If It's Hysterical, It's Historical: The Liberating Power of Understanding Your Past | Dr. Orna Guralnik

On psychoanalysis, which we haven't talked about much on this show. Dr. Orna Guralnik https://www.ornaguralnik.com/ is a psychoanalyst and writer. Her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis, dissociation, and cultural studies. She has completed the filming of several seasons of the docu-series Couples Therapy https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/couples-therapy/. In this episode we talk about: The relationship between happiness and truth How to cultivate love from within Practices to support us in being more open-minded (to avoid what she calls a "splitting" mindset) Trans-generational history, and how it impacts our personal lives and relationships (in other words, how the ghosts of your ancestors operate in you now) One single, powerful question to ask yourself when you get annoyed The overlap between Buddhism and psychoanalysis Related Episodes: Why Your Brain Turns The Miraculous Into The Mundane—And How To Fix It | Maria Popova https://www.danharris.com/p/why-your-brain-turns-the-miraculous-aac?utm_source=publication-search George Saunders on: "Holy Befuddlement" and How to Be Less of a "Turd" https://www.danharris.com/p/george-saunders-on-holy-befuddlement-e7b?utm_source=publication-search The Profound Upside of Self-Diminishment | George Saunders https://www.danharris.com/p/the-profound-upside-of-self-diminishment-144?utm_source=publication-search Sign up for Dan's newsletter here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Ten Percent Happier online bookstore https://bit.ly/46TZglY Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? A lot of people come into therapy with all sorts of resistance. Isn't this just self-indulgent? Don't other people have it way worse than I do? Are you gonna ask me about my mom? What does she have to do with anything? Why are we dredging all that stuff up? I'm not a therapist personally, but in my understanding, the reason therapists go deep on our past is that if we don't understand our stories, they own us. For reasons that remain opaque to us, we can react disproportionately to seemingly innocuous triggers. There's an expression I love that really captures it. If it's hysterical, it's historical. Today, I'm talking about all of this with Dr. Orna Guralnik,

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  who you may know from her Showtime docu-series Couples Therapy, where she works with real couples on camera. She's quite extraordinary and very, very popular. Off-camera, Orna does way more than couples therapy. She's got a bunch of impressive academic credits. She serves on the faculty of NYU PostDoc, National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the Steven Mitchell Center, and the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She also co-founded the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at the Mount Sinai Medical School. Sounds like a super fun place. But getting aside for the purposes of this episode, here is the most salient detail from her resume.

• 1:45Dan Harris?

  Dr. Guralnik practices a kind of intensive therapy called psychoanalysis, which you may have heard about, but not here on this show, because we've never really covered psychoanalysis. I will let her describe it, but as I understand it, the basic gist is this. You meet with your therapist, often several times a week, and take a deep dive into your past so that you can navigate more successfully in the present. I might be mangling this slightly, so again, I will let Orna define it more accurately. In this conversation, we talk about some practical takeaways from the world of psychoanalysis that we can all use in our daily lives, whether we're seeing a therapist several times a week or not.

• 2:24Dan Harris?

  Those include the relationship between happiness and the truth, how to cultivate love from within, practices to support you in being more open-minded, to avoid what Orna calls a splitting mindset, transgenerational history and how it impacts our personal lives and our relationships. In other words, how the ghosts of your ancestors operate in your mind now. One single and very powerful question to ask yourself when you get annoyed, and the overlap between Buddhism and psychoanalysis. Before we get started, I just want to let you know about something very cool that we're going to be doing in the second half of May. We are going to be doing a live meditation mini-series each weekday from Monday, May

• 3:06Dan Harris?

  19th, to Friday, May 23rd at 4:00 PM Eastern. I will be leading a short guided meditation, and then I'll be taking your questions. The whole mini-series is going to center around a set of practices that I often refer to as the Buddhist antidote to anxiety. And I'm not making this up. One of the key practices that I'll be teaching is loving kindness meditation, which the story goes was invented by the Buddha to help his monks who were dealing with a lot of fear. And loving kindness is part of a family of four related practices known as the Brahma Viharas, or the Divine Abodes. I will admit, when I first encountered these practices, which are designed around cultivating loving kindness, compassion, something called sympathetic joy, and also equanimity.

• 3:49Dan Harris?

  When I first ran into these practices, I was, as you might imagine, a little reflexively judgmental and dismissive, but I have really come to embrace these practices in a huge way over time, and they've had a massive impact on my life. And, by the way, they've now been studied quite extensively in the labs and have been shown particularly loving kindness practice to have physiological, psychological, and even behavioral benefits. Anyway, this is all happening over at DanHarris.com. Like I said, Monday through Friday, the week of May 19th. Like any good drug dealer, the first dose will be free, so Monday's session will be open to everybody. And then, for the rest of the week, you have to be a paid subscriber.

• 4:32Dan Harris?

  So head on over to danharris.com and check it out. We'll get started with Dr. Orna Goralek right after this. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit.

• 5:16Dan Harris?

  And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week.

• 5:58Dan Harris?

  The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Orna Guralnik, welcome to the show.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dan Harris. Thank you for inviting me.

• 6:39Dan Harris?

  It's a pleasure. So I thought I would start with psychoanalysis because this is a bit of malpractice on my part because I don't actually think after eight years and 700 episodes, we've really ever talked about what psychoanalysis is. Let's just start with what is it and how is it different from the therapy that many of us have are already doing or may have already experienced?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Sure. Psychoanalysis is a very serious project that aims to help patients, people, but the world at large, understand unconscious forces that operate on us. Psychoanalysis, as far as this therapeutic process, is a process in which patients come in and spend a long time with their therapist, multiple times a week. I sometimes see people three, four times a week. Sometimes they lie on the couch and the treatment usually goes on for quite a while because we try to really go deep and really understand why things are happening

• 7:47Speaker 01

  in people's lives that they are not aware of. We use the process of the therapy as one of the labs that we look into. So the relationship with the analyst is very important in psychoanalysis and we use it to kind of, it's sort of another realm of experience that helps us understand what goes on with the patient. We talk a lot about history, about early history, sometimes about even transgenerational history. In more contemporary types of psychoanalysis, we also talk about the wider context, like sociopolitical factors and how they infiltrate the unconscious. So it's a serious endeavor.

• 8:33Dan Harris?

