismatch disorder, right. Where organisms are not adapted, they’re not up to speed on a changing external environment here. We’ve spent 99.99% of our lives living in closer relationship with the earth out of doors. And so here we are, spending most of our time removed from that. We’re in this constant stress state because our bodies and our minds are wired to be attuned to the wild earth, and yet we’re separated from that, and we’re in this horrible light mismatch or dysphoria that prevents that kind of intimacy and attention. So that’s why I’m so obsessed with practices that will bring us back into that intimacy.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:53  Yeah. So let’s maybe turn towards some of those practices right now, I’m curious what sort of things you would offer to the general listener out there who says, yes, I do want to be a little bit more connected to nature, you know? And yeah, some of it is because the science says it’s good for me.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:13  And like, we all do things because, you know, it’s why we do yoga. We know it to be good for us on some level, and just to have a deeper connection with something more meaningful. What are some practices that you often recommend to people?

Lyanda Haupt 00:30:26  I’m just going to start at the most basic for people that are living in urban places. We’ll just sort of often ask the question, you know, what do I do? I don’t have trees all around me. I don’t have a body of water to contemplate. There’s no coyotes roaming my neighborhood, which, you know, you may or may not be right about that. We’re in Portland or Seattle. We know there’s plenty of them around Chicago. There’s coyotes among us anyway.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:47  There’s coyotes in Chicago.

Lyanda Haupt 00:30:49  Oh, so many coyotes in Chicago. Some of the deepest research on urban coyotes that took place in Chicago. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:56  Okay. Well, I learned something new today.

Lyanda Haupt 00:30:59  Yeah, coyotes among us. But anyway, one of the things I want to offer is that we are connected to the natural world, no matter where we live.

Lyanda Haupt 00:31:05  If we open our window, we put our head out of the window, become aware of the ground beneath us, the sky above us, the wind that teases our hair in the same way it teases the leaves on the trees. The rain falls on our face just as it’s falling on. You know the forest far from us. Just the moon is turning in her face as above our head. Just as all over the rest of the earth. And so just being aware of the cycles of life. Allowing that into our daily life with just recognition. Moments of pausing to acknowledge our place in these cycles is a form of connection. It’s a very radical form of connection, even, and in the way that our culture is currently structured to keep us separate from those moments of intimacy. I also think it’s important to realize, you know, we hear so often that, oh, these little things that we do from our homes don’t matter. You know, we recycle, but what does it matter if I get on a plane the next day? And for that, I want to return to kind of the discussion we were just having, that we act from our highest self, we act from the place that we know is right, and people think that we need to, you know, get in the SUV and go way out to the wilderness to go on a hike to connect with nature.

Lyanda Haupt 00:32:16  But the truth is that ecologically, the choices that we make from our home, how we feed ourselves, how we clothe ourselves, how we heat our homes and use our water, these are the things that tie us into the very, very stuff of the life of the earth. And so we have every moment an opportunity to recognize that constant continuation in the lives that we live. So that’s just the most basic level. But I do have in the book a lot of ways to just, you know, connect with trees and connect with our own solitude. And we can talk about those, but a very first kind of next step beyond the household that I throw out is the idea of removing our shoes and socks and putting our feet directly on the earth. And if that can’t be the soft earth of a woodland trail for you, then the soft grass of a parking strip or an urban park can Bring this very, very lively, neurologically connected part of our body into connection with the complexity that our feet were meant to know and walk upon, and that enlivens our whole sense of creativity and connection.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:30  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at one you feed. a book and take the first step towards getting back on track. So one of the things I love about your work, and it’s in the very title of the book, is The Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature and Spirit. And so you are a scientist, among other things. And you know, when I hear take your shoes off and walk on the earth, there’s something the old punk rocker in me just has a little bit of a feeling towards it.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:40  You know, it’s.

Lyanda Haupt 00:34:40  Like crunchy granola.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:42  Yes, yes. Which as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized I’m very much a crunchy granola kind of guy. But my 18 year old is like, I’m not in favor of this, but I have a mohawk, so I’m giving him some degree. You know, I’m keeping some of my 18 year old self alive. Talk to me about is there science around this groundedness idea?

Lyanda Haupt 00:35:01  Yeah. So, I mean, there’s this word earthing, and I want to tease that out a little bit. Before I wrote this book, I was walking. I’ve taken barefoot walks for years, and I was walking in the wooded park near my home, and there was this other woman who just seemed to be. I was carrying my sneakers in my hand, and this other woman came towards me, and she had her sneakers in her hand, too. And she had this lovely, ethereal look on her face. And I should have respected the silence. But just, you know, sometimes things pop out of our mouths, right? So I said, oh, happy barefoot walking.

Lyanda Haupt 00:35:33  I was thinking maybe I was making a little clever connection with her, and she just kind of set her gaze above me off into the world. And she said, I’m earthing. And she floated past and I thought, oh, well, then I’m earthing, too. And I kind of remembered that phrase. Do you recognize that phrase, earthing?

Eric Zimmer 00:35:54  I’ve only heard it one other time. So yes, I know a little bit about it, but relatively very recently actually.

Lyanda Haupt 00:36:00  Yeah. So after she said that, I kind of thought, wait a minute, I know this word. It’s some kind of trend. And I went home and googled it. And sure enough, it was in the 80s, this group of kind of a motley, science adjacent group of folks explored this idea that, in a nutshell, that the Earth has a negative ionic charge and our human bodies have a positive ionic charge. And by separating our feet from the negative ionic charge of the Earth with shoes that don’t conduct like if we were wearing leather, it would be okay.

Lyanda Haupt 00:36:32  We are causing inflammation and all of the kinds of attendant ailments of that. And I thought, wow, that’s kind of this beautiful poetic idea that we actually need to walk barefoot to be in full health. But I explored it. I threw myself into it. I talked to physicists. I talked to, you know, electricians. I looked at the papers that these people had written in support of it, and unfortunately, all the footnotes that they had referred back to other papers they had written, I couldn’t find anything external. And the physics people I talked to about it said, this is just not how things work. It’s not how things work. So leave that out there in the world. Maybe something will come of it. In the future. We’ll learn something more. But for now, I want to keep the word because I think it’s very intentional. That woman said that I didn’t know anything about the irons and all of that, but when she said earthing, I thought, oh, I know what that means.

Lyanda Haupt 00:37:26  It means walking with attentiveness, with consciousness, something I do intentionally. I’m not just like playing in the beach, which is a great way to be barefoot, but I’m making this choice intentionally to create a connection. And so I love that beautiful word. So I did look further into the benefits of walking barefoot and found another kind of science that supports it, which is biomechanics. It relates with the way that our bodies move in the world, and it turns out that walking barefoot is an ancient human intelligence. You know, it’s one of those things. Until very, very recently, our feet evolved around contact with a complex substrate. Straight. And so we cast our feet as biomechanics. Katie Bowman says, I really love her work. She has a book called Move Your DNA, which I just highly recommend. She says that when we basically put our feet in little casts, which sometimes we need casts, our feet are injured and we need to keep them from movement to protect them. But for the most part, we put them in these highly engineered shoes where we can’t feel the earth, they don’t move.

Lyanda Haupt 00:38:30  And so it weakens all those little tendons and muscles that if we were walking barefoot, would be strengthened. And so when we finally do go barefoot or try, God forbid, running barefoot without just, you know, right out of the gate, without strengthening those feet, we injure ourselves. And then everyone goes, oh, see, we’re not meant to walk barefoot. What we are meant to do is to work up very slowly, to having feet that can be responsive to all of the contours of the earth. Katie Bowman says that most of our walking involves mind unnecessary movement. And I thought, wow, that just hit me really hard. I don’t want to be walking around without having to be attentive with movement that doesn’t involve my mind, my intelligence, my imagination. And when we take off our shoes automatically, we’re attentive. We drop into mind active movement. And we have learned, too, that even though we can walk faster and take more steps, when we put on our engineered shoes and walk on a concrete flat substrate, whether it’s up and down hill or not, when we take off our shoes and we walk on a natural substrate, our minds become more active.

