BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS

“Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.” —Susan Cain

Recently, I have been spending a lot of time trying to define (and find meaning in) this moment, with my current understanding of reality. Why is life so hard? If hard things don’t always make us better/stronger, what is the point?

There are so many ways to reframe pain in the positive. But I keep finding holes. Ways in which the theories don’t add up. Perhaps it is my depression or upbringing. Perhaps it is years of critical studies. Who knows. I was reading an interview with Fr. Mike Schmitz from the podcast, The Bible in a Year. He said he confidently teaches the Bible because it makes sense to him and he believes it is the truth. He hopes the truth will help other people understand and make meaning in life. I long for his certainty. I am still looking, desperately for what feels true. And just when I think I have found the answer, something seismic shifts, and I change my mind. The competing truths wrestle on.

If pain and suffering don’t always make us stronger, how can we reframe the hard stuff in life to keep going? To heal? Or move through?

The heart of Susan Cain’s new book Bittersweet is “transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love.” This makes sense to me. It is the silver lining that I have been looking for. Pain and longing help us empathize with others, know what we want, and make peace with our brokenness.

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We talk about letting go of the concept of flawless love and Alan de Botton’s article, Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person. I reference this a million times. But if you have not read it yet, go for it. Susan David comes up a lot. I talked about her before on the importance of emotional granularity. Cain references David’s work several times in Bittersweet. From a quote from Susan David’s TedTalk—“research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger”—to the idea of accepting sadness and sorrow as a part of life, without judgment.

We also talk about “emotional labor”—how putting on a happy face for others is a whole heck of a ton of mental energy. This expanded the way I view emotional labor. I am constantly torn between states of being—true to myself or true to my perception of what other people need. Plagued by the question: Is it bad to share my pain in a world that is already so full of suffering? The answer, I think, is sometimes it is ok to share your pain. I am not going to say all the time because I don’t know if that is true.

But sharing might sometimes be ok. It is connective. Listening to someone I love’s story, bad and ugly, can be frustrating when I can’t solve all their problems, but at the same time, the act of listening makes me feel closer to them. I am sad that they are going through hard times, I wish they were not, but something inside of me feels less alone in my sorrow. The act of sharing that we are having a hard time is somehow transformed into part of the process of healing, for both people. A repair that in the end, could actually make us stronger, because we are in this together.

Wishing you light and love on this first day of daylight savings, xo Carissa.

Do you ever wonder why we think our brains are separate from our bodies? In this week’s episode, author and psychologist (and former finalist of the Great British Bake Off!) Kimberley Wilson talks us through her recent book How to Build a Healthy Brain and the role that sleep and nutrition play in how we feel.

We address how emotions are grounded in the body - so to take care of brains, we must take care of our bodies. There are also many daily preventive actions that we can do, like we do for our teeth (brushing to prevent cavities), to help prevent our brains against aging genetic predispositions.

“We’re not made to deal with pain by ourselves, we need other people”

-Kimberley Wilson

As someone who takes mental health very seriously and is always looking for ways to feel better, this conversation was eye-opening and fulfilling. Kimberley highlights how we can start to apply the preventative paradigm that we use for all other aspects of health in mental health too. Why should we wait until something goes terribly wrong, when there are a lot of scientifically proven ways that show we can influence our mental health trajectory?

Thank you for reading BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS. This post is public so feel free to share it.

If you are just in need of a key takeaway, we all need to eat more fish. And sleep.

Thanks for being here. I am very grateful to share everything with you. Sending light and love your way.

XO, Carissa

Katherine May’s new book, Enchantment, comes out this week! Feb 28 in the US and March 9 for the UK - preorder here (preordering a book is super important for authors to get seen. If you know you or a loved one want a copy, why not order it now?) Help Katherine get her message to the people who need to hear it. Or wait 2 more days if you’re feeling super patient.

Thank you for reading BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS. This post is public so feel free to share it.

In celebration, this week I want to revisit my chat with Katherine, a best-selling author and podcast host, of whom I adore in so many ways. I had the pleasure (and it really was a pleasure) of talking to her in January. I first heard about her with her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times during the height of the lockdown in 2020. In so many ways, this book helped me let go of control and step back. That there is comfort in resting. I don’t know about you, but I needed permission to use rest as a way to keep going.

When I saw she had a new book coming out, I had to talk to her. I do these interviews because I love meeting people and I love sharing ideas that I feel are helpful in defining what it means to be alive in these times. And wow, Katherine does that. First, let me explain the title. For those of you who thought of rainbows and unicorns with this title, sadly, there are not any featured in this book. However, the elements here, are no less filled with wonder and magic. The book is organized around connecting with the Earth, Water, Fire, and Air - giving into the cyclical nature of being.

The western culture so often has us working against the seasons, nature, and each other. This leaves us feeling disconnected and often like we are swimming upstream (maybe this is just me? IDK) working against forces that naturally offer soothing moments.

I also pretend Katherine is a dictionary, and ask her how she would define terms that I feel like I don’t really have a grasp on even though I have spent my life using them freely. For what seems like forever, I have been trying to make a structure for meaning that reflects the world I have experienced. Perhaps you are doing this too? It feels like a longing for understanding and connection, a search for some truth (all the while knowing there probably is none…).

We re-define Enchantment, Rituals, Resilience, and how Katherine sees God in this moment. She, however, pushes back on the idea of fixed definitions altogether. And why it might feel good to feel small sometimes.

Sending softness and care your way, love always, Carissa

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Is comparison the thief of joy? Most days I think I can confidently say that I’m content with where I’m at, happy even, excited to celebrate in the small, mundane moments of everyday life while holding space to celebrate others’ joys and successes. Then there are the days where I find myself falling into a spiral, comparing myself to the highlight reels of a stranger’s Instagram.

So how do we navigate these complicated feelings? I’ve been trying really hard to take out “better” from my vocab and remind myself that we’re all different humans just trying to figure it out one day at a time.

This week, I want to revisit my conversation with Liz Fosslien, co-author of Big Feelings. This book has been a gentle companion for the hard moments and hard feelings we might be going through, something to help us feel less alone.

Big Feelings walks us through 7 hard feelings (that I personally deal with) and gives practical strategies for moving through them. We talk about envy in this video.

A few quick takeaways if you don’t have time to listen:

* You cannot change how you feel but you can change what you do.

* Give yourself Grace. Liz defines grace - I like this practice.

* The starting point to moving through emotions is admitting that you have feelings - sounds simple? I don’t know why I have a hard time with this.

As always, thanks so much for being here. I hope you enjoyed hearing about Liz’s book and feel a little less alone when big feelings surface.

If you know someone who is working through some hard feelings, please consider sharing this with them:

Transcription:

00:00:00 Carissa 

Hey everybody, this is Bad At Keeping Secrets. Today I have Liz from Liz and Mollie talking about her book, Big Feelings. 

00:00:09 Carissa 

Liz, will you give me a brief bio of, or kind of this is your second book, about how you got interested in exploring feelings and emotions and sort of helping people work through them. 

00:00:23 Liz 

Yeah, So I grew up, my parents are immigrants, very stoic. There was not a lot of emotional expression in my household growing up. In high school I had kind of a hard time and I remember at one point even mentioning therapy to my parents and the concept was totally foreign to them, like they were just like why? Why would you talk to a stranger? What is there to talk about? You know, you have a good life. We live in a nice house, things like that. 

00:00:51 Liz 

So those were the messages that I had and really internalized. And then I, after college, where I studied math and economics, because those were like solid quantitative fields to study, got a job as an economic consultant and just really hated it. 

00:01:12 Liz 

And it was surprising to me, which looking back seems obvious, but it was surprising to me how I couldn't just will myself to enjoy it and will myself to do it every day. 

00:01:24 Liz 

I started getting migraines like I think I was just repressing my emotions so much they started manifesting physically and so then I eventually just completely burnt out of that job and didn't know what I wanted to do next. And that was, I would call like a forced reckoning of “OK, I have feelings. I can't ignore them. It's just not going to let like. You can't work in a field that you fundamentally don't like.” 

00:01:49 Liz 

Especially for 40, 50 years and so that was how I was kind of forced into better understanding what was going on within me. 

00:01:58 Carissa 

I think in the Live we talked a little bit about trying to figure out what you did like or where the where the sort of loopholes of enjoyment were in your job in economics. But can you talk a little bit about the importance of maybe finding out or how you figured out what you what it was you didn't like? 

00:02:16 Liz 

Yeah, I'm actually really grateful for that experience. Now I can say that, like 10, 15 years later, at the time, it was horrible. But there's some, so psychologists sometimes differentiate or they say that we have multiple selves. 

00:02:32 Liz 

So there's this “ideal self” which is the version of you that is fulfilled, that is doing what you love to do and then there's the “ought self,” which is everything you ought to be doing. 

00:02:42 Liz 

And so at the time, and generally we're more happy when we live our ideal self life. And at the time, I was definitely living the ought life, like I should have a successful job. I should put on a Banana Republic pantsuit. And I should go into a tall building and, like, do all the traditional corporate stuff. 

00:02:59 Liz 

And and I'm actually really glad that I had that experience and hated it so much because I think it allows me, it allowed me to like, let go of that self much more easily than if I had never pursued it. 

00:03:13 Liz 

I think it would be more likely that I still sometimes would be like, “Maybe I should have been a lawyer. Or I should have pursued this path.” So, yeah, I think we underestimate the value in really clearly understanding where we don't want to invest our energy because it just makes your decisions that smaller and makes it easier to figure out where you do want to invest your time. 

00:03:37 Carissa 

Did you, was there something about the day-to-day of that that you remember thinking like just this is gut wrenching? 

00:03:45 Liz 

Yeah, so there were two things. There was one, which is, so the way economic consulting firms work is law firms hire them to calculate how much money big companies should pay each other. 

00:03:56 Liz 

And so, especially as a very junior person there, I would basically get to the office at 9:00 in the morning and then often be waiting till like 5 or 6 for whatever I needed to do to come in from the law firm and then I would have to be at the office till one or two doing that work, and so to me, it was like the fee.. 

00:04:15 Carissa 

Wait one or two in the morning.? 

00:04:18 Liz 

Yeah, so it was like extreme hours. And then it was also it just felt so meaningless to have to be in the office when there wasn't work to do. Like it just you know, it's like it's almost worse. Anyone who's had a job where you literally are watching the time tick down and you're like, OK, it's 9:05, it's 9:06, it's 9:10. It's excruciating. So that was bad.  

00:04:42 Liz 

And then I started working there after the financial crisis and one of the cases we were working on was basically a lot of older people had lost all their pensions when a big bank went bankrupt and we were trying to make a case for why they shouldn't get any money back. So that's just like, fundamentally kind of soul sucking. 

00:05:02 Carissa 

Do you, so you kind of brushed on this a little bit. But can you talk a little bit about how sort of your enjoyment of charts and graphs, how you started the practice of this now you sort of use those, sort of subvert those mediums to kind of talk about this, talk about feelings and emotions. And Sort of these nebulous things that are floating around us, and it's really like an effective strategy and understanding them. 

00:05:31 Carissa 

Can you kind of talk about the process of how you think about how you think about making these sort of illustrations? 

00:05:40 Liz 

Yeah, I, so definitely started. Like I don't have any art or design background and so I just started with what I knew, which was charts. 

00:05:50 Liz 

I actually started creating. Like my very first, I don't even want to call them illustrations. Visual images. I made in MS Paint because that was what I had so they were. They were hideous. 