  Why would someone opt for two, three times a week psychoanalysis over garden varieties, talk to a therapist once every week or every other week?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  First of all, there's plenty of good things you can do in once a week therapy. There are all kinds of therapies out there and they're good for many things. I mean, if you have like a spider phobia or a particular kind of pernicious thought that keeps going in your mind, you can get some cognitive behavioral help. There are many ways to help all sorts of things that trouble people. Psychoanalysis really aims to go deeper and change deeper patterns in the psyche. You know, the same way that advice is sometimes feels kind of good in the moment, but it's not really useful because things go on and you have your patterns and you keep going back to your old patterns and you can say to yourself whatever you want consciously.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  The old patterns will take hold of you again and again and again. You need to find a process to kind of delve deeper into these older patterns or like these deeper patterns and tackle them from that place. If you want a deeper dive into yourself and more change, you have to invest the time and effort into it. Aside from all of that, it's really interesting. It's just really interesting, like what goes on in our mind, like under the surface. It's the same question of like, why is it a deeper experience to read a full novel as opposed to like a blog post? It's just more interesting.

• 10:11Dan Harris?

  So it's not the case that psychoanalysis is only indicated for people who are deeply troubled? Maybe some of those people would fit the bill for psychoanalysis, but it's really for anybody who's deeply curious?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yes, that's one way to say it. In more traditional psychoanalysis, people used to say that you need a certain level of what we call ego strength to go through analysis. Nowadays, we've expanded the way we do psychoanalysis and we include people that suffer from, let's say, more troubling conditions. But it used to be that you needed to be sophisticated well enough, put together to endure the turbulence of psychoanalysis because it's an intense process. But nowadays, we've changed the technique, we do things differently. So it could be for anyone who's curious, anyone who's willing, anyone who has the time and means.

• 11:08Dan Harris?

  Just going back to what you said before about how, you know, if you really want to understand why you're suffering now, you need to dive into all of the causes and conditions in your subconscious. You also mentioned the transgenerational subconscious, which I want to come back to. So are you saying that if, that if we're not doing psychoanalysis, we're really missing out on something that can provide us a more full level of happiness?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  I agree with most of what you said, and I know we're on a 10% happier podcast. I am not sure happiness is the exact thing I'm talking about, although hopefully it's woven in there. But I would say we're missing out on knowing more about truth, about the reality of who we are, knowing more about what's in front of us. Psychoanalysis helps you see reality in a, in a much richer way. It's not always a happier picture, but it's a fuller, richer, more honest picture, sometimes happier.

• 12:15Dan Harris?

  Yeah, since you brought it up, I'll, I'll take the bait. My view of happiness is not jumping up in the air, joy. It's a holistic, capacious understanding of a life well-lived.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can I ask you questions?

• 12:31Dan Harris?

  Of course.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  What is the relationship between happiness and truth?

• 12:37Dan Harris?

  I think there's a deep relationship between happiness and truth. And I, you know, I come out of the Buddhist tradition. So in Buddhism, there's this massive emphasis on mortality, finitude, you're gonna die. And that's an uncomfortable truth, but liberation lies in the direction of embracing what ultimately will destroy you.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  From the, the little I know of Buddhism, and I've studied some, and I meditate myself, so. I think there are a lot of commonalities between psychoanalysis and the practice of Buddhism. And a kind of search for getting beyond the noise level of things and kind of soaking into like the deeper layer.

• 13:19Dan Harris?

  Yes, that was immediately what came to mind for me when you were talking about, you didn't use the term causes and conditions, that's a very Buddhist term. Understanding all of what has led us to this moment, what's informing both our conscious mind and our subconscious mind, that is a, at least to the extent to which I understand Buddhism, that is a very Buddhist approach, although in Buddhism, we don't tend to focus too much on the details of our childhood, but it is about understanding what leads to what. And that's what karma is, you know, cause and effect.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and then I know that in certain types of Buddhism, there's plenty of attention to like the past, even like reincarnation and like big pasts.

• 14:08Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  So there is, there is some idea that there is things that are driving us from behind, there's wind from behind.

• 14:14Dan Harris?

  Absolutely, I kind of think of it as like, everybody's got this vapor trail behind them, you know, like this incalculable gumbo of causes and conditions that have produced our mind state and behavior right now.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and isn't it fascinating? And I think in a, in a moment like this, when we're like in this very, very particular moment in history, it feels very useful to like be able to have tools to try to look at reality.

• 14:53Dan Harris?

  Say more about that.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Well, we're in a moment in history, I mean, both in this country, but elsewhere in the world, there's like a crisis, compounding crisis and all sorts of... It's a very violent time, violent in many ways, literally violent on the lives of people, violent on our minds, violent between us. It's a time of great chaos and distortion, noise, misunderstanding. And I think having certain tools to try to sift through signal and noise and find a way, both internally, but also in viewing reality, is incredibly helpful.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  And I assume you feel similarly about like meditation practice?

• 15:45Dan Harris?

  I do, and many other practices. I kind of, to the extent that anybody knows who the hell I am, I think I would be pegged as the meditation guy. But over the course of this part of my career, post-writing about meditation and getting some attention for it, I've really broadened out to all the modalities that can help one do life better. So I'm not a meditation fundamentalist by any stretch.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Can you say more? Like about the different, what you're calling modalities?

• 16:15Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I think there's like a pantheon of no brainers, evidence-based levers one can pull to improve the quality of one's mind and life. So sleep, exercise, eating well, with the caveat that you don't want to be too... And I would put this caveat, this asterisk next to exercise too. You don't want to fall into the orthorexia trap, the unhealthy obsession with being healthy. Nature, beauty generally, medication if you need it, meditation, meaningful work. And then probably most importantly, from my understanding of the data, is the quality of your relationships. And under that, there's a whole set of skills too, from communication skills to how you talk to yourself and how that redounds to how you're talking to other people.

• 17:00Dan Harris?

  And I just see this as just a big menu of skills that you can train to be better at life. Does that rhyme with how you see the world?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  It, to some degree, does.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  I have like two sort of general thoughts in response to that. In addition to, first of all, yes, yes, to all of that. As a psychoanalyst, because of my training and because of what I'm interested in, I always feel like there's all the stuff we know with a capital K or the things we think we know and the practices we think will lead us to the good thing. And then there's always this kind of unconscious thing that's bubbling underneath that knowing too well how to live is gonna block us from that.