Lyanda Haupt 00:39:35  Our creativity is enlivened, but also we work our bodies just as hard. Yes, we might have to move. So for fitness people, we might be moving slower, but we’re working just as much. But it’s a beautiful, ancient, innate human movement that our bodies and minds were created to experience.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:56  Yeah. It’s interesting. I work out at a gym with a physical therapist. She’s a physical therapist slash trainer, and I started working out with her when I had injuries, and I’ve just kind of kept doing it because I seem to periodically always have something in my body that’s like, ouch, that hurts. But she trains a lot of athletes, like she consults for many of the athletic departments across the country, and there is some of their work where they are very much focusing, particularly on rehab with people about having them work out in bare feet, because there’s something, again, about the biomechanics of it that produces more stability and strengthens muscles and tendons in very different ways. And so, you know, from somebody who’s a little bit more science based, sort of pointing to like, there’s real benefit to this barefoot idea.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:45  And for sure, when you start walking barefoot, I mean, I do pay more attention if for no other reason, because I’m like, well, I don’t want to step on a piece of glass or, you know, my feet are tender. I’m going to be careful. It does bring the experience of walking into much more consciousness. And it reminds me of a Zen idea that I love. It’s called work. Practice, Samu. And it’s a way of developing our attentiveness. And it basically means you take something that you could do without thinking about it. Wash the dishes. As an example, you could do it without thinking about it. Most of us do, but by giving it your full attention, you actually strengthen your ability to pay attention. You strengthen your ability to be present with what’s happening. It’s seen as a bridge between like seated meditation and the rest of life.

Lyanda Haupt 00:41:34  And then in, just like the biological or the physical science of it strengthens our feet. It makes them healthier.

Lyanda Haupt 00:41:41  And that goes up. We know it’s all connected, goes up to making our legs, makes our knees stronger, brings all the joints all the way up to our head and our neck. So can I riff on the philosophical side of this? Sure. So one of the things that because you can tell now, I’m really obsessed. I went down the rabbit hole of barefooted ness and one of the most famous admonitions to take off our shoes is from the Hebrew Testament, where Moses is approaching the burning bush. The voice of the divine and the divine speaks and says Moses. And the translation that we almost always see is take off your shoes or remove your sandals. But I learned when you go into the Hebrew Aramaic history of this word, the word is a stronger word. It’s shed or it is shed. And I think that is a powerful exclamation or proclamation of transformation, right? What do we shed? Snakes shed their skins in the great turning deer’s shed. Their antlers and antler is an organ, you know.

Lyanda Haupt 00:42:45  It’s innervated. It’s blood. It’s the leaving behind of something that was once an organ of our body. Like skin or antlers to make way for the next space. And I thought to myself, when I was writing that chapter, I thought, shed, what do I shed? What if. By removing my shoes. Figuratively, what am I shedding? And I put a big piece of paper and a bunch of crayons out. So every time I walk by, I could sort of think of something and add to this list or something that had come to me through the day, and I had this list of what, you know, by removing my shoes, I remove a certain kind of security, right? A certain kind of beauty, an otherness, a separateness, an elevation, potentially a certain kind of comfort, a certain kind of complexity leads me into this deep, deep simplicity. And so it can be a metaphor for just kind of doffing all of the cultural modes of separation that keep us from deeper connection.

Lyanda Haupt 00:43:46  So taking up our shoes works on so many levels.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:08  Let’s change directions to birds.

Speaker 4 00:44:12  Oh, yay.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:13  I mean, I guess I’ve always appreciated birds, but we have become. We can’t even call ourselves backyard birds because we don’t have a backyard. We simply have a balcony that I have managed to, by hook or crook, string up a couple bird feeders. But the joy that comes from just seeing these birds that close to us consistently is sort of surprising to me just how much we enjoy it, particularly Jenny. Jenny is just over the moon about the birds she’s always talking about, you know, listen to that song and that song and, you know, so talk to me about birds because you’ve written a lot about birds. You wrote a book about Mozart, Sterling. And I think you have an entire book about birds, right?

Lyanda Haupt 00:44:52  I do. My very first book was Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds. I wrote a book about crows and yes, Mozart Starling. I don’t want to go off format here, but I’m curious what makes you feel joyful about watching birds? Like, what do you think it is for you?

Eric Zimmer 00:45:07  Well, I have always loved to watch animals.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:11  I love to see them move. I mean, I love to think about the fact that they’re interacting with the world in a way that I can’t imagine really. And to try and imagine what that might be like, even though I know I can’t because it sort of stretches my mind. It feels like, you know, I’ve just always loved animals. Generally. I haven’t had animals that close to me, you know, dogs. But, you know, most animals I see are either kind of off in a distance or I’ve seen them on TV or. But here are these birds right outside, and we get to see their patterns be like, oh yeah, that guy comes by every day around 7:00 and sings his little song and he comes with his partner, or he comes alone. And I just love to watch the way they eat. I don’t have words for it. It just fills me with a certain buoyancy.

Lyanda Haupt 00:45:59  I love that I think that you’re hitting on something when you say that you don’t get to see wild animals that close very often, because I do think that birds will allow us to come close to them.

Lyanda Haupt 00:46:10  There’s this thrill of being in proximity to a wild creature who could choose to leave. She has wings, right? They can. They could fly away. And yet here we are, being close together and creating this kind of intimacy. And that makes us feel excited. And there’s this psychological word for something we’re feeling now which is called species loneliness, that humans are so separate from the wild earth that we kind of miss. Once again, that proximity to wild creatures that we have evolved alongside. And here, birds interrupt that species loneliness by coming near or allowing us to approach. I think it’s important to remember, you know, when we feed birds, we’re not really doing it for the birds. The birds are fine. You know, if they’re around, there’s enough food for them. We’re doing it for us, but that’s a perfectly good reason to do it. It enlivens our spirits, and it also makes us more aware of the wildness that’s around us. I mean, they’re hanging out, and then all of a sudden, I also love this moment with birds.

Lyanda Haupt 00:47:09  They have that kind of poetic beauty, right? Being winged, unlike us, most of them, when we’re sitting there and we’re just hanging out with them, we’re like, oh, here we are. Being with the birds, they’re so pretty. I love them. And then they fly. All of a sudden we’re like, oh yeah, oh yeah, they take flight, there’s the sky off they go into this wild world that we are now connected to. They were with us, and now they fly off with maybe a little piece of our heart and imagination along with them. So they offer a rare, rare thread between us and the wilder.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:42  Yeah, yeah. The more I learn about them, the more fascinating they are as creatures. I have a question for you that I wonder about my birds, and maybe you know the answer to this. Maybe you don’t, But I think that I recognize like, we get, you know, a certain set of cardinals that tend to come by, we get a certain set of goldfinches that come by.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:01  There’s some other birds that are more common that I can’t remember their different names that we see a lot of. Do the birds recognize each other, do you think, are they like, oh yeah, that’s that cardinal that comes by. I see him hanging around the neighborhood again. I know birds don’t think like a human does, but I’m kind of curious what their relationship with each other is.

Lyanda Haupt 00:48:20  Right? So for the most part, the birds that we see regularly in our backyards or our balconies are the same birds from day to day. So that’s not always true because there are migration times. So different birds come through and birds can fly, so they can go to different yards. But by and large, the residential birds, we’re seeing the same ones over and over again. And they absolutely recognize the other birds in their close group through a whole variety of ways of apprehending that. Like you say, we don’t always understand. So some birds really connect with one another through vocalizations. Some connect with one another through physical movements that they make.

Lyanda Haupt 00:48:57  And we’ll find like different family groups that have the same kind of physical tics or vocal tics. But it’s also just like, you know, people that look at, you know, a family and say, oh, you guys all look alike. You know, I can’t tell you apart. Or we’ll look at twins that we don’t know and or triplets and we’ll say, how do we tell them apart? And their parents are like, what are you talking about? You know, maybe we think they’re identical, but they’re absolutely not. And so bird communities are like that with each other. As far as we know, there’s many studies that have been done that prove to us that they do recognize one another, or they recognize when another bird from another flock comes in. So yeah, they do.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:30  It makes me think of like how dogs just they key into each other. Like I take my dogs out every morning. And, you know, there are other dogs on the other side of the street that walk by.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:40  And my dog, Benzie is very old and she’s nearing the end, although I keep saying that. So she doesn’t pay much attention anymore. But she used to. But, you know, there’s just certain dogs, they just stop and they’re like, there’s a dog over there. Like, they’re very keyed in. They wouldn’t be keyed in necessarily to me. They’d be like, oh, whatever. They pay no attention. But the fact that it’s another dog, they’re like, oh, I gotta check this out.

Lyanda Haupt 00:50:03  Being a parent, have you noticed that with raising a kid two, you’re out with your two year old and they spot each other. All the two year olds spot each other. And then the same with the teenagers you’re growing up. They all spot each other. They don’t notice the two year olds. They don’t notice the 30 year olds, but they notice one another. And I think that continues on. That’s really fascinating and probably has evolutionary value to find our people.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:25  It probably does.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:27  In your book, you have a number of what you call the tenants of rootedness, and we’re not going to have time to go through all of them. But I thought I might pull a couple out that I wanted to talk about. And one was that truth and fact are not synonyms. Say more about that. I think that’s a really interesting idea.