00:06:04 Liz 

But so yeah, I think one of the things is just like starting where you are with the tools that you're familiar with and then trying to use them in new ways and now I find. Yeah, it's just like a it's it helps me process my own emotions. 

00:06:18 Liz 

So people also often ask, like, where do you get inspiration? And it's usually just whatever I'm feeling and then somehow it's still most comfortable for me to express those in these like more quantitative ways that I have a background in. Just like it feels like safe and known and comes most naturally to me, so it's like a it's like a how it's like, I take whatever the left brain, creative brain, and then express it through the right brain. 

00:06:52 Carissa 

No, I, since I don't have that sort of area of expertise underpinning how to organize my thoughts, it's really, it's, I love the translations instead of that language. 

00:07:06 Carissa 

So the book, if we talk a little bit more about Big Feelings, wait, can we start with your first book, can you tell us a little bit about the first book? 

00:07:15 Liz 

Yeah. So the first book is called No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, and came out in February 2019 and looked specifically at the workplace. 

00:07:25 Liz 

So how can we harness the motions to improve our leadership abilities to craft better teams, to improve communication? Things like that. 

00:07:34 Liz 

And then the second book, Big Feelings, is much more. It's much more personal and it looks at basically hard feelings. 

00:07:44 Liz 

So we wrote the first book, had experiences in our personal lives that were really difficult, but then also we're hearing from people like, you know, we, I think often people don't have an opportunity to talk about what they're feeling at work. 

00:07:58 Liz 

So we would do workshops and then afterwards that they became kind of therapy sessions. And it was this view into whoa, there's, there are really thorny situations. 

00:08:07 Liz 

People feel burnt out. 

00:08:08 Liz 

People struggle with perfectionism. 

00:08:10 Liz 

People have a lot of regrets in their personal and professional lives, and that all inspired the second book. 

00:08:17 Carissa 

Can we just rest really briefly on what, what, so what do you think the specific outcomes like I can project what I think the specific outcomes are for, like embracing feelings and emotions at work, but can you talk a little bit about sort of why that was important for you guys? 

00:08:38 Liz 

Yeah. So, some of it was we essentially set out to write the book that we both wished we had had when we entered the workforce. 

00:08:46 Liz 

So Mollie, my co-author, had a really similar experience where she got a job she thought she always wanted. She worked hard for it, and then it was like, just not a supportive work environment. And she also burnt out of it. And we both had so much guilt around not having succeeded in these roles, but then looking back. I don't mean, I don't think I would have ever been in my first job long term, but I also never knew that I could do something like go to my manager and say, hey, I actually like the writing parts of this job, can I take on more projects that have to do with writing. 

00:09:24 Liz 

And so very much was, it's also, I will say too like it just made sense to do a business book, our publisher was like you should start with a business book that's kind of like a nice safe, like lucrative entry point into book writing. 

00:09:41 Liz 

And I think that platform actually made it possible for us to write this second, more personal, more narrative book. 

00:09:52 Carissa 

So let's talk about the seven emotions, how you, how you came up with the seven emotions from the previous book. 

00:10:00 Liz 

Yeah so like I said, we published this book called No Hard Feelings and then I would say six months later, Mollie and I both had really hard experiences. 

00:10:10 Liz 

I was losing my father-in-law to cancer. I was also commuting 3 hours a day at the time like there was just a lot that was not good for my mental health and Molly was dealing with chronic pain issues that led her to feel a lot of despair. 

00:10:25 Liz 

I think the biggest thing we stumbled upon was suddenly changing what we did, didn't change how we felt like we had sort of hit these like, emotional points where it was like, I don't even know how to pull myself out of this. 

00:10:39 Liz 

And so we wrote down all the emotions we were experiencing at the time, and then surveyed people who had read our first book, who followed us on social media, and that allowed us, based on the responses there, allowed us to get it down to these seven emotions that we cover in the book, one thing that's interesting is people sometimes point out like, you know, comparison, which is one of the chapters is not an emotion, it's a behavior. 

00:11:04 Liz 

But when we ask people about envy, which is often what happens when you compare yourself to someone else, there was kind of a response, but when we said comparison, there was this overwhelming response and so it was interesting even to see that even though people could identify the behavior that they were engaging in, they still had somehow detached it like I think they were repressing the emotional response so much that the connection between like comparison and regret and envy wasn't obvious to them. 

00:11:33 Liz 

So in some cases we use the word that evoked the most response in people. So like perfectionism, uncertainty. 

00:11:42 Liz 

Whereas perfectionism is really about a fear of failure, and uncertainty is really about anxiety. But we wanted to meet people where they were. And it seemed like it was sometimes more the behavior versus the actual feeling. 

00:11:54 Carissa 

I did not notice that. 

00:11:56 Liz 

Yeah, some people are sticklers. So some people would be like “This is not an emotion.” 

00:12:02 Carissa 

Oh, I didn't even think about it. I mean. But can we talk a little bit about comparison because I think that's something I mean, all the emotions, basically. I personally feel like I try to rip or push down and have guilt for feeling, but I think all of my life I think that I've had issues with jealousy and it was. It's definitely something I feel like everyone when you tell them, like, oh, I struggle with comparison, it's hard not to imagine them judging you for it. 

00:12:36 Carissa 

And can you talk, you both talk about it pretty frankly, I think there's a story about Mollie and pregnancy I think that that you open with. But can you talk about comparison and why you think comparison maybe is something we struggle with. 

00:12:55 Liz 

Yeah, it's very natural. We're kind of hardwired to look around and see how we stack up to people. So humans are a relational species. The way that we know even, you know, sort of seemingly fundamental things about ourselves. Like how do you know you're tall? because you are taller than other people. 

00:13:14 Liz 

How do you know you're good at something? because you have more success metrics or whatever there's like, you've gotten more praise for it than someone else. 

00:13:24 Liz 

How do you know you're kind? Because you've seen people be not kind. So again, like, even these descriptors are based in comparison. So it's not, I think there's this common trope now that if you get off of Instagram you will be free of feeling bad because you're comparing yourself to others. 

00:13:41 Liz 

It can definitely help, but fundamentally, it's just something we do, but we do it in a, I think we often don't know of the common pitfalls. 

00:13:52 Liz 

So research shows that when we compare ourselves, we tend to compare our weaknesses to other people's strengths. And we also tend to compare ourselves to this like mish mash of 15 other people and so we create this fantasy person. So instead of saying, you know, my kitchen isn't as nice as my neighbor's kitchen, but you know, my living room is nicer. 

00:14:17 Liz 

It's just like my kitchen isn't as nice as my neighbor's kitchen. I'm not in Italy, like my friend who's posting on Instagram. I'm not as fast of a runner as my other friend from college, and so it's like you just take all these other things and mash them into one comparison as opposed to comparing yourself more in a more truthful way, which is like I've had, I have this sometimes where I'll see one of my friends gets like a promotion or one of my friends recently got a promotion and now manages a department of 200 people. 

00:14:49 Liz 

And I had this moment of like, oh, that's really cool and prestigious. Like, why don't I manage a department of 200 people? And then I kind of talked myself down from it by saying: I hate being in meetings back to back, you know, like I think I would actually really be miserable in this job. And it's also in a field that I'm not interested in, and she works hours that are just like, you know, she doesn't have a lot of flexibility in her schedule. All of these things that I really value and so even though there was this initial like flare up of jealousy, it was useful for me to be like - I need to actually compare the nitty gritty as opposed to just be like I don't do this. I'm a terrible person. 

00:15:30 Liz 

It's like, no, I've made choices that have led me away from that, and I'm very happy with those choices. 

00:15:34 Carissa 

I think that there was something there's like, a surprising plot twist in the chapter about actually needing to compare yourself more. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you mean by that? 

00:15:49 Liz 

So it's part of what I just said, which is not stopping, like often there is a stigma around feeling envious of someone. I find this especially with women in the workplace, where it's like we should all be supporting each other. So if you are jealous of someone else just, you know, pretend like you're not. Pretend like you're just happy for them. 

00:16:09 Liz 

Which, yeah, you should be supportive, but it's also totally normal to envy someone who has something you want. In the case of my friend, it was comparing myself more was not just stopping at the like, she has this prestigious job. I want it. It was what gives the day-to-day of that job. What does her schedule look like? Do I actually want that? And the answer is no. There's also research that shows, there was a study researchers ran where they asked people to like how good of a runner are you. 

00:16:39 Liz 

And people said I'm not a good runner and what they found is that people were thinking of the very best runner they knew. And so then they said, well, why don't you first write down ten of your friends, write down their names and think about how good they are at running and then they said, now how good of a runner do you think they are? 

00:16:57 Liz 

People are like, oh, I'm a decent runner because they had actually compared themselves to a broader range of people. So I think often we just, yeah, it's like this one person who seems to be doing really well in a specific area and we don't actually take the time to look around more or to look at people who don't have it as good as we do. 

00:17:17 Liz 

And so we're just only looking like up in the sense of this person has more in this one domain and forgetting about the fact that, like you probably have more in some domain than a lot of other people, and that can help you feel better too about where you are. 

00:17:33 Carissa 

This sound this is going to sound really sneaky that I had, I had like a lot of issues with envy in Graduate School and particularly I'm thinking about, I would get, it was really difficult for me because I really wanted to be, like, very happy and supportive. I felt a lot of pressure and I really value that I wanted people in my life to support me too. 

00:17:55 Carissa 

It wasn't like I was just like blindly thinking about it, but I would always kind of like default to, “Why? Why can't I have that job where I manage 200 people?” Which I I'm with you. OK. I don't know. I have like, it's very hard for me to manage myself and my emotions, but 200 people seems like a lot of people. 

00:18:17 Carissa 

But somehow I have figured out a way and I don't know if this is helpful or works for people or something you do, Liz, where I take credit for other people's success. 

00:18:29 Carissa 

In the sense that if something really good happens to me somehow or something really good happens to somebody I'm close with, I just pretend that that we're both having the same success at the same time, and then in ways it's, I feel like, I don't know, maybe I shouldn't be admitting that I do this, But I'll. OK, I'll say this. 

00:18:50 Carissa 

This way, so one I can think of as a specific example. After Graduate School, a good friend of mine, Jenny Odell, do you know her? 

00:19:01 Liz 

Yeah, she wrote the How to Do Nothing. 

00:19:04 Carissa 

She had, like, a lot of, I think. I mean, she's had a lot of success just in, in general. But then when How to Do Nothing came out. And it was a bestseller. And then it was on Barack Obama's list. I was like, s**t. I really want to be Jen. 

00:19:24 Carissa 

My life would be so much better, but I, if I thought about it as like sort of a network of people that we were connected with that her good fortune was also my good fortune. It helps me be a little less envious. And again there's no way Jenny watches these. But if she does. Jenny, I think you're great and I'm really proud you're my friend. 

00:19:46 Carissa 

But OK, so back to the book, can we. So we're totally out of time Liz, but I just wanted to kind of maybe touch back on the sort of conclusion or what you kind of again want people to feel when reading this book and sort of the main takeaways. 

00:20:05 Liz 

Yeah, I think it's honestly, I think one of the best outcomes of the book would be a conversation like we just had, like, people being like, cause I actually do the same thing where one of my friends came out of the book last year and then had, like, a New York Times article written about her. And there are these moments where it's, like, exactly what you said. Like s**t, I want that. 

00:20:24 Liz 

But I'm also, it's cool that my, I feel like that's the kind of person that I'm so excited to have in my life. And so having that mentality does help with the sort of harder feelings. 

