Why Am I Like This? | Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach

Why even self-help authors can still be messy. Glennon Doyle https://momastery.com/ is the CEO and Founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. She is an author, podcaster, producer, and philanthropist. Her books include the #1 New York Times bestsellers Untamed and Love Warrior; the New York Times bestseller Carry On, Warrior; and Get Untamed: The Journal. Abby Wambach https://abbywambach.com/ is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, FIFA World Cup champion, six-time winner of the U. S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award and one of Time's Most Influential People. She is a founder of Treat Media, and the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Wolfpack and the New York Times bestseller Forward. In this episode we talk about: Significant personal struggles that happened simultaneously for Glennon, Abby, and Glennon's sister, Amanda How that led to them writing a book about the fundamental life questions they believe everyone grapples with Why people in the self-help world don't always have their shit together Why trauma leads to dissociation How to "go on" after the experience of grief Why we are the way we are Family roles, attachment theory, and learned behaviors The possibility of personal change Our thoughts on the latest season of the White Lotus And much more Related Episodes: Abby Wambach On: Grief, Addiction, And Moving From External To Internal Validation https://www.danharris.com/p/abby-wambach-on-grief-addiction-and-732?utm_source=publication-search Glennon Doyle is Rethinking Her Relationship to Social Media, Hustle Culture, Intuition, Her Body, and Her Parents https://www.danharris.com/p/glennon-doyle-is-rethinking-her-relationship-762?utm_source=publication-search Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: We Can Do Hard Things Book https://treatmedia.com/#the-book We Can Do Hard Things Podcast https://treatmedia.com/#the-podcast Treat Media https://treatmedia.com/ Untamed https://untamedbook.com/ Wolfpack https://abbywambach.com/books/wolfpack/ Intimate Terrorism by Michael Vincent Miller https://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Terrorism-Crisis-Love-Disillusion/dp/0393315320

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

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hey, gang. How we doing? There are many reasons why I enjoyed this conversation, but perhaps chief among them is that I personally feel a special kinship with people who write self-help books and yet who are still very willing to admit that they continue to occasionally be a fuck-up. Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach are each stars in their own right. Glennon is a huge bestselling author of books such as Untamed. Abby is a two-time Olympic gold medalist in soccer and also a bestselling author in her own right. And together with Glennon's sister Amanda, they host a huge hit podcast called We Can Do Hard Things. And they are now out with a new book, also called We Can Do Hard Things,

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  where they talk about 20 of life's biggest questions. In this conversation, we talk about a time of significant personal struggles that happened pretty much simultaneously for Glennon, Abby, and Glennon's sister Amanda, which led them to writing this book. We talk about why people in the self-help world don't always have their shit together, why trauma leads to dissociation, how to go on after the experience of grief, why we are the way we are, family roles, attachment theory, and learned behaviors, the possibility of personal change, and our thoughts on the latest season of White Lotus. Before we get started, I just want to let you know about something very cool that we're going to be doing in the second half of May.

• 1:43Dan Harris?

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

• 2:26Dan Harris?

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

• 3:11Dan Harris?

  the rest of the week, you have to be a paid subscriber. So head on over to danharris.com and check it out. We'll get started with Glennon and Abby right after this.

• 3:22Speaker 01

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• 3:50Speaker 02

  How do I recover from a friendship breakup? How come there's nowhere to hang out anymore? Why do I feel lonely when I can communicate with anyone and everyone through my phone? These are the questions that you're not alone in asking. And that's where our new podcast, Cornerpiece, comes in, to start small on life's biggest questions. I'm Taha, and with my friends Sabrina and Melissa, we're going to explore life's ungooglable questions on this new podcast with TED. Come hang out with us on Cornerpiece, with new episodes every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:24Dan Harris?

  Abby and Glennon, Glennon and Abby, welcome back to the show.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Thank you, Dan. We're delighted to be here.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  We love you. So we're just grateful you keep asking us to come back.

• 4:34Dan Harris?