Lyanda Haupt 00:50:46  We are one of the only cultures in all of history that has conflated truth with scientific fact. Now, I want to be really careful right now, because we are in a time when science is being questioned, and I want to absolutely honor the significance of science in our conservation choices and climate crisis and health. And I’m saying something a little bit different, and that is that sometimes we know things. We know things with a capital N, we know things with our heart knowing and our spiritual dimension of apprehension. And I mean that non religiously. By spiritual I mean those kind of non quantifiable ways of accessing or apprehending the world or wonder our sense of beauty, even our sense of anxiety and grief, all of these things that can’t be reduced to scientific quantification but still have everything to do with human intelligence and imagination.

Lyanda Haupt 00:51:47  So these are all ways of knowing that though we can’t find them in quantifiable or lexicons, language of science, we know that we honor them as a kind of truth with a capital T. It’s sort of like looking at a poem. A beautiful poem. Is the poem factual? We look at a piece of literature, a beautiful novel. Is it true? Did it happen? And or is it factual? Did this really happen? No. But is it true? Absolutely. Is it true in the sense of art? In the sense of that expansive sense of spirit I was just speaking to? Is it true in the sense that we know it in our heart? Absolutely. So the problem when we pit science against what we would normally call spirit. I think that is a false dichotomy. I think that science, as we find more and more of the minutia of how the wild earth works, the more enamored we can become with fascination and wonder. It’s just extremely gorgeous. And so that is in itself a kind of poetry.

Lyanda Haupt 00:52:51  And then when we look at the stories and mythology of science and we bring to it our own imaginations, when we bring that knowledge into our own human stories, then the science becomes enlivened and sold. So I think the problem comes when science is the sole arbiter of validity of any thought or way of being that we have. And yes, sometimes it it has to be. The stringent science is so meaningful right now. So I don’t want to say in any way that I’m diminishing the role of science in our conservation and health choices, but recognizing that in creating whole humans that relate to a more than human world, there are other dimensions of knowing that are also true.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:35  I think that example of a poem and a novel makes a lot of sense. And, you know, knowing what mode of apprehending might be Most useful. You know, as soon as we start talking about like that, we absolutely know something like intuitively, I always get a little anxious around that because that is how often, you know, many misguided people are misguided.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:58  They’re like, I just well, I know the science says this, but I know that vaccines are dangerous. You’re like, well, all right, this is a science based conversation, probably, that we should be having. You know, I used to know on a deep level that heroin was a good idea for me, right? It felt so true. And yet there is a way of apprehending the world and engaging with the world that is not strictly scientific. And, you know, I know I have changed in this way over the years where I’ve moved from feeling like everything should be explainable via science to recognizing that even when science explains many things, it doesn’t necessarily really explain them to me on the deepest level about how life came to be and how things are. There are these deeper mysteries that I’ve become a lot more comfortable with over the years about saying like, well, who knows? This is a mystery that is very alive for me.

Lyanda Haupt 00:54:55  I’m just thinking of a really practical example of something like that.

Lyanda Haupt 00:54:59  Is spending time with a tree. And this is a beautiful practice. Even if you just have a backyard or a city park is finding a tree that you’re drawn to, you know, that you respond to in some way. And then spending time repeatedly over and over again with that same tree. We have this sense of responsiveness. You know, you might be walking along and kind of go, oh, there’s my tree. Just this kind of recognition and then this sense of responsiveness from the tree. If we return over and over again, sometimes we’ll get that sense that maybe a breeze passes over and the leaves are fluttering and you think, oh, the tree is saying hello to me now. Is that scientifically factual? Maybe. But we don’t know that now. And maybe we will come to know that someday. But is it true for me? Is it meaningful to me? Am I in a kind of relationship with this tree that has a poetic truth? That is an absolutely beautiful thing to live under the influence of?

Eric Zimmer 00:55:55  That makes me think a little bit about a maxim that’s often used in psychology around working with your thoughts.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:02  And one of the ones that I found to be the most helpful starting point is, is this useful? Right? You know, because thoughts aren’t exactly true or untrue to a large extent. Now, there can be facts within thoughts that are true or not true. And maybe this is a good analogy for what we’re also talking about. But a lot of our thought is interpretation. It’s meaning based, right? And so knowing that it’s not necessarily strictly true or untrue, this idea of is it useful is a really helpful framework. And if it’s a thought that’s leading me towards being kinder, more compassionate to myself, to others, to responding more wisely, to the world, to all those things, then it’s a thought that’s worth keeping around. And if, on the other hand, it’s a thought that isn’t contributing to any of those things, it might be a good idea to say, well, what can I do to work with this, to sort of move it to the side because it’s not contributing anything.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:52  And I think there’s a little bit of that in kind of what you’re talking about. Like, is the tree responding to me? We don’t really know. I mean, the trees are responding in ways that 50 years ago we couldn’t have imagined. You know, it’s astounding the ways that trees are, are responsive to their environment, that 50 years ago people would have said, you’re crazy. So is the idea that the tree is responding to you strictly factual? Not necessarily. But is it a useful thought? If it brings you into closer community with the world around you?

Lyanda Haupt 00:57:22  Absolutely right. And is it true from a poetic sensibility?

Eric Zimmer 00:57:26  Absolutely right. Because a poetic sensibility is exactly that. I think the novel is a great, great example of that. I love fiction, I don’t get to read as much of it as I’d like with all the work I do for this show, but over the last month I’ve had a lot less interviews, so I’ve been reading a lot of it, and I’ve been thinking a little bit about that aspect of, well, these things aren’t factual, but there’s a truth in them that is deeply profound, that is there and feels very true, even though it’s, to your point, not factual.

Lyanda Haupt 00:57:53  And I also think there’s a innate sort of human sensibility. I don’t want to press this too far when because, as you say, there comes a point when anyone can say, well, I just know this to be true, I just know it. But in terms of things that tend to be ecologically helpful, I think we often have a sense of that. Sometimes we don’t need the scientific paper to tell us that when we plant a tree, more birds come. You know, we have eyes and we have hands, you know, so we know so, so these kinds of things, like sometimes we just have this basic common sense knowing that we don’t have to wait for science to validate. It comes from observation. It comes from attentiveness. It comes from just walking on the earth with a sense of connection and willingness to listen. Going back to that.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:40  Yeah. And like I said, it’s one of the things I’ve loved about your work is you bring a scientist’s view to it. But it’s not the only view that you bring.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:47  I love it, and I’ve often thought about you mentioned the nature studies earlier about where we start to quantify the benefits of being in nature. And it made me think a little bit about kind of what’s happened with meditation and mindfulness in the modern world. Right? We’ve quantified in many ways why it’s helpful, and there can be ways in that in which that strips away some of the broader context that have gone around them. You know, there’s the term mindfulness, right? Because you’ve stripped away everything except that just the thing itself. So there are ways in which that can be problematic. But there are also wonderful ways in which science is backing up. We see this in a lot of the ecological research, right, is that we see that this interconnection that the mystics have been talking about forever is really absolutely true. And so, you know, I kind of tend to like it when different areas of interest of mine sort of align and, and overlap. And I know that to be true for you also.

Lyanda Haupt 00:59:45  Right. And in fact, that was sort of the root of this book. Rooted was a lot of this new science that’s coming out that is affirming that the health of our bodies are strongest when we are in continuity with nature and when we have exposure to nature. We’re learning things like trees do communicate both through, you know, the movement of their limbs and the chemicals that they release in the wind from that down to their roots and the mycelial network. We’re learning that animals have forms of consciousness that we never dreamed, and we are able to observe these days scientifically. What’s funny and what I just kind of want to always be mindful of is, once again, that connection is that science did not discover these things. Science is giving us the mechanisms by which we can understand these things and their beauty and their depth. Things that we could never just simply observe with our eyes. Scientific study offers us this deep, deep window. But what we have to remember is that in terms of again, now we’re going back to the truth, just a basic awareness of a conscious universe, of an animistic world in which beings beyond humans have consciousness, where we are alive and invigorated and creative and affirmed when we’re out in nature.

Lyanda Haupt 01:01:00  These are things that indigenous cultures, earth based religions, poets, musicians have known, and just everyday people walking the earth have known for. Across time and across cultures. Forever.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:14  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created the Six Saboteurs of Self Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now. At one you feed. Net e-book. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. One you feed e-book. 50 years ago we would have said like that trees are not communicating in ways. And you’re right. The Western scientific worldview would have said trees are not capable of doing that. But to your point, many indigenous cultures have been very clear about all the different ways in which these things are alive and consciousness.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:16  And yeah, my favorite consciousness game is to try and imagine what it might be like to be an octopus, which again, you can’t do it. You know, it’s like, what would it be like to have a thousand individually controlled suckers and to be able to change my skin color instantly because my skin can see color. I mean, like, you just are like, well, there’s intelligence there that is so vast and so completely unlike mine that just to even contemplate it just brings me a sense of wonder and happiness.