00:20:38 Liz 

So I think if people just feel more comfortable sharing that, I think that will continue to normalize that these are emotions we all have. There's nothing shameful, you don't need to beat yourself up for feeling them. And then I also hope that people see the book as a helpful guide to working through hard moments and recovering from them and maybe finding meaning in them later. 

00:21:03 Liz 

I think there's so much pressure and messaging in our society now that's like, you know, if you don't, if you do these five things you should feel better. And if you don't feel better, that's, you know, you failed in some way and that, you know, ignores structural forces. It ignores the fact that, like life is long. If you're lucky, you're kind of signing up for bad days like we're all going to lose someone we love. We're all going to just not get something we want, have someone else succeed in a place where we're not succeeding right away. 

00:21:37 Liz 

And so it's just useful to know how to move through that. And also just accept that like it's fine. Those are, you know, feelings come and go in waves. Success comes and goes in waves, too, in some sense. 

00:21:52 Liz 

So it's, I think it's just like less pressure to always be radiantly happy and feel like life is good and you're thriving. 

00:21:59 Carissa 

Can I throw you another, potentially, maybe not curveball, but tough question, maybe not tough. I don't know. How do you feel on, what's your stance on post traumatic growth and maybe I should define that or actually I think most people just the idea that like you, hard, hard things in life are worth it because there are opportunities for growth. 

00:22:23 Liz 

Yeah, I definitely think it can be helpful. I think fundamentally making meaning, I think they've even added it as the sixth stage of grief now is just looking back and finding something that you did gain from that experience. 

00:22:39 Liz 

I really, really don't like. I think it's. It just takes time. Like it's useful to keep that in mind as you're going through something hard that like maybe one day I will find this meaningful, but it shouldn't be used as a weapon to minimize what you're feeling in that moment. 

00:22:55 Liz 

And I think it's also true that. You know, like losing my father-in-law, definitely, it's part of like why I'm having a family now, because it was for me, it crystallized like, oh, this is what's really important to me is family and the people in my life. 

00:23:11 Liz 

And I probably should like, step back from work a little bit because I was being, I was huge workaholic at the time, but also like, I would have preferred to not go through that. You know like, I wouldn't do it again and so I think it can be comforting in those moments to be like there might be something on the other side of this that, like, helps me cope with it. But it's not. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things we go through in life where, yeah, I would not sign up for that for the post traumatic growth that it's going to give me afterwards. 

00:23:43 Carissa 

Can I ask a couple, I have a couple more questions for you because I can't stop myself. 

00:23:50 Carissa 

So, like right now, I think, I don't know if other people will relate to this, but what I would love to hear is something you're hopeful about for the future or something you're excited about, something to look forward to? 

00:24:05 Liz 

Yes, I, so I'm having a baby in like 3 weeks which I'm, I would say hopeful and terrified. 

00:24:17 Liz 

But yeah, I think it's. I'm kind of, I'm looking forward to just being very present in the moment, which sometimes I struggle with and I think, you know, for good or bad, a child sort of forces you to put some of your own anxieties to the side and just focus on what's going on in the moment, so excited and hopeful for that new experience. 

00:24:43 Carissa 

Well, thank you so much, Liz, for doing this with me and best of luck with the whole labor process and sort of the transition from being one being to sort of being two. I don't know when your nervous systems actually detach from each other. 

00:25:03 Carissa 

Again, Big Feelings, it's a practical companion to take with you to make you feel a little less alone, and to also work through some of the hard, hard moments the hard feelings that you might be going through at the moment, so take care. 

00:25:22 Carissa 

Thank you again. So thank you so much, Liz. 

00:25:25 Liz 

Yeah, it's so nice to chat with you. 

00:25:27 Carissa 

You too. 

Many of us have a complicated understanding of the statement, “Things Were Meant To Be.” I know I do. So does Katie Hawkins-Gaar. It’s a concept that I long to take comfort in, but that’s not always helpful in processing grief.

Katie started My Sweet Dumb Brain in 2018, a year and a half after her husband died while running a half marathon. He was 32. Suddenly she was a widow at the age of 31.

My Sweet Dumb Brain is a newsletter about facing the ups and downs of life, all while being kind to yourself. It is like a dear friend checking in with you once a week to talk about what it feels like to be human right now.

In this interview, Katie talks about making heart-centered decisions, what other people remember about us, and passive vs active processing. Katie says carrying grief is a superpower and how the concept of “getting over” grief was not helpful.

Do you know someone processing intense grief right now?

Grief reminds us of all the love we have, and if we listen to it, with time, we might find peace with the past. If you are a person trying to hold multiple truths at the same time and take comfort hearing about other’s healing journeys, I know you will love Katie’s caring candid writing. By offering her truth, she softly affirms the truth in all of our existence.

Thanks so much for being here with me. As always, this is my favorite thing to do each week, and you make it possible. Love always, Carissa

**Transcription of audio can be found at the end of this post**

Humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others.

- Paul Bloom

Thank you for reading BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Paul Bloom is a professor, scholar, and writer who studies how humans make sense of the world. When he said yes to letting me interview him last year, I lost it. I have been in love with Paul’s writing for years. Ever since his book, “How Pleasure Works,” came out he has been a favorite of mine. In my opinion, he infuses just the right amount of human drama into research to keep it relatable and interesting.

We dig a little deeper into the connections of suffering and meaning, and talk about his book The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. For me, Paul Bloom’s writing helps me wade through the pressure to be happy all the time, that emotions are complex and often hard to find to be either all good or all bad. There is comfort in this mess.

When we get to the topic of motivational pluralism, Paul Bloom explains the “Experience Machine,” the thought experiment by philosopher Robert Nozick. If given the chance to be hooked up to a machine and live the rest of your natural life in an imagined life full of accomplishment and joy and pleasure and success far beyond your wildest dreams, would you do it? Paul has posed this question to a lot of different people and the answers always vary. But he says that he wouldn’t do it. He doesn’t want to just get the feeling of doing things, he wants to do things. He has people in this world that he loves, and he does not want to abandon them. I think this helps to shift the mindset on what it means to make meaning out of life - where surviving for the people I love can be a sort of beautiful motivation to stick it out and keep on going.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Wishing you a relaxing weekend with the people you love. XO, Carissa

Transcript:

00:00:02 Carissa 

Yay, hey everybody, I'm super excited to introduce you to Paul Bloom today. He's a professor of Psychology. He's a researcher in the areas of morality, of identity, and of pleasure, and he's also an author, and he just finished the book, The Sweet Spot, which is out now, which is amazing. 

00:00:24 Carissa 

And yeah, Paul, will you give us a quick, what sort of, how did you get into the studies of identity and understanding pleasure? 

00:00:33 Paul 

Yeah, I'm, thanks, thanks for having me on. 

00:00:35 Paul 

I got into the book because I was interested [in] certain puzzles of everyday life. So it's not surprising people like food and like sex and like to be loved and good company. But why do we like hot foods and saunas, running marathons. Scary movies. BDSM, you know, and your mileage may vary. It's sort of a list painful things, but everybody likes some stuff that's painful and difficult and hard. 

00:01:05 Paul 

And so I was really interested in how this contributes to pleasure. I was going to call my book the “Pleasures of Suffering” but the more I looked at it, I, just it got a bit broader and I started to think about ways in which we choose difficulty and suffering in ways that don't bring us pleasure in any simple sense, but bring us higher goals like, you know, starting a business or a romantic relationship sometimes. 

00:01:29 Paul 

Or raising children. Nobody raises children and thinks this is going to be easy. They know it's going to be hard. And I don't even think it's going to be fun in a simple sense, but I think it's going to give their life value. 

00:01:40 Paul 

And I began to think about the role that chosen suffering plays in a life we're living. 

00:01:47 Carissa 

Well, can you really briefly talk about how, I think that this ties into the idea that one can be motivated by different things and different things in the same moment, but also different things over the course of a lifetime? 

00:02:02 Paul 

There's a lot of people, and maybe this was me before, before I started the book, who thinks a lot of psychologists say we're just after pleasure, we wanna have pleasure. We want to avoid pain. 

00:02:11 Paul 

And whenever somebody tells us different, I said no, no, I wanna do good I wanna make the world a better place. We say, uh, you just wanna, you just wanna get the kick, the feeling good you get from doing that and I've come to believe for a lot of reasons that's just wrong. That I'm come to believe something that people call motivational pluralism, which is idea we want many things, so we do want pleasure. 

00:02:34 Paul 

And you know it's a really hot day outside. You're all sweaty. Nothing like a cool drink, yeah we like that. 

00:02:40 Paul 

We also want to be happy we want to look back and says this is a good life. I'm happy with my life I'm positive about it, but we also want to be good. 

00:02:48 Paul 

You know, I think very few people would take a pill that would make them into a psychopath, even if they were happier, you know, because we want to, we want to make the world a better place we want meaning. 

00:02:57 Paul 

We want meaning and purpose in ways that are sort of above and beyond happiness and pleasure. We want to make a difference to people's lives. We want to engage in long and difficult projects. One reason why I call my book The Sweet Spot is that for each of us, given all these many motivations, we have to find a compromise, have to find a sort of a proper space between all of this. 

00:03:20 Carissa 

I think that sort of I was wondering if you could speak to, I didn't ask you on the Live this, about sort of the trend of toxic positivity and how your book kind of plays into that. 

00:03:31 Paul 

It pushes against, it plays against it actually. 

00:03:33 Carissa 

Plays against it, sorry. 

00:03:38 Paul 

You're right, there's some, there's a lot of talk. A lot of people pointed out that psychologists seem to focus almost exclusively on happiness, pleasure, positivity. And I think they're missing something, and in fact they’re missing some fairly ancient wisdom. That I think all of the world's religions capture, which is a good life, is not merely a matter of you know maximizing the number of orgasms or hot fudge sundaes you have. 

00:04:04 Paul 

It's a matter of often in addition to those other things, it's often a matter, a matter of living a life you could be proud of, living a life you could be satisfied by. 

00:04:17 Paul 

And when you ask people whose lives are full of meaning, they'll tell you, and there's these are sort of scientific studies. They'll say my life is also full of difficulty, anxiety, struggle. The most meaningful jobs, for instance, are not the ones that pay the most nor that are ones that are most high status. 

00:04:34 Paul 

They're jobs like being a member of the clergy, being a social worker, being an educator, and those are difficult jobs, but they're difficult jobs involving struggles, sometimes conflict that make a difference, and so meaning pushes you in a different way than happiness, and I think too many psychologists and too many people are ignoring that. 

00:04:54 Carissa 

Why do you think we as humans crave meaning? 

00:04:57 Paul 

That's a really good question. 

00:05:00 Paul 

I think some of it may be cultural. There's sort of a notion that of long term goals, one should aspire to, and different cultures have different ideas what these goals are. 

00:05:12 Paul 

Some of them really valorized child rearing as a meaningful goal, others much less so. But I also think some of it is built into us. 

00:05:19 Paul 

I think that the sting from other animals sort of for Darwinian reasons we want to do things that make a difference, that impress the group, that show off our value in a community of people. Because we're very status oriented. 

00:05:37 Paul 

So I think unlike pleasure which could be fairly hard-wired, fairly built-in, and largely shared with other creatures. The appetite for meaning is something that distinguishes humans and has a source both sort of evolutionary and also cultural. 

00:05:51 Carissa 

Oh no, that was a really good answer and also a way of saying. 

00:05:56 Carissa 

I don't know, you don't know. 

00:05:58 Paul 

The best answers also say, no, you have caught me, whenever somebody says it's a combination of evolution and culture, that's kind of like saying “I don't know.” 