  The feeling is mutual. I'm always happy to have you on. I've never had you on as a couple, only solo, so it's really nice to talk to you in this format. Let me ask about this new project. From what I can gather, it was really born out of a lot of, to be frank about it, suffering and struggle. Am I understanding this correctly?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Kind of, yeah. I mean, it started during a period where the three of us, Abby, me, and my sister, who all do life together and also do our podcast together. I had an anorexia diagnosis. Abby lost her brother unexpectedly, and my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, all in the same six months. So during that time, we kind of all panicked. You know, you have those people who show up for you and you take turns freaking out, but we were all just really spinning at the same time. And so we started collecting little glimmers of wisdom for each other. And then that sort of turned into this exploration of collecting glimmers of wisdom

• 5:40Speaker 03

  in all these different categories. So it was out of a place of lostness, I would say.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been a hell of a couple of years for the three of us collectively. And because we work so closely together on the podcast and we do life together, obviously Glennon and I are married, but one person is usually not going through trauma or a really tough time to kind of steady the boat. And we just didn't have that. We were just kind of all flailing a little bit. And our podcast is a place where we like talk to the wisest and most brilliant people that we can think of and find in the world, our teachers, really. The conversations that we've had, not just on the podcast, but in our real lives, like, we started sending these like little snippets to each other as a pathway forward.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  And that's kind of what was like the precipice and like the beginning of us actually thinking about and creating this book.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was like we needed to externalize the hope. We couldn't. We couldn't save ourselves in those moments, which is ironic because most of my life's work has been about, it doesn't have to be out there, it's inside of you. And during this time, it was not inside of me. So it was a way of externalizing and finding a place where we could go to remember what we knew that turned into this.

• 7:01Dan Harris?

  I just want to pick up on that word, remember. You write something, Glenn, and in the introduction that really landed with me as somebody who's, you know, we're all in the same line of work. We're all, let's call it personal growth or self-help or whatever, whatever you want to call it. Neither of those terms is perfect, but there's a way in which people who don't do what we do might expect that we have our shit together in a holistic way, but we don't, at least none of this in this conversation do. And we need to be reminded, even when we've written whole books, in your case, four. And I really resonate with that. I've gone back and, because I've had to write a new foreword for an old book I wrote or something like that, and remembered, oh yeah, I'm not even practicing this thing anymore. And it sounds like that happened to you.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  It is all that happens to me. I mean, it's the only thing that happens to me. Sometimes, especially during this time, and I'm going to explain it to you, and then I'm going to try to explain what I think might actually be happening in my brain during this. But during this time, I was so disconnected from my own wisdom. We would be in grocery lines and somebody would come up to me and say, oh my God, I read your book and you really helped me through this time. And it was all I could do to say, is there anything you can remember that I said that you could tell me back that might help me? And Abby and I always laugh about this as like my Dory from Nemo phenomenon, where every day I just wake up and I'm, forget everything.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  I'm just like, brand new here. And I've called it beginner's mind forever because I've wanted to put a positive spin on it. And I do think that there are positive spins to be put on it. I think some of the ways I see the world are because there's some freshness involved.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  But the more I think about what's actually happening is I think it's possible that the worse things get, or the harder my life is, the harder it is for me to connect to what I know. And so I wonder if it's like anxiety does create a bit of dissociation. I think it might be a mini dissociation that happens over and over again, that when we are going through a hard time, when we need wisdom the most, when we need to remember, I've been here before, I am not new on this planet, I have walked this path, and I have wisdom to lean on, that's when it's hardest to access. I think it's because when things get hard, we go. I don't know where we go.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that, I mean, I can speak for myself. When I lost my brother over a year ago, these hard times that all of us kind of go through, weird seasons of all of our lives, to me, I always get to the fact that these are the great humblings for myself, like the great moments of humility, but it takes me a while to figure out how to get there. For so many months and weeks, and for almost even a year, even though I had never really traveled the road of grief, I do remember feeling similar ways of despondence

• 10:08Speaker 04

  and questioning and total and utter confusion about mortality, and what it means, and what it means to me, and how this now affects my whole family. But it takes some time to get from the bathroom floor, or whatever crisis you're going through, to this mindset of, oh, this is a great humbling, this is a moment. And that remembering, it's like, how is it, where are we going when we forget every day about the things that we've learned? I don't know. Can you, can you write a book about that or something?

• 10:43Speaker 03

  I probably did already.

• 10:47Dan Harris?