Lyanda Haupt 01:02:47  I love that because you’re tapping into that idea that, you know, so often humans recognize intelligence just insofar as another animal is like us, you know, if they think like us, if they make eye contact like us, if they can make vocalizations that we can vaguely sort of get a handle on, we think, oh, that’s a smart one. And that keeps us from recognizing all of the myriad just infinite intelligences that are surrounding us every single time we step out the door, but we don’t even recognize because we’re just caught in what looks like intelligence to us as humans.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:20  Right? What is our type of intelligence? Yeah. I mean, animals are so intelligent, but it’s just you have to think of it in a different, a much broader and wider context. I mean, I was at the zoo the other day and I was contemplating flamingos. I love to look at it. You know, I think we all do. If we paid a little bit of attention to evolution and all that, and you think like what? Like, how did we get here? How did we get a creature that looks like that? But you realize, given certain conditions, like this thing evolved beautifully and perfectly. It’s just incredible.

Lyanda Haupt 01:03:50  You know, I love that line, Eric. It sounds like the beginning of a poem. I was at the zoo, and I was contemplating Flamingo. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, all of this is. What if we’re going to use that word hope, which gives me a grown up optimism, is this idea that we are living in a time.

Lyanda Haupt 01:04:06  So we have this rare confluence. Now, all of a sudden, for the first time of this new super modern science that is recognizing this interconnection that the mystics always recognize. Grounding it in ecological science. And so we have our imaginal side, that expansively spiritual side, and the deeply scientific side Excited, affirming each other. That’s powerful. That gives us. That’s a tool. We can use this power, you know.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:36  Yep. Well, we are at the end of our time. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed the book. I really enjoyed talking with you. Of links in the show, notes to where people can find you and your work. And again, I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.

Lyanda Haupt 01:04:52  I loved our conversation. Thank you for having me, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:54  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:08  We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

In this episode, Ross Ellenhorn explores the complexities of why we resist change and what to do about it. As Ross explains in this conversation, “staying the same protects you from the insult of small steps.” He shows us why these tiny steps can sometimes feel insulting and demoralizing. Ross also delves into the fear of raising expectations, the pain of disappointment, and why hope itself can feel threatening

Discover the six hidden saboteurs that quietly derail your best intentions—like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, and emotional escape. Download our free guide to uncover what’s getting in your way and learn simple strategies to take back control. Get it now at oneyoufeed.net/ebook.

Key Takeaways:

• Psychological concepts related to change, addiction, hope, disappointment, and self-efficacy.
• The complexities of addiction and the distinction between harmful behaviors and positive attachments.
• The challenges of personal change and the forces that resist it, including fear of disappointment and existential anxiety.
• The concept of “fear of hope” and its impact on motivation and willingness to change.
• The importance of social support and community in the recovery process.
• Critique of current addiction treatment models and the need for a more compassionate, harm reduction approach.
• The role of context in shaping an individual’s ability to change and the limitations of individualistic approaches.
• The significance of incremental change and the value of small steps in personal growth.
• The importance of respecting resistance to change as a form of self-love and preservation.

Ross Ellenhorn, PhD, is an eminent thought leader on innovative methods and programs aimed at helping individuals diagnosed with psychiatric and substance-use issues recover in their own communities, outside of hospital or residential settings. He is the founder, owner, and CEO of ellenhorn, the most robust community integration program in the United States, with offices in Boston, New York City, and Raleigh-Durham. Dr. Ellenhorn is also the cofounder and president of the Association for Community Integration Programs, and the founder of two lecture series that aim to shift current behavioral health paradigms. He gives talks and seminars throughout the country, and is an in-demand consultant to mental health agencies, psychiatric hospitals, and addiction programs in the United States and Europe. Dr. Ellenhorn is the first person to receive a joint PhD from Brandeis University’s Florence Heller School \

Connect with Ross Ellenhorn:  Website | Facebook | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Ross Ellenhorn, check out these other episodes:

How to Integrate Behavior Change with Your Values with Spencer Greenberg

Tiny Habits for Behavior Change with BJ Fogg

Behavior Change with Dr. John Norcross

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Episode Transcript:

Ross Ellenhorn 00:00:00  Disappointment is this profoundly important and scary thing for people, because it means when you’re actually trying to change something, it’s telling you that you’re not capable of doing it. And in that it’s saying you’re kind of helpless in running your life. So every disappointment is that message. And so it makes sense that a person might want to avoid that.

Chris Forbes 00:00:25  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:11  I have a book coming out next year called how a Little Becomes a Lot, and it’s all about how change happens through small, incremental steps. So you can imagine how the title of chapter seven in today’s guest book stopped me cold. Staying the same, he says, protects you from the insult of small steps. Ross Ellenhorn, therapist, researcher and author of How We Change and Ten Reasons Why We Don’t, shows us why these tiny steps can sometimes feel insulting and demoralizing. In this conversation, we dig into the fear of raising expectations, the pain of disappointment, and why hope itself can feel threatening. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. 

Hi, Ross. Welcome to the show.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:02:02  Hi. It’s nice to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:04  We’re going to be talking about two of your books today. One called How We Change and ten Reasons Why We Don’t, which is a subject I spend a lot of time thinking about. But you’ve had a book more recently than that called Purple Crayons The Art of Drawing a Life, and I want to spend some time with that book.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  Also great. But before we talk about either of them, we will start with a parable like we always do. And 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 and 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.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:03:01  Yeah. Well, on one level, it’s a parable that’s a little bit about righteousness. And that kind of way of thinking can be good for us, and it can also put us in difficult situations, because I actually think that there’s parts of my life where I feed the quote unquote bad wolf that I’d hate to give up.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:03:24  That life’s messy, that part of the messiness has to do with the issues of aggression and trying to get gratified and all of that stuff. And if you were to remove all those things, what would you end up with? You know, I’ve been working for over 30 years on what I consider and I’ve been observing this diagnosis a lot, and I’ve been studying this diagnosis for over 30 years. And it’s I think it’s the most, really the most terrifying diagnosis there is that when you spend time with somebody with this diagnosis. It’s disturbing. And that diagnosis is the diagnosis of normal. The normal is probably the most terrifying diagnosis there is. And so parables like this sometimes are pointing out a kind of a black and white version of things. Yeah, that helps us on some level because it helps us think about, well, what are you feeding? What areas in your life are you kind of, nurturing and how can you resist nurturing it? That’s what that parable is about. But it also fits in with these other ways of thinking that are about there’s one thing that’s kind of perfect and good and one thing that’s imperfect and bad, and we should stay away from the imperfect and bad.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:04:38  Yeah, right. Is addiction bad? No. Addiction is bad when it’s bad for you. I’m just completely addicted to my relationship with my wife. I’m addicted to writing. I can’t stand it when I don’t do it. This. This habit of mine that I can’t get away from called. My attachment with my family members is a habit, and I go into withdrawal when I don’t feed that habit. So there’s all kinds of things in our lives that are one or the other, that kind of get mixed up when we sort of split things off in the bad and good. That’s sort of my my take on it. On the other hand, what do we want to feed? We want to feed those more righteous parts of us. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:18  Yeah. I’ve always found it ironic that I’m a guy who deeply dislikes binary answers to things, and yet I picked a completely binary parable to base this show on for the last 11 years. Yeah. you know, I think the addiction thing is an interesting thing to dive into because I would argue, and I’m a recovering alcoholic and, and drug addict, I would I would argue that one of the definitions of addiction is continuing to do something while mounting serious adverse consequences.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:51  Right? Yeah. And so in that way, I’m not sure that being addicted to loving your wife a huge amount is really the same thing, even though it shares some characteristics and I feel the same way, like I have some tendencies towards doing things a lot if I really like them, which I think is part of my character and it’s a good part of my character also, but it feels different than my addiction did.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:06:16  Yeah. So you and I differ a little bit on that because I wouldn’t put it in a context of, you know what I mean? Like addiction is only addiction when it’s bad for you. I think addiction is, habitual behavior that you don’t feel completely in control over.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:31  That’s fair.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:06:31  Yeah, yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:32  Control is a big piece of it.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:06:34  Yeah. And that kind of behavior can can lead towards profound experiences of emptiness and shame. And that kind of behavior can lead towards painting a beautiful painting, you know. And so to me at base, that’s what it is.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:06:48  So there’s problematic addiction. And then there’s just habits that you can’t quite escape. And some of those habits create the most beautiful things in our lives. You know art. Art. To to to paint a painting requires a certain addictive quality to it. It kind of it kind of focus. Everything else gets pushed aside. You know, it’s kind of this kind of hyper focus. And the focus is about the experience of it, the high of it you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:14  Yeah. I mean control is a huge piece of addiction because you know that is one of the, the big markers of when things you know, slide from what I would call something you, you really like to do to something that’s addictive is you’re not in control of whether you do or don’t do it. To a certain I mean, to a certain degree now anyway, I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole because because I, I want to move on. And I want to talk a little bit about your book, how We change in ten reasons why we don’t.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:48  And there are so many things in your book that I really love. And I think one of the core ideas is that change is just really hard, and that this changes in a follow the instructions kind of thing, right? It’s much more complicated than that, and that there are always, at any time, forces that push us in the direction of change and forces that push us in the opposite direction. And I think your book is one of the few that really addresses that latter category in a lot of detail. Yeah. You know, what are these forces that cause us to want to stay the same? Now, there’s a simplistic version of this where people say, well, you keep doing drugs because you like drugs, and there’s truth in that, right? Like, I, you know, I was an addict because I liked it, and I liked what it did for me. But it goes a lot deeper than that, this resistance to change that we get into. And so I’d like to kind of talk about all that, but I’d love you to start us off by saying a little bit more about this allure of sameness.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:08:56  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it’s it’s pretty clear that there’s an alert to sameness, right? I mean, look out your window. Everybody’s dressing the same. Acting the same. Everybody’s worried about seeming like they’re not the same. I mean, conformity is just sort of part of our daily life now, in some ways, the way people are behaving. But I think that staying the same has a grace to it. It has a beauty to it, and that until we recognize why a person might not want to change and why there’s a logic to it, we can’t really help them change because we’re not speaking to part of them that’s attracted to that. And that that attraction isn’t just like you said to the high of the drug or liking the drug. It’s protecting them from experiences of disappointment that it’s protecting them from another time. When they tried, They got their hopes up and then the thing didn’t work out. And disappointment is this profoundly important and scary thing for people, because it means when you’re actually trying to change something, it’s telling you that you’re not capable of doing it.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:10:07  Yeah. And in that it’s saying you’re kind of helpless in running your life. So every disappointment is that message. And so it makes sense that a person might want to avoid that. All love is disordered, all love is crazy and so is self-love. So you can be staying the same out of your own love for yourself, your own wish to protect yourself. Yeah, from this powerful sense. I don’t want to feel helpless again. And that’s especially true with people in the behavioral health system who have been over and over again disappointed. And they live in a system. This comes from my work in mental health. I interviewed a group of people I was running a group for about 30 years ago, and I said, what, what, what stops you from changing? And not a single one of them said, my symptoms. All of them said, I don’t want to raise anybody’s expectations. I don’t want to raise my expectations. In this system, people are constantly, constantly raising expectations and then being disappointed, raising expectations and being disappointed.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:11:03  I mean, can you think of a more insane thing to have your job being changed? You wake up in the morning and everybody’s waiting by your bed saying, is this the day where you’ll change? We’ve been waiting for change. Is it today? Oh, not today. Okay, well, tomorrow we’ll check back in and see if you change then. Right. That kind of pressure. Yeah. Creates all these expectations. And then there’s all these disappointments one after the other. And that creates what I call fear of hope. And we can talk about that further. But we’ve done full research on this concept. We have a scale for it. It’s not it is its own thing. And that is hope is that thing that got me to disappointment. If I don’t hope, I won’t be disappointed. And yet hope is at the center of all motivation.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:47  Exactly. You you have to have it in order for real change to any kind of change to occur. Because if you don’t have some hope that you can change, you’ll never bother.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:56  So yeah, it is a little bit of a double edged sword, right?