00:06:07 Carissa 

I mean, I think it's crazy how much I really want certaintude and answers when I know that there's, it's just, I don't think it's going to be within my lifetime, if ever. 

00:06:20 Paul 

I think, I'm a fan of psychology and I think we have answers to certain questions we could talk about things which I think we know. When it comes to the question of what do people want and what satisfies them, what makes for a good life, if somebody tells you they know all the answers, run the other way. So I'm just trying to present some ideas. 

00:06:40 Carissa 

Oh no, I think we mentioned this earlier that I mentioned this earlier in when we spoke about how the, for all my life I really desire to be a good person and to have competing sort of motivations in what to do is really confusing. 

00:06:57 Carissa 

Or how to be a good person and I think the idea of motivational pluralism is actually really helpful in accepting that there might, that humans are complicated and that there could be different motivations. 

00:07:09 Paul 

It's a way of acknowledging the problem. You're really happy at home. You have a good book in front of you and a glass of wine. You're feeling really good, but there's a sick friend you should visit and you know it's going to be a long trip. You know it won't be much fun and now you have a sort of this with the, that's the right thing to do. 

00:07:24 Paul 

But now there’s a pleasurable thing to do and there's no simple answer, it's not like, oh, we always do the right thing. People are complicated, sometimes. Sometimes pleasure could override morality. 

00:07:34 Paul 

I think sometimes meaning could override morality, so that's what we wrestle with. 

00:07:39 Carissa 

I was wondering if you could talk about the one such or the idea or the simulation that you could choose to enter into a life that was just a simulation that was pure happiness and joy and what you would choose. 

00:07:55 Paul 

It's a wonderful example. Just to sketch it out just a bit it’s by the philosopher Robert Nozick. 

00:07:59 Paul 

And he says, yeah, imagine an experience machine so that you plug into the machine. It's like the matrix, only much better, you plug into the machine and for the rest of your natural life, you're just lying on a table until your body dies a natural death, but you will live a life, an imagined life of accomplishment and joy and pleasure and success far beyond your wildest dreams and you will never know for a second it wasn't real. Your memory of choosing the machine gets blotted out. 

00:08:27 Paul 

And so the question is, would you do it? 

00:08:30 Paul 

And I'll tell you, I've asked a lot of people this who teach these classes and answers vary, but I wouldn't do. 

00:08:37 Paul 

Because I am, I want to do things, I don't want to just get the feeling of doing things. I have people in this world I love. And I don't want to abandon them, even if I wouldn't know I abandoned them. I still don't want to abandon. 

00:08:52 Paul 

And to the extent you say wow, there's a bit of a problem plugging into the machine or to take a more realistic example, living the rest of your life on some incredibly high quality heroin that just gets you totally buzzed. You see, that's not a good life. 

00:09:06 Paul 

That means you're also a motivational pluralist. It means you also see other things that should be maximized. 

00:09:12 Carissa 

Is there sort of, I don't know if you, I can't remember, I'm a little bit foggy these days, is there a sort of a generational difference between people who would choose the simulation and people who would choose to stay in the present. 

00:09:27 Paul 

It's a good question. I don't know of any systematic data from it. 

00:09:32 Paul 

I know when I've asked the question to people recently, a lot of people say that they would go into the machine and maybe that's because young people today are more hedonistic. Maybe it's because of COVID, which makes us makes many of us want to escape our lives, but yeah, there are definitely individual differences, and I gotta say to the extent that you say oh don't plug me into the machine. I'll have a full life. If that's cause I'm living a pretty good life now. 

00:09:58 Paul 

If I was in a in a prison, or if I was suffering from terrible pain or whatever, I might say, hey, plug me in. So I'm not denying that pleasure has its lures. 

00:10:09 Carissa 

It's weird that when you, when you talked about that, it really sort of elicited a really emotional response. I think during the pandemic, especially when I've been really sad and hopeless and sort of felt like you know, the things are stacked against me, surviving for the people I've loved or the people I love, I think is a real sort of beautiful motivation or having that sort of desire to stick it out with them is like a very fundamental source of meaning for me that I would know that I was letting go of, which I think is kind of disappointing or pointless I guess. 

00:10:46 Paul 

It's a beautiful way to put it. One of my subtitles of the book is “the pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning,” “a search for meaning” is a shout out to Victor Frankel's book, Man’s Search for Meaning. 

00:10:56 Paul 

And he talks about his experience in the Holocaust and talks about what people will survive on the concentration camps and what people decide to kill themselves or just give up. 

00:11:07 Paul 

He says the solution is meaning. That the people who make it through don't give up often have some sort of broader purpose or broader connection. Often the family or the loved ones that keep them going. 

00:11:19 Paul 

And you know this isn't the Holocaust, but any difficult time I think, has a similar moral, which is the thing to hold on to often is what you're describing very well, which is things that matter. Not day-to-day pleasures, but things that matter, deeper things like the people you love. 

00:11:36 Carissa 

The, well Paul, thank you so much for talking about your book. We'll talk about it again just at the end, but I want to be respectful of your time and ask you what this so this is not really a podcast. This video cast is called Bad At Keeping Secrets and so I ask everybody if you would be willing to share a secret. 

00:11:59 Paul 

You know I had a secret I was going to tell you. It was very boring and I told it to you before. But then we had a conversation, so I'm going to tell you a different secret this and well you could edit it out if it's too, it's too terrible. 

00:12:12 Carissa 

I don't know how to do that, Paul, so you're just gonna have to take the risk. 

00:12:16 Paul 

OK, fair enough, thanks for thanks for that. 

00:12:20 Paul 

We talked and you argued that some of my claims are controversial and then you said my last book is called Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, where I really do say a lot of how we think about goodness, is mistaken, and you asked me, very nicely, asked me: Are you a contrarian? 

00:12:38 Paul 

And in some way in my work I am. I push back on things and so on. But the secret is that I'm almost embarrassed to say that, is that I'm actually very uncomfortable with conflict in everyday life. 

00:12:52 Paul 

I really like to, I like to talk about ideas, but I like, kind of people, I like in a friendly, open way. And acrimonious debates, people screaming at each other. People dunking on each other. I have no stomach for it and so. 

00:13:09 Carissa 

What do you think that says about your core identity, that these sort of disagreements can exist in this particular realm, but not in this sort of more serious sort of violent realm or not. Maybe violence is the wrong word, but anger or that they can exist in the theoretical realm, but not in the sort of actual realm. 

00:13:31 Paul 

So you know, my partner and I have, you know, amazing relationship we talk about things all the time we disagree about and I love it. 

00:13:40 Paul 

But when it turns personal with anybody, it's just unpleasant and I wanna pull away and I think for whatever reason I have a difficult time being hated and a difficult time hating people. 

00:13:55 Paul 

And you know, and I'm not, this is not. This isn't really a a humble brag, I think sometimes a willingness to jump into the fray and really mix it up with people who are the enemy. I think sometimes this is a good thing, and that's not my strength. 

00:14:10 Paul 

My strength is more, I don't know, what we're doing now talking. You may disagree with me. I could disagree with you, but we're, we don't hate each other and this is all and that's my strength but my, but my secret is that there's a lot of people I think who read my book say, “boy, that's a guy who really likes likes, you know, do big fights and everything” and not so much. 

00:14:30 Carissa 

So give me an example of what sort of. Was that highlighting a moral or is this, do you find this is a Canadian attribute? I'm sorry to stereotype. You probably get that all the time. 

00:14:46 Carissa 

As a non Canadian. Who yeah, do you find it? Is it because, I mean I do think that, that's, you're Canadian, correct? 

00:14:55 Paul 

I am definitely Canadian. I was born in  Montreal. 

00:14:58 Carissa 

OK, I'm definitely not Canadian. To my knowledge. And I, I think for me I'm uncomfortable like to think about why I'm uncomfortable with conflict is I think I take it back to like culture and gender and expectations. But I'm also like, genuinely I, I'm just like not that interested in it? 

00:15:20 Carissa 

But I do like to argue. A lot, yeah. 

00:15:25 Paul 

Ah, I never thought of it... could be Canadians, of course, are notoriously polite. 

00:15:30 Carissa 

Sorry, I mean I mean sorry for making that stereotype, but sometimes there's a current I, find that there's a truth. 

00:15:34 Paul 

I thought when you said sorry, I thought when you said how you're making fun of the Canadians, you know they always go “sorry.” We're very apologetic, maybe. Maybe it. Maybe it is my Canadian blood coursing in me. 

00:15:47 Paul 

It's also I realized when I was a teenager when I was a graduate student, I would argue about everything. And I had a certain style. I went to grad school at MIT, which had a very belligerent style, and I and I had a style which people told me later was very belligerent and aggressive. 

00:16:04 Paul 

And I'd say, oh, thank you, good. That's what I want to be. I want to be, you know, and a lot of the people I admired, scholars were very, very argumentative and very, you know, take no prisoners you know, humiliate the other person, push your points, see how it, what happens. 

00:16:18 Paul 

And I've just grown tired of it. I've grown tired of it personally. I've grown a bit tired of it as a way of ascertaining the truth as good scientific practice. I like people who hold strong and interesting views. But the sort of treating, treating intellectual disagreement as if we're two armies meeting across the field and one must win and one must lose. I think just is not actually a good way of getting at the truth so maybe thinking about this the way I am now, my secret is, is a new secret. I hadn't always been this way. 

00:16:52 Carissa 

Oh, uh, people change. 

00:16:55 Paul 

Yeah, people change. 

00:16:56 Carissa 

I just wanted to add I don't think for me in my life it's been an effective strategy to actually win people over or to change their mind, not that or to have an effect. A thoughtful effect, a deep effect, an effect that is thoughtful and meaningful. 

00:17:16 Paul 

Yeah yeah, I agree, so we've come at it from different ways, but we're both in the same place I think. 

00:17:21 Carissa 

I'm really sorry about this beeping, my computer won't shut up, but anyway, I just want to talk one more time about this amazing book that doesn't give you any answers, but it's very thought provoking and explorative, on why we are the way we are. What at this point drives us to keep going and I think for me and I won't speak for other people, I think I need that. I need an argument to keep going and to understand why and the motivations behind that is really insightful. 

00:17:57 Carissa 

So thank you Paul so much. For your work. Thank you so much for your time today. 

00:18:01 Paul 

That means the world, this was terrific. Thanks for having me on. Let's do this again sometime. Talk about empathy. 

00:18:05 Carissa 

OK yeah anytime. Take care, bye. 

00:18:09 Paul 

OK, take care. 

**Transcription of audio can be found at the end of this post**

This year, I’ve been curious about how holidays like Valentine’s may perpetuate co-dependence in our relationships. What are some ways that we could rewrite Valentine’s Day? I don’t have the answers, but I recently asked you all about it and so many of you wrote to me saying you would want it to be about: a) platonic love; or b) fostering self-love and self-worth. I am really into both.

I’m excited this week to be sharing with you my conversation with Jessica Baum on her book, Anxiously Attached. We talk about Attachment Theory, how we can heal our relationships by healing ourselves, and becoming self-full.

Thank you for reading BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Jessica Baum is a licensed mental health counselor, relationship expert, and author of the book: Anxiously Attached: Becoming More Secure in Life & Love. When I say that Jessica Baum’s book is juicy…I just could not put it down.

Jessica and I both identify as “anxiously attached” (more on attachment theory here). If you’re not familiar with how being “anxiously attached” shows up in real life, here’s an example:

You text your partner. They don’t text back for hours, maybe days. You quickly go from “they must be busy at work” to “they are leaving me.” You feel it in your gut. Like the floor has dropped out from under you, like your whole world is turning upside down. You are spiraling and panicked. It’s hard to think about anything else.