  Well, here are a couple of things I think I know. First, trauma does lead to dissociation. I'm not a clinician and not a mental health expert, so whatever. All the caveats issued, but I do think that makes sense. What I definitely do know is that when you're in a state of stress or anxiety, the amygdala, fear center of the brain is firing. And definitionally, when that's firing, the rational part can't. And so it makes complete sense that you could have done a lot of learning and a lot of teaching, both of you, and then you hit a speed bump. And based on what we know about how the brain operates, you forget all the shit you learned and taught, and you need to be reminded. And usually, it's the people in your life who are closest to you who can help you.

• 11:30Dan Harris?

  As it turns out, for the three of you, you were all on red alert at the same time.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  It makes really good sense now.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  It really does. And it's infuriating. Like, and the problem is, is this is happening on a minute-to-minute, day-to-day basis. Because so many of us are riddled in this current climate that we're in, riddled with confusion and anxiety. And there may not be a rock bottom that you've actually hit, but like, our country's kind of going through one, and that's scary. So of course, our rational minds can't get online for a long period of time for us to actually understand what it is, in fact, we're going on. So nobody remembers anything. Everything feels like it's elusive or out there. And I think that that's why this project and this book is so, at least for me, like, we wrote this for ourselves.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  So true.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  So that we have a place that we can go to, to remember all of the shit that we've learned that we just keep forgetting, day in and day out.

• 12:31Dan Harris?

  What's interesting is that you centered it around 20 questions, and you've kind of landed on this idea that these are really the 20 questions. I'm curious, like, how did you get to that number? How do you derive the confidence that you're covering all the bases?

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure, we're not covering all the bases.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  This is our best attempt.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Didn't we just tell you? We were traumatized and at 20, we got exhausted. And somebody said, I feel like people like the number 20.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  So let's go with 20.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Who the hell knows? All we ever know is what we swirl around all day.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Then our entire lives and podcasts are about, is it possible that you also swirl around these questions? Over time, it felt like, holy shit. I think that the fact that we go through these 20 questions every single day over and over again is maybe not a personal problem. Like, it might just be one of the states of being for human beings. So it felt like to us, after doing this for, I don't know, 20 years, we felt pretty confident that most of the people we talked to in our lives or on our pod, in one way or another, ask themselves these questions each day. There's probably 20 more, there's probably 100 more, I have no idea.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, a million more.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Really did try to get to the root of a lot of questions. You know, in the conversations that we've had, not even in the last year, but in the past four or five years. Like, what are the things that are we all asking each other? And then there's like these questions deeper.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  We really tried to get to the deepest question of what we're all kind of swirling around.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, because Abby, there's a chapter on grief. So what happens when you are in grief? I mean, you could call that chapter grief. But it felt like, to me, being Abby's partner, walking through the days and moments with her after losing her brother, it just felt like her whole being was looking at me each day and saying, how do I go on? It didn't feel like a category. It felt like a desperate question. When I got my anorexia diagnosis after dealing with freaking eating disorders for 30 years now, 35 years now. I mean, you could call it eating disorder, but like, really, the question is, how do I make peace with my body?

• 15:01Speaker 03

  And people come from that to that with a million different ways. It has nothing to do with anorexia for a lot of people. It's still a question that you ask yourself in a different way, maybe every decade. So I don't know, I guess I'm just more of a question person than an answers. But that felt right to me as a philosophy, that really, we kind of seem to all just be spinning around the same questions over and over again for our whole lives.

• 15:29Dan Harris?

  I buy it. So you got one customer.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  Good enough for us.

• 15:34Dan Harris?

  If you're cool with it, in whatever time remains for us, I would love to just talk about some of these questions.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 15:38Dan Harris?

  You brought up the question that you, Glenn, and felt Abby was asking you either explicitly or implicitly in the wake of the loss of her brother, which is, how do I go on? So Abby, maybe I'll start with you. What does that question mean to you? And I know we're not big into like concrete answers here, but like where have you landed with regard to this question?