Ross Ellenhorn 00:11:59  Yeah, yeah. Especially if you think of hope this way. Hope. Hope isn’t optimism. It’s not. Everything’s going to be great. Hope is the mindset that gets us through uncertainty to something we yearn for. Whether we get to that thing or not. The most brilliant philosopher, I hope, is probably Martin Luther King, because this is what he was trying to activate a whole, a whole movement around this concept that we don’t know where we’re headed, but we got to get through uncertainty to get there. That’s hope. It’s not the guarantee things are going to be good. And so every act of change, every act of motivation requires that because you’re always stepping in the unknown. Even if you have a workout schedule, you don’t know, am I going to quit in the middle of it? Am I going to give up all those sorts of things? And so it’s always about some level of can I get the uncertainty of this thing I want.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:12:51  So a person is afraid of hope, who has fear of hope that the well to motivation is poisoned, and then they stay the same and they’re staying the same because they just cannot handle the idea of another disappointment.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:05  Yeah. So let’s dive into a couple of the reasons not to change. I think we’ve hit on like the big overarching picture here to a certain degree, but within that there are lots of little or subtleties that we could say. And the first I’d love you to talk about is staying the same protects you from your aloneness and accountability. What do you mean by that?

Ross Ellenhorn 00:13:27  Yeah. So if you think about all change as an act that exposes you as a person in charge of your life, we’re all afraid of that on some level. It’s called existential anxiety. The idea that I’m in charge of my own life. Yeah. And so every act of change kind of exposes that that I’m making this happen, which also means I’m alone in this. On some level, this job in my life.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:13:55  I can be connected to people. People can support me, but I’m kind of alone and accountable for what happens. And so every change always has that threat to it always has that. You know, when you talk about the things that are sort of holding you back, it always has that threat. And if you are afraid of disappointment, you’re going to be more afraid of that threat of your own accountability, and you’re going to feel more alone in that process. You’re going to feel more like I’m the one that made this fall apart when things go bad.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:27  Now that is the truth. Regardless of whether we are attempting to change or not, that we are alone and responsible for our lives. This is an act of just not wanting to actually come more face to face with it, is what you’re saying?

Ross Ellenhorn 00:14:41  Yeah. On some level it’s not quite intentional, but it’s a person who is almost choosing sameness. You know, we all do on some level. I mean, this thing called resistance, which has never been proven.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:14:53  This thing called denial, which has never been proven. This thing called difficult to engage clients, never been proven that it’s a psychological issue. You know, for me, it’s all about a person saying, I don’t really want to do this because I don’t want to. I’m terrified of another disappointment. It’s not a person who’s saying, I’m not looking at my problem. It’s a person saying, I don’t want to move that way, because I don’t know if this will just be another time when I feel disappointed and harmed by that disappointment, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:15:21  Yeah. Here’s one. Some of these are paired with each other, right? One is staying the same, protects you from your own expectations, and staying the same protects you from the expectations of others.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:15:32  Yeah. Those are kind of the big ones, you know. So one of the interesting things about hope is it appoints whatever you’re hoping for is more, more important than it was before. You hope for it. It’s like your parents asked you.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:15:45  You know what you want for your birthday. Can’t come over. And then you all of a sudden you think I want a bike? And then the bike becomes the life saving most important thing in your life, right? So once you start hoping for something, you’re raising its importance. And so all our expectations go up and the value of the thing goes up once we start moving towards it. You’re not going to feel disappointed if those things aren’t there, but those things have to be there for you to be motivated. And so when the thing doesn’t happen, that’s what’s crushing about it, is that your expectations went up and as your expectations went up, so do the value of the thing. And now that thing that you feel is going to kind of make your life what it should be, is taken away from you. And then there’s the disappointment of family disappointment or treaters. You know, there’s this thing called self-sabotage, which I don’t know if that exists either, but we see people over and over again when they start reaching points of success begin to fall apart.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:16:41  And for me, that’s because they feel as if they’re kind of terrified of raising people’s expectations even further.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:14  Any success, actually, then raises expectations.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:17:18  That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:19  Right. You do well. And now it’s not like, great. You’re at the finish line. It’s you did this. Now you can do that. And now that you can do that, now you can do this. And it just keeps going.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:17:30  Yep, yep. My son used to call home from college and say, hey, dad, I got an A in English. And I’d say, Max, that’s that’s fantastic. What are your grades in your other classes? Right. I wasn’t being a bad parent. I was being a parent. But everything becomes it begets more expectations. Every time you do better people than say, okay, well, if you can do that, you can do this. It becomes this terrifying world where things become more and more alone, and also more and more like, if I fail, it’s going to be all the way from the top.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:18:00  Now, all of this failure is going to bring everybody down, including myself. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:05  Is this the sort of thing, this, this fear of hope that happens after we have been disappointed by our own failures to change? Is that part of it? Because I’m wondering, you know, if you’ve got somebody who has been so far successful in making the changes they want to make, maybe they don’t feel this, but the people who have tried and it hasn’t gone, it becomes a it reinforces itself.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:18:35  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:35  Yeah, yeah. In both directions probably.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:18:37  Right. Yeah. Yeah yeah. So I think I think everybody has it. The issue is how much faith in yourself do you have that you can handle it? The disappointment. How much do you believe you can deal with it if the disappointment happens? You know, there’s all this research on this thing called self-efficacy, which is the ability to kind of feel like you’re competent in life. But but half half of self-efficacy is self-efficacy. People aren’t ruined by disappointment because they feel self efficacious about that, too.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:19:05  I can handle it. I know how to deal with disappointment. But if you’ve been sort of crushed in your faith or yourself, then everything becomes kind of terrifying. You can’t really raise people’s hope. You can’t really lower their fear of hope. But what you can do is get them to believe in themselves more. And the more that they can believe in themselves, the more likely they’re they’re going to be willing to hope, they’re going to be willing to kind of do that because the risk of the disappointment goes away. It’s not as much.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:31  You know, how do we do that? Because, you know, self-efficacy or confidence tends to come from you can’t you can’t pretend you’re way into that stuff usually, right? Yeah. That gets developed by you being successful or doing well in certain ways. So how do we get people to believe more in themselves when, let’s say, their track record isn’t great? So, I mean, I can look at myself with my getting sober the first time. I mean, it took me a bunch of attempts.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:20:01  Yeah, yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:02  Yeah, yeah. So how do you get somebody who points to the, the their track record? Yeah. To believe in themselves.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:20:09  Yeah. Well, I’m going to tell you how not to do it and I’ll tell you how to do it. How’s that?