• 17:56Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  In a certain way, that you have to keep a certain ear and attention to all the unpredictable and all the stuff that, you know, you sleep well, you eat well, you this, that, and the other, and then you're like still rattled or your mind goes somewhere else or all sorts of surprising things happen. Or the world just comes at you in a way that is, I've done all these things and look, it's still like we're in a mess. I have one ear towards the messy, unpredictable part that always emanates from within us and from outside of us, on one hand. And I'm, maybe it's not a different thought. I'm always a little suspicious of knowing too well how to do things.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  I'm always worried that we're, I don't know, in the claws of the next big thing. You know, whether it's the new pharma that's out there, the new app that's out there, the new AI technology that's out there to optimize us. So I have kind of a built in yes and, yes and, yes but.

• 19:06Dan Harris?

  I'm four square in your camp, I think, on both of those. You know, on the first one, you don't wanna get overly sort of programmatic about this. Oh, well, so ex-podcaster is saying I should do why thing first thing in the morning and that's gonna fix everything. No, that would be to ignore. All of the causes and conditions we were discussing earlier that contribute to what's happening on a conscious level and probably more importantly, perhaps from your point of view, subconscious level. So yes, in the second, which is I think deeply related, this idea that if you know what to do, quote unquote, it's like in some way kind of blinding you and there's that kind of dogmatism that can set in and you know, within Buddhism itself, you know, there's kind of an elasticity.

• 19:49Dan Harris?

  And again, I don't want to overly emphasize Buddhism, I'm taken by it, but I'm not, again, it's not an evangelistic tradition. In Zen Buddhism, this idea of don't know mind, beginner's mind, and the Buddha talked a lot about how he was an analyst, not a dogmatist. And he specifically said, which makes him quite unique among quote unquote religious figures, I think we can debate whether he was a religious figure, but he specifically said, don't take anything I say at face value, come see for yourself, check it out in the laboratory of your own mind. And so it works well for me as a journalist and as a skeptic who's always, as you are, alert to what am I missing? It kind of encapsulates that uncertainty.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I relate to that a lot. Yeah.

• 20:31Dan Harris?

  Just to go back to something you were saying earlier about psychoanalysis being really helpful in times like these, you said something about tools to help us deal with it. So I'd be curious, like very specifically, what do you mean by the tools? Is it simply having spent the time to go sift through in a very systematic way and the proper supportive environment, your past, so that you're not reacting based on subconscious triggers to the complications of the world? Is that what you're referring to?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  It's many things. I mean, yes, it's partially that. I'm hesitating a little bit because I don't know how political we want to get.

• 21:14Dan Harris?

  Do you? Be as comfortable as you want, there are no guardrails here.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Okay, so for example, let's say someone comes in and they're, as all of my patients are, utterly rattled by what's going on in the world, in our country and beyond. There are many ways that, thinking psychoanalytically,

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Helps, first of all, me be in a state of mind where I can be helpful to other people. But also, the tools that the analytic work gives people include things like seeing your mind getting, let's say, fearful, or angry, or full of revenge fantasies. Watching your mind do that, and you watch your mind, and you can understand where it's coming from in yourself, whether it's coming from, let's say you had a tyrant of a parent, and your entire life is devoted to freeing yourself from that kind of childhood, and then you suddenly have this administration, and you feel like you're being bullied all

• 22:21Speaker 01

  over again. Being able to kind of understand your own reactions, both through your personal history, and being able to see what's going in front of you, what's happening in front of you, and how it's triggering you. So, being able to have the tools to, in a way, modulate, understand your own reactivity, not for you to dumb it down and like become passive, but to understand what's going on, not fall under the spell of what's going on, keep a clear mind, so you know what to do with yourself, with your children, and then what are you going to do about the world? Rather than become just overwhelmed and like pass it on to the next person you see on

• 23:06Speaker 01

  the subway. It's having a mind. And then being able to see kind of large group processes from a psychoanalytic perspective is very helpful. We're all driven by all sorts of unconscious forces, and more and less primitive forces that we have a choice between. There are certain ways that I see what's happening, right? I've written about it in The Times, that there's a way in which we're kind of tempted to fall into what in psychoanalytic jargon we call a splitting state of mind, where it's all like good and bad. We're almost like drawn into this comics world, in which there are evils and good

• 23:47Speaker 01

  people, and it's a very primitive way of thinking, that we all have that in us, I mean, from a very young age. And psychoanalysis gives you kind of tools to understand that as a developmental phase that you retreat into when you're feeling threatened. And then to imagine what it means to work your way out of that and to be able to invite yourself to not be stuck in that because it's such a toxic mind space.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Am I making sense?

• 24:21Dan Harris?

  You are. I'm particularly interested in this splitting state of mind. And I'm trying to formulate a question and make sure it's clear and not annoying. And if it is.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  That's fine.

• 24:34Dan Harris?

  Okay.

• 24:38Dan Harris?

  I appreciate you creating a supportive environment in that regard.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  I'll use my tools.

• 24:48Dan Harris?

  One of the things that I try to do on this show is because we've had an enormous amount of luck at getting people who are leaders in their field. And sometimes they're coming in, talking about quite a complex field that requires some mastery, like psychoanalysis. Most listeners are not in psychoanalysis. Most listeners haven't done a lot of internal family systems either. Most listeners haven't done somatic experiencing or haven't gone on a 10 day silent meditation retreat. So I am always trying to extract doable little practices that a listener, even if they are not deep in whatever tradition we're discussing, can apply in their own lives.

• 25:28Dan Harris?