In a physiological sense, when this happens, your fight-or-flight mechanism kicks into high gear. It is not just something that happens in the mind, it unfolds in real time in your body.

I have been there. I know exactly how this feels. Jessica’s brilliant book helps us move from shame around this experience to understanding and self-acceptance. In our interview, she explains that being anxiously attached does not occur out of nowhere. It is a state that comes from your relationship with your caregivers when you were a baby. But, it is not a state that has to determine how you are in all of your relationships, forever.

Jessica argues that once you awaken to this response in yourself, you can build a relationship with your internal state. You can hold it in the way that it needs to be held.

I loved this conversation and it spoke to something deep inside me. Please share it with someone who you think needs to hear it, too.

Thank you so much, Jessica, for making these ideas so accessible. xo, Carissa

Transcript:

00:00:03 Carissa 

Hey everybody, I am so excited to welcome Jessica Baum. Her new book Anxiously Attached is out for pre-order now. I had to like. So I was really excited to get an advance copy because I was so excited about this and when it came in the mail I just like, couldn't handle it and I really ate through it. 

00:00:26 Carissa 

It was. It's just really juicy. Could you give us a little bit of, so you are a relationship therapist, you're based in Florida. This is your first book, right? And you have kind of a background. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into this? 

00:00:43 Jessica 

Sure, I mean I personally got into it because I struggled with anxiety, depression. And quote un-quote “codependency” in my 20s and even in my 30s. And I originally wanted to help people with depression, but as I entered the field, I was finding myself actually helping codependency and treatment centers, believe it or not, and working with systems and then I became a certified Imago specialist which is really around relationships and the dynamics of how relationships get played out, our pacts, our unconscious pacts, our nervous systems and helping couples get back into connection. 

00:01:19 Jessica 

And so I built a very successful practice helping couples seeing this happen. I've experienced a lot of what's in my book in my personal life. And I just really wanted to get this information out to the everyday person in a way that was digestible, so that therapists weren't the only ones that knew this information. 

00:01:38 Jessica 

So I practiced writing a book and breaking it down so it was easy to understand, hopefully very easy to understand because they're complicated subject matters when you start talking about the nervous systems and how people dysregulate each other and get back into connection and co-regulation. 

00:01:57 Carissa 

So I recently tried to write about polyvagal theory and realized how complicated it is, can you kind of talk a little bit...maybe we should start there with like the intersections between attachment and attachment theory and our nervous system. 

00:02:16 Jessica 

Yeah, I mean I can explain a little bit about attachment theory again. And so it's, attachment theory has been around for a really long time and it's at the root of many things. And so when we're born, we're not fully developed as babies, we're actually still, one energetic unit with our primary caregiver. 

00:02:34 Jessica 

And the way in which that caregiver attunes or mis-attunes or attends, and it doesn't have to be perfect, but that interaction that we have with them lays down the fundamental blueprint for our nervous system, and actually more of our organs, like the quality of our organs, reflect the quality of our earliest relationships on a cellular level. 

00:02:54 Jessica 

But for this conversation, our nervous system starts to respond. If I cry louder, I get my mom's attention. If I shut down, you know, if I shut down, that means I'm giving up on the fact that my primary caregiver is there. 

00:03:05 Jessica 

So in these many embedded patterns and ways in which we learn to get our needs met, we can develop four different types of styles of attachment, and they're embedded patterns, so it's complicated because I know we all like to label things. But they're “secure,” which has an inherent trust that I'm going to get my needs met even when it's not perfect. 

00:03:24 Jessica 

There's “anxious” that sometimes my needs get met, sometimes they don't. I turn up the volume. You know, I try to get close because I'm not sure if they're going to get met again, and sometimes my sense of self worth is a little bit less. I'll track the needs of my primary caregiver and later my partner. I'll know what they're thinking, what they're feeling. I become hyper vigilant of the outside world, very much codependent traits. 

00:03:47 Jessica 

Then there's “avoidant.” And that's a true avoidant. Because there's two different types, is someone's parent who wasn't as emotionally attuned. And they really did shut down and they kind of walk away thinking like an inherent distrust and relationship that I'm not going to get my needs met and I can do it on my own and self regulate and very independent people. 

00:04:09 Jessica 

They're different, and then there's “fearful avoidant” which you know also has an embedded pattern of both. That's how I can best explain it. There are a different type of avoidant person which is avoidant, but were smothered by their parents, so it's really more anxious. And so when someone gets really close to them, they need to retreat because it brings up too much anxiety in them. It's very different than someone who literally doesn't value relationships on the same level. Usually those people are workaholics and they just don't have the same need for connection as someone who's anxious who has a high, high need. And a drive to stay close and in connection with their partner. 

00:04:47 Carissa 

So how does this sort of tie into the nervous system? 

00:04:51 Jessica 

So when you're a baby you know and you cry out, you're signaling to your mom come, you know and your mom is attuning to you. We call this coregulation - it's a dance between two and she's tending to you and doesn't have to be perfect, but you start to learn “ohh she's going to get there even when she messes up. I'm going to get my needs met.” 

00:05:13 Jessica 

But if she doesn't and I have to cry out louder and louder, I shift into a sympathetic mode and that gets embedded where I have to turn up the volume louder and louder to get back into connection. 

00:05:24 Jessica 

And if you don't get your needs emotionally met at all, and they're not really attuned to you, maybe they're not picking up on the residency circuits, or the mirror neurons, the baby learns “I'm not really going to get my needs then I'm going to shut down and I'm not really excited when my primary caregiver is here or not because that emotional connection isn't there.” 

00:05:43 Jessica 

So our nervous system starts to understand these things and then when we become adults and we turn, we attach to our primary caregiver, our partner. The attachment is the same. The behaviors might change. But if you're anxious, you're going to turn up the volume, you're going to expand your energy. 

00:05:58 Jessica 

You're going to get louder, you might get angry because that's a normal response, because that's how you've learned to get your needs met. That's what your system actually knows. 

00:06:06 Jessica 

It might look different on how it comes out, but the system and the embedded patterns are actually from early and early earlier times, so we embed these patterns. And then we reattach and our partner is a lot like our primary caregiver in that we try to get needs met through them. 

00:06:23 Jessica 

And when they're not being met, our system will react in the same way as it did when we were very, very small, and so people can say, oh, you know, I've the perfect childhood, and I don't know why I'm responding when my partner shuts down or ghosts me. Or distances me. 

00:06:37 Jessica 

It's painful to be in disconnection and if you experienced enough of that when you were a child, the sensations as an adult are explosive inside your body and they're really, really scary, as they should be because that was literally life or death for you as a baby. 

00:06:53 Jessica 

But your system is reacting that way in the here and now, because the same signaling is happening inside your body. 

00:07:01 Carissa 

There was an example you wrote about in the book about, I think it was an automatic thought that happened to you when your first husband didn't text you back. Can you talk a little bit about how your experience as a person with your first marriage, if that's not... I assume you're comfortable with it because you talk about it [in the book]. 

00:07:20 Jessica 

Yeah, yeah no, that's fine. I think it, I mean it still can happen to me to varying degrees. I just have awareness. I think the reason why I wrote the book is because my gut would fall through the floor like I felt like if enough time has passed, because he often broke up with me after that, but I could literally feel the disconnect in my body, the micro disconnection, and my gut would just, and normally my sensations come through my heart because we have two brains. We have a heart brain and we have a belly brain. And they store good things and they store painful memories in both these centers. 

00:07:51 Jessica 

And so my gut would fall through the floor and my world would get flipped upside down and I knew that there was a, an abandonment coming, a separation coming. 

00:08:00 Jessica 

And when I was writing the book, I was like I need to explain why this happens. This must happen to so many people on different levels, especially with technology these days. And how people are ghosting or not responding and how quickly you can go from “Well, they're probably just busy at work” to “Oh my God, my system is sensing danger.” And everybody's system is different. But fear is held in the in the belly and a lot of the stored emotions and connection is held in the heart so a lot of what comes up in these interactions is actually embedded trauma. 

00:08:35 Jessica 

I hate using that word, but our felt sense of the experience of disconnection and what it elicits inside our body sensationally so I really had to explain that like my gut would fall through the floor, I feel like I didn't have oxygen and I couldn't breathe and I didn't know at the time fully what this was about. I identified as anxious attachment, I identified as codependent, but I hadn't connected the science completely to it and I needed to connect it because that's what gave me compassion. “Oh my God, this is a sensational experience. This must have been something I experienced when I was very young and I need to get in touch with this, because it's not really lining up here right now.” 

00:09:17 Jessica 

And I think you know if you've experienced disconnection like that, then the connection can come back and it can feel even more heightened because now the “abandoner” quote unquote is healing it, so you can get stuck in these vicious cycles of just wanting to stay in connection and it feels like a roller coaster type of relationship. 

00:09:34 Carissa 

I think I relate to one of those people being like an ebb and flow. One minute I think that I had a totally healthy childhood. Whatever “healthy,” it's that term could encompass so many things, and then other times I think, “Oh I am, I'm very anxious but I don't remember.” These memories are sort of stored within different places in my body and not necessarily my consciousness. 

00:09:58 Carissa 

Can you talk maybe a little bit how memory lives in the body and how our core wounds affect us. 

00:10:05 Jessica 

Yeah, I mean that's such a great question because I don't think the average person understands it, but implicit memory is... we're not born with the fully developed hippocampus. And so when you think of memory, you think of “What can I recall?” But really, in the beginning I think it's first 18 months or so, we store memory as sensation. 

00:10:25 Jessica 

We don't store memory the way you think of storing memory, so we have these sensational memories that are living in our body, not in our head, and so they travel with us and they get cued every day as adults. 

00:10:41 Jessica 

And we're not even aware that this is a sensational felt experience that has been that has happened before, because it doesn't register like regular memory. 

00:10:50 Jessica 

So you know, as we get to learn, some people have regular memory, like when I do the work with them, they can remember reaching out for a parent and a parent not being there or a parent being disconnected. Some people just are like this is what it feels like in my body and I'm like that's an actual memory too that our body, the language of the body, is sensation, and memory is so much more than what we can recall in our brain. 

00:11:13 Jessica 

But what happens is when it happens in the here and now and even back then we come up with a story or a narrative. If we're really young, “I'm not good enough.” “I'm not lovable.” “I will be left.” The story and the thinking mind happens so much slower than the body. The body actually picks up cues a lot faster than the mind, and then the mind tries to make sense of it. So often what I see happen in relationships where people are getting in fights because their body is going crazy and there's all these feelings and sensations. And then they blame their partner, but the partner is really just stepping on a landmine that already exists or awakening a deeper part within them to be held, and there's a lot of blaming and projecting that can happen when you're unaware. “Wow. This is sensational. This is actually old.” 

00:11:59 Jessica 

My partner might be doing a behavior that hurts me, but the response in me is eliciting so much pain that this is a felt experience I experienced before and when we can get in touch with that, we can start to heal it and be with it in a different way and start to even be an observer and tend to it and hold it and not maybe even communicate to our partner differently when we start to understand that they're not actually the cause of it. 

00:12:24 Carissa 

Can you talk a little bit about the different terminology, I think in the book, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're not...it's not that you're not a big fan of using the term “trauma,” but you kind of have a couple suggestions for replacement terms that might be a better fit. 

