Hard Feelings: Daniel Smith on Embracing Shame, Envy, Annoyance, and the Wisdom in Dark Emotions

In this compelling episode, Dr. David Puder sits down with New York Times bestselling author and psychotherapist Daniel Smith to explore his latest book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions. They dive deep into the often-avoided world of "negative" emotions like shame, envy, and annoyance, revealing how these hard feelings carry profound wisdom rather than being obstacles to banish. Drawing from Smith's personal experiences, they discuss double binds, screen memories, dissociation, and the freezing response that shame can trigger. The conversation also covers annoyance as a temperament trait tied to highly sensitive, hyperpermeable nervous systems, noise sensitivity struggles, links to traits like idealization/devaluation in borderline patterns, and much more. Listen now for raw, insightful reflections on emotional authenticity and mental health. By listening to this episode, you can earn 2.0 Psychiatry CME Credits. https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/cme-program Link to blog https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-podcast/episode-259-hard-feelings-daniel-smith-on-embracing-shame-envy-annoyance-and-the-wisdom-in-dark-emotions Link to YouTube video https://youtu.be/8bgxeW1_5rQ

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

• 0:14David Puder?

  All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Daniel Smith. He is a psychotherapist in New York. He is also a New York Times bestselling author. Previously, he wrote Muses, Mad Men, and Prophets and Monkey Mind. And today, we're going to be talking about a book he wrote called Hard Feelings. Daniel Smith is someone I know. He is a psychotherapy cohort member. So, you know, weekly, we get to hang out, talk about reflective function, talk about psychotherapy. We've been doing that for about seven months now. So I feel like I know Daniel Smith pretty well. And today, we're going to be talking about envy, annoyance, and emotion. So, welcome to the podcast.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

• 1:01David Puder?

  So you said this was a hard book for you to write. In the email, you said it was a very difficult book.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was hard in a bunch of different ways. You mentioned two books I'd written before. The first one, Muses, Mad Men, and Prophets, was about hearing voices, the experience of hearing voices. And partly memoiristic in that my father heard voices. So there were like, and I was very young. I was in my twenties when I wrote it. So there were difficulties there in sharing what was essentially the, like, the family secret. Monkey Mind was easier because it was, I mean, there's no easy book to write, but it was straight memoir. And it was a little, I was able to be a little bit more humorous.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  And it was about one subject and had sort of a clear mission, which was, I looked around and I was like, there are no, there are lots of mental health memoirs, but weirdly, at that time, there'd been, I think, only one other memoir I know of about anxiety and none that I thought adequately described.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  What it feels like to kind of go through the world in a body that's hardwired for that particular experience. So the mission seemed pretty clear and the narrative arc was clear. It was kind of like structured like a classic comedy, right? Like it was gonna end. It was gonna end with a marriage, my marriage to my first wife. So I knew, I knew the arc. But this book, it ended up being like seven or eight books in one. Because um, I knew, I knew that there were particular emotions that I wanted to dive into. But each diving into each emotion was opening up an entire new world. And delving into the literature of each one

• 2:53Speaker 01

  was kind of like starting, starting anew.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  So I kept having this feeling like I was, like I was writing many books all at once. And that's, I mean, that's one of the things that made it arduous. Another one is that you mentioned I'm in this cohort with you. And I'm a fairly new therapist, so I went to graduate school while writing this book.

• 3:16David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Sort of made the decision a few years in of writing this book to go back and become a therapist. And becoming a therapist changes a whole lot of things, including one's angle of approach, how people view you, the sense of vulnerability you feel when being autobiographical.

• 3:38David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Um, essentially self disclosing in between the covers of a book. So there were all sorts of things that made this, this book look a lot a lot weirder and harder and more prolonged.

• 3:54David Puder?

  Yeah, you are a therapist, I can tell from your writing. But you also are a writer, which I think like for those of you who after this get to enjoy the book, it's, it's not like you're reading a psychotherapist write about stuff. It's colorful. It's on, it's very honest. It's like palpably, uh, you know, I think a good writer can draw you in to, to, to, to a memory, to a time period and kind of make you feel what it felt like. Actually, I should probably, I, I was thinking I might read a little bit. To kind of like get people into some of the experiential piece of it here.

• 4:39David Puder?

  Okay, here we go. An early memory. I am seven or eight years old. My father and I are at a stationary, stationary store in a nearby strip mall, buying gum or crowns or stickers. I have just gone grocery shopping. We have paid and I'm dragging my feet before we leave, thumbing through the Spider-Man comics on the thin, wobbling wire rack. As I spin the rack around, I notice a boy only slightly older than I am at the register. And he's buying a candy bar. That is, he is trying to buy a candy bar. He has brought a little

• 5:23David Puder?

  plastic bag with coins in it. And he has emptied the coins onto the counter. The clerk, an old man with a bulbous, pocked nose, counts the coins, slides each from one side of the counter to the other. He shakes his head, "Not enough." The boy is 20 cents short. A line has formed behind the boy, impatient grownups with their pens and greeting cards now. In view of these staring others, the boy must gather the coins from the counter and place them back in his plastic bag. This is not an easy task. The coins are hard to fit

• 6:07David Puder?

  from the smooth countertop. He levers them up with his grubby fingernails and they clatter back down. I watch him. He knows full well that he is being watched. His face is like a Macintosh apple molted with shades of red. When he has finally managed to get all the coins into his flimsy plastic, he rushes to the door. His shoulders slumped, his eyes on the linoleum floor.

• 6:42David Puder?

  The door dings. It's jaunty welcome as he leaves. I'm feeling embarrassed that I can't say linoleum, linoleum. There we go. It's, it's a tough word. I'm feeling shame as I'm reading this. Now, all at once, I am ashamed. I'm ashamed for the boys vicariously ashamed. It feels like the shame is mine, like it is owned by me. His shame is now my shame in my body and mind. My face is aglow. I don't want to look at anyone and certainly not at his eyes. What do I want? I want to get home as soon as possible. Hurry to my room and get under the covers.

• 7:24David Puder?

  I want to cry, but out of sight. A confusion, a kind of psychic haze overtakes me. I've forgotten what I meant to do or what I want to do. The comics no longer hold my interest. They're frivolous or simply absent. My father is outside in the breezeway. I can remedy this situation. I realize the boys and my own. And by the way, in reading this, I so want you to remedy this situation.

• 8:00David Puder?

  All I need to do is to ask my father for 20 cents, find the boy and hand it to him. I resolved to do this, but I find that I can't. The act, however charitable, seems terrible and extreme. My father will detect my oversensitivity. He will see and judge my susceptibility to the emotion of others, my girlishness.

• 8:25David Puder?

  Already I have a reputation in my family. I'm the crybaby, the tattletale, the wuss. My father asks me what is bothering me. I start to tell him. I can see how the boy now, at the end of the breezeway, getting on his bike. But the words won't form. They won't cohere.

• 8:44David Puder?

  I say that nothing is wrong, nothing. I'm fine. Can we go home now? The blood rises in my face again, my ears and my neck. For I know that I have missed an opportunity to do good. I've proven myself a coward without speech and without action, full of nothing but useless, pitiable, pointless emotion. Yikes.

• 9:12David Puder?

  I felt that.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  I felt it again, too.

• 9:15David Puder?

  I felt it, but oh.

• 9:19David Puder?

  There's something about shame and the contagiousness of it, right? That like, I imagine the audience is feeling some, some of that, too. You know, it's like, it's like almost you feel the embarrassment, multiple layers of it. Right? For the boy, not being able to, having to pull up those coins from the countertop. For you, both your shame of telling your father out of a sense of your own sensitivity, that he would shame you for having that sensitivity, for the historical prior experiences of you being shamed for that sensitivity.

• 10:00David Puder?

  And then for, um, I've, it's almost like I'm put back into my own shame of my dyslexia, the difficulty of pronouncing some words. And then, you know, and then on top of that, I think it's, you are drawing the, the, the listener in, they're feeling it as well, right? And so there, you are imagining they're feeling, you know, embarrassed that you didn't speak to your father, right? Courageously.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:31David Puder?

  It wasn't courageous at that time, of course. Hindsight is 2020. It was, you know, you, you know, knowing the repercussions of sharing emotion would be worse than sharing it.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I don't, I'm not sure. I guess I bristle a little bit inwardly at the word courageous, because what becomes clear to me hearing that, it's, it's useful, it's useful hearing it from someone else, sort of having it externalized, is, is, is the double bind. Like, there was no way, there really was no way out of the shame. If I, if I spoke up. I would feel ashamed at my sensitivity. If I didn't speak up, as I didn't, I would feel ashamed at not speaking up and doing what I felt

• 11:27Speaker 01

  was was authentic to me, which was I felt empathy for this kid.

• 11:33David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  I felt I felt for this little boy. And I and this is, this is, this is truly a kind of indelible memory for me that has just been sitting around for forty years or so and found the right place for it. But there there was, there was no way, and I don't think my father would have, I don't think he would have shamed me.

• 11:59David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  But but that almost doesn't matter because there's, there was a kind of ambiance of shame. I had already been taught, I'd already been socialized into some belief that I was oversensitive, that this was weakness. I'm I'm gonna mess this up because I don't, I'm not well versed enough in in in the terminology, but there's a, maybe you know it better, there's a term Freud has called screen memory. Do you know this?

• 12:30David Puder?

  Hmm, no.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna, as I said, I'm gonna mangle it, but I, it's it's a sort of, it's a memory from childhood, a childhood that that is kind of really bright in our minds and that sticks.

• 12:42David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And if I'm getting this right, he believed that those memories are are representative of certain um larger conflicts in the childhood.