• 15:59Speaker 04

  Good question, Dan. I've been through a time, a process of getting into really deep therapy. Ironically, about a year prior to my brother's death, we had a woman on our podcast. Her name is Suzanne Stabile, and she came to talk to us about the Enneagram. And I'm a number seven on the Enneagram. What she said in the podcast kind of changed my life because, yes, I'd been in and out of therapy throughout my life. A number seven on the Enneagram is an enthusiast. I'm just like super optimistic and positive and I want to have fun doing things. She just said, I wonder, have you ever worked on your shadow side? And I thought, no, I for sure haven't.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Not planning on it.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  That sounds like a bad time, not a fun time.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  And it got me thinking, like, what is that about? What am I avoiding here? I'm not accessing half of myself. I was in kind of real deep therapy around this idea of my shadow side and what that means to me and what I'm afraid of and really getting honest with myself about it. And then my brother passes away and enrolls the train of grief. And by the way, I'm sober now for nine years and nothing like this had happened to me within this nine years of sobriety, nothing that was going to bring me to my knees like losing my brother did. And in with this train of grief came all of the unprocessed grief that I had ever

• 17:33Speaker 04

  incurred in my whole life as an adult person, especially when I was using alcohol and drugs. And so this train was heavy. This train had many cars to it, and I have had to spend quite a lot of time dealing with, I think my overall biggest fear is death. And the truth is, the way that he died, he had a heart attack. He died in his sleep. And I was really searching for the justice of it. And it was something that I felt like a a relationship with, like, I'm gonna figure out what happened to him, why it happened.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  This links with the going on question because I have now understood that we don't know anything. We do not know. The medical examiner's report says it was a heart attack. And then you go down the the line of the why of the heart attack. Was it genetic? Or was it his health? And was it his diet? And is there something he could have done? And none of that actually matters. And all of the going on-ness of my life lies in acceptance of what is. I don't like that answer. I really, really, really don't like that answer. Because

• 19:01Speaker 04

  that forces me to accept what is in every moment. And every present moment requires of me presence. And that is a hard thing. That is a hard thing in our culture. That is a hard thing as a person to maintain present focus on what is in this moment. Especially as a parent, we have responsibilities. You have to be thinking about the future for their wellness and their health and all of the things. But in terms of the going on of it all, there's nothing I can do to bring him back. There's nothing I can explain.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  Factually, as to why exactly he died, I have no idea where he went, or if he went somewhere, which is a big question to me. Ironically, I think that we give ourselves these symbols in life so that we can go on. I land in this real need to have a structure. Structure makes me feel safe. You know, and I think that this is why I've been so anti-religiousness for a lot of my life, because it's so faith-driven rather than structure. But I remember sitting in the church at his funeral,

• 20:18Speaker 04

  feeling so grateful to have this space of possibility that there was maybe not the definitive answer that I've walked with throughout my life in terms of being a little agnostic and atheist. So this is a long way of saying, accepting never knowing anything is where I try to get to every day. Pretending to know things is usually where I live a lot of my day. And the balance and the tension between those two things is, in fact, I think, kind of the human suffering struggle that we all go through. I don't know if that answers anything.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  So beautiful.

• 21:02Dan Harris?

  Great answer.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  What did I say? See, I forgot everything.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  I might actually listen to it.

• 21:12Dan Harris?

  You did say a million good things in there. One of the things I was thinking about as I was listening is that we do so much scrambling in our lives to protect ourselves against entropy, impermanence, uncertainty, groundlessness. And so certainty, telling ourselves some neat and tidy story is one way to do it. But you know, structure is another. I do it too. You know, I create a lot of structure to, you know, as a bulwark against insanity. But you know, at some point, I'm gonna lose that too, because the body's not gonna function as well and I'll be lying in a bed, maybe, in a hospice. So there's more letting go to be done all the time. And I know that's a gigantic pain in the ass, but it appears to be true.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  It does appear to be true.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  The setup is a little bit tough. All of this whole humaning, earth school thing.

• 22:02Dan Harris?

  Yeah. There's a lot of awesome shit, too.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Sure is.

• 22:08Dan Harris?

  In fact, one of the central promises of Dharma or Buddhism is that there's a pleasure in the equanimity of relaxing into the flux of letting go and allowing things to unfold without frantically trying to control the universe all the time.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, that sounds so good.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, that does.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Every time I read a book about Buddhism or hear somebody give a specific vibe of it, I'm like, that's right.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, same.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  That feels correct.

• 22:40Dan Harris?

  It's funny because as somebody who, you know, is trying to drink from the fire hose of the Dharma as much as possible, it's like, the whole deal is rubbing your nose in the hardest of hard truths, like death and decay and the unreliability of things that are pleasurable, you know, the Buddha likened chasing pleasure to licking honey off of the edge of a razor. This is just like nothing but bad news. And yet, when you hear it, it somehow relaxes the nervous system. It's like, oh, well, this is the truth and it's easier to take it on than it is to live in constant denial in some way.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, because there's like, I think what I've always gone for is that there's some way to be safe, which goes to everything I've ever involved myself in, every fundamentalist religion, every eating disorder, every form of rigid thinking. I'm constantly like, we call me cult susceptible, like just somebody tell me what it is. And it's like, the only problem with that is it goes against what life is.