Eric Zimmer 00:20:15  Okay. Perfect.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:20:16  Maybe we should have a system if it’s going to call addiction a disease, which I don’t quite believe, I believe addiction. My favorite word for addiction I’ve come up with myself is this term called addiction. I think that’s what addiction is. It’s not disease. But if you’re going to call it a disease, we have a system that says it’s a disease, but you can’t get help for your disease unless you’re not showing symptoms of the disease. That’s a cruel and inhumane model. And it hurts people. People feel bad about themselves and they’re out there failing all the time, because abstinence is the only way to get into a program. Then we have programs that claim to get people to abstinence, and they do.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:20:56  But so what? They’re behind walls. They got abstinent. Right. And we have programs that say, you’re not ready for this. You’re not ready for that. You’re not ready to have a relationship. You’re not ready to use your phone. You’re not ready to work. You’re not ready to, Right?. All of those things are the medicine for addiction. Having a sense of purpose. I feel like a valuable member of the community, feeling connected to someone you love. Those are the medicine that help a person have faith enough in themselves to hope and to try. And so we have a system that removes the medicine for addiction by removing people from their communities. So in my mind it should be harm reduction oriented harm reduction does not mean it’s not abstinence oriented. You can use harm reduction means all kinds of things, but it’s not kicking people out all the time because they’re using. And it’s about getting people into their own lives you use today. That means you shouldn’t go to work tomorrow. You should go to an IOP.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:21:57  That job you had that you finally got, you’re not ready for it. Go to a program. Oh, you’re almost about to get your degree. Forget the degree. We gotta remove you from the place and put you somewhere instead of having a team around you outreach wise, that’s helping you stay in the world and become valuable and feel valuable. I don’t know if you if you’re a person that went through AA, but the before the meeting and after the meeting or the events. Yeah. The fellowship C of that.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:27  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there are I think there’s a little more nuance in it than what you’re, you’re talking about. Like, I’ll give you an example. We had to put our dog to sleep last week, and we chose to get out of our house for a week. Go visit some people. So we weren’t in the place where everywhere we looked, she wasn’t. Yeah. Now we have to come home. Yeah. And when we come home, it’s there, right? It’s waiting for us.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:57  It’s there. But we’ve had a week of building up some strength and some skills that allow us to go back to that place a little bit more supported. So I think there are, I think, any type of addiction treatment to assume that it’s the only right one for people is always a mistake, because we’re all different and our circumstances are different. So I think there are plenty there are cases where putting somebody in somewhere to build some skills to get stronger before they go back to their community. Make sense? But I also do agree with you that purpose is is really important into what makes us the medicine for addiction. I think part of the problem is this the outreach in the community around people that you’re describing doesn’t often exist.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:23:45  Yeah. No it doesn’t. No, no.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:46  Right. And so so people are kind of between a rock and a hard place a little bit.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:23:51  Yeah. No, I’m imagining something that’s not there, really. You know. I mean, our program does it, but I mean, yeah, I’m imagining something.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:23:57  I’m imagining something that’s not quite there. I’m just saying what? But, but, but I do think that the, the system we have now is almost pro addiction on some level, just like the mental health system is kind of pro suicide because it’s putting people in hospitals all the time when they’re suicidal, which doesn’t really work. But that doesn’t mean, oh, I totally agree that there’s a need for triage and their need to remove the person from their use. I don’t consider that really the curative event, though. It’s giving them enough to go back to then be in the curative event. It’s it’s giving them enough room to do that, you know. Yeah. And and sometimes people need to go away because what they’re doing so dangerous, they need to be protected from it so they can make better decisions. I mean, there’s all kinds of reasons to go away, but the idea that treatment is kind of focused on going away and not focused on how to help people feel like parts of their community, I think, is a problem.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:24:51  I don’t see things working if we don’t do that, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:24:55  Yeah, I think the real problem. I agree with you when we say go away. So my my experience, I got sober twice, once at 25 as I was homeless, heroin addict, real low bottom. And then I stayed sober about eight years. And then I started drinking again. And I got sober at that time. The first time I went, I did treatment. Yeah, I went into treatment. I didn’t go away. I went to treatment in Columbus, and then I chose to go to a halfway house and that worked for me. I have seen what happens when people go away, away, meaning they they go to Minnesota. That happens to be a popular destination for people in this situation. they start to build a community there. Right. So I was building a community in treatment in the halfway house. I was going to meetings. I was meeting people at meetings. I was doing all that. And when I left treatment or the halfway house, that community was still there.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:25:53  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:54  Right. I think when you send somebody to Minnesota, because they’re building that community, ideally in a decent program, they’re building that community right away. Right. But then you leave that whole supportive environment. And I think that is a really rough transition.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:26:08  Yeah, I agree with you. And the story you’re telling me is still about social connection. Yes. And so 100% medicine. In the end, the medicine was social connection in a sense of value in the community, you know. And if that’s the way to get it, that’s a great way to get it. You know, the other part of it is who knows? This is sort of from my book. Who knows what it was that made you susceptible to change at that point? Yeah. In my mind, it wasn’t the place. It was whatever was going on in your life that made it so you could metabolize the care that people were giving you. Yeah. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:44  I always think of it as it was a combination of things in my life were really getting bad, but that I don’t think that’s enough.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:54  I think that that came up at the same time with somehow the thing we talked about, which is hope. Yeah. Some hope that I could get better. And when those two things come together, I think we’ve got a shot. But when things are just bad, that’s a really dangerous place to be. When it’s just. I’m. I’m broken, I can’t change. Yeah. There’s nothing I can do about this, right? You know, those were the most dangerous days of my my drug use, I think. And they were after I had tried 12 step programs and treatment before, and it didn’t work that time. So I concluded it doesn’t work. Yeah. Instead of recognizing very much what you’re saying, and I think this is some of what’s critical to getting people to hope again, is to recognize that you’re not the same person this time that you were last time. That’s right. Just because it didn’t work last time doesn’t mean that it won’t work this time, because you’re not the same.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:55  And I think that’s a really key piece.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:27:58  Yeah. Yeah, that’s a hard one, isn’t it? Because because, treatment becomes as repetitive as addiction, you know. And so.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:05  Yeah.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:28:06  You can. Okay. Again, just this is part of the whole thing. And the feeling of isolation, shame and loneliness doesn’t really get addressed often in the treatment. So the underlying suffering from the addiction often doesn’t go away. I’m still feel broken. I’m not drunk anymore, but I still feel broken. I still feel unheard. I still feel alone. You know. And so those things aren’t always addressed in treatment centers. Sometimes they are. But but. And then also sometimes we have to get those things from the community. We have to get it from being part of the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:44  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:57  You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now. At once you feed. And take the first step towards getting back on track. So let’s move on from there. And I want to talk about one of these reasons not to change that jumped off the page to me. And I’m going to give it a little context real quick. So I’m a big believer. I use a phrase a lot that little by little, a little becomes a lot. The change happens through these incremental small steps. I have a book coming out next year called how a Little Becomes a Lot. So obviously Reason not to change number seven. I was very intrigued by which is that staying the same protects you from the insult of small steps.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:04  I love this. Yeah, talk to me about the insult of small steps and what you mean by that.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:30:10  Tell me about the theme of your book. This idea that a little bit, a little bit means a lot. What? What does that mean?