  And so I'm wondering whether there's some bootleg version of what you would talk about with your patients when it comes to splitting that anybody listening to this show could apply to their own lives, given the current political context.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've actually been trying to do that. I appreciate you asking it in this way. I've really been trying specifically to focus on this concept of splitting and trying to translate it into a language that is not jargon-y and that can be useful to people because I think, especially during this time in history, it's maybe the most useful concept that psychoanalysis has to offer right now. Splitting is a state of mind. It's a state of mind that we all are familiar with. We may forget that we're familiar with it. We may think that we're better than that, but we all know what splitting feels like. First of all, because we all went through

• 26:24Speaker 01

  the phase of splitting as infants and as young children, where we want to preserve some good feeling about ourselves or about the people we're close to. And then we assign all the bad stuff to outside of ourselves. So we think of ourselves as only good, as having benevolent, generous qualities. And all the greed and meanness and envy of the world is outside of us. Think of sibling relationships. All the bad is on the brother or the sister, and I'm the good one, always, as young people. And it's a way to try to build a sense of goodness in oneself,

• 27:07Speaker 01

  to feel coherent, to maintain bonds with people. And as we become more sophisticated and mature, and let's say if we have like a good enough environment to support us, we become able to tolerate more complexity, more contradiction, more nuance, both in ourselves and in the people around us. So when you become more mature, you can understand that the same mother that feeds you and dresses you and keeps you alive and warm is also the mother that was late to school and didn't have time for you that day and was mean to you one morning. And it's the same person,

• 27:51Speaker 01

  and those qualities are all in her. Or your best friend that suddenly did something like really nasty. And it's actually the same person, and you can have like complex feelings about them. And you know what? You're also both decent and a shit sometimes. So that way of like integrating like a more nuanced and complex version of yourself and of reality, it's not good branding, but we call it in psychoanalysis, that's the depressive position, where you come down from like the comic world of like good and evil, and you're into this like depressing reality of, eh, yeah, both and, good and bad. And things are more complicated than you think.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  But being in that quote unquote depressive position is actually a very powerful place because you can forgive, you can see reality more clearly, you can forgive others, you can forgive yourself, you have more compassion, you see things as they are rather than from a defensive posture. So that's my little summary of splitting and the way things are in our political system and especially coming from like the ultra right, it's all about splitting. Every sentence is all to induce splitting. It's kind of amazing.

• 29:17Dan Harris?

  I would argue that the social media algorithms which reward outrage produce splitting in a quite bipartisan fashion.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. They produce splitting both in the outrage language, but also just by the mere fact that it's about the clickbait. So you're economically, you're encouraged to split. You're encouraged to just keep go down a deeper and deeper rabbit hole, which is like the extreme version of splitting. It's economically just better for whatever the app we're using and whoever's selling, whatever they're selling.

• 29:58Dan Harris?

  There's a lot of money to be made by inducing splitting.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yes, it all comes down to like capitalism.

• 30:06Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Dr. Orna Guralnik talks about Buddhism and psychoanalysis and how to cultivate love from within.

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• 31:20Dan Harris?

  A couple of little practical phrases popped into my mind as I was listening to you speak, and I want to run them by you. Just by way of context, I'm, I'll state my prayers out loud here. I'm deeply influenced by, there's a meditation teacher named Joseph Goldstein, who, he'll be 81 soon, sort of eminent, eminent Greece, Dharma guy, who I have become friends with, and he's been my teacher for about 15 years, and I really love him. And one of his teaching methods is to have these pithy little phrases that if you hear them enough, will start emerging in your mind when you need them. And he did not come up with this. I mean, it's a venerable Buddhist tradition and a spiritual contemplative philosophical

• 32:02Dan Harris?

  way of helping people put these concepts to use in their own lives. And so, two little phrases, neither of these come from Joseph, but they do come from Buddhism, might help turn down the volume on splitting. One is, "Just like me." So, when you look at people on the quote-unquote "other side," well, just like me, they want to be happy. Just like me, they're doing what they think is right. Very few people wake up in the morning Hoping to be the bad guy, they think they're the good guy. And again, this should not lead to passivity. It's just a way to get you out of, into the depressive state. So you can make a more nuanced diagnosis and then plan of action.

• 32:46Dan Harris?

  And then the second little phrase that I like, and this comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Zen master is, "Am I sure?" He's like, "I'm reading, I'm reading the, the paper today and it's making, or my, my algorithm is making X political figure look like a complete asshole. But am I sure? Maybe there's a case for tariffs. I don't know. Check it out.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I deeply resonate with both of these. Just like me and am I sure? It's interesting. I have a lot of arguments with my closest people. I have like a, a, a group, like a writing group that we think together and argue about all of this a lot. And the people in my group that object to this just like me position are threatened by it implying non-action. When I tried to write about splitting for the Times, like the most intense pushback, it was like one of the pieces that I wrote that was a kind of a benign piece. And I, I had such intense pushback with the same complaint that I'm not seeing like

• 33:52Speaker 01

  the moral and ethical flaws of the administration. And how can I even think to ask or to say to myself, "Just like me." And I understand the critique of this, but I do find when I listen to people, it's, you know, when I work with couples, for example, I listen to each side of the conflict. And when I listen closely to each person in my couples' practice, if I really listen carefully, I get where they're coming from. Even if they're talking about doing things that are, to their partner seem absolutely hurtful and outrageous, I get where they're coming from. And then I listen to their partner and similarly, I get where they're coming from.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And I can imagine myself, most of the time, I can imagine myself into the shoes of that person. It doesn't mean that's where we end. I mean, there's got to be some, you gotta then apply some sort of like, whether it's ethical standards or mutual negotiation, something needs to happen then, but.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  I think that the Just Like Me is incredibly important and incredibly powerful listening tool. I'm in close contact with this lovely Palestinian woman, and you know, I'm part Israeli, and she's a serious activist, and we've engaged in many, many, many hours of conversation over Zoom and sometimes in person. Sometimes she comes to New York and we meet in person, trying to listen to each other on this Palestinian-Israeli nightmare conflict. And we say things that are very hard to bear to each other, but we try to enter this state

• 35:39Speaker 01

  of imagining ourselves into the shoes of the other with the history that each of us brings, our history, again, transgenerational history, what we even call history, the differences in what we understand is history, what's relevant, what's not relevant. And then we create this kind of DMZ, this kind of demilitarized zone between us. And then we go back to arguing about the actual issues on the ground, but constantly going back to this DMZ, to this place where we can find commonalities or find a way to imagine ourselves into the experience of the other, it's very helpful.

• 36:23Dan Harris?

  Yes, and I get why people fear that it's going to lead to non-action or passivity, but I think ideally it leads to wise action, because hatred and rage don't tend to lead to the best decisions. And even if you set that aside, they're pretty unpleasant, toxic states of mind for you to live with. Better to tune into compassion, in my view, and that doesn't mean forgiving, blessing the behavior of the other person. There's a great story from Sharon Salzberg, another eminent Buddhist teacher, who was over in India back in the 60s and 70s, learning about the Dharma from older teachers, and

• 37:07Dan Harris?

  said to one of the teachers, "Well, what am I supposed to do if somebody tries to mug me?" And the teacher said, "You compassionately hit them with your umbrella."