00:12:41 Jessica 

Yeah, I mean so “trigger” for me has brought on a lot of shame and I'm doing this training now. We shift “trigger” to awakening and a lot of the language in there is awakening cause I think when you think “trigger” it's like, what do you think of? You think of a gun, you think of shame, you think “here I go again.” When you think of awakening, which is really the implicit, right, it’s really awakening these deep sensations in you, they're horrible and I get it. 

00:13:06 Jessica 

If you're listening to this, they're not fun but when you awaken to something, you can experience it differently just by shifting the language around it that now there's a holding that can happen, and that's actually in the amygdala. 

00:13:19 Jessica 

So if the awakening happens and it surfaces and we label it as a trigger and we get mad versus “wow, let me get curious. What's being awakened in my old brain? And let me tend to it differently or bring it to someone who can help me connect it to integrate it, you know, that's really what healing happens. 

00:13:39 Jessica 

Then we could start to speak about these things differently and have a new relationship to our internal experience, which is a lot of the book too. Is starting to learn how you adapt. And start to have new relationships and compassion for these awakened parts and to get out of the blame game. 

00:13:55 Jessica 

A little bit, and not saying that your behavior your partner's behavior is OK, but when you start to explain it from a place of this is what it's awakening inside of me, they're able to move in and be more compassionate and empathetic towards your internal experience versus you’re doing this to me. So I forgot what your question, but that was part of answering it. 

00:14:17 Carissa 

Oh no, it actually was great, “trigger,” explaining using the term awakening over trigger and trauma if that makes sense. 

00:14:24 Jessica 

Yeah, and I think trauma is a word that I think so many people have a problem with. When I'm talking about trauma, I'm talking developmental trauma so what happens to you at 2 or 4 might not feel like a tragic event, but in your body at that time, and you're very egocentric it feels like a traumatic event. 

00:14:45 Jessica 

You're missing school a lot of times, or having an alcoholic parent or these things that don't seem traumatic compared to someone getting raped or something like that, which is a very different type of trauma and actually easier to heal. 

00:15:01 Jessica 

But these things happening repeatedly over again have a big impact when you're small because you don't have a frame of reference and so they do very much impact you. And part of the work is acknowledging that it's not about blaming parents because our parents are locked in their own nervous system responses and likely doing the best they can but they likely impacted us and starting to notice “wow like this did really deeply impact me.” And “how can I reparent this?” “How can I be with this in a new way?” 

00:15:29 Jessica 

And that's another big part of shifting is use the internalization process of someone who's nurturing but a big piece of this is starting to start to look at your developmental process and realize I really was impacted by this and there's no one to blame. 

00:15:43 Jessica 

It's just starting to be with that more and allow that to surface. 

00:15:48 Carissa 

So can we take a little bit of a step with kind of thinking about our expectations in attachment and sort of fairy tales? I think in the book you, towards the beginning you talked a bit about sort of our conceptions of marriage being the ultimate goal of a relationship, and I thought that the way that you described the problem with our culture’s narrative around relationships was really fascinating. 

00:16:17 Jessica 

Yeah, definitely. I love that I could go so many different directions with that. And I thought marriage would bring me a sense of security too. And I think anxious people want commitment because they want that security. If you grew up in a home, and mine was a little like this, but there was a little bit of neglect or abandonment, and you watched Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or Twilight. 

00:16:38 Jessica 

I even talk about Twilight. 

00:16:39 Jessica 

A way to escape the pain in the moment is actually to project that your needs will get met one day by some person. Someone is going to sweep in and meet all your needs. And your relationship can meet a lot of your needs, but this actual projection to the fairy tale is actually a protection that happens when we're really small. It's actually a gift at the time. 

00:17:03 Jessica 

The problem is when we get older, especially if you're anxiously attached, you can be more prone to love bombing or when someone comes in and does promise you the fairy tale very much feels like the answer to your subconscious prayers. 

00:17:17 Jessica 

And so you can feel like this person is going to meet all your needs and maybe they do in the beginning because the honeymoon phase is wonderful and releases a lot of neurochemicals. 

00:17:28 Jessica 

But if you didn't feel special enough when you were young, those chemicals are going to feel extra potent when you're an adult, and so you're more vulnerable to be like this is my everything, and it sets up an unrealistic expectation because relationship goes through phases and relationships are going to bring up your core wounds, which I help you identify in the book and that conscious relationships are about realizing that these things come up because they're here for us to heal, hopefully together. 

00:18:00 Jessica 

And become more aware of it and rupture and repair, which happens as a baby is that I can have conflict in these core wounds can come up and we can work through it successfully and get back into connection. 

00:18:10 Jessica 

Not that we don't have conflict. Not that we don't have rupture. Not that we don't have times of despair that very much happens in every marriage and you know our work will show up because the deeper we fall in love with someone, the deeper the wounds will be touched and most likely activated. 

00:18:29 Jessica 

And when you do the work and you get more conscious, if you can, and then you have a partner that's willing the other side of, that is, they work through all of it and you have a conscious relationship that is not a fantasy anymore, it's a reality of the whole person, the good, the wounding, everything, and you start to work through these crises, which will can feel like crisises in the moment. 

00:18:53 Jessica 

In a way that becomes safer. So you reexperience them and your partner becomes part of your inner resource. But they're not your savior, and I think that's what our culture gets wrong is like if you get married and you see it on Instagram and you think that these people are having wonderful, wonderful relationships and they have no glitches. 

00:19:13 Jessica 

And I'm a relationship therapist and a human and I'm here to say that's just simply not the case. Marriages are hard work. Your core wounds will show up. Your patterns will show up. All of that is OK, and all of that can be healed, but most relationships evolve. You know they, they evolve in this format, and I think we live in such a transactional culture that, like the second that things get hard, people can jump ship and start the honeymoon phase all over again, thinking that there was something wrong when the relationship would really only...their woundings started to show up and their protection started to show up and they didn't work through the conscious harder parts to get to the other side. 

And so it's sad because so many people don't know this and they just think that there's something wrong with the relationship when actually there isn't anything wrong with your relationship. 

00:20:03 Jessica 

It's just asking you to get conscious of what's showing up in the here and now. 

00:20:08 Carissa 

Jessica, so there are two. We're like running out of time, but I want to make sure that I touch on. I really wanted to talk to you a little bit about the sort of spiritual aspects of your book and for those of you, well, I mean for me, language is really important and I often don't use it correctly, but could you define what you mean by when I use the term “spirituality,” what that brings up in you. 

00:20:38 Jessica 

That brings up so much, so I use spirituality in the book and I back it up with neuroscience so I do both. So if you're inclined to spirituality, this is my thoughts around it. And here's the neuroscience. 

00:20:51 Jessica 

As humans, we're biologically wired to warm connection, and as you do the work you internalize nurturing people. So you take experiences of warmth and care and you bring them into your internal world and you expand your ability to access more and more people in a loving way you can kind of...It's all felt experience, but I think anxious people feel alone in the world. 

00:21:19 Jessica 

And loneliness happens to be one of their core wounds. Or “I'm going to be neglected or abandoned.” 

00:21:25 Jessica 

And as you internalize more and more healthy people, you start to realize how not alone you are and how interconnected you are and how many people actually are going through something similar and or able to offer deep space and love and compassion for you when you reach out. 

00:21:45 Jessica 

And so I think the spirituality is realizing the universe helps you grow, and some of these hard situations are for growth. 

00:21:56 Jessica 

But the universe also provides you, usually with messages and tools, and hopefully people if you're open to it, because a big part of this is letting in the right support. You can't heal alone, but letting in the right people to help you. 

00:22:12 Jessica 

Because if you didn't...if you internalize, for example. I love my mother. Bless her heart. She was the best thing ever but she was going through postpartum depression and a lot of anxiety. And so I internalized an anxious mom and a pretty absent dad. 

00:22:27 Jessica 

So I needed to reinternalize some people who are really safe for me, and I need to experience that on the external world and realize that I can pull that into my internal world as a resource which is very hard to explain. And it's that you're reparenting or you're repositioning new people into your psyche that can help be a resource for you. 

00:22:51 Jessica 

And for me, that is spiritual. And I, oh God, I've been through so many hard chapters in my life and I've struggled and currently going through hard chapters. I think you can trust that A) growth is always there even when you don't want it, and B) the person you least expect it or there are more people around you that want to support you and help you. 

00:23:14 Jessica 

If you raise your hand. And you reach out to the right support that will help you move through these things, that you're absolutely not alone. 

00:23:21 Jessica 

And quantum physics even proves that we're all interconnected. So call it spirituality meets science. It's coming more and more to our awareness that we are so interconnected we're connected to the earth. We're connected to each other. We're connected to each other's nervous systems and the more you can trust that and lean on that, the more I think you make decisions that more are more in alignment for your highest good and the more you can let go and get out of the ego state that you're all alone because you're truly not alone. 

00:23:52 Jessica 

We are truly all in this together. We're just not aware of it. We feel separate in the moment and so part of the work is to tap into that sensation. And I can tell you through my own experience at the times when I have been regressed and felt really alone, I imagined my therapist on the corner of my bed. I imagined all the friends who really do care about me and being able to access that at the same time when I was feeling really alone and sad about a partner or something. 

00:24:25 Jessica 

Being able to have that dual access, “but there are all these people who do love me and do care” is an expansion to realize that you don't have to be in that lonely state all along and that is actually part of the spiritual or transformational growth to building new plasticity, but also awareness in those regressed moments. 

00:24:47 Carissa 

Can you just really, briefly, before I ask my final couple of questions just to, when you say plasticity. We didn't talk at all about neuroplasticity, which I think is a really exciting sort of development that I don't know when I first came into contact with the word neuroplasticity, but, can you talk a little bit about...Can you just define it and talk about how it relates to our capacity for change in growth? 

00:25:14 Jessica 

Yeah, well for a lot of people, for many, long time we always thought that you know you were set in one way and your brain is developed at a certain age and that's just simply not the case. 

00:25:24 Jessica 

We have a lot of science saying that our brain is malleable and we can change and if the environment around us changes then we can build new neural pathways and so a lot of the book is about that. I can kind of, I want to like, so if I if I'm sitting in a house and my neighbor is across the street and there's snow on the ground and I walked to their house every day, I'm building a neural pathway and if that neural pathway is anxiety and that's how I know how to get there, that's the pathway I'm going to choose is the pathway of least resistance. 

00:25:56 Jessica 

It's been a well worn path in my brain, but as you start to do the work and you expand what we call a window of tolerance and you start to be with these parts and these sensations more, you start to build new paths to the same house. There are actually harder paths in the snow, which is why we have to repeat them. 

00:26:13 Jessica 

And on a really bad day if I'm in a rush and really freaked out, I'll take the familiar path. But as you do the work, you're building new pathways in your brain. And you will start to pick the other pathways to that house because you'll have more options. And you won't be as reactive. And so the brain starts to change and the brain we now know can change at any moment. 

00:26:36 Jessica 

So if you didn't have self regulation, you don't have self regulation, you can get that through healthy co-regulation. If you are really reactive, when you do the work you will build space in your internal world to have the capacity to have different reactions when these sensations come up and as you start to see, well, OK, last three times I reacted badly, but on the 4th time I was able to pause and breathe because that actually can trick your brain back into safety. 

00:27:04 Jessica 

And I was able to be more resourced and I picked a different path that was less harmful for me and potentially my partner. A lightbulb moment goes off that there are there are other ways in which to deal with these feelings and sensations when they come up, and so that's the developmental process of building new pathways that weren't there before and it is work. That's why they call it “earned security.” 