Eric Zimmer 00:30:16  Well, it’s that my experience is that change comes through a thousand small moments and choices. Right? If you were going to film the movie of my life, you would see a scene of me going into a detox center and them saying you need to go to long term treatment, and me saying no, I don’t. Going back to my room and having a moment of clarity where I thought, God, I am going to die or I’m going to go to jail. I’ve got 50 years of jail time and I go back and I say, I’ll go to treatment. And that’s the moment, right? That, you know, the cue, the triumphant music, all that stuff. That moment only matters only has any significance because of a thousand tiny choices I made after that, again and again and again.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:57  Yeah, we over prioritize the epiphany. We over prioritize the five easy steps. We over prioritize all of that. And that change actually tends to most lasting change happens a little bit at a time over a long period of time. Yes. I love what you’re talking about with the insult of small steps, because there are reasons why. Little by little doesn’t work. And some of it is what you’re addressing here.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:31:28  Yeah, yeah. No, I think that that’s beautiful how you’re describing this, you know, and if you’re afraid of hope, the only thing you can bear is the small steps. Yeah. Because the big ones are like, oh, shit. Everybody’s gonna, like, see that it happened, you know? And it’s also like, I can only digest little moments of pride. I can’t feel completely proud of myself because I’m so afraid of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:50  That’s a great point. Yeah.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:31:51  So every small step is just this the most manageable unit of pride, the most manageable unit of self-efficacy.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:31:59  And anything past that scares the person. The insults of Small Steps is sort of about that. It’s like if the step is a little bit more than small, or if it’s just even small, it becomes like, well, that makes me look at where I’m at. I made a sandwich today. That’s my big event. I know, but you know, I’ve been eating out all week, and today I made a sandwich because I’m trying to be more responsible for my life because someone at AA told me to make a sandwich. I made a sandwich today. That’s the big event. But that small step, the way you’re describing it, is one of those small steps that led to the bigger one. Right? Yep. And so it’s that constant sense of being insulted by these small things I have to do, you know? Yeah. We got plenty of people in my program who say, yeah, oh, I’m ready to go back to college. I’m totally ready. I’m going to graduate next year.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:32:47  And then we say, well, you know, first you got to apply. And they’re like, oh God, apply. Which means to them I’m not as far as my friends who are already in college. Yep. And that’s sort of a big step. But even that step is like now I’m looking at where I am in relationship to my goal. The minute you take a small step, you’re looking at the distance to the goal.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:05  Yes.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:33:06  And then it becomes insulting and upsetting, you know, and you have to kind of get through those things because you’ve got to have the small steps to get there.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:33  I think your point is a really good one. There’s a couple there. I mean, one is, yeah, if we keep comparing ourselves to the end goal. Yeah, it’s demoralizing. And every time you have to sort of look at where you are, it can be very disappointing. I mean I can think about that like, well, okay, I went to two meetings today.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:50  I feel on one level I feel really good about myself. On another level, I can look at friends of mine, like you said, who just graduated from college last year, and I’ve never darkened the doors of a college due to my addiction. Yeah. You know, and these, these little steps. And it’s also just hard to sustain.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:34:08  Yeah, yeah. Unless you have some sort of credo to help you with that. Like there’s a credo called the One Day at a time, right? I mean, in other words, like, that’s really brilliant. And it is sort of about that. It’s like, don’t set your sights on the big thing, get through today and then you feel some sense of accomplishment about today, and then tomorrow you’re going to get up and start again. But don’t look too broadly. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:34  Yeah. I mean, it’s there’s so many cliches around it. Rome wasn’t built in the day and all that stuff. I mean, they’re they’re cliches, but, you know, one day at a time is a huge cliche.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:44  And it happens to be actually very useful.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:34:47  Very. It might be. Without it, I don’t see how people recover. Right. Yeah. How can you not if you’re not in that mode of saying today, today is my day. This is the day I’m working on it. I’m not thinking about tomorrow, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:01  Well, really? From both angles. Right? It’s one is, you know, a day breaks it down into, you know, recognizing it’s small steps. And the other is when you feel really overwhelmed. Yeah. My partner talking about our dog passing, the thing she said a few times is I can’t imagine how I’m going to live the rest of my life without her. Right. And the one day at a time answer to that is you don’t have to figure out how you’re going to live the rest of your life without her. All we have to figure out is how we live the next hour without her or the next. You know, today without her, right? When we start thinking about how am I going to live the rest of my life? It feels overwhelming.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:35:39  Yeah. And think about what that does for you. This isn’t a problematic problem. This is a sadness. But it allows you to grieve. You’re not. You’re not. To think about your future is not to grieve. It’s to grieve. It’s to grieve. Who will I be without? You know, this is actually a lot of grief. Turns out is about like, who will I be without this person? But still, it’s to think about who am I, not what am I? What have I lost?

Eric Zimmer 00:36:06  Right. It’s your brain trying to figure something out so that you don’t feel what you’re feeling. It is a it is a mechanism of of distancing yourself. Yeah.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:36:17  But it’s one of those situations where if you go towards the thing it’s actually more gratifying. Right. Like that’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:23  Great.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:36:24  Grief is we’re doing right now. We’re grieving. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:27  Yeah. And I had to put a number of dogs to sleep over the years. And I do like one thing about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:34  It is that it is. The grief is just so pure and strong and straight and simple. Yep. Yep. It doesn’t have any of the complexity that human things have. It’s just I loved this thing. It’s gone. I miss it, and it’s just it’s a very I like it in its its intensity but also its simplicity.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:36:59  Yeah, yeah. I wrote about this a little bit to somebody that, there was a period of time in our lives where we knew things more than we know things now, but we didn’t have language. You knew what it meant to be comforted before there were words. One psychoanalyst calls it the unthought known. This place pre words after you were born in our relationships with dogs is in that world the known unthought known. And what those animals give us is uncomplicated grief because it’s not complicated by thought or by what do I mean to you? And who do you mean to me? We just know it. You’re not questioning. How did I harm? You know, like none of that stuff, is there? Yeah.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:37:52  It’s the chance for uncomplicated grief, you know? yeah. You know, immaculate grief. You know, it’s like it’s really a great.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:00  That’s a good term for it.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:38:01  Yeah, yeah. The real gift on some level. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:04  So looking at all of these things here that we’ve, we’ve laid out these, these reasons not to change. And a lot of them as we’ve talked about being around hope, how do we get people to hope. I think I asked this question. I’m not sure we got the answer. I think we may have gone off on a tangent. I probably took us off on a tangent if if past history is any indication, this was me. Not, you know.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:38:32  Past history with me.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:32  To how how do we get people who don’t currently believe in themselves to believe in themselves enough to hope?

Ross Ellenhorn 00:38:41  Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. If I promise I’ll get to that, I’m gonna take a little tangent. It’s just a small tangent, but I think it’s important because it’s something that after that book, I began to understand better and better.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:38:56  There’s there’s a thing in social psychology called threat assessment theory. And what it is is that something is a threat when you don’t have the resources to handle it. So if you’re in a t shirt and shorts and you’re walking around and it starts to snow, there’s a threat. But if you put on a jacket and pants, it’s just a challenge. And there are things in our lives around us that are just like that coat that make it so that challenges personal challenges. Stay in the challenge column and not the threat column. Social support. People around me who have my best interest in mind, who back me up. Self-efficacy I can get things done. Sense of purpose. Sense of value to my community. These things are really proven within social psychology that they become the resources that make it so things don’t seem threatening. Things like looking at your problem. No longer is it a threat. It’s a challenge. I’m willing to look at the fact that I have an addiction. If I don’t have those resources around me, I’m not going to accept the care, because I’m not going to be willing to look at the problem because I can’t handle it.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:40:13  It’s a threat. It’s a threat for me to go into treatment. It’s not a challenge. Life becomes just all threats. This is what there is, what their discovering and all the loneliness epidemic stuff is that people who are lonely, who don’t have the resources of social support, are constantly in this threat mode. And so if we’re going to help.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:30  Perversely makes it harder then to connect to people. Loneliness is a yeah.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:40:35  Yeah, yeah. When they’re finally ready, they’re paranoid. I mean, it really is. Yeah. Awful that way. So the answer is complicated, but it’s I think it’s a fact that if we don’t have the right social resources, we’re not going to move towards change. Those are the things that are push us forward. When we talk about things holding us back and things pushing us forward. And so we really do need to be kind of focused on who you are in the community. How do I support you to continue to be a valuable member of the community, even if you’re using? Yes.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:41:09  If you use last night, is it really the best thing for you to quit your job? Or is it better for me to show up at your job during your lunch break to make sure you’re not using then, but keep you in that job? And is it valuable for you to see that the person caring for you sees the job? Not fixing you with some intervention, sees the job as the most important thing in your life, and it’s surrounding you with that. Giving a person a sense that there’s a continuous, non-judgmental relationship. We just know this to all the addiction research, that long term relationships are the number one thing that, contribute to a person’s recovery. So how do we do that for people where they don’t feel like when they use, they lose those relationships, that social support?