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Okay, well, my association to that, I mean, not funny at all, is there used to be this, it's probably still true in Israel, there used to be this saying...

• 37:26Speaker 01

  In Hebrew, it's yoriv nebuchim. It's in English, it's shooting and crying. Israelis used to have this idea of themselves as compassionate while they're killing, crying while they're killing. I mean, of course, I think that fantasy is long gone.

• 37:46Dan Harris?

  Another expression that's coming up, this is a bit more on the understanding where everybody's coming from. It's not a direct response, but it picks up on the theme that we've been exploring of, can you understand where people you disagree with are coming from and still take effective action in the world? There's an expression I heard from a Cuban friend. I might mangle this, but it's cada loca consu tema, which is every crazy person has their story. And we all have our story, which is, which goes right to the heart of psychoanalysis, which is, do you even understand your own?

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. The person in my group, my friend Jade, who mostly pushes back on me very hard on this just like me attitude. She says that it's a stance of privilege that to try to free your mind from, like you're saying, from states of hatred, you can do that when you're comfortable enough. But when you're really under the boot of whatever, whatever the situation is, it's not about freeing your mind. You can only hate and rage and be violent because otherwise nothing will change.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  There's always this debate among activists of like nonviolence, violence, and when violence. Not a simple question.

• 39:12Dan Harris?

  No.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Not to mention that there's so much violence that is done in the name of the good.

• 39:18Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I'm not here to dismiss. I mean, I genuinely do not dismiss Jade's argument. I think there's something to it, and I also don't want to hold myself up as an expert here because there's a lot of learning I'm sure I still have to do. I guess I think about it less from a macro perspective and more on a micro perspective. Like, what do you, listener, or you, Orna, or what do I, Dan, want to be my mind state as I move through this world? Whether I have privilege or not, and we all have various forms of privilege, and we're all marginalized in one way or another, some of us. Myself, I have, I have more than my fair share forms of privilege. So I'm aware of that, or at least I try to be. But what do I want my mind state to be?

• 40:03Dan Harris?

  What do I want the quality of my life to be? And how effective do I want to be? And I just think the data show that you're less likely to be happy and healthy, and also simultaneously less likely to be successful in an abiding way at whatever your goals are if your fuel is hatred, resentment, spite, anger. And all those things are natural. They are gonna come up. They come up in my mind, even with all the privilege I have. But like, what do you want to be tapping into as the cleanest burning fuel going forward? And it just seems to me that all the data point toward the cliches of love and compassion, and it's annoying to hear, and I kind of think it's true.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  I do too. At the end of the day, I totally do. And I do think that love is a much more powerful force than hate. That's why I do what I do. Yeah, and I do think that's something that has to be cultivated internally. You can't expect it from the world. You have to, it's a practice.

• 41:11Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  It's an action.

• 41:14Dan Harris?

  I want to ask you in one second, how can we cultivate that internally? But let me just say to Jade, whose argument I take very seriously, my understanding of love and compassion does not rule out smacking somebody with your umbrella. You can do pretty much all the same things you would do in a state of anger and rage. With a mindset of compassion, you could take many of the same actions. It's just, there's a tweak, a change in the internal posture that makes you more effective over the long term. That's my understanding with all of my flaws and caveats and privileges and all that.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe, maybe the nuance there, just thinking about it now, but maybe the nuance is the difference between a state of love and compassion and a state of comfortability. I think being comfortable as a goal induces like passivity and compliance and going along with the idea that love is the most powerful force, like being in a state of compassion and love is, it's hard. It's not, I mean, sometimes it's wonderful, it's, sometimes it's a transcendent experience, but sometimes it is hard.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  When I'm talking with Christine, this Palestinian colleague of mine, and she challenges me

• 42:40Speaker 01

  to remain connected to her and to remain empathic to her experience and really widen my scope to understand the plight of somebody else and somebody that I might be implicated in harming, it's hard. It's ultimately awesome, awesome in the sense of awesomeness, but I ultimately would much rather spend my life in that state than in the state of knowing and hating and I, I'm clear what's good, what's bad and.

• 43:12Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:14Dan Harris?

  Yeah, and I, I think maybe one thing you're pointing at, I think, is when you start using words like love and compassion, it's easy for that to induce a splitting mindset for people because they're thinking of a cartoonish version of love and compassion as opposed to what it actually is, which is like changing your father's diaper even though he was mean to you when you were a kid. It's being in the room and non-reactive while your child is throwing a horrifying tantrum. It's sitting with your friend who's on the other side of a geopolitical fissure. It's much grittier than Hello Kitty.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not rom-com.

• 43:54Dan Harris?

  No.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:56Dan Harris?

  So you said something before about love is something you cultivate internally. Do you have any thoughts on like how one does that?

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have many thoughts. I mean, it's sort of a large part of what I do in my practice. But there are many ways to think and talk about it. I mean, one is I'm going to distinguish between like doing it in the presence of another person or other people or an outside entity. And with oneself, but really it's the same thing. What you you were talking earlier about like a certain kind of stance that one can take. You can adopt a stance of deep curiosity for the story or the plight or the experience of the person you're with.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  You have to kind of observe your mind. We're very, we all are very quick to rush to judgments, to comparisons, to kind of making things kind of clear to ourselves. Oh, this is good. This is bad. This is better. This is I'm better. He's better. And to kind of constantly try to let go of that impulse to differentiate and and instead listen with that kind of beginner's mind or, you know, like he's negative capability and try to immerse yourself in the experience of another for something new to come at you, for the world to bring you new things, not what you know already and kind of assuming trusting that that will

• 45:33Speaker 01

  elicit in you all sorts of feelings, good feelings, like curiosity, like empathy, like understanding. This very delightful experience of learning something new. How fun is that? It's a state of mind and you can have that state of mind. That's in a way in psychoanalysis, that's the state of mind you try to cultivate in analytic practice, which is that a person, I mean, it's a classic idea of someone lying on the couch and free associating, doesn't exactly happen like that all the time, but the idea is you're letting your mind, your psyche kind of roam and you're listening, not because you know about yourself, oh, I'm that kind of person, I'm that kind of person, but you're

• 46:15Speaker 01

  actually listening to new things that are going to emerge and you try not to judge, not to foreclose, but listen, listen, listen with a stance of openness and curiosity. I think that's kind of the fastest route to a state of benevolence and love.

• 46:34Dan Harris?

  You're reminding me of an excellent essay. Are you familiar with Maria Popova?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I get her mailings, yeah, so good.