• 12:55David Puder?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, it's like, it's like, there's often a multiplicity of similar memories, right, that consolidate or that make that certain memory that's memorable.

• 13:10David Puder?

  Something that sticks. Yeah. And I think, and I think that, yeah, I like how you talk about that as a double bind, because a lot of my patients get in double binds in their marriages. You know, if I'm vulnerable, you know, something bad happens. If I'm not vulnerable, something bad happens.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  And then, and then they freeze, right?

• 13:31David Puder?

  And then there's a freezing. Yeah. In the double bind, there's a freezing. Yeah. It's interesting. As I was reading it towards the end, I started to feel a little bit like a haze of dissociation even. And dissociation and shame, I always say shame is the shadow of dissociation or, you know, it's like, it's what follows, right? There's always, always there. And I know dissociation is there in, when, in my patients, when I feel the shame, right? It's, it's thick.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  It's really fascinating that, because I, I felt that as well, like after all these years and having written it, which is to say to kind of externalize and objectify it and turn it into a narrative, which is, is often a good way to like diffuse it somehow. But I too sort of found myself zoning out towards the end of the anecdote and getting confused and dissociating a little bit.

• 14:26David Puder?

  Today, as I was reading it?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:28David Puder?

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:29David Puder?

  Okay. So maybe I was pick, either I was picking up, either you were picking up what I was feeling, or I was picking up what you were feeling.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  That's like, that's what interests me about shame and like, is, is the kind of atmospherics of it. The ambiance of it.

• 14:46David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  And how it transmits almost in a, in an environmental way, in a kind of like atomized or diffuse way.

• 14:55David Puder?

  And, and I think that the, the, the very sensitive person has a lot of behaviors that are bent on reducing the, the potential of shame in others. And it's very hospitable.

• 15:11David Puder?

  And we even, you, you kind of go into that with, um, in your envy chapter, which envy is a topic I really want to talk about. It's like so thick.

• 15:22David Puder?

  In how your wife introduces people to your home. Okay.

• 15:28David Puder?

  It's almost as if like, so, so the backstory is it's a beautiful home. And she, you know, and so the, the chapter on envy is like, okay, how do we reduce the potential envy of my visitors to the home? Right. And is that part of why there's kind of this elaborate telling of the issues of the home? Right?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:53David Puder?

  So that anyone who comes to the home may, um,

• 15:58David Puder?

  may feel a little bit less envious, right? Or, or less shame. Shame would also be part of that, I would imagine. I'm adding that in, of course.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Reducing the, the, I mean, the, the backstory is we, we had a second child. We, we were growing out of the place that we were renting. We needed to buy a house. We felt we needed to do it pretty quickly for a bunch of reasons. And my wife's family has some wealth and they were able to help us to buy a house. And, and, and the house has a bunch of problems with it still. So my wife would, in her sense that it was kind of, there was something wrong socially to have a large house, given the kind of our friends being

• 16:52Speaker 01

  artists and journalists and cartoonists and maybe don't have the same privilege. But her going through that over and over again, whenever someone came over, was either to reduce their potential envy, but to reduce her, her fear at her, at their potential envy.

• 17:14David Puder?

  Not that they had envy.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Not, they might not have had any envy whatsoever, but, but her, her apprehension, her sense that any envy would be dangerous somehow to whatever the social structure that had been established over the course of years and years.

• 17:35David Puder?

  You know, it's interesting. A lot of these thoughts are not fully formed as I, as I sort of do these interviews. They kind of come up in the midst of it.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 17:45David Puder?

  But the, um, the prior chapter on annoyance.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:50David Puder?

  A lot of the story of annoyance that really resonated with me and just, it seemed like absolute torture was you trying to write in, in like these apartments where you could hear so many sounds around you. And actually bought you some like, um, noise dampening headphones, you know?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:10David Puder?

  Like, I like researched like the highest decibel.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  I think I've got a pair here, like the, like the kind that they use in construction.

• 18:20David Puder?

  Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about painting them really nicely for you, you know? Yep.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Right here.

• 18:24David Puder?

  That's, that's exactly, those are, that's the exact one. That's the exact one. Of course, I hadn't got into the chapter on when you bought a home yet, right? And I saw. And, um, and then I, I didn't know if you would want them, but, or if they, or if, or if the feeling of the, around your ears would become a new annoyance of sorts. But in the midst of that chapter, I felt so viscerally like annoyed for you. Just by the, the neighbors pounding music or just like all the awfulness of construction and, you know, all these, all these different noises that was just like, um, it reminded

• 19:06David Puder?

  me, actually, I, I watched, um, a YouTube recently on the data centers and the, you know, AI data centers that are going up in towns.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:17David Puder?

  And the, the, the sound and the hum and the vibration of, because there's, you know, so much noise coming out of those things.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:26David Puder?

  Is overwhelming to these people. And I, you hear these stories of these people talking about what it's like to have a home where you can never, it's never quiet. Right?

• 19:39David Puder?

  And so I'm, I'm reading that and I'm feeling for you like, oh man, this is,

• 19:46David Puder?

  this is so unpleasant. You know, you, your nervous system needs like to live in the woods. You know, it needs to live in a cabin of like quiet and nature and solitude. Like I'm wanting that for you. Right. And so when we got to this chapter on your home and getting this home, I was, I was just like, I was just like, oh, thank God, you know, like this is great. I'm so happy for you.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  It helps and it, and I mean, I often say to my wife that my nervous system is, is not built for the city. And her answer is always, maybe, but there, you'd always find something.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Like you, your nervous system is such, I mean, that chapter, the way I structured those chapters sort of, and I think it's explicit in the book is that there are different levels at which emotion operates, right? The annoyance chapter is about temperament.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  That which is, or seems hardwired into our nervous systems, the way our nervous system operates, probably the way it operated since birth. So that if I moved to upstate New York, I might be driven up the wall by birdsong or, or like the chittering of squirrels or whatever it happens to be, you know, someone with a snow blower. I don't know, but I kind of suspect that she's right. Like I'm, I'm happier being here than I am living across from a, from

• 21:28Speaker 01

  a loading dock. But I still am prone to annoyance in a way that others I know are not to this degree.

• 21:40David Puder?

  I think that's a real thing. My son actually is higher in annoyance than

• 21:46David Puder?

  my daughter and me and my wife. Like it just naturally higher disgust, higher experiences of like pickiness with food. You know, highly sensitive child type thing. You talk about the chess, chess, not the game, but chess, the author, who wrote about the kind of the difficult child.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:09David Puder?

  10%. We talk about that a little bit in my episode on borderline personality disorder, which I don't think they all become borderline personality disorder, but actually, some of the kids that are highly difficult, and this is right out of the womb, highly sensitive, not harder to console, right? 10% of kids, they end up with more disciplinary issues. Sometimes they end up, you know, with more aggression. But I think, I think what you were pointing at is there are people that are just physiologically more sensitive to annoyance, right? To like, like they're the more sensitive souls, they're, they're hyper permeable, right?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  That's a good word for it.

• 22:57David Puder?

  Hyper permeable to affect.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:00David Puder?

  To emotional contagion. And you know what? A lot of them make really good therapists.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad. I hope that's true. It's, it's, yes, it is. I mean, there's always two sides to the coin, but having a kind of very tenuous locus of control

• 23:24Speaker 01

  is, you know, it's a tough way to live. It may be that it also increases one's capacity for empathy.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  But when you were talking about the Stella Chess and the and borderline.

• 23:38David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  It does. It does make me wonder, and this is also in sort of an unformed thought or an ill-formed thought. But about whether there's something about that that high sensitivity, that slipping of locus control that goes along with idealization and devaluation. Because I notice in myself, in my own therapy, in my own work of becoming a therapist and becoming more sort of self-reflective, how quickly I toggle or frequently I toggle between an idealization of the self and a devaluation.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  And I wonder if that's at all tied, not listening to you talk, with, I wonder if that's all connected to a sense of, oh, I'm, I'm, my nervous system is now intact, like I can control it. I feel safe now. But when it's not, when it feels permeable.

• 24:38David Puder?

  Yep.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Then the devaluation comes in, rushes in, what's wrong with me? And a sense of sort of an allophantic sense.

• 24:48David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 24:51David Puder?

  Yeah, I, what I've thought is that different types of, you know, high, people who are higher neuroticism in the big five, they tend to be.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  And you've seen my big five.

• 25:05David Puder?

  I've seen, I've seen your big five. I don't know if you'd feel comfortable. We could pull it up if you want.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  I'm high in neuroticism. Let's just say that.

• 25:16David Puder?

  But it's like the stress reactivity, right, is higher. Now that could change. I've seen people decrease with, with good psychotherapy, their neuroticism, like two standard deviations.

• 25:30David Puder?

  I've also seen those same people probably go backwards at other points in their life. You know, so stresses can re evoke a neuroticism in some people. It's not as permanent in all people. Yeah, okay.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  It's about maintenance, right? I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's about, it's like,

• 25:49Speaker 01

  I mean, so much of this book for me was about a kind of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, avoiding what Buddhism calls the second arrow. Do you know this idea?

• 26:03David Puder?

  Go ahead, explain it to people listening.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Well, let's see if I can, if I can get it right. The, the first arrow is, are the pains that, that life inflicts that you can't avoid. I mean, I think the Buddha himself was talking about physical pain, but, but metaphorically, analogically, it just, it, it, it covers all pain. Things happen, you know, you, you, you get into conflict with someone, you lose a job, someone dies, whatever, your tire pops on your car. That's the first arrow and it, and you feel the emotion. You feel fear, you feel shame, you feel anger, you feel envy.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  The second arrow is feeling bad about feeling bad.

• 26:52David Puder?