Eric Zimmer 00:41:53  Yeah.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:41:54  How do we have conversations not about the addiction, but about where they want to go in life? You know, I think that’s a better conversation. And but, you know, I work in mental health largely.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:42:03  And I think it’s that’s a better conversation than talking to someone who has schizophrenia about their symptoms. It’s like, where do you where do you want to be? And by the way, your symptoms might be in the way of that, but where do you want to be, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:14  Well, yeah. And I have a lot of compassion for family members, friends of addicts. And I have I’ve been in that role. So I have compassion for myself in that role and people in that role. It’s a terrible it’s an awful spot to be in. Yeah. And that part of what ends up happening, I think, is that those people become threatening to the addict.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:42:40  Yeah, absolutely.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:41  Because to look at addiction, to talk about it, to think about it is threatening because that person is so angry. Yeah. And again, I don’t blame people for being that angry. I get it. And it doesn’t really help take the it doesn’t help you take addiction from a threat to a challenge.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:59  Right? It ups the threat.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:43:01  Level, it ups the threat level. And it also creates a system of lying. So now you get like there’s no the attachments gone at that point. They’re threatening me. I’m lying. That’s our relationship. And I’m sneaking around. And now there’s a secret. And so the chance for social support is lessening at that point, you know. And that’s generated in these kind of experiences like this. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:30  I want to spend a couple more minutes here on change, and then I want to get to purple crayons. Late in the book, you talk about you can’t always change, and you talk about the fact that there needs to be an acknowledgement of two things that I think are important. One is that you talk about the cruelty of purely individualistic approaches that blame people for systemic problems. Meaning you give a great example about for a CEO to go back to school and get their master’s degree is like climbing a minor hill. Yeah. For somebody who works in the warehouse of that same company who has two children and is a single parent.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:21  That’s not just a small hill to climb. That’s a that’s a big mountain to climb, right? Right. And so so it’s not just purely individualistic. What’s the circumstances? The system, all of that stuff matters. And yet accountability needs to remain crucial, right? People have to have a sense of efficacy, of hope and and about how you how do you balance these things. And you say that extremism always tends to bend towards cruelty, which is such a great line. Talk to me about this idea.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:44:55  Yeah. I mean, this sort of concept we have, that all you got to do is make the choice. To change. You know, I mean, every book that says there’s five steps is just basically saying, why aren’t you doing the five steps instead of respecting the person’s context, you know. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:16  And context is everything.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:45:18  Everything. And so we have all these things going around us that decide whether we’re ready to make a change. And those things switch and change every day.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:45:28  And there are those resources I’ve been talking about, you know, and if you don’t have those resources, it’s insulting on some level. And it makes you feel bad when people act as if this is something you can just do. When it’s always what’s around you that’s going to support you enough to then be able to make the decision to change. And we do live in a system that’s basically saying, well, we have all the cures. Just come and take the cure and you’re done. And and that’s a lie. There’s a lot of evidence, actually. People that never go to treatment do pretty well, you know. So we’re also trying to talk people into all these treatments. Say, and then we say that there’s something wrong with them. They’re not accepting them. And what we’re not respecting is that that person lives within a context, within an experience. Now, the fact is that CEO actually could be impoverished in areas that the poor person is not to. Yes, that Theo could be living somewhere in some suburban place where there’s no culture, no sense of connection, no sense of cultural connection, no sense of shared language, nothing like that.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:46:27  And that poor person could live in a neighborhood where in at night, everybody’s out on the street talking to each other, having connected experiences. They live close to their family and all of that. Those are also resources. Yep. You know, it just depends on the situation, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:44  Right. And so how how do you work with people to understand the context but not let the context define them? Because we both said context is everything. But it’s I guess I would say probably to speak less binary. It’s not it’s not quite everything because there is an element of human agency in all of this. So how do you work with people to understand their context, to have kindness and patience towards themselves, but also not allow the context to become. Something that holds them back.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:47:20  Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. I mean, you know, for me it’s like it is all about our aloneness and our decisions. And the context is the thing that might give us enough courage to face that. Right? So that the world we’re in might give us enough room to look at that.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:47:34  I think that, we’re in trouble that way. That political debate, the debate about human beings is all totalizing. You’re this. That’s why you’re feeling this. And that includes you’re this kind of oppressed person, right? Which I appreciate, and I understand why it’s there, but it it is not it is not seeing the person as a unique humanity with all kinds of complex things going on.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:57  Right.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:47:58  And so this kind of identifying with these things is its own kind of nationalism, its its own kind of way of having a totalizing view of things. It’s a kind of nationalism I like better than other horrid forms of nationalism, but it still is. It’s this kind of totalizing idea, this idea that instead of the complete and complex mystery of a human being, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:20  Exactly. And one that the outcome is not known.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:48:24  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:24  Yeah. You know, nobody’s outcome is known. Yeah. We we can say, oh, we could predict that this type of person is going to be more successful this way, or this type of person is going to do better in this environment.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:35  We can make some predictions. Yeah. But there’s a lot going on that we don’t understand.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:48:41  That most of it we don’t understand. Yeah. I mean about about human beings. It is a completely uncertain event. change is improvisational. Growth is improvisational. Yup. Psychotherapy was invented as an improvisational art form where you didn’t know where it was going. And all of this has become these little best practice tools instead of what it was supposed to be, which is I’m here listening and I’m following you, but I’m not going to make decisions about who you are. Right. And Martin Luther King had this gorgeous concept called the sacredness of human personality. And when he talked about oppression, he was talking about that sacred thing that everybody has their own unique, fascinating world inside of them is crushed by them, made into things. And so he was celebrating that everybody has this unique, fascinating world that can’t be captured by saying you’re this or you’re or that, even when those this is and that are part of the resistance.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:49:42  He was saying every person deserves the dignity of being a fully human, unique person. And that’s the version of oppression that I appreciate is being made simple by another person’s perception. And that can include the list of things that says, your identity is this and this and this.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:06  You know, I’m thinking, you know, all of those sort of I’m this, I’m that. they they serve purposes to a point. Yep. Right. And you know, I’ve talked about this on this show a lot. You know, at what point did my identity as an addict and an alcoholic help me? And when did it become limited? Or my diagnosis of having depression? Where was that useful and served me, and where did it suddenly become non useful? And I think it’s the same thing for people who are parts of oppressed groups. There’s a there is an understanding that’s really valuable there, but it’s not the whole story. And and how you know what, whatever that thing is, is, you know, how can we use these identities, diagnoses, all these things when they’re useful but be able to discard them when they’re not? And I think what you were just talking about with Martin Luther King is a beautiful way of saying.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:50:59  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I often say like the DSM, what if we treated it as this remarkable book of poems about human suffering, all the different forms of human suffering. What if we said that it was that? Then it’d be pretty cool. What if it’s. If it’s a way of us designing how to fix somebody, because they’ve got this and this and this and kind of telling them what they are. It becomes something completely different.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:24  All the poets in the audience who have been issued a challenge, take the DSM and make poems out of it. I think it’s a beautiful idea.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:51:31  It already is, in a way, these little, short little things. It really is about how do you approach things as flexible and nimble and not defining. You know, and we live in an age where people are terrified of that. And so everything’s becoming the opposite of that. You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:46  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:01  And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at once. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. One you feed e-book. So if listeners are listening to this and they want to take away one little thing that they could do today in their life. Small thing that would move them in the direction of the change they want to make. Like, can you give us one little takeaway thing? And I know you hate five simple steps. I’m not asking for that. I’m not asking for that. I’m asking for a particular starting point.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:52:56  I think you might want to respect and honor all the ways you try to stay the same. Then you should stop insulting it and putting it down and see That it comes from your own self-love. It comes from your own attempt to preserve yourself.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:53:12  And that. Well, in the end, it’s probably not good for you and your progress. It’s also a moment of rest, and it’s also you doing the best job you do care for yourself, and if you do that, change actually becomes easier. Change doesn’t emerge out of shame. It just doesn’t.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:30  No, it sure does not.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:53:32  And so I was going to title the book Don’t Go Changing, but Harper Collins wouldn’t let me. But that but that is kind of the message in it. Like it’s okay, you know, respect this, respect this thing you’re doing, staying the same. There’s a grace to it. There’s a beauty to it, you know? and if you do that, there’s more likelihood that you’ll be freed to change.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:49  Excellent. Well, that’s a beautiful place to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation because I said we were going to talk about purple crayons and we did not. So we are going to go talk about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:00  Listeners, if you’d like access to that post-show conversation where we’re going to be talking about the role of creativity in all of what we’ve just been talking about and life in general. You can go to one, you feed coin and you can get ad free episodes. You can get these post-show conversations and you can help support this show, which really needs your help. Ross, thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed talking with you and I really enjoyed your books.

Ross Ellenhorn 00:54:26  Yeah, yeah, it was great. It was really great. You’re good at this and I appreciate your questions and the way you listen. So thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:31  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:57  Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.