• 46:44Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so I get her mailings too, and she's been on the show. For the listeners, I'll drop a link in the show notes to my conversation with Maria, who I think is extraordinary human being.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  She's wonderful, yeah.

• 46:54Dan Harris?

  And she was writing this essay and she was quoting another extraordinary human being who's also been on the show a couple of times, George Saunders, the novelist, whose big theme is empathy, really. Maria talked about how, you know, nothing, not one single thing hurts us more than our certainties. And it's just like this moat between us and the world. It's this kind of psychological armoring that deadens our lived experience. And then she quotes a lot from George Saunders, talking about how reading, especially if you read the right authors, can put you in a state of mind where you, first of all, you're empathizing with characters whose POV might be different from yours, and then

• 47:36Dan Harris?

  it's inducing, I believe the words George uses are a holy befuddlement, a constant state of reconsideration. In fact, George describes some Russians' work as reconsideration machines. That may seem like, oh, is that related to love? Well, it is related to love in that what is love if not openness and a desire to understand? And if you can train yourself in that, that's the grittier.

• 48:03Dan Harris?

  Deeper version of love you and I are talking about as opposed to its rom-com rendering.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  I, by the way, just listened two nights ago. I just listened. David Sedaris reads George Saunders' short story. So good. The Letter. It came out in The New Yorker. It's great. It captures that. It's very important for this moment.

• 48:33Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Orna talks about some practices to help you stay more open, transgenerational history and how it impacts your life and your relationships. I try to get some advice from Orna, even though she's against advice constitutionally, which you'll hear her explain. And she'll give us one single question that you can ask yourself when you get annoyed.

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• 50:33Dan Harris?

  So this openness, this reconsidering, what habits of mind can we develop, especially for those of us who are not in psychoanalysis? What practices that can we bring into our own life that might make this a state we can inhabit more frequently?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  That's a great question. It's funny, the first thing that came to my mind was fact checking. And I don't really only mean it like literally, but I mean it in, you know, you were saying earlier, am I sure? Notice when we're always grabbing on to things to have some sense of certainty, but you can notice that it's happening and we need it. I mean, especially, I mean, the world is so chaotic and scary and we're so vulnerable to it. So we need to grab on to things, but we can also just ask oneself like, why am I feeling so certain right now? Or am I feeling, what am I feeling right now?

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Is there a certainty that is seeping in here to make me feel safer in this moment? Okay, maybe I need that right now, but can I be honest with myself? Am I going to feel this way tomorrow? I have been watching my mind super carefully when I listen or watch the news, when I read the news. Those are moments for me, super important right now to watch my mind.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  When am I grabbing on to something? Because I'm anxious, because I'm something? And what's happening to my mind? Am I being twisted into a state of like rage, vengeance? Is this evoking understanding and curiosity in me? What is this doing to my mind, this thing I'm reading?

• 52:19Dan Harris?

  I sometimes think about, and I've tried to craft like a social post about this, but I haven't been able to come up with a way to say it that doesn't get me canceled. But picking up on your fact checking notion. It's like, don't be manipulated by the algorithm. As we discussed earlier, there are people who have a lot to gain by inducing outrage and splitting in you. That doesn't mean if you read the front page of your favorite paper, it's wrong per se and that they're the bad guys per se, or they may not even know they're doing it. So like, let's not split again. But just check, you know, it's just check or like, okay, okay, certainty has arisen. Or actually, one little, um, back to Joseph Goldstein, one of his little phrases is certainty

• 53:03Dan Harris?

  is not an indicator of truth. Maybe the arising of certainty in the mind can be a kind of alarm bell. All right, what's going on here?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I have been recommending it to my students a lot to consume multiple news outlets and not from the same side. The other day, I, geez, I listened to Joe Rogan. Believe me, not because I want to take in anything he has to say, but I want to know how different entities, different groups, different collectives are shaping reality. So I will know what's happening to my way of shaping reality. You know, so I'm not too certain. Not because I want to take in that version of reality, but I, I want a check on my Yes. sense of certainty.

• 53:55Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  You know, and similarly, I, I try to read like international news. I, I read Al Jazeera, even though it sometimes drives me insane, but it's really good for the mind to not, not be manipulated, not be drawn into a state that ultimately prevents you from being wise.

• 54:13Dan Harris?

  I really, I resonate with that a lot deeply. And part, it may be my training as a journalist, but I, I have this nagging question in the back of my mind all the time, which is, what is the other side of this argument? For example, with all the Trump stuff, speaking of one's priors, I was raised in the People's Republic of Massachusetts by like ultra liberal, overeducated physicians and, you know, went into the news media, which is dominated by liberals and my whole world is, you know, I'm in a bubble, I'm in New York. And, and so I'm constantly like listening to Ben Shapiro, or not constantly, but occasionally trying to listen to people I know I'm going to disagree with, because sometimes, you know what, I realize, oh, I'm not seeing

• 54:55Dan Harris?

  this correctly. And that's really painful. This morning, I was listening to the Commentary Magazine podcast, where I try to check in with those guys occasionally. And, you know, they were just much more sanguine about Trump stuff that is putting the left on red alert. And they're not pro-Trump, per se, but it's just very interesting to... And I don't, I'm not saying one side's right, or anything like that. I'm just saying, this is useful befuddlement, I think.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, you called it holy befuddlement. That was so good.

• 55:25Dan Harris?

  That's from George. One, one last thing to say, and I want, I don't want to take up too much airtime here, but there is a difference between when you self-gaslight in this way, you can change your opinions, but it's not supposed to be about changing your values. So like, I can listen to people I disagree with, but it doesn't make me pro-cruelty.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, very important. That's one of the things that worries me so much about this rhetoric of splitting, that it, it's like a spell that can make people forget the ethic of protecting the vulnerable. I mean, you know, a kind of thing that we're, most of us kind of took for granted, like, that's not in question. But there are kind of spell states that can lead you to forget that, dissociate from that very basic value. We're living in dangerous times, dangerous to the mind.

• 56:26Dan Harris?