00:27:28 Jessica 

But it's pretty cool when you're in it because you start to, not every day is an easy day, but you start to realize wow, I have more options now. 

00:27:35 Jessica 

There's more space. There's more awareness, there's more holding and I'm not quite as reactive. 

00:27:42 Carissa 

It also offers a sense of hope and possibility that I take a lot of comfort in and kind of going back to the sort of how you define spirituality as a trust that growth is always available if we need it. 

00:27:58 Carissa 

So I know, we're almost out of time, but I really want you to talk about your concept of “self-full.” 

00:28:06 Jessica 

Yeah, so self full is actually, so I talk about three states, a selfless state, a self-full state, and a selfish state. And many years ago I was working with codependency and I kept telling my clients you got to learn how to be selfish. 

00:28:20 Jessica 

And they would look at me and then, like I can't deal with that word. And I was like this word isn't going to work. And the truth is selfish, not really what I was going for and there's a pendulum and so we can like in our defense mechanisms, we can lead to a default. 

00:28:37 Jessica 

So selfless is a person who self abandons, who's slightly more codependent and who knows the needs of others, who will have poor boundaries because they don't want to disappoint others or the fear of asking for their needs. 

00:28:51 Jessica 

A selfish person is very aware of their own needs, and there's nothing wrong with that. 

00:28:55 Jessica 

But it's also survival state, both selfless and selfish, are sympathetic states. 

00:29:02 Jessica 

Self-Full is expanding what we call eventual state of connection and ability to stay in more receiving and giving and there's a fluidity to that and so we shift out of these states constantly and in our romantic partnerships and other partnerships. Wherever we place high importance, we can shift into our default, which might be selfless, right? 

00:29:26 Jessica 

But as we start to do the work and start to challenge some of this, we become more in the self-full state. We can actually become aware of my nervous system is activated or I'm in a selfless state, I'm giving and giving and giving. I'm exhausted, I am running on fear right now. I need to shift into a self-full place or you know, I keep partnering with someone who's selfish, quote unquote, but they're also in a survival place. 

00:29:51 Jessica 

Or I'm being selfish right now because I'm scared and I'm only thinking about myself. 

00:29:56 Jessica 

None of this is wrong. 

00:29:58 Jessica 

There are states of being, but in the book it's about expanding the self-full state, getting back into homeostasis or regulation faster and starting to realize that I have a sense of safety in my body, more and more and more and when I'm not safe, I feel it and I can get back with these tools into a sense of safety and connection, more and more and more, so we might slip in and out, but again, the neuroplasticity and the work is about expanding our ability to be in that state or the ability to get back to that state faster. 

00:30:35 Carissa 

Well, Jessica, thank you so much for coming on and talking with me about Anxiously Attached, which you can pre-order all the links in the newsletter today. But I just wanted to say this book really weaves, it's really timely, and it really weaves in all these sort of like cultural concepts that I feel in the air and just puts them all in one spot. And makes them really accessible. 

00:30:56 Carissa 

And I also think already like it's again creating this space between this sort of initial sort of, I guess awakening and my response time, and I can feel it. And it's really exciting. So thank you so much for doing this and for coming on. And for also the amount of work and care and sort of personal story that you share in here is, it's just, it's a beautiful book, thank you. 

00:31:22 Jessica 

Thank you so much and I just got chills. 

00:31:25 Jessica 

I can tell that it really deeply resonates with you and thank you for having me and helping me get this message out and I appreciate you. I hope we stay connected and I love your artwork.  

00:31:36 Jessica 

It's so impactful and so needed too. We all have our way of getting through to people and you've touched me as well. 

00:31:45 Carissa 

Thank you, take care and I'm excited to see what you come up with next. And best of luck with your launch of everything. 

00:31:51 Jessica 

Thank you, bye. 

**Transcription of audio can be found at the end of this post**

Florence Williams is a journalist, author, and podcaster. Her book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, totally had me at the title.

I have been a fan of Florence Williams since I read her book, The Nature Fix, a while back. BUT when I heard that she had been writing on my favorite topic ever I lost my mind. Her book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, is everything I could ever want in a book - deeply personal vulnerable stories alongside expert understandings of what is going on throughout the body. Florence herself was taken aback when her long-time partner left her. She found herself losing weight, not sleeping, and eventually developed type 1 diabetes. She learned a lot. She tried a lot. This book is a testament to the valid pain that we all feel when our heart breaks.

I was so excited to have the chance to sit down and speak with Florence about her book and her experiences with heartbreak. If you’ve heard about how your body and mind change when you fall in love, and have always wondered why it hurt so badly to have your heart broken, this book breaks it down biologically, while following along with Florence as she experiences it all. Not to mention, in the audio version of the book you get to actually hear from her rebound. And she even taped her therapy sessions so you get to hear her go through the process in real-time. Like a friend, holding your hand as you go through the pain together.

Thank you for reading BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS. This post is public so feel free to share it.

P.s. Florence shares one of the best secrets I have heard yet!

Thanks as always for being here with me, all my best xo

Transcript:

00:00:02 Carissa 

Hey everybody, thanks so much for tuning in to Bad At Keeping Secrets. I'm Carissa, and I feel so unbelievably lucky to have Florence Williams here today. She's a scientist, journalist, and memoirist. She has three books, and she's all around I would say, a conceptual artist. But I can't say that I don't have a certain amount of bias in saying that. 

00:00:29 Carissa 

I think most of my Graduate School work and my work thereafter has been dealing with our understanding of heartbreak and relationships and sort of the spectrum of emotion, and I feel like Heartbreak, Florence's new book, a personal and scientific journey, does just that, she melds her own heartbreak and her own story with sort of cutting edge research on how pain and emotional pain and trauma affect the body. Kind of I would say, in your own search of sort of coping with what was going on and then sort of disruption of your identity. 

00:01:06 Carissa 

Can you talk a little bit, Florence, about kind of what events happened in your life that sort of spur this research? 

00:01:16 Florence 

Sure, and thank you for having me for this conversation, and thanks for saying I'm a conceptual artist, that's like, that's such a compliment. 

00:01:27 Florence 

So, you know, I often my own life is what drives my curiosity to the topics that I write about. And I tend to, you know, write everything a little bit in the first person, but it's usually a very subtle first person, but when I got heart broken, it became a much bigger first person. And so the book really does kind of veer into memoir because it is by necessity, an extremely personal kind of topic that requires baring one's emotions, and I think being really vulnerable on the page, which is kind of the whole point of getting through heartbreak, is kind of owning and inhabiting your vulnerability. 

00:02:14 Florence 

I met the man who would become my husband when I was eighteen. It's my first day of college and we were together for 32 years until he really fell in love with someone else and that was really hard, it was really hard. I was dealing with, you know, a sense of betrayal, a sense of abandonment, the loss of the life I knew, the loss of the future that I thought I had, and a lot to deal with in terms of, like, just my self-esteem and my identity and how I was going to survive. 

00:02:56 Florence 

And a lot of fear, a lot of fear. 

00:02:59 Carissa 

I think...Well, well, thank you for sharing, obviously, I mean this is a really hard, potentially, topic to talk about. And I wanted to kind of ask you about when that sort of happened, you had done some research in the book about the sort of ways that our brains change, and sort of the symptoms around or the correlations between having like a death heartbreak in some ways being worse than a death in terms of the brain, chemicals, or chemistry changing. 

00:03:33 Florence 

I don't, I don't really want to sort of order one as being worse than the other. 

00:03:36 Carissa 

That’s fair I shouldn't have done that. 

00:03:37 Florence 

I mean, I think grief is, it's such an idiosyncratic emotion. It's so different for everyone, and certainly there's a lot of fear of the unknown and fear of the future and people who've lost a life partner as well, but with this kind of heartbreak, there's layered in on top of that, the sense of abandonment and sense of, yeah, the rejection someone chose someone else over you or thinks they want someone else over you. 

00:04:07 Florence 

And as humans, we are not, we're not very happy about being compared to other people about changes in our status. You know, we're hyper aware of our sort of standing in a group or in a couple. We're very, very hypersensitive, and our brains are designed that way because that's how we survive best, is if we are liked. If we are loved. If we can get along with other people, that's how we succeed. It's how our offspring thrive, you know, we need other people. 

00:04:48 Florence 

And so, when we sort of feel like we've been kicked out, it's terrifying and our bodies register that, our immune systems even, register that as being a threat to our very survival. 

00:05:03 Carissa 

You talked a little bit in the book about being, you had a, you were taking, I think you were having blood draws throughout the breakup in different durations. Can you talk a little bit about how the heartbreak actually affected your nervous system, immune system, and potentially genetic implications? 

00:05:25 Florence 

Yeah, I mean it's one of the things I often do in my sort of writing is that I find ways to kind of experiment, you know, on myself, to tell the story. And when I had heard that lonely people, of which there are many, many, many. That we know, and we've known for a long time, that people who identify as lonely have a 26% increased risk of early death, that they're much more likely to develop chronic diseases such as metabolic diseases like diabetes, such as cardiovascular diseases, metastatic cancer, even Alzheimer's and so I was interested in why, like, why was that? 

00:06:15 Florence 

Why does your immune system care if you're lonely? How does it know that you're lonely? 

00:06:19 Carissa 

Interesting to apply care to this this this system that we feel like it doesn't care, but actually does. 

00:06:29 Florence 

You can't really hide things from your immune system. Like somehow it knows everything. But why, like you know? And so I worked with this immunogenetics who's made it his life's work to find and identify the transcription factors, the actual different kinds of molecules that tell your immune system how to upregulate or downregulate certain types of immune cells to fight different kinds of diseases or threats. 

00:07:01 Florence 

And it turns out, when we're feeling lonely, our bodies pump out a lot more inflammation, and that's because we're sort of gearing up in some ways for a wound, for, for battle, for you know because our bodies and our brains feel like we've been abandoned, so now we're on our own suddenly. ‘Oh, we need a lot more. We need a lot more information.’  

00:07:26 Florence 

That's gonna help us in the short term if we're alone, you know, stumbling through the jungle, but it's not really gonna help us if we're A) living through a pandemic when we need not to be fighting wounds, but to be fighting viruses and you know if we're gonna face these kinds of social pains for a long time, like potentially months and months and years and years, and even decades for some people. 

00:07:50 Carissa 

Can you talk about how if you don't mind sharing kind of that, you thought that you knew that there was going to be emotional pain, but could you talk a little bit about the specific ways that this heartbreak affected your body? 

00:08:05 Florence 

Yeah, so I did. I knew it was gonna hurt emotionally. I didn't expect my body to start breaking down in the aftermath of heartbreak and. 

00:08:15 Carissa 

It's like a really inconvenient time. 

00:08:18 Florence 

It's like please can I just have my health? 

00:08:23 Carissa 

Yeah no. 

00:08:24 Florence 

No, yeah, so yeah, I mean, so again, our nervous systems get really hyper, sort of activated to prepare for threat and so things like, you know, sleeplessness like you're, you're hyper vigilant, you're looking over your shoulder waiting to be jumped, you know, by a predator. 

00:08:46 Florence 

So your digestion doesn't work well. You know you don't sleep well. I lost 20 pounds like right away that I did not want to lose, and I was diagnosed with diabetes. Adult onset Type 1 diabetes, which is pretty rare. Usually that's diagnosed in children. And it was part of my autoimmune system, you know, kind of responding probably to all this inflammation that my white blood cells were now putting out there. 