  Right. Oh, yeah. Okay, okay.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's the self-inflicted one. That's the, that's the arrow that you pull out of your own quiver. And the neuroticism, the, the sort of trait annoyance, the, the, the temperamental annoyance. This is me, like I know this. And so I'm the instrument. How do I have to tune? If, if I know my instrument, like, like, like a musician, how do I tune it?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  You know, I was like, I was reading a guy I know, I read this wrong, long profile of Willie Nelson recently. And he's got this guitar, this, this like broken down guitar he's been playing for decades. And it's got a hole in it and it's got very particular sound and resonance. He knows what it needs in order to keep playing it and playing it well. He knows how to maintain it. He knows which luthier to bring it to, to fix it up. Like, what is your temperamental instrument? What do I need in order to continue to stay at a level of?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  I don't know, equanimity, or within that, a band of equanimity and disequilibrium that allows me to connect, allows me to do the work I want to do, to write, to not fall into states of hypersensitivity, or shame, or whatever it is that I know that I'm prone to after, you know, nearly five decades of life.

• 28:31David Puder?

  Right, I think it's like the first initial experience of the emotion is not necessarily the thing that we should, we shouldn't feel shame about that, it just is, right? It's not bad or good. You have anger, you have shame, you have envy, it's like, okay. I've found that if I can, in my better states, act curious, instead of judgmental of, right? So it's like the guilt, the added guilt, the guilt about the initial emotional experience is the second arrow, right? It's the added thing.

• 29:13David Puder?

  You know, it's the, I'm thinking that the thing that I probably would challenge you the most, though, with your understanding of emotion, is I think Ekman had some validity with the micro expression. And here would be my, like, here would be my couple little pieces of how it actually fits better into your system that you've put here, is I think that the micro expression, or the flashes of emotion, occur on the face as someone starts to talk about something.

• 29:50David Puder?

  And then the degree of their awareness of it is sometimes there, sometimes it's not. So what I'll see is I'll see the flashes and then I'll see the defenses come.

• 30:03David Puder?

  So the flashes are, you know, basic things like anger, fear, disgust. You know, I had pain in because there's some newer research to show what pain looks like on the face. It's one tenth of a second. Blind people have it. And so this is my like contention against the arguments against Ekman is that actually congenital blind people flash the same micro expressions as normal people who have been inculcated to view other people's emotions throughout their life. Right? So it's not like we're just mirroring people. So when I learned about this, I actually filmed a bunch of my friends and watching YouTube videos and they would flash micro expressions watching certain scenes.

• 30:48David Puder?

  And one thing I learned was that some people flash more than others. Some people flash different ones than others, different types of scenes. There was one guy who was a friend of mine, who flashed very, very few emotions the whole time. And he has, he has one of the most flattest demeanors. He's had a really hard time dating. He has a really hard time connecting with women and he's very flat emotionally. Like we're talking about one expression of sadness and one expression of anger, pretty much the whole time. Where like a more, my, my wife who did it is very empathic, highly permeable. She flashed all sorts of emotions. She also flashed dissociation because some of the things were actually, you were actually

• 31:32David Puder?

  watching like scenes of child abuse. You're watching scenes that we would like really awful scenes that we, we found that we wanted to evoke emotion. And the, so that would be one point of evidence. Point evidence two, which makes me believe it's true, is Gottman's study where he filmed newly married couples one hour and then he followed them years later.

• 31:58David Puder?

  And the amount of different types of micro-expressions predicted months of separation and somatic illness.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 32:09David Puder?

  Okay. And so there was a predictive validity that I think this study showed of micro-expression. Just the amount of fake happiness expressed, you know, fake happiness is like you're smiling, but not with your eyes, it's just with your mouth, you know, it's just like, it's like the eyes don't, you know, smile with it. Disgust predicted things, so, you know, wrinkling around the nose. So that was the predictive validity. And the third piece that convinces me is probably just my own experience of doing psychotherapy and specifically with psychosomatic patients.

• 32:49David Puder?

  So psychosomatic patients, you know, they're experiencing emotion in their body, like migraines. And there's actually studies that show psychosomatic patients are not as good at reading other people's micro, like emotions. And they're also not as good at reading their own. Okay, so they have more alexithymia. So there's a whole research on alexithymia and micro-expression and, you know, that they're, they're not as good at reading emotions. So, okay, but I think this fits into your paradigm, maybe a little bit different than you would imagine. Okay. Cause for example, annoyance, you could say like, oh, annoyance is anger. So we'd always, we'd always expect a micro-expression of anger, you know, down and together, quick

• 33:33David Puder?

  down and together of the eyebrows. But actually I would say no, because annoyance is complex, right? Annoyance is multi-layered and it, yeah, I agree with you. It's probably more, there's a multiplicity of micro-expressions you would find in someone who was more easily annoyed. You would find more disgust, right? When the waiter comes and brings you a cup and their hand is too high, it's like, oh, wait, I'm gonna, I'm about to sip out of that cup. That, that, that's very annoying for me. It's, it serves up, micro-expressions of disgust. So you would have disgust, you would have micro-expressions of anger, which is kind of like a little bit of tinges of frustration, right? Different things. You would have micro-expressions of, of fear, like maybe, like fearing the, you know.

• 34:19David Puder?

  Differently. So you'd have like a multiplicity of the the micro-expressions. You may, a lot of people, when they have these flashes, they don't know that they're having them. And a lot of people who are watching people, they don't know that the people they're watching are having them. But they mimic them. And so there's a whole science of mimicry as well. People are more likely to mimic the other person's micro-expression if they're trying to focus on emotion. If they're focusing on what the person might be doing for a living or something external, they don't flash as much of the person that they're watching's micro-expressions.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:57David Puder?

  Okay, so that's.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I I'm not sure that our our our views on emotion are all that different, because when you're, when you talk about micro-expressions, you're you're talking about them in a highly contextual way.

• 35:16David Puder?

  Right.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Let me see if I can get this right. I mean, my my objection with Ekman is is with the theory that there are set sort of neurological programs for different emotions. And emotions that across cultures will be universally recognized. Those are the, those are the two poles of basic emotion theory as Ekman and his cohort laid them out, that I think that people like Lisa Feldman Barrett and people who have a theory based on the brain as a as a predictive organ, as a fundamentally predictive

• 36:02Speaker 01

  system, have done a good job of of debunking. But.

• 36:08David Puder?

  But I'd see that, I would say debunking, like, okay, let's go study by study.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:13David Puder?

  I, yeah. Because I'm I'm actually very critical of of, and I'm I'm, I've been working on like a rebuttal episode to her theories for.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  To Barrett.

• 36:22David Puder?

  For quite a time. Yeah. So it's something that I've I've thought a lot about.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:27David Puder?

  I I feel like there's a loss of nuance. So.

• 36:33David Puder?

  So for example, okay, with Ekman, you said first universally, all cultures can re- potentially label certain pictures as like emotions, right?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:46David Puder?

  And I would say it's I see it a little bit differently. I see it as universally, people across all cultures and actually animals as well, flash, one tenth of a second type of flashes of emotion, probably pretty universally. Now, do they know how to describe them the same? Absolutely not. Is there a correct way to describe it? Probably not, right? Are universally people good at recognizing this? I don't think so. I actually think it takes a lot of training and it's it's very unusual for me to find someone who's naturally very good at reading micro expression. So it's a little bit different.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  If I can just jump in there, I mean, I think what Barrett would say is that when when animals show what we're calling expressions and you're calling emotional expressions, are they in fact emotions? She would say that you need a conceptual act. You need a contextualized conceptual act in order to sort of make the thing an emotion, that what you're recognizing are along the axes of pleasant or unpleasant, negative or positive, when you're looking at human expressions. When you sit across from someone in therapy and you see a micro expression, well, you've

• 38:13Speaker 01

  already understood the context of it. You know this person's history. You know what's going on. You know what emotions they've been acculturated into. You know what they're prone to. You know what they're dealing with. So you're able, given the knowledge that you have, the very deep knowledge that you have of this person, to sort of approximate the label of what this person may be feeling and disavowing or not not articulating.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  But that doesn't mean that that's disgust, anger, frustration. There might be a lot going on underneath that expression. That expression to you is, is a kind of, I don't know, it, a, a, an on-ramp to further elucidation of what's going on internally in that person. Correct?

• 39:08David Puder?

  Okay, so I think you're talking about this one study of hers in which she changed the, she, she, she gave a pre-story and it changed how people interpreted the, the emotions of the actors. And so, you know, in my mind, this is a study more of bias exists, you know? Like if, if a judge is being a judge after he's eaten a large meal in the afternoon, he's more critical of the people he's judging, right? If, if we're primed with a bunch of words denoting old people and, you know, we walk out of the research room slower, right? Than we would otherwise.

• 39:52David Puder?

  So we're quite easily swayed. But I think what she would, what she's saying is therefore there's no objectivity with emotion and the expression of emotion, like there's no one visual thing of micro, like in a micro expression of anger, for example, like this doesn't exist. But then I would come back to like, well, okay, so without context, right? The newly met, the newly married couples who had more negative expresses, expressions, micro expressions that predicted, you know, things in the future, months of separation, physical issues and, and people who are born blind, who never see other people's faces,

• 40:37David Puder?

  who never learn other people's, what, what emotions look like from other people's faces. They themselves have these flashes of emotion in the same way as a person not born blind. And so I think, I think there are these building blocks. But what I think I also, I think what we agree with is that the building blocks come together in a very aristocratic, unique way for an individual.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:02David Puder?

  Where the individual then is describing them. And so what I've found is despite my ability to read someone's micro expressions very accurately.

• 41:12David Puder?

  And I built a whole training course on how to read them accurately.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 41:15David Puder?

  Which I need to have you go through and might change your mind even further, but.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  No, I'm actually have been thinking that, that I wish that I had been able, had the time to take that course before this. Cause this is a complicated topic for me and kind of, this was the hardest part of the book to write, so.

• 41:28David Puder?

  It's, it's, it's.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  I'm still open to having my mind changed on this.

• 41:32David Puder?

  I'm, I'm, uh, for your, I, I don't think it changes much of your points in the book and the thrust of your book at all. Cause I still agree with kind of the, the, the place where you arrived to, right? And this idea of like, how do I diminish the second arrow or the, the impact of the second arrow?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:53David Puder?

  But the, um, but I think it's value, it's a valuable dialogue. Because I think that it allows for an understanding of, okay, there may be some starting points, starting blocks, right? And there may be people who for whatever reason have less of, uh, micro expressions that will pop on their face at all. Or more, then maybe they're more prone to dissociation. So there's a whole spectrum of, of people out there based on their personality, right?

• 42:24David Puder?

  But if, if I were to tell someone in my office, like, hey, you just flashed a micro expression of anger. It doesn't go well, you know? And so in my, in my training, I, that's not like, that's not what I train people to do. But it's, it's like a piece of information, you know, like just all other pieces of information we gather from someone. It's like, huh. Okay. So like, for example, I had this 16 year old in my office and he's, he's, um, he's had this, uh, this role in his family as a peacemaker. And he is flashing micro expressions of anger in regards to something.

• 43:07David Puder?

  And so, but he's not talking about anything anger.

• 43:12David Puder?

  So I kind of had a curiosity like, well, let's slow down there. Let's tell me some more about that. Is there anything, you know, and I, I, it gave me like a curiosity, like, okay. And what, what ended up being the case was he was telling me the first 20 minutes of the session, more facade than reality. And once we got to the reality, he was really upset. But this upsetness was dormant as a protective mechanism, as the peacekeeper of the family, to subvert any upsetness, you know, it was a disavowed, it was a disavowed anger and emotion.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  I don't think Barrett would disagree. I mean, in a way, I think, I mean, we don't need to get into the sort of Ekman, rest in peace, and Barrett fight so deeply. That's sort of their battle. But

• 44:04David Puder?

  Right.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  I think the, I think the objection that she really makes is ultimately, I don't speak for her, but neurological, the, the, the sort of the idea of dedicated emotion circuits in the brain, and the idea that there are sort of inside out Pixar like programs, that we have internal, internal experiences, that we have feelings, interoceptive experiences, and mental representations, and that these flash in our, on our face, that we have, you

• 44:47Speaker 01

  know, very highly intricate muscles in our face that show what we're feeling. I don't think she would dispute that. And we use it all the time as, as signs. I think, I think her argument is, is, is more about how we actually produce emotions. And in a way, it's more of a philosophical point about, about what emotion even is, which is why it took me so many months to write that chapter, because it's, it gets pretty abstract. But, but I think what you're saying is, is indisputable.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  That if you pay, that you have to pay close attention when looking at someone to what's going on on their face, what's going on with their body, to what they're saying and not saying. And that if you pay close attention to what flashes on their face, that might give you a clue to what's not being said.

• 45:51David Puder?

  Hmm. Okay. I have an interesting, actually.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  All right.

• 45:54David Puder?

  So you talk about the still face experiment.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 45:58David Puder?

  Which I'm glad you did.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  One of your favorites.

• 46:00David Puder?

  One of my favorites.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:02David Puder?

  And you talk about it in the context of shame.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:08David Puder?

  And I actually had people watch the still face experiment and recorded their micro expressions.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Patients of yours?

• 46:16David Puder?

  Friends.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:18David Puder?

  Friends, friends. And they flash a lot, people flash a lot of distress watching the still face experiment, right? And a lot of happiness in the reunification. And there's this, there's a common thread, though, of like, okay, is there a larger emotional experience? Right? So there could be like these little microcosms of like frustration and, you know, fear for the child and so on and so on and so forth, right? But shame, you know, sometimes people look down, sometimes people look sad, but it's also like the body,

• 46:59David Puder?

  there's a bodily experience of like, like how you describe it in the story of like cowering, you know, or like curling up in a ball, right? And this child inevitably, you know, like the body contorts, right? In the midst of the mother having the still face, in the midst of the distress of the disconnection of the not being able to reconnect.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Twists and.

• 47:24David Puder?

  That the baby, it's like, the baby like.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:27David Puder?

  Kind of like that, right? Where it's like, oh, like I have to move away.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:34David Puder?

  Um, and the baby goes through this kind of like playfully trying to reconnect and then angrily trying to reconnect. And then finally, it's more of like this dissociated like response.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  An implosion almost.

• 47:46David Puder?

  An implosion, yeah. And that's, is that the experience of shame that you kind of like link to? To this experiment, or is it the the experience of maybe having a still face growing up? It like internalized a deeper shame?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Can you can you ask the question again? I want to make sure I'm clear about it.

• 48:07David Puder?

  Draw draw the connection just just for me again, like, what about the still face experiment? Experiment specifically elicited in you this kind of like evocative memory of shame?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's exactly what you say, Ed Tronic, Tronic.

• 48:26David Puder?

  Tronic, yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Tronic, you know, he has a very optimistic view about it. It's it's about the optimism of repair, the power of discord, I think he calls it. And yet, at the same time, that that sense of of being not met face on for what your needs are. For for for expressing your needs and having the person on the other side become, you know, the bad object. And how that

• 49:07Speaker 01

  that is productive of shame in a way that will continue to loop loop forward in throughout your childhood, that not being recognized for what you're actually feeling. I mean, when I when I think of that experiment now, I I I feel shame as a parent for the ways in which I can recognize when my children have emotional needs. But because of what's ever going on for myself, I'm unable to meet them where they are. And that that as important as repair is, if you have that experience repeatedly.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  You might gain a sense of yourself as somewhat as your own needs as wrong, your own needs, your own emotional needs as, as devalued, as sort of globally problematic. I'm not sure I'm putting this in exactly the right words.

• 50:12David Puder?

  Right, and, and maybe, and maybe the, you know, like going back to the story that I read, the inability to tell your father due to your, you being a more highly sensitive child and somehow that the needs, needs were not something that were enthusiastically met, but rather like, don't be a, don't be a girly man, don't be a wussy, wussy man type of thing. That messaging is shame in and of itself, right? It's like a very sort of like, and the repetitive nature of that messaging. And then you internalize a sense of I, I am, there's something about me, this part of me is bad, right? I am bad.

• 50:58David Puder?

  That, I think that's that internalization that.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  There's a, there's also a confusion that comes in, as in that anecdote.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Are my, are my natural instinctive needs going to be met with acceptance? Or is someone going to turn away? And the inability to rely on that may create an internal confusion about the validity of those feelings. That's in itself productive of shame. I mean, there's no way around this really, because no parent is perfect.

• 51:37David Puder?

  But there, but there are some parents that, you know, if they have postpartum depression, if they have, you know, atronic show this, like, they react differently. The child reacts differently in the self face experiment if they've had a postpartum depressed mother. So I think, I think there is this kind of like.

• 51:57David Puder?

  Yeah, sure. Every child probably goes through periods of micro-moments of

• 52:05David Puder?

  not perfectly being attuned to. Absolutely. There's no way that we can get around that. And if AI ever perfectly attunes to children, it will probably create a pathology that's a brand-new pathology that we've never seen, you know?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let me, let me put this another way that's, that's maybe clearer when it comes to what I was thinking of in my book.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  I grew up with parents who, for their own reasons, experienced a great deal of shame.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  And for whatever moments of attunement that they were able to provide, there was a kind of ambiance of shame in the household. And an ambiance of shame is an ambiance of, of hiding away.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  It could be in some, it could be rage sometimes. That's one way of hiding. There's a kind of shame-rage cycle that, that occurs. But in its quieter form, it's a kind of,

• 53:10Speaker 01

  a kind of wall, a kind of, a kind of shrinking away.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  And, and the child is so sensitive to that, that what I saw in the still-face experiment was the way in which that transmits across generations.

• 53:27David Puder?

  Okay.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  The way, the way that the parent's chronic shame may produce in the child his or her own shame.

• 53:42David Puder?

  Okay.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Through a repeated blankness, a sort of a moving forward into this space that, that isn't able to take it in because that parent is feeling shame.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  And so the child, that shame then gets repeated in the child.

• 54:04David Puder?

  Okay, so it's like that

• 54:05Speaker 01

  I'm sure I put it more clearly in the book.

• 54:07David Puder?

  Hyper permeable, like this, this you're absorbing. And I think you actually talked to your, yeah, okay. So I'm seeing, I'm seeing that connection with how you even talk about your own kids. Right. You're afraid that your own issues will get kind of absorbed by them or have been absorbed by them. Right. Rather than the reality, which is your friends say you're a good father, you know, you engage your kids, they notice that, right?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  But it, but it will get absorbed into them.

• 54:40David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  They, they will pick up on it. They will inevitably be formed by who I am.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  And there are some parents who, who wear that burden more lightly than others. And I think I'm a little highly attuned to that difficulty of being a parent. The fact that children have these incredibly sensitive antennae,

• 55:11Speaker 01

  coupled with an inability to really introspect. And so their vulnerability is just enormous emotionally. And, you know, avoiding the second arrow, I think, is one way of improving one's parenting.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  I mean, we keep circling back to shame. And I wonder if that's the kind of master emotion in, in, in all the work that I did on this book.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Not name, simply naming the emotion and noticing it without collapsing into the self.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  I mean, what was happening with that woman in the still face experiment? When, when, when she goes blank, the still face is the face of shame, as I see it.

• 56:00David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  That's, that's what happens with shame. You're sort of there, but not there.

• 56:09David Puder?

  It's, it's like a profound dissociative moment, you know?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 56:15David Puder?

  Yeah, and I think that's, I think that's something that has made me resonate with that as well. Uh, my mother struggled a lot with dissociation. And, uh, I think that that video evokes something in me pretty deep when I saw it, which is kind of like drawn me to it, you know?

• 56:35Speaker 01

  It's such a powerful experiment. I mean, there's a reason that it's resonated for so long.

• 56:43David Puder?

  Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting, Ed Tronik, even his narrative on like, oh, of course, like this happens all the time, people repair. They've actually done studies where they bring a kid back to the room where they did that experiment and their cortisol goes up.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 56:58David Puder?

  Um, and so it's like, well, what if that was a hypomanic defense against the reality that this was actually a very unhealthy experience for these kids, you know? Like, I mean, it's possible that kids go through that on a regular basis. Parents on their phone or blah, blah, blah, you know, but you, usually there's some, it's, it's very unusual for the, for the kid to have a completely blank parent for an extended period of time when they're trying to reconnect.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's almost always more mixed than that.

• 57:35David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Um, unless you're dealing with a, with a truly depressed parent.

• 57:41David Puder?

  Truly, almost, or even like, almost like a psychotic, psychotically dissociative, you know, catatonic. Like, but then usually the catatonic is more like chronically like that for, for long periods of time.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I, you know, I, I was writing about that experiment in the context of my, my father and his.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  His sort of, um, I don't know, his hiddenness.

• 58:11David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  So, so, I mean, it's taken me a little while to get there in this interview, but, but, but when I was looking at that and contextualizing that experiment in that chapter, I was thinking about growing up with someone who was, according to everybody that met him, warm, loving, generous, kind. And yet, for the highly sensitive child, also kind of the man who wasn't there. Right? Like, there was, oh, there was also a sense of, who is this person? What am I not seeing?

• 58:57David Puder?

  To have, to have a facade and, and to be a good, um, a liar of sorts, right? Um, the most popular kids are the best liars.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:08David Puder?

  In high school. I'm not saying your dad was a liar, but we all lie, right? We all like, we all can have a facade at times and like our real emotionality is underneath the surface. Right? He was very good at hiding it with, with people that didn't know him well.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, the mask of shame. There's a book, there's a book by, I think Leon Worms, or called The Mask of Shame.

• 59:29David Puder?

  But the-

• 59:30Speaker 01

  And that's, that's what I was thinking of.

• 59:31David Puder?

  And, and, and not that we, we all have to some degree, different facades for different contexts. That's, I'm not, I'm not saying that's a bad thing necessarily. But with you, you, you were hyper permeable to something else inside of him. Right? In psychotherapy, we talk about this kind of the counter transference of what the person is saying, what the words they're using, but then the counter transference of like the objects, uh, the unprocessed objects of their past or the, um, you know, so maybe it's like this, like deep, profound, unspoken emotions that you could feel like anger, shame, you know, all these things that were hidden. Right?

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14David Puder?

  Underneath the surface, but you were feeling it. And it's like, I, I heard throughout your, your telling of this part, you really wanted to know.

• 1:00:26David Puder?

  Like, because if you don't know, it's a little bit crazy making.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Right. It's a, it's a little bit crazy making and, and, and deeply confusing to, to, to be met with a mask. Or to have the sense that what you're being met with is a mask, even if it doesn't, it doesn't look rigid.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  But the sense that you're not getting some sort of authenticity, that that person is holding back who they actually are. I mean, this happens in, in marriages all the time.

• 1:01:02David Puder?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  It's, it's, I mean, it's often the complaint that people come into, in with, and it's, and it's hard for people to articulate. Like, I'm not getting this person. I want more of them. And, and, and the, the partner may be made crazy by that because they don't even know what that means or how to give it. My father, when I, you know, when he was dying of cancer and I asked him, and this is in the book, you know, tell me what you're feeling. He flashed out with rage, with anger at me because I don't think he knew how to provide that.

• 1:01:42David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  And I think out of a sense of shame. So, so when I was looking at the still face experiment, that's what I was thinking of, a kind of the, the parent's hiddenness.

• 1:01:59David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Right? Like, maybe, maybe the mitigating factor in, in, in all of this is trying to be a parent who is as fully human as possible, which is to say, yeah, I'm, I'm neurotic. I feel shame. I feel this. I feel that. To actually name the things, to be aware of them. Even if you can't necessarily mitigate the emotion, to cope, to, to sort of cop to who you are.

• 1:02:29David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  And in some fundamental way, having a parent that can't cop to who they are. And I think he was getting there when he got sick, would have gotten there.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  That's the thing that, that in a way is, I was trying to probe is maybe productive of shame within families.

• 1:02:51David Puder?

  The shame of hiding the voices, the shame of hiding what was underneath, right? The shame.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  The shame of witnessing in some way that doesn't yet have words that it makes sense to hide away, that you're supposed to hide away, absorbing the lesson that you're only supposed to give a fraction of yourself, show a fraction of yourself.

• 1:03:15David Puder?

  And it's interesting that this book is kind of like a behavioral experiment of sorts in reversing that, putting out, putting out yourself, putting out these parts of yourself that are at times kind of like confessions of sorts, like St. Augustine's Confessions, probably the first book where someone actually wrote critically about themself, right?

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:42David Puder?

  You're continuing that genre to the next level here.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not a comfortable feeling, Dave.

• 1:03:48David Puder?

  But, but your wife kind of pointed out that you didn't really confess about envy.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  That, it's funny, if I was going to rewrite any chapter, I think that would probably, probably be the one.

• 1:04:01David Puder?

  What would you confess?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  The extent to which I feel envy, the extent to which I envy also, I mean, she says at the end, like, you don't talk about, you're envy of these writers, of these people, of these people, of these careers, like, you've made this chapter all about me and you've avoided it. I mean, envy is such a, envy is productive of shame. To confess envy is to say, I feel inferior, is to say, I, I have, I have a deep sense, an apprehension of my own inferiority relative to others, whether it's true or not. And so it's very

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  hard to cop to that kind of vulnerability. And I think writing that chapter, I found myself hiding behind this other anecdote of someone else. And the best I can do to remedy that was to end it with her voice saying, you blew it, man.

• 1:05:06David Puder?

  Which is, yeah, I guess that.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Bless her.

• 1:05:09David Puder?

  I guess that in and of itself is kind of the confession, right? But it's a double confession. It's the confession of not being able to confess, right?

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18David Puder?

  It's the, it's the confession of like, um, yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Go there. I don't know why. Sorry, go.

• 1:05:27David Puder?

  Yeah, I, um, when you share like a success with a friend and the friend flashes a micro expression of anger, like for me, I'm always curious about that. Well, what did I say that was frustrating? Because in my mind, I'm like, I'm happy, you know? And in, in some of my close friendships, it is, it is envy. Or, you know, that they're, they feel maybe safe enough expressing that there is a bit of envy there, right? But yeah, in my own experience, what I have found is that envy also is a, is a truth sayer of what I find important or what kind of like I worship to, so to speak, you know?

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Say more. What do you mean?

• 1:06:13David Puder?

  So the things that I'm envious about are like, um, maybe people who are further along in, or who have had even faster success in like podcasting or like intellectually. So I, I don't think I've ever felt envy for someone having like a Lamborghini or a car. It's just not like my personality. I'm, I'm more like ideas. So if someone can convey ideas in a, in a very articulate way, like I may experience envy for that more than, more than houses, more than cars, more than, you know, things.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I mean, I, I know what you mean, but I don't, um, I guess I have a less sunny view of what my own envy.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Signals to me. Because I could envy someone who I think has written better or more. And it certainly is valuable to me to write well. I would like to be more productive or to envy, you know, to be in the cohort with you and experience envy because you've been doing it longer and know more and I'm impatient to know more. And I want to feel more like an expert, more like I have a better grasp of the psychoanalytic principles or whatever it happens to be.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  But my, my experience of that is that always takes me away from the self. That always de-centers me and places me almost cognitively and emotionally into someone else's life and to their journey. Hmm, okay. It makes it much more difficult for me to have a sense of, all right, where am I? What are the reasons for, for where I am? How can I gain an appreciation of that? I felt a lot of envy while writing this book because I looked around at people who were lapping me in terms of publications. Hmm.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  At the same time, while writing this book, I got divorced, I got remarried, I had two kids. I, I had to deal with the chronic illness of, of, of my oldest child. I went to graduate school. Like I was living my life in a granular way. And envy is, is, um, whenever I experienced envy, it was almost, um, it was, it was weirdly made me ignorant in that moment when that emotion was existent of the particularities of my own life. And, and so it's kind of disturbing of contentment in a way

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  that just made it harder to even achieve those goals. If that makes sense.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Because it's distracting, it's comparison. It's assuming that there is some correspondence between you and another person in the world. When essentially there is not. You know, it's when it makes you compete with others as opposed to yourself and what your own goals are and what the truth is of your own experience.

• 1:09:45David Puder?

  Yeah, okay. I think that I may.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  You're also, you also are an athlete, so you have more of a competitive.

• 1:09:54David Puder?

  I know my achievement striving is high. But I also know that sometimes when I, when there's a project that is very close to like my particular passion, it's almost impossible to do it.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Can you say that again?

• 1:10:09David Puder?

  If I have a project that's very close to my particular passion, my particular interest, it's almost harder to do it. And if it's only me, if I'm the one that's producing it.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24David Puder?

  Because, and I don't know what that is, but if, I would say that that's probably for me the the dark side of there's, you know, it's very, it's unproductive. Is it envy? In that context, I think would be more of like the shame shutdown, not moving forward. I think there's a, there's more of an aspirational type of envy, which is like, okay, they're doing here, this is obtainable, this person's further ahead, it's obtainable. But I, I look up to this person, I, there's like a gentle, maybe idealization. But it's not like it's not shutting me down. It's more of aspirational.

• 1:11:06David Puder?

  So I think, I think if it feels unobtainable, if it feels completely unobtainable.

• 1:11:13David Puder?

  Then I think that's a little bit different. Then I think like it may not inspire envy because I may just not even go there. But I think as well, when I was, when I've been reading about envy, the link between vulnerable narcissism and envy, it's very strong, not grandiose narcissism. Because I think the grandiose person is, their defenses are around not feeling envy. Or so you're, they're not going to fill out, they're not going to, they're not going to proclaim envy in some, you know, survey, right?

• 1:11:53David Puder?

  It may be deeper, you may get to it psychodynamically and in therapy over years, right? But it's superficially not there. But the, but someone who's narcissistic with more of the vulnerable narcissism, they have a lot of envy and they're totally eaten up. I don't know if you've had a patient like this, but they could be, I mean, everything is envy from the watches that someone else is wearing and this and that. And they're constantly comparing themselves and it's, everything is competitive. And so there, it's like, it's, and I think that's more of like the Karen Horni, when she talks about someone who's very neurotic and living in the false self, there's all

• 1:12:36David Puder?

  these shoulds, they're competitive, it's neurotic ambition. So it's ambition not towards something that they're actually like gifted at, like a unique gifting, but it's more of a general, like I have to win at everything, you know? And there's a deep dissatisfaction that pervades because they can't necessarily ever arrive at satisfaction because they're always in this loop, right? Of dissatisfaction. So yeah, I think I think that there's there is no rest and there is no like peace.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  And and that chapter of the book is is sort of at the tail end of the different levels of emotional influence. So if annoyance was my way of writing about emotions at the level of temperament and shame was my way about writing about emotion at the level of the family and transmission of emotion within families, intergenerationally, envy was my way of talking about the way that emotions are transmitted and stoked within cultures.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  So vulnerability, the sense of comparison, of invidious comparison, is is in many ways the sort of defining feature of of Western capitalism, of commercial capitalism. So, yes, if you if you if you're sitting across from the vulnerable narcissist, narcissist, it's very, very clear. But I think that we all live in increasingly in a world where that kind of envy is being stoked, that kind of aspirational.

• 1:14:29David Puder?

  Right. Envy sells, sex sells.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and and, yeah, and sex sells probably by way of envy. You know, like, and envy is is the is the instrument through which people try to get us to stay on social media platforms, to buy this, to buy that, to stay on the streaming services. Envy, the sense that you can have the essence of what someone else has.

• 1:15:01David Puder?

  Yep.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  Maybe by way of actual consumer goods, almost always by way of actual consumer goods or lifestyles.

• 1:15:10David Puder?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  And since and since we all have a narcissistic wound, how do you how do you protect against that? How do you my, you know, my my oldest child is is in college and I've learned that it's the.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  More people have gone out for fraternities and sororities this year in colleges, I think, than in any other.

• 1:15:34David Puder?

  Really?

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  But that's what I, that's anecdotally, that's what I've heard, is that the numbers have just increased. And apparently that's because they've so effectively marketed themselves on TikTok.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  That if you have this experience, there's something about it that if you could join in with this experience, you can be valued in the way you can have the social experience. That's the most highly valuable social experience in college.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a casting outward into some, it's a sense of how, how you're supposed to be, how you're supposed to live.

• 1:16:13David Puder?

  Interesting.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like when I, when I, there's um,

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  this work of anthropology by a guy named George Foster. And he's talking about this village when they first got windows. And they forgot windows facing the street. And this, this culture that he was, he was studying was so highly attuned to envy and invidious comparison, that they would, they would block the windows so that people couldn't look in. Because they knew they were highly attuned to the danger of envy. You know, every culture, every culture has, has some version of the evil eye. The invidious stare. The, the, the look that wants. The look that will grasp.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  And, and of course, we, we're constantly looking through windows now, all the time, every day.

• 1:17:12David Puder?

  Yeah, social media has sped that process up quite a bit, right? Where, and also, I would say, you know, we're also.

• 1:17:23David Puder?

  Yeah. So, so what do I do with my kids? Sometimes I'll show my daughter like videos on how photoshopped some of these models are. Yeah. And so she is looking at, if she sees a beautiful woman, you know, on a picture, she'll say, oh, I could see that they brushed the skin and they did this and that, you know? It's, it's like, she, she's kind of like viewing the picture as not, this is not real. Right? Yeah. I think that meta influencers do sell product. Oh, I don't know if you saw, but AG1, there was a brand new study on AG1 that just came out. What's AG1?

• 1:18:06David Puder?

  AG1 is sold on a bunch of the top influencer podcasts. Okay. Um, and this is a, a supplement that's supposed to be like a, you know, help you in your health. So they did this study and it didn't do it, didn't do anything. But this thing's like $70 a month and you know, that like this, you know, people listening to like,

• 1:18:31David Puder?

  some of the top podcasts, like that promote this, I don't even want to say their names. Cause you know, just going to put it out there, but some of the top podcasts,

• 1:18:41David Puder?

  this thing doesn't do anything for your, for your gut flora. Right? And I talk about this in my podcast a while ago with Drew Ramsey. We talked about how really, if you want to change your biome, you need to eat fermented foods. Cause there's just so much more good, healthy bacteria and fermented foods than ever, than you could ever take in a pill. Right? Yeah. Kimchi is the only way, man. But I think my point is that, yeah, kimchi, fantastic, sauerkraut, you know, right? Kefir, good, good for you.

• 1:19:16David Puder?

  And especially after, if you ever have to take antibiotics, you should definitely get a lot of that stuff in you. Okay, but my point is that this stuff sells. And it's because people want, people are influenced by people that they imagine to be, you know, having this sort of the answers, right?

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and what's, and how do you, if not inoculate yourself against that? How do you stay alert to it enough? That you're not so driven by it? I mean, talk about ambiance, like ambient, it's, it's everywhere. Envy is, is, is the way, in many ways, that the economy has,

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  has developed by way of, by way of envy, by way of comparison. That's how consumer capitalism operates. And, and as you're describing, like, you sense as your children grow up, just how vulnerable they are to that.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  And, and how it gets at a kind of very core

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  mechanism within a human, because we do naturally tend toward models. We need models, right? When it's, it's hard, it can be hard to discern between envy and aspiration, envy and admiration. You know, I, I

• 1:20:53David Puder?

  Yep, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  I will admire a clinician who has a lot more experience and knowledge than I do, or a writer who, who I feel has a certain, I don't know, a facility or style. And that, that admiration

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  is a good thing. It's motivating. It feels sort of nourishing.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  It feels like even talking about it in this way, I can, I can sense my nervous system settling.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Because it, it maybe, maybe because it remains about the self and the aspirations for the self.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  But that can very easily tip over into into envy, which is wanting to be that other person, wanting to sort of have in some core essence, be in some core essence, what who they are. And it can be a delicate operation to stay with admiration and not fall over into into envy, which is is larcenous in a kind of way, right? I mean, Dante in The Purgatorio punished the envious by sewing their eyelids shut with with wires so they couldn't see.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  There's something about seeing that is grasping. Um, you know, if if hearing is is is brings things in like you like with with annoyance, if there's a passive receiver of things, vision in this in this sense is a grasping. And and how do you how do you avoid in a culture that wants you to grasp doing it? It's a very, I find it to be, I don't have any answers. I find it to be a difficult thing and something I think a lot about as a as a parent.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  And usually usually do things like you do, like teaching my children or showing my teenager, talking to my teenager about how social media operates, how how algorithms operate, what these companies and the executives in these companies say behind the scenes about what they're actually trying to do. And that helps, I hope.

• 1:23:24David Puder?

  Hmm, I I have an example of this. Cause cause there are, you know, therapy influencers, there's just one that's selling a course, it's like very expensive. And take this course and you'll get better at this thing, right? I went to their Instagram and they have fifteen thousand followers or something like that, right? And yet I look at their posts and they have three likes and like one comment on each each of their posts. So I know that they're fake followers.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00David Puder?

  So you can, um, I know because I've had companies reach out and want to sell me on this, you know, and I'm like, no, I'm good. I'll do outboard my own social media. You know, there's, there's bots you can get that do fake comments.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:24:14David Puder?

  Hundreds, you know, per post or whatever. And so here you have kind of like this facade of like, here I have something great to teach you that are a lot of people are following me for. But there's like no real substance. Now, I didn't look at this. It's like, what, what is the value acquisition? And I think this is where it's like, I think customers are getting smarter. Actually, I think a lot of the youth are a little bit more cognizant of like, you know, the kind of the house of cards, you know, that there's this kind of like falseness to a lot of politics that, you know, there's a lot of corruption and I think, I think there's a lot of skepticism.

• 1:24:58David Puder?

  I just had a kid in my office yesterday who was like, yeah, I don't respect any authority. You know, kind of attitude, right?

• 1:25:08David Puder?

  I'll listen to my friends. Those are the people I care about. So there, there is kind of like a push, there is a push to the other direction that I think is probably inevitably happening.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Man, I mean, that sounds, that sounds good to me. At the same time, I, you know, I, I feel, I can't help but feel a little skeptical or even cynical about it because consumer capitalism has always done a very good job of commodifying even that,

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  that kind of dissent, even that kind of internalizing dissent. They're very good. It's like water, you know, it always finds its way. And so these companies. Hire very talented social scientists.

• 1:25:49David Puder?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Find ways to, all right, kids are becoming a little bit more skeptical, a little bit more anti authoritarian, a little bit more wily. How do we use that?

• 1:26:00David Puder?

  Okay, so then, yeah, so it's like, who's the YouTuber that has that attitude that's captured their attention? And then how do we get?

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Sell products that way.

• 1:26:08David Puder?

  How do we get that YouTuber to sponsor our stuff?

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12David Puder?

  You know, did you hear about how in Japan, they used to not drink coffee? But how they slowly changed them to drink coffee?

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:26:21David Puder?

  They they made coffee flavored candy.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:26:24David Puder?

  And so for a decade, the kids were eating coffee flavored candy. And then they introduced the coffee.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:26:32David Puder?

  So when all those kids hit, you know, the age where they would probably actually go to a coffee shop.

• 1:26:39David Puder?

  So, yeah, I think I think capitalism is very intelligent and ve- very, very intelligent at being able to woo the next generation. And it's it's tricky, too, because it's not always that they're wooing them into things that are going to be healthy. Right? Like vaping and, you know, there's all these like new marijuana type products now, like, that are legal in some, that legal in states where cannabis is illegal, you know? And and all these types of things. Yeah, it's wild.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, I guess that's what would worries me so much is is not envy as it as an interpersonal

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  experience, but envy as a kind of system systemic experience. And I just don't know, I don't know what.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  What can be done about that?

• 1:27:42David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  Beyond raising, you know, continuing to raise awareness about about how it operates.

• 1:27:49David Puder?

  Maybe it is an increased reflectiveness, you know? Maybe maybe that is part of the answer here because it's how do we properly reflect on what is going on? That's leading us to be galvanized towards this specific thing, you know? Like, what are the what are the influences influencing us?

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  I mean, here's where I here's where I get I'm sorry if I cut you off.

• 1:28:13David Puder?

  Go for it.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  Here's where I I I get a little confused because,

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  you know, part of the impetus for the book is is a kind of

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  trying to to disempower the the the moralizing view of emotions. The the idea that there are negative emotions and positive emotions. The that valence is is that language is is is new in that sense. It's taken from it's it's taken from chemistry. It's taken from the study of electricity, ions, charges, all that. And to say, well, no, there's no good emotion or bad emotion. There are just emotions and and what we need to do is see them in their fullness. But with envy, as I as I write in this chapter, you could you could sort of see the moment

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  at which the the the moral valence of envy shifts. Right? Like up to the turn of the 20th century, 1910s, 1920s, all the messages, all the cultural messages were envy is bad. You know, Cain killed Abel because of envy. We were we were we were fallen were fallen as human beings because of envy.

• 1:29:34David Puder?

  Sure.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  Satan is the great envier. And to feel envy is bad.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Now, part of me, a lot of me, the therapist in me, the human in me wants to be like, well, no, no, no, no, it's just an emotion. You know, it's, it's universal. We all feel it and we have to get curious about it. But then there came a point when business leaders, uh, moral leaders, governmental leaders, realized that actually envy can be used. If they change the moral valence of envy, then you could really unleash these animal spirits of the marketplace and you could really move the economy along by way of consumerism. And, and voila, like it, it worked like gangbusters, right?

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  The American century is in many ways a result of the unleashing of envy as, and presenting it as a moral good, right?

• 1:30:35David Puder?

  Is, is it, okay, so this is where I kind of, I'm kind of like, okay, is, are people conscious of their envy? Uh, or do they say, do they describe it some other way?

• 1:30:48David Puder?

  Like, for example, like someone who buys AG1 from their influencer who says like, oh, this is gonna help you feel better and have more energy and be more productive. They may not recognize how envy sold it to them, right?

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 1:31:05David Puder?

  But they may be taking it. Uh, so it's like, is it envy that is bad or unconscious envy?

• 1:31:14David Puder?

  Like, is it, is, is the awareness of envy, kind of like what we're talking about, right? That there's the first arrow, we're like, okay, there's this thing that hits us and I notice I'm envious, right? And then I think what I was saying before is like, sometimes it's helpful because it's like, oh, that's what I value, or that's what I, I may be overvaluing, right? I may be over worshiping this thing and it may be actually starving me of my contentment with where I'm at, right? It's, it's, is it, is it ever good enough or am I, or can I be content with the, the influence and the impact and, you know, blah, blah. So, or just with playing with my kids, you know?

• 1:31:55David Puder?

  Cause envy actually, like with some people, it's so strong, it keeps driving them and they forget about their kids, they forget about their friendships even, right? Envy can be all consuming. It may be completely unconscious for those people that are envious that it's driving them forward into a sense of destruction, right?

• 1:32:17David Puder?

  So maybe that would be where I would put the moral valence piece is like if it was not serving the person and taking them away from what they would really value, right? But maybe they would consciously not be able to know that it was driving them. Maybe though with some therapy and some exploration and maybe if it was driving them in the wrong way, they eventually would have some symptomatology or pain points, right? Like, oh, I have a marriage that's falling apart, or I have kids that hate me, or I have this or that, right? And it's like, maybe the pain points lead them to therapy where then it's like the exploration and the unfolding.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  Or a sense of emptiness, a sense of my needs, my behaviors are kind of feel somewhat, and I've experienced this with patients, that they feel somewhat alienated from me, like I'm being driven by these aspirations that, and this is too strong a word, but they were sort of implanted in me. Like, I keep aspiring and aspiring, aspiring, or acquiring, acquiring, acquiring, but I don't know really why I'm doing it. I don't really have a sense of meaning in my life.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  I think that happens a lot with sort of highly successful, highly functioning clients.

• 1:33:52David Puder?

  Highly externally functioning.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Yes, yes, yes, that's right. Thank you for the correction. I appreciate that. Very important, very important.

• 1:34:00David Puder?

  Because I think that there, and I think Nancy McWilliams talks about there's a deep, profound emptiness in someone with that more narcissism, with more higher narcissism traits, right? There is a deep, and I think that Karen Hart and I would say that the true self is like this kind of like wilting flower inside of them, so to speak. And they've watered this facade, this projected image of themself, which is...

• 1:34:30David Puder?

  Sometimes to stir up envy in others, sometimes to just try to prove to themself or to avoid the feelings of shame. And it has a bunch of shoulds that surround it, moral, moral shoulds of I should be this and I should be that. But there's a vapidness, there's the kind of like this, um, there's a valuelessness, right? Meaninglessness.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, this is, this is a part I struggle with therapeutically when I'm thinking about it because how do you, how do you think about and introduce into the work these, these larger forces, these cultural and economic forces that are no doubt influencing the person and their views of what they want, what they need, that might be contributing to the sense of, of emptiness or, or aposity of meaning. And yet are so large, so powerful, so, so much things that you as the clinician can't

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  influence. How do you incorporate that into the work itself? Because it, I have no doubt that it's there when we're talking about these kinds of, of patients, you know, the, the really highly driven, highly successful, often very acquisitive patients who, who then come in with it, with almost an inarticulate sense of longing. How do you make sense of that in that room? It's something I, I, I think about and think about a lot and thought about a lot when I was, when I was writing this chapter on envy.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Because that's not, that's not the level at, at which the therapist works. I mean, I think, I think there are, there are psychiatrists who write critically and try to think counterculturally and in terms of, of what's going on in the broader culture and how that's showing up. But, but, but keeping that level in mind in the room is something that I, I wonder about and I'm trying, still trying to, to make some sense of.

• 1:36:49David Puder?

  I think it would come down to individual, you know, like you would, you would almost have to catch someone in a, in some sort of individual obsession. And then, and then try to distill the why. And in the why question would be, you know, there would be a low reflective answer.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:13David Puder?

  Well, I don't know. You tell me. Why, doc? And if you told them, that would probably not allow them to, to enter into that sort of curiosity. So yeah, maybe it would be a, like a Socratic questioning. You, you wouldn't know necessarily where you would end upon. But I think what you're, what you're pointing at is that likely there is a lot of the culture that has biased people to have certain drives towards consumption, which may inevitably not be in alignment with their values, but more of like values that they've absorbed.

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, or, or that in a, in a more even complicated way might have become their values.

• 1:38:06David Puder?

  Become, become their values, but this is where it's like, for most people, it's probably not their meta-values.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:13David Puder?

  You know, it's not like, like, okay, like I used to go into the prison, the prisons in medical school. And I would talk to a group of like 15 guys. And I would say, okay, so you guys like, like, what do you want to do when you get out? Like, oh, I want to get a good car and I want this and I want a house. And I'm like, okay, so imagine you are 75 years old and you have the best cars all in your garage. You have a huge house. And you're all alone. You're a hundred percent alone. And you haven't seen anyone in your large house and all of your cars for like. For the last year. And they're like, no, no, I'm like, oh, tell me, what do you want? Well, I have to have my friends there. I have to have like some family after.

• 1:38:58David Puder?

  Okay. Okay, well, that's tell me about that. So then like inevitably, the values that they project is like, this is what I really want superficially from capitalist sort of, you know, from the movies they watch from everything, it kind of falls short if if that's all they have.

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And and this is the way in which I think therapy is inherently countercultural, or at least a certain kind of psychotherapy, because it does. It does, in fact, have its own values. It isn't valueless. It is, it does, in fact, value connection and openness and reflectiveness in a way that absolutely runs perpendicular to a lot of the culture as it exists right now.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  And and when I when I feel any dipping of faith about what psychotherapy is or can do, I often find myself returning to that. That that therapy as a as a as a necessary countercultural force, a place that really can center exactly those kind of values that you're talking about and and finding myself trying to get more comfortable with the fact that therapy is in fact value laden in that way, in that broader way, that that's that's becoming more and more important to me.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  And and as we talk about envy becomes more clear to me as well.

• 1:40:51David Puder?

  Yeah, I like that. There's this like, maybe the value of connection, the value of, you know, I mean, what is therapy but two people trying to connect, right?

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:02David Puder?

  So at the core, it's connection. I would say also the value of family,

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:08David Puder?

  Friends, the value of connections outside of, meaningful connections outside of, outside of the office, when it's, when it's done well, at least. And then the, yeah, the, you know, I tend to think that most mental illness leads to isolation,

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:31David Puder?

  Perceived isolation or actual isolation. And so it's like, we're trying to get people to move into more connection.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43David Puder?

  So, yeah.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:41:46David Puder?

  I could see how envy and shame can kind of make that difficult at times, and it can be a hindrance towards that.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Envy is, in a way, that maybe connects to what I was saying about its relationship to admiration, a kind of severance of, of connection.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  Because it's, because it's, because of its inherent acquisitiveness, its desire to, to sort of grab, maybe like shame inherently disconnecting.

• 1:42:26David Puder?

  Right.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Maybe that's too absolute a statement. I'm not sure, but that's my, that's my intuition.

• 1:42:33David Puder?

  Yeah, no, I think that envy would lead to, envy does lead to, I have seen very, people who are very envious, and it's very hard for them to have male, like male, very high, highly competent males with high envy have a hard time with friendships.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  When I was working on this book and really in the heart of it, and struggling terribly for all sorts of external reasons, as well as just the difficulty of writing the book, and would talk to a friend, a really beloved old friend, who was flourishing in his literary career.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  And was proud of it and wanted to share something with me and I would feel envious. I experienced it as a severance of connection. I experienced it as a failure of intimacy. Because I could not join him there. Because it became about me. It kind of

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  sort of like bounced back against me and and made me lose my intimate connection.

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  Which creates all sorts of other things, sadness and shame, but if you're not careful, but that's, that's.

• 1:44:02David Puder?

  But you'd be, I think the first step is like, okay, that is, that is the first arrow. Right? What is the, what is the second arrow of envy?

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  The second, the, the, the second arrows, the second step is always just to name and notice. The second step is always, I feel envy because I'm struggling and I'm going through a hard time and I'm lost. And, and, and it's reflectiveness is the next step. Would you ask me, what is the second arrow?

• 1:44:37David Puder?

  The second arrow is about, would be the

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  The second arrow in this is, I should not be feeling envy of this person. Yeah, that it's wrong. It's a violence to feel envy of this person. It's wrong to feel envy.

• 1:44:48David Puder?

  Or, or this, or maybe the second arrow would be be that which then leads to the disconnection. Right? So be, I, whatever that is. So I would say that and it's, it's okay if you see this differently, but the way I was thinking about it was the second arrow would be putting, putting the book down, your friend's book, not, not rejoicing, right? It consumes you to the point that you can't like rejoice with your friend, maybe. So what, what is the, uh, the, if the, if the envy is unconscious? And then you put the book down and you don't rejoice. That leads to the disconnection.

• 1:45:30David Puder?

  But then the the awareness of the envy, this is the maybe I'm just thinking out loud here, how I would see it. It's like, it almost is like information on like, the the capacity then to to pause and to say, well, I envy because I actually value what this person has accomplished. And I have aspire towards that as well. And yeah, I would want to celebrate with them out of not a reaction formation, which would be doing the, you know,

• 1:46:06David Puder?

  or opposite action, but actually somehow then finding an ability to move through the envy into into more of the other person's experience, right?

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, it's mentalizing, right? In a way, it's, it's, it's seeing that person slowing down and seeing that friend in his in his fullness, in his, his own narrative, remembering what his aspirations are, what his struggles have been, what his emotions are, as opposed to sort of tethering your experience to his or his to yours. It really is keeping his

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  mind and his existence in mind, loving, loving the other. There's the writer Annie Dillard, who I, I just absolutely adore, once said something like that, that the the only real prayer is love them, love them, love them. And in this context, I think of that, I think of when I'm feeling envy, it is, and I don't mean this in a second arrow way, but in a descriptive way, a kind of failure of love.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  It is, it is a, it is, it is in making this person's experience reflective of my own as opposed to granting them autonomy of their own life and loving them for who they are and what they need. At the moment of envy, there's a kind of, at least at that moment, a severance of that. It feels disconnecting, it feels bad, it feels lonely.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  Because the fact of the matter is that in no way do I actually want what that person wants, especially in this context, right? If I don't want to write the book that that person wrote, I want to write the book. The, the point, the whole point is to be original and to find your own voice. When you listen to someone who's a successful podcaster, you don't want that podcast, you want your podcast. You want your podcast to be a reflection of you and what you find interesting in your own explanation, explorations. So the envy in itself is always in, on the level of authenticity, false.

• 1:48:49David Puder?

  Yeah, I'm hoping that you felt in this, in this time together that I was able to see, see the world from your perspective and not just trying to see it through my own perspective. Cause I realize I have challenged a couple of points where I, I'm looking at it through my perspective, you know, and um, but I've also seen, I feel like, I, you know, I've, I've enjoyed. And like, there's part of me, I know you invited me to your, your book thing. I'm like, I haven't traveled for a long time. I'm tempted, you know?

• 1:49:26David Puder?

  I'm very tempted to come celebrate with you. And the, uh, but, but no, I think, I, I would hope that you would feel like I have seen you in the midst of this. I'm, I'm conscious now of maybe.

• 1:49:38David Puder?

  Like, am I enacting this in a poor way, you know?

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  How so? I don't, I, I really appreciate the way you've come at it. I've probably been too focused on my own sort of shame in the moment when I haven't been able to articulate points well, or I've forgotten points of my own book. That's a funny feeling. It's like, I wrote this thing, but I haven't, but I finished it over a year ago. And, and there's so much in there. Did I describe what I wanted to say about the still face experiment the way I wanted to? And as I said, this is the first interview I've done, but I don't know, I don't know what you're worrying about. Uh, I'm probably over here worrying about my own thing.

• 1:50:19David Puder?

  And maybe that's, um,

• 1:50:22David Puder?

  that's, that's probably that internal reflectiveness that makes you a good writer.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm grateful to have had the chance to have a long conversation about, about this book, which is, um,

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  you know, means a lot to me and, and is, is, is it's, it's scary to put a book out as a therapist that's this autobiographical. So I'm, I'm.

• 1:50:54David Puder?

  You're like, you're like the next Yalom. That's, that's, that, that would be my like assessment.

• 1:51:00David Puder?

  You're the next Yalom. We need like, next one will be envy's executioner.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But I don't, I don't want to envy Yalom. I want to be my, my, myself.

• 1:51:11David Puder?

  You will surpass Yalom.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  I have to surpass myself. It's a.

• 1:51:17David Puder?

  You'll surpass, yeah. I'm like, I'm stoking the flame of envy. I'm marketing envy to you. I'm like.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  The idealization of others. No.

• 1:51:25David Puder?

  I'm trying to subvert. No, no, no.

• 1:51:27Speaker 01

  I don't want anybody else's essence, or at least I try not to. I'm really, I'm grateful to you, David. I appreciate it.

• 1:51:35David Puder?

  That's fun. Now we're playing some, we're playing some gymnastics here now.

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:51:38David Puder?

  It's like, uh. Yeah, no, I, and I, I think that there is, um, like, I'm, I'm conscious of some envy of how you write, because I will never write like that, because you, the way you're, like, be having dyslexia, right? Like, I will, I will always probably be a better podcaster than I will be a writer. That's just, that's, that's truth.

• 1:52:00David Puder?

  But I'm also happy, but I'm also enthusiastic that there are people like you that can write the way that you do. You know, so it's like, I'm, I'm, I'm aware, I think, at this point, like, if, if I write something, it will be, it'll probably be like, like a, like a syphilis. It'll probably be like syphilis, or, or Sisyphus. It'll be Sisyphus, it'll be a Sisyphus-like thing. It'll also feel like the syphilis, probably.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  Well, there's a quote by Thomas Mann that I love, and I'm going to mangle this too, but it's something like, "A writer is a person who has a harder time writing than other people." So, so it's always Sisyphian. And I was feeling envy this morning for your, your industry, your, your, your voraciousness, your speed. So, um, I have to try to quiet down and remember what I do is what I do. Like, I gotta work my side of the street.

• 1:53:08David Puder?

  My speed? What's my speed?

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  You, the, the, how, how often you, you produce podcasts and get things out and write, you know, long articles on the website accompanying that. The, the, the way that you, you, you, you feel like you can research things, you know? That horrible tragedy occurs near your house of a therapist getting murdered, and you very quickly get into action and, and produce a spreadsheet of the ways this has happened and how this has happened in other ways and in other parts of the country and different times. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not, I'm going to say not envious, but deeply admiring of, and in a way, you know, in a way envious that you have that ability.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  I've always wanted that for myself, but don't. That's just not the way I operate.

• 1:53:59David Puder?

  I, I think, um,

• 1:54:02David Puder?

  Part of that is teamwork. I'm pretty good at. You're good at collaborating. I'm good at getting highly motivated medical students. So if you're listening to this and you're about to apply to medical school, reach out to me. I got some projects. Yeah. Beautiful down there. But, um, yeah, no, it's, uh, well, I think, I think we should probably wrap it up right now. With like, I think this is, this is good. Mutual, mutual enjoyment of each other's successes. And, um, and just, just enough envy to aspire towards our own hard work, right? To point to what we admire in the other. Yeah, that's good. Okay. All right. We'll leave it there for today. Okay? Thanks, David.