  Yes. Yes. There are a couple of things I want to touch on before I let you go. You did make a reference to transgenerational history, and I would love to hear a little bit more about what you mean by that.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, transgenerational history is a, obviously a giant topic that can pertain to one's very personal history. Let's say there was, I'm just making stuff up. Let's say there was a suicide in the family two generations ago that no one talked about, but it haunts the family in a certain way. Like, there's a certain energy around the secret. And it is transmitted through the way people raise their children, a certain kind of quiet around certain things or certain habits that conceal truths.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Those can get passed down across the generations and implant certain anxieties or patterns of thinking in each of us. And you don't know. You have to, I mean, if you spend time in analysis, or it doesn't have to be in analysis, you can spend time like really collecting your history and asking and getting interested. And suddenly you realize, oh, my God, there's this thing that happened like two generations before I was born that is shaping who I am, that can be profound to discover and release one from a certain kind of haunting or grip. And similarly, it doesn't only pertain to like personal history.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  There are big histories that are passed down to all of us. For me, for example, it had a lot to do with like the history of like the relationship of Israelis to the Holocaust and how it shaped our understanding of what it means to be Israeli and how it blinded a certain kind of Israeli way of narrating history to the plight of the Palestinians. It's big, like the transgenerational stuff that's passed down to us is, it can be huge. I mean, here it can be whether it's the history of slavery, of like the history of like how this country was built on the destruction of Native Americans and ways in which these

• 58:48Speaker 01

  histories are buried.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  But continued to haunt the culture in ways that are systemic and unspeakable. So it's interesting and powerful stuff.

• 59:03Dan Harris?

  Yes. I'm gonna try to build a conversational bridge here. I'm gonna invoke again my, the permission you gave me earlier to be annoying. This has implications, understanding your transgenerational history. On a micro scale, like in terms of your own lineage and also on a macro scale in terms of the broad sweep of history. It has implications for your intimate relationships. Which brings me to something I want to make sure I ask you about before I go, which is your TV show. So, do you think I'm right about this? That like, we have these, personally for me, I have two little inner characters in my dramatis persona internally.

• 59:48Dan Harris?

  Like one, I've called RJ, after my grandfather, Robert Johnson, who was this kind of mean, stern guy. Who, he's a sort of my, a personification of my inner critic and my outer irritation. Another, my great grandfather, who I never met, who was a hustler. Jewish guy, came here from the Pale of Settlement in the Ukraine in early, early 1900s and like, became a criminal. And ultimately took his own life because he had gotten indicted by the FBI and the family found him in the kitchen. He had put his head in the oven. And, and so like, I have this, a very like, fear-based, ambitious side of me. That if I don't see it, I can get carried away by it.

• 1:00:33Dan Harris?

  And these two characters can fuck up my marriage if I'm not aware of them and willing to call them out and bring them into the room and work with them. And so, I'm just curious, does any of that ring true to you? And do you see that among your patients on television or, or behind the scenes?

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, first of all, totally rings true and Kind of beautiful the way you're describing these characters. It's sort of like a novel. But yes, it's very true. In the, in the show, the time I spent with couples in the show was a maximum, except one couple that we kept for longer. It was a maximum of 20 weeks. So it's not, I mean, it's a decent amount of time to do therapy, but it's not enough time to really, really sink into transgenerational stuff. But there was one, one couple in which, it's interesting. They were each of a different, they came from very different families and very different class systems.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  She kept feeling deeply insecure in the sense of constantly worrying that they're about to get into trouble, that things are not going to be okay, that they're going to get divorced, that just things, anxious, things are going to be bad. And he was like on a much firmer footing. And eventually, we did get into some of the family histories, transgenerational histories. And she talked about how she came from kind of deep poverty. And every generation prior to her, the men were alcoholics that left the wives, left the family, like dysfunctional, deeply dysfunctional.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  That was like every generation that preceded her. And she was like, I cannot imagine a situation in which that's not going to happen here. And he was like, I don't know. I come from like a very steady family. This is our life together now. I want you to join my history. Jump out of your movie and come into my movie and expect this future. So it's very interesting when couples really have the time and space to get into their, like, who are the RJ's that they're holding inside them and?

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Who's talking to who between them? Like, the couple can be talking between them, but it could be grandpa talking to grandma through them.

• 1:03:06Dan Harris?

  Yes. I sometimes think about interpersonal communication as this miracle, but also mostly it's a disaster. And it's persona talking to projection. You know, in that scenario, like, nothing can happen. You know, it's so hard.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it's one of the reasons I see a lot of patients now going into psychedelics. You know, it's like the trend. I think that's one of the reasons that people are going to psychedelics. They're trying to kind of find a quick way to shed all of that and have at least a few hours where they're like, it's a little bit less persona to projection. It's quick fixes, they don't really work.

• 1:03:51Dan Harris?

  Okay, back to my being potentially annoying here. But, and I know you're, as you said before, a little skeptical of advice, given that a strategy can land in the mind of somebody who hasn't reconciled with their history and their predilections. And so the strategy doesn't mean anything. But given that you've done no small amount of couples counseling, couples therapy, and that's the name of the TV show, are there strategies that you could recommend, with all the caveats that, you know, everybody's mind and life are complex and there's no silver bullet, no quick fix? But are there strategies that you can recommend that might put us in the direction

• 1:04:35Dan Harris?

  of healthier interpersonal relationships?

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  You know, it depends on the day and who I saw yesterday. My answer will depend on what just happened. There's so many different ways to answer that question. But maybe to build on what we've been saying in this profound conversation, if you're in a couple and you're in trouble, usually there's a kind of a story each person tells themselves about their partner.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  And they usually get pretty dogged about their story with a lot of certainty. They know, they know their partner. They know what's wrong with their partner. If you can come at yourself with a certain kind of practice of, let's say, using what we've said so far, like, less certainty and more curiosity. So first of all, kind of try to wipe the slate and listen to your partner afresh. What are they actually saying? What really matters to them? And really make a distinction between what am I convinced of? And I'm trying to find in what they're saying, just to reassure myself that I know what's going on? Versus what are they saying?

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Am I listening anew? Am I listening with a fresh mind? To actually try to hear them, which is hard. It's hard to actually hear another person. We're working through so many personas, projections, certainties, like to actually try to clear the field a little bit and hear them anew. And what matters to them in that moment? That kind of experience can go a very long way to get people out of a troubled space. And then there's another question you can ask yourself, which is, if I'm so troubled about something outside of myself, how can I take it back into myself? Well, why is this bothering me so much?

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Okay, it's out there, but what's it to me? Why am I so out of my mind? Because, I don't know, they left the dishwasher not turned on.

• 1:06:48Dan Harris?