00:09:18 Carissa 

So I think I think that when I think about the sort of, not to overuse the word ‘journey,’ for feeling better, what do you think about sort of the language around heartbreak that might need a little bit of altering? Or I guess what I'm asking is, since you've tried all these different ways to kind of move through it, time being an important one, what do you think, what parts of the way that we talk about language aren't helpful or talk about heartbreak with language aren't helpful? 

00:09:51 Florence 

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I found so many of the metaphors actually really apt. You know, the pain metaphor is the broken heart. I mean, there actually is literally some heart break that people experience where their hearts stop pumping sometimes in the wake of this kind of grief. So the pain metaphors were very apt, I think. 

00:10:11 Florence 

What's a little more problematic, and this extends beyond heartbreak, is the way we talk about trauma. As being, you know, so devastating, and I think we don't spend enough time talking about how in, in some ways trauma is normal, like we're supposed to feel deeply upset when something has gone wrong. We're supposed to feel unsafe. Our bodies kind of protecting us by doing that, but on the other side of that trauma, very often there is growth. 

00:10:48 Carissa 

I think you talked a little bit about this in the IG Live about kind of how heartbreak in some ways has made you a better human. Could you talk a little bit about what you've learned, or how you've grown from this experience? 

00:11:06 Florence 

Yeah, I mean I used to be someone, I think, who was really focused on my career, focused on my kids. Even though my marriage wasn't always so fulfilling and connected, you know, after 32 years, I didn't pay a lot of attention to my heart and to ways in which maybe I was feeling like sort of hurt or sort of sad or not connected. I wasn't spending a lot of time with my emotions. It was kind of easier not to, and when you're so knocked over by something like this, you have no choice but to confront your emotions, like they are just gonna clobber you. 

00:11:53 Florence 

And the best thing you can do at that point is to sort of, pay attention. Like what are these emotions telling you and when I surrendered to that those deep, kind of the deep pain, and the deep suffering, I also weirdly and unexpectedly found myself being open to other emotions like to love - of my kids, or love of my friends. Like the being vulnerable made it possible for me to sort of relate and move through the world in a different way. That was weirdly fantastic and rewarding. 

00:12:32 Carissa 

Can you talk a little bit - I'm sorry, I'm sorry if I interrupted you a little bit - about how, in some ways it cultivates or the ability to empathize with other humans and be compassionate. 

00:12:48 Florence 

Well, when you've experienced your own suffering, I think it's it's easier to see it in other people and to empathize with other people going through it. 

00:12:58 Carissa 

I wanted to talk two more things. I want you to talk a little bit about the role of finding awe and beauty because I feel like that is a theme throughout the book. But I also wanted to, if you could talk a little bit about the sort of extras on the audio version of the book that I think are really fascinating. 

00:13:19 Florence 

Yeah, thank you for asking about that. As someone who's done several podcasts and has also been interested in audio work, I taped all the interviews throughout the reporting for this book, including, I kept an audio journal. I taped my therapist, I taped my best friends. I taped the sound of crows on the river you know, and the wind and the rain. And so I ended up with 200 audio files that we decided to actually layer in to the audio book. So the audio book is this kind of hybrid between a classic audio book and almost like, podcast. 

00:14:02 Carissa 

I think that this is this is again where I kind of feel like the conceptual artist comes in. Are you familiar with Sophie Calle’s work? 

00:14:09 Florence 

No, who's that? 

00:14:10 Speaker 1 

She's a French conceptual artist who's done a lot of work on documenting her own heartbreak. I think the piece that comes to mind was she videotaped, she decided that she was going to take a road trip with a man and this is like in the 1970s across the United States and make him fall in love with her by the end of the trip and document the whole thing. I mean I won't spoil it, but. 

00:14:32 Florence 

How do you spell her last name? 

00:14:34 Carissa 

So C-A-L-L-E, she's represented France at the Venice Biennale several times, but there's, I mean there's so many different people working in this vein, but she came to mind. But I think like the idea that the immersive nature of having these like actual reality, the sounds, I almost feel like maybe I need to have whatever you were drinking at the same time while I'm listening to it and have this like immersive experience which I feel like is really important right now when everything is virtual. 

00:15:08 Florence 

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think there's something about sound that creates a real intimacy with the listener or the reader. You know the emotions are so raw and, you know, in some places and they're just easy to access. 

00:15:22 Carissa 

Can you talk about how you actually, I mean, this takes a lot of guts, Florence to like interview your rebound. 

00:15:33 Florence 

It probably took more guts on his part. 

00:15:37 Carissa 

Pretty mutually gut involved I guess, but how was that like going back through, kind of combing through your experience and connecting these people, did you find that there was an alignment with how they experienced the events with how you remember it? 

00:15:56 Florence 

No, I don't think that at all. I think, you know, that's the thing about life is that you know we all are sort of governed by our own egos and our own perspectives. And as, as anyone who's written a memoir knows, or who has read a memoir written by a family member knows, you know, they're definitely different experiences by different people, even of the same events so. 

00:16:22 Carissa 

Yeah, it's crazy in my own life how we remember things so differently. 

00:16:27 Florence 

Everyone has their own story, everyone has their own story to tell. 

00:16:31 Carissa 

Yeah, and they're all really exciting. Florence, do you have a secret at all? Did you think at all about that question that you'd like to share? Even though this book is like the most intimate vulnerable secret that anyone could ever share. 

00:16:48 Florence 

All of my secrets are laid bare. I mean, you know, I, I guess, just to be even more intimate or more obvious to take one thread a little bit further. I don't talk as much, as I felt, that sex was like a very healing kind of experience for me, coming out of a long marriage, like rediscovering that part of my identity was super profound and I just hint at it in the book. But that could be a whole other conversation sometime. 

00:17:23 Carissa 

Recently I was interviewing someone who talked about this data behind couples. How many couples say that they're actually having sex and how much sex they're actually having through, uh, analyzing Google searches and it turns out we like lie about it, a lot. And that no one's having sex.  

But I think like when I was in undergrad and when the last time I broke up, I've been in a long term relationship for 12 years now, but the I think one of the most soothing or like coping skills that really worked for me was getting back out there and was that distraction, and I think that your book is really validating because I'd never heard that that was an OK strategy. It was always just like a shitty strategy, that I was careless with other people's emotions, but actually I mean like if you're just really honest about it, and both people are consenting, I feel like it can be a really positive experience. 

00:18:25 Florence 

I think, you know, it's tricky, right? Because you have to feel safe. I mean, that's part of the whole point of getting over your, or getting through, you know never gonna get totally over, you know, your griefs and your losses, but you need to come to a place of safety and so if you can engage in sex in a way that feels really emotionally safe, it can be, it for me, it was really. 

00:18:54 Carissa 

I think the sort of cool thing to imagine is what it would feel like to be desired. 

00:19:00 Florence 

Yeah, that was amazing. I mean everything about it just blew my mind wide open. 

00:19:06 Carissa 

Well, Florence, that secret I think that's great. Can I ask you one more question? I'll make it really fast. 

00:19:15 Carissa 

This is in regards to sort of my own interest, but when you're writing about other people, especially sort of reflecting on other people's actions and your ex, how do you sort of marry how you talk about being authentic with your experience and your story - sorry to use the term marry. 

00:19:35 Florence 

[laughing] Don't use them, PTSD. 

00:19:38 Carissa 

Well just I think a lot of my work, it's tricky because I know that my actions affect other people and I don't want to harm them, but I also like this is how I generate the, or the content that I'm interested is the content from our lives. And do you have any sort of, how did you go about doing that, or are there any sort of? Did you have to? How did your ex feel about this? 

00:20:01 Florence 

Well, I, very early on let him read an early draft, and he made comments on it and requested some changes and I accommodated those. I feel like I worked really hard actually to protect him, because of my kids largely, and I feel good about that. 

00:20:25 Carissa

Recently, I did some writing on that we had to terminate a pregnancy for medical reasons and It was like a really big. Like there were some people in my family that were really upset that I had written about it and felt like it was really inappropriate. But for me it reminds me of this sort of, I think Jericho Brown told me once that you can't limit your experience in pursuit of creativity and your understanding of it, because it's all we have. And I think that, I think that you do a really good job of being really sort of neutral and non-judgmental through intense pain. 

00:21:10 Florence 

Thank you, thank you, I've heard that when I was also when I was getting my Fine Arts degree, my - 

[phone ringing] 

00:21:19 Carissa 

Sorry, it's funny, so I have an editor who always thinks it's funny how my mother calls during these. Every one. And I don't know how to turn it off, anyway, she’s calling now. But you were telling about your arts degree. 

00:21:35 Florence 

Yeah, I mean I had a teacher once who said it's OK to write about other people. But you have to be fair. 

00:21:42 Carissa 

I like that 

00:21:43 Florence 

And if you don't tell your story, if you feel like you're being censored, that's also bad for your health. So self-expression, vulnerability, showing up, all of that stuff is kind of what we need in order to be healthy and to be happy too. 

00:22:03 Carissa 

Yeah, well thank you so much Florence for making time to do this with me again. Everyone, I will put in the e-mail a link to get Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey. Also check out Florence's website. There will be links for the audio files that we were talking about that are really exciting and immersive, and I really appreciate this. Florence it was a really, like, page-turner. It was a novel - it was a not a novel - it read like a novel. But it actually had like, really honest deep understanding of the pain and trauma that we go through when we go through heartbreak. 

00:22:43 Carissa 

So thank you so much for everything that you do. 

00:22:44 Florence 

You're so welcome. Thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. Appreciate it. 

There is something inherently beautiful in the human condition and being able to experience the entire range of emotions, both good and bad. But there’s also something undeniable that we can’t escape from - life is really hard. Sometimes I’m still not sure how I feel about silver linings. For me, it feels like there is a reality that is being denied when I force myself to see the “good” in every situation. Because sometimes things just suck.

Thank you for reading BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS. This post is public so feel free to share it.

I had the chance to speak with Kieran Setiya about his new book Life Is Hard, a philosophical guide to facing life’s inevitable hardships (and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Economist). Kieran is a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his book shows how the tools of philosophy can offer us a map for navigating life’s rough terrain, from personal trauma to the injustice and absurdity of the world.

I am not against acknowledging that the randomness of the world and our existence can and does help us learn from things, but do they always have to make us stronger and better? I think there is space to hold both in harmony with each other. Life is hard, but it is really really beautiful too.

Thanks for being here with me, much love to you all

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I am not the kind of person who wants to be happy all the time. Actually, I am a wallower - sitting in pain is somehow worthy of time. But sometimes I get stuck. And lately, I have been deep in the mud. So I invited Cassie Holmes, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management to talk about her new book, “Happier Hour.”

BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS is a reader-supported publication. We pick people to talk to because we believe in them. This is possible through your subscribing.

Being happy all the time is WAY too much pressure for me, and I also think that humans were not really meant to be that way for survival purposes. And yet, the pandemic highlighted the fragility and pointlessness of everything in a way that dulled my senses in all directions.

There is also some guilt in longing to be happy again as if this life that I do have is not enough. Happier Hour takes a new approach to think about finding joy: data. Cassie goes through step by step using behavioral science to help us make an action plan, which is essential for the creation of joy.

Is it unromantic to think about joy in terms of orchestration? And not of a random set of occurrences that somehow fall together magically in a moment resulting in unexpected elation? I think not. Sometimes when you are so low, it doesn’t matter if you follow a recipe to feel joy, joy can be felt just the same.

Is there someone in your life that you feel needs to hear this right now? If so, consider sharing it with them.

Thanks for being here with me. I hope you find joy or joy finds you real soon.

Much love, Carissa

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