• 23:45Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  So that's the only problem. But I guess there's a different version that is, it's not safety, but it is kind of a wild peace. Like, there's a peace that comes from admitting that there's no safety and then stopping the frantic search for that. I'm thinking of this line to this song that I listen to almost every morning. Abby's probably really sick of this song, but there's this song by Florence and the Machine called Free. And she's talking about just like spinning in the unknowing. And she says, is this how it's always been? To exist in the face of suffering and death and somehow still keep singing.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  And there's something in that that's just like, how? Like, that's what I want. I want to admit that there's no safety and just still just like swirl and spin and live amongst other people who are not holding tight, but who are also swirling and spinning and living. There's a peace in that.

• 24:49Dan Harris?

  And it's easier said than done. My experience, it only happens in moments and takes a lot of work and practice. And then you fuck it up and get a relapse of whatever prior addiction you might've had. And then you clean that up and you're, you spin in the wild peace for a second and then you fuck it up again. And like, as far as I can see, short of enlightenment, that's the best possible outcome.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. Did anybody see the lot? And we can't talk about White Lotus, never mind.

• 25:16Dan Harris?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Oh, we can? Okay. So.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Talking about enlightenment, straight to White Lotus, that was where Glennon's brains at.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  Because I feel like there was a moment of enlightenment.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Here we are.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Final episode, which was Carrie Coon at the table, sitting like she's suffering so much. I related to her so much because she's just trying to figure out, am I doing this right? Why am I doing this wrong? Why does everything seem so hard? Why can't I fake it like they are, her two friends? They faked it so much. They were holding on to this idea of security or presenting everything shiny as being the answer. But she looked at her two friends and she said, I'm happy you have a beautiful face. I'm happy you have a beautiful life and I'm just grateful to be at the table. And I just could cry talking about it because I just felt like, oh, that's enlightenment. Like, I'm not grasping at what you have.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  I'm also not pretending that it doesn't drive me batshit crazy. And I'm just grateful to be at the table, regardless of whether I'm the best one or the most beautiful one or the smartest one, or I just thought, that's it. That's the only character that had any enlightenment in the whole thing. Which, which was a series about West versus East, desire versus.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Contentment, I guess.

• 26:34Dan Harris?

  I totally agree with you. I loved it. I know it was a controversial season for some people, but I loved it. And in particular, I think that scene where Carrie Coon, who's in part of three women who are on vacation together and their kind of passive aggressive cattiness that plays out over the course of the season and they're fighting, sometimes it's straight up aggressive cattiness. And she has this breakthrough moment that you just described where she drops the mask. She's totally real. She's not pretending that she's not sad or annoyed. And she's in love with her friends in a really healthy way. And so like, that's kind of the punchline. We're in this fucked up bus. We don't know how we got here. We don't know when it goes off a cliff for each of us. So you might as well like be pretty tight with the other people on the bus.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  And you might as well stop searching for things to give meaning. The other thing she said was, she gave a speech that was very like closer to find Indigo Girls vibes. Like, I've been to the mountain. I've been to the, she's tried to find meaning everywhere. And she said, I think I can stop looking for meaning because time is what gives my life meaning.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Oh, that was good.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Meaning, I don't have to force the meaning. All I have to do is be present at this table. And over time, there's some other force that's going to decide what all this means, which is sort of a beautiful thing to surrender to.

• 27:51Dan Harris?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I kind of heard it. I didn't know what to make of that part of it. So I construed it the way I wanted to construe it, which was that you don't have to search for sort of esoteric or metaphysical meaning when love is the answer. And by love, I don't mean just like romantic love. I mean, like having positive relationships on every level of your life.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:12Dan Harris?

  If you go into an LLM, a large language model, AI, and ask, what's the punchline of all spiritual traditions since the dawn of time, it will give you the one word answer of love. And that appeared to me to be what she was landing on. But maybe that's just because I didn't understand fully what she was talking about. She talked about time.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Well, it was interesting, though, that she used the word time because she could have used the word love. What I liked about her using the word "time" is we kind of all determine what love means. Love means nothing. I mean, this side says love is this. We say love is this. Like, you have to bring your own dogma, your own belief to the word "love," and you can make it whatever it is. But "time" is the thing that we have no say in. So it just makes me feel like that was her way of turning it over in a way that she couldn't manipulate in her mind. Somebody else is in charge of time.

• 29:05Dan Harris?

  Fair enough. That is an impersonal, unstoppable force that you have no choice but to surrender to.

• 29:15Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Glennon and Abby talk about the unshakable question of "Why am I like this?" or "Why are we the way we are?" We talk about family roles, attachment theory, and learned behaviors, the possibility of personal change, and more.

• 29:33Speaker 05

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• 30:04Dan Harris?

  Let me go to another question, which you opened the book with. And Glennon, you write about this. Well, you both write about this. And this is a question my wife has asked me a lot about me, but you're asking about it yourselves. "Why am I like this?" Yeah, so those conversations are less fun than the one we're about to have. Glennon, I'll start with you. Why that question and what comes to mind when you pose it?

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Well, I thought if I talked about White Lotus enough, we could avoid this.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  I think that is for sure the question that I ask myself the most all day, every day. It is very comforting to me. I think the most helpful thing, maybe, in learning what I've learned throughout the million interviews we've done with brilliant thinkers and therapists and...

• 30:50Speaker 03

  People on our podcast is, there are actually some answers to that one. Why am I like this? You can't answer all at all. But in terms of really understanding attachment theory, or all the different things we kind of go through in the book, it's like, well, one version of this is when I went through, I'm still going through this most recent bout of eating disorder recovery. It felt to me like the closer I got to health, to claiming that maybe I wasn't broken, and sort of acting with more health and peace and power,

• 31:34Speaker 03

  which is interesting, I think I could only do, because we were both doing the same work at the same time. So that we were polarized, which happens in close relationships, right? Like, I was the sad artistic shadow. And because I lived there, Abby constantly had to be such a toxic positivity son, because we were playing different roles. When Abby started stepping into her shadow side, I kind of, you know how when one person doesn't worry, they keep saying to the other person, stop worrying. Why are you worrying? And that makes the other person feel like they have to worry more. Because, well, if nobody's going to worry, then I have to double down. We were constantly doubling down.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  And when I began to consider, what if I wasn't born broken? Because that's what I've been saying. I mean, my first memoir, I said, I was born broken. That is what I believed about myself, because I've struggled with mental health since I was 10. But this interesting thing happened, which is, as my therapy insisted that I stopped landing there and asked more questions, like, is it true that anyone's born broken? How could that be true? That forced me to look at my whole family dynamic. Because one of the reasons why we are who we are, why am I like this? Is because of the family roles we were given.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  That's just one. And in the book, there's probably 10 ways to look at why are we like this? One role, like for me, there was a lot of unhealth in my family dynamic. There was a lot of beauty too, but there was a lot of unhealed trauma, unhealth. We were not a family who could admit that or look at that. And so what happened is that I became the sick one. And this happens in many families. There's a designated patient. Sometimes it's called a scapegoat. But it's the person who embodies in their self, all of the unhealth of the family. And that serves a real purpose for the family because now it's not in either of the parents.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Now it's not something we need to talk about as a family dynamic. It's just all in one person. And now we know more, we bring whole families into therapy. We understand that, but when I was young, that was not, it was you send her away. She's broken and that was the family storyline. My little sister became the hero, which happens often when a younger sibling has an older sibling who's sick. Right? Okay. So she's messed up. So now my role in the family is to prove that we're okay and we're good. And that she doesn't speak for us. And so my sister became perfect, which is, I think, even worse, harder to recover from than being the sick one.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  But I really feel like when you figure out what your family role was or is, you realize why you're just playing a role all the time. Like that wasn't all of who I was. That wasn't, why didn't I feel like I could be a full human? There's like this kind of hero's journey you can go on to step out of that role. But it's very tricky because it messes with the whole family's dynamic. Because when you stop playing your role, nobody knows their lines anymore. I actually had some, just as another Nemo reference that just came into my mind. You know that scene in Nemo where they like go out of the anonymity and then back in? Go out, back in, because it looks like danger outside the anonymity.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  That's what I felt like, because I kept poking my head out, like, what if I'm not broken? What if I'm okay? What if this whole family has some things to talk about? And then everything would scare me because everybody would start acting crazy. Because I was challenging everybody, so then I'd step back in and act sick again. It was so weird. I think I'm at the point now where I'm not going to go back into the anonymity. But I will still say that it's still scary out there in terms of my family. Nobody's rearranged, nobody knows what to do with it. There's a lot of outer conflict instead of me just keeping the conflict internal.

• 35:46Dan Harris?

  Let me ask a supplemental question, and maybe it's on your list. If we're, starting with a foundational question of why am I like this? Is it possible to be some other way?

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Um, not yet, but, well, first of all, I think there's hope. I feel a little bit different than I was at the beginning of recovery. But I found a loophole in terms of, I'm really interested in passing on less of this shit to my kids than I got.

• 36:17Dan Harris?

  Yep.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Which I find extremely stressful because I don't know about you, but I don't like the system where I can know better in my mind and my heart. But my body still does the old programmed things, like, like I'm a very judgmental person. I keep myself safe from other people that scare me by judging them. And my kids notice that about me, and I cannot seem to stop, even though I'm trying really hard. It's like trying to turn a boat two degrees le, like, it's just so hard. So sometimes I jump back into it. And I think it hurts my kids. I think it's like putting a dirty lens over their eyes. That's my lens and not theirs. So we found kind of what we're leaning on right now. We took our youngest out,

• 37:02Speaker 03

  who we noticed was noticing my judging and was making her sad. I saw it happen at the dinner table. And we took her out to dinner and I said, okay, so here's the thing, I'm scared of people. And I do this thing when I get scared that people are getting too close, which is that I list a bunch of things that's wrong with them. It's the same thing as my anorexia. It's what I do with food. It's like, I have a few safe foods and scared of everything. A few safe people scared of everyone else. So when you see mom doing that thing, where I'm at a table and I start telling you all the reasons why someone's bad, I don't want you to look at the person I'm talking about. It has nothing to do with them. Okay?

• 37:45Speaker 03

  I just want you to look at mom, look at me and think, oh, my mom's scared. She's doing that thing again.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  And she did not look surprised. Okay? I was not giving her any new information. She knew that I did this. She knew. She said, it's really hard though, because you're so smart. And I do feel like you know a lot of things. And I said, I do, I do know a lot of things. And no matter what leader you have in your life, no matter, you might have some really smart people in your life and you still have to. The only person who knows is you. So use me as this practice, practice. But I don't want you to have my lens. You have a clearer lens. I want you to trust. I want you to make big mistakes with people because you trusted them. I want you to live more open heartedly and clearer than I do. So don't put my lens on.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  See me through yours. So can we change? I don't know, but like, I'm not less judgmental, but at least I can tell people how to see that.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  That's the thing. That's, I think, what we're trying to do is. In the act of just asking this question to yourself.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  And in the curiosity of whether or not we can change, that's the first step. It's not whether you can or not. That's not the point. To me, the point is becoming aware of who you are and why you operate the way you do. Ninety nine percent of the world, I feel like, doesn't even ask themselves that question.

• 39:15Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  And I think that we could really benefit from asking ourselves these certain questions because the ways that we interact in our daily life, how we respond to our children, how we respond to our partners, how we respond to our coworkers. A lot of that stuff might not have anything to do with outside of us.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Of course it doesn't.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  And it has everything to do with the little culture that we were raised in as a family. It has everything to do with the culture that we were raised in here in our country, in our communities, in our states. For me, on teams, you know, like all of these little things all add up and matter. But do we ever give ourselves the space to wonder about ourselves? I used to wonder about myself and the universe and the world when I was a kid all the time because I didn't have the complexities of responsibility and adulting.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  If we can get brave enough to ask ourselves some of these questions, what we have found in our experience is that some of our best friends, our wisest wayfinders, the contributors in this book, have traveled some of these roads also. And the loneliness factor, people don't ask themselves some of these really important questions because they think that they're messed up. Or why would I? I don't have any answers, but the truth is all of us have these questions, whether we want to admit that to ourselves or not. And so do so many people. And you're not alone. I know for me, I was just for much of my life, just soldiering through and being a pro athlete.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  And I can figure everything out and I don't need anybody's help. And independent Abby.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  And my gosh, that's so lonely. So lonely.

• 41:05Dan Harris?

  I'd want to fundamentally agree that I do think I'm very certain we can change. I'm not saying it's easy, but I think it is doable, and I do think it starts with what you just described, which is getting a sense of what your tendencies are. Glenn, and yours is judgmentalism. It's that's probably an impersonal process and ancient neuroses and historical patterns playing out in your mind that are the result of your family culture, your ancestry, the larger culture. Then you can work with it. Once you know what your tendencies are, they're more tractable. And like you said, it's like a 2% change, but that can really add up over time. And as I was listening to you talk about training your daughter to have a new reflex

• 41:47Dan Harris?

  when mommy goes into judgment mode, I was, this is a bit lighter, but I was thinking, I have an old friend, her name is Kaama. I like to tease Kaama, and every once in a while, when I'm giving her a hard time, she'll just turn to me and say, are you okay? Do you need something right now?

• 42:02Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 42:02Dan Harris?

  Which I think is such a brilliant response, because of course, that's what's going on. On this question of why am I like this? Abby, let me pick on you for a second, because you wrote something in the book that I had a kind of a flush of embarrassment or shame, because I recognize my wife in this, in parts of this. She doesn't come from a large family, but you write, "In large families like mine, it's hard for each kid to get the attention they need from their parents. I learned that I had to chase love to get it. So when I sought out relationships as an adult, I was attracted to people who were a little aloof and even a little bit mean." This is the part I found embarrassing. "I recognize the feeling of the chase as love." So yeah, I just wondered if you'd hold forth a little bit about that.

• 42:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot in it. Gosh, the chase as love. When you are...

• 42:55Speaker 04

  How do I say this? I'm the kind of person that, and I think this drives Glennon a little crazy, but I'm a kind of person that immediately trusts everyone and immediately loves everybody until you give me a reason to maybe distrust you or not necessarily go down the love path with you. And it's taken me a long time. And I just thought that that just made me a good person. This was my pathway into good personery. I know a little bit better now that, oh, that's based out of insecurity and a deep need of wanting to feel love and worthy of this world.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  I think that being in that I'm the youngest of seven children, it was really positive for my professional sports career because I got beat up as a kid. I was playing against older people my whole life. I learned how to be on a team. There was like so many awesome, beautiful ways in which my childhood really helped me. But as a sensitive person and a sensitive human being who then played this sport that armored me exteriorly, I found it really difficult to get into really good relationships with people because it was so fear-based rather than love-based.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  I was calling love, love, but I don't think it was that when I was young. It was like a desperation. The amount of relationships that I squeezed to literal death because I was so afraid of space or letting go or any kind of independence. I mean, I know that a lot of us lesbians trickle into the codependent lane quite easily. You know, the second U-Haul date joke is true for many of us. I have had to get really honest with myself around the chase and love and what that really does mean,

• 45:03Speaker 04

  which has led me down the path of trying to figure out what it is I'm trying to prove and to whom.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  And I think that in the end, a lot of us are really trying to get the love and attention of our parents, you know, because of these parts in me, we do internal family systems in this house. Well, I'll speak for myself. There are parts to me that were probably really young, that were wounded, that I needed to protect. And I found ways to protect myself. And I have to get really in touch with these really young, sweet, loving parts that just wanted to be seen and loved without needing to do anything for it.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  And I've realized I've just been outsourcing so much of my self-esteem and self-love. In fact, I've only just gotten into a relationship with myself around self-love recently. And it was the work through my grief of my brother's death. It was the honest to God, the work of creating and developing this book of like, really asking these hard questions to myself, like, why can I not love myself? What the hell is that about? And what is self-love? Like, what really does that come down to? I never have taken care of myself. I mean, there was this one moment that I've been working on this in my therapy with my therapist,

• 46:33Speaker 04

  and Glennon was, she was teasing me about something. I had ordered another thing on Amazon because my eyes are starting to get aged. And so I just keep ordering stuff to try to fix my face. I'm not going to do plastic surgery. I'm just not going to do that. But I do want to try everything else under the sun. I've lived outdoors, sun damage, right? And Glennon kind of teased me this one day about ordering another thing that might fix my face. And oftentimes, what I would do to respond to that is I would say nothing. I would let it go deep and I would kind of process it myself and then maybe have a conversation with her about