  I love that. So a great question to ask yourself in moments where you're worked up about something. It really could be anything, but specifically in your romantic relationship is like, why is this bugging me so much?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:00Dan Harris?

  What's going on?

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  What's going on with me?

• 1:07:03Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Like, forget, okay, they, she, he. Me, what's going on with me? What is my problem here? And can I take care of myself?

• 1:07:15Dan Harris?

  This may be a therapeutic cliche, but I like it. And I'll say it out loud and see if you like it. If it's hysterical, it's historical.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Oh, this is good. I never heard that one.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  That is good. Writing it down. Um. I might have to use it in my book. It summarizes Freud's original work. You know Freud, the majority of his early work was with hysterics, so-called hysterics, which were women that presented with all sorts of like weird symptoms like hysterical blindness. They couldn't see suddenly, even though there were no neurological reasons, or they were paralyzed in one arm in a way that doesn't conform to the neurological system. All sorts of like funky symptoms.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  What Freud and his colleague at the time, Breuer, what they did that was like so revolutionary is rather than treat these women with all sorts of like, I don't know, cold baths and assuming that they're of what they called feeble minds, they sat down and asked them to talk to them. They listened to them and asked what happened, like, tell me about what happened, when did this begin, what happened just before? And lo and behold, as they were listening to the patients, the symptoms kind of relieved themselves. They were cleared of symptoms. And at the time, it was like absolutely revolutionary.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  First of all, listening to a woman was revolutionary, but listening to patients as opposed to like coming at them with some kind of authoritarian regime was a revolution. And so if it's hysterical, it's historical that he believed that all hysterical symptoms are histories that have been repressed.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  So, for example, if there was a, this was like a funky tiny little example of someone who had this like horrible cough and couldn't swallow.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Refused to swallow liquids. And then it turned out when Freud was asking her, when did it start? It turned out that she saw a dog drink water out of a cup. And it kind of disgusted her. And from that moment on, she refused to drink. But until she recollected that memory, she couldn't like get rid of that symptom. I mean, that's kind of a very simplistic example. But obviously, there were like serious traumas that these women have repressed, like sexual coercion and sexual abuse that has been kind of repressed and showed up in symptoms. So yeah, that sentence is a

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  good summary of early Freudian analytic theory.

• 1:10:20Dan Harris?

  One of the, maybe this is a good place to close it. One of the critiques that I've heard, to the extent that I know much about this, but one of the critiques I think I've heard about Freudian analysis or psychotherapy generally is that it can bring you understanding without relief. I'm not sure I agree with that because I think understanding is a form of relief. What's your take?

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  I think anything can be used, any therapy can be used defensively. It can be used not to change. We don't like change. It's hard to change. And I think there is a way that you can use a psychoanalytic process in a way to just convince yourself of why you should stay the same.

• 1:11:05Dan Harris?

  I'm laughing because it sounds like something I would do, probably have.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  We all do that. We all do that. But you know, in good analytic work, that will not go very far. You can do it for a while and then it's just not going to hold water. But that's a risk. And you have to have like a good analyst and you have to, that will push you and not, not let you just stay the same.

• 1:11:28Dan Harris?

  Right, so I've, I think I've heard people in the past say, okay, I went and I talked to him on my childhood and I get it. My dad was a dick or whatever. But what do I do about it? And I think what you're saying is, well, actually, if you go in with the intention of understanding so that you can be. Liberated from it, meaning that you're not so owned by it, swamped by it all the time. It's not all coming back every time there's an external trigger. And you have a therapist who doesn't let you hide, or at least doesn't let you hide for too long. That therapy, that understanding can be a path toward genuine relief.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely. There's no way that you won't change if that happens. You won't change by way of like, oh, now I have the three things I know what to do. You're just gonna change deeply. It's not a change like, next time someone reminds me of my father, I'm going to say this, that, or the other. You're just gonna feel differently about everything. You change from within. So, yeah, you will change.

• 1:12:29Dan Harris?

  Well, there are roughly 75 things I could ask you about in addition to everything we've discussed, but we are pretty much running out of time. I did hear you make a reference to the fact that you're writing a book, so perhaps we could use that as an excuse to bring you back?

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Awesome. Awesome. I would love that, yeah. Can I ask you, so from what we've talked, are you more interested in psychoanalysis?

• 1:12:52Dan Harris?

  For sure. I actually have a good friend who's quite a bit older than me, who's a practicing, he practices psychoanalysis. He's an analyst, yes. I'm not gonna use his name just because he hasn't given me permission, but he's quite a respected local practitioner. I've asked him about a million times, and he's, you know, elliptical in his answers, which is, this strikes me as on-brand. But I am, yes, I am intrigued, because I, my whole world now is mining my own stuff to come up with content that helps other people. So, I am really interested in it. I bump up against the time thing, but yes. Short answer, yes.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Good. Okay.

• 1:13:36Dan Harris?

  Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of the show that you're on and anything, any other resources or things you've written that you want my audience to know about in case they want to learn more, more about or from you?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  So I'm Orna Guralnik. I'm a therapist on the documentary series Couples Therapy. It was on Showtime, but it's now Paramount Plus. I write for the publications like The New York Times or The Washington Post, and I am writing a book, but it's gonna take some time till it's out.

• 1:14:11Dan Harris?

  Do you have a website where all of this stuff is collected?

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, ornaguralnik.com.

• 1:14:16Dan Harris?

  Great. I'll put a link to that in the show notes, everybody, if you want to learn more from Orna. In the meantime, such a pleasure. Thank you for making time to do this. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Such a pleasure. Thank you, Dan, and thank you for a profound conversation. Really appreciate it.

• 1:14:35Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Orna Guralnik. Great to talk to her. We mentioned during the course of this conversation, some of my previous conversations with podcast guests Maria Popova and George Saunders, who's the one who talks about holy befuddlement. I will drop links to those episodes in the show notes. And a reminder to go check out our live meditation mini-series that will be happening every afternoon from Monday, May 19th through Friday, May 23rd at 4:00 PM Eastern. You can get all the details over at danharris.com. As mentioned earlier, this will be centered around the four related Buddhist practices known as the Brahma Viharas. I will guide some meditations and then take your questions. Come check it out, danharris.com. And if you can't afford a subscription, just let

• 1:15:20Dan Harris?

  us know. We'll hook you up. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:15:52Speaker 07

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• 1:16:34Speaker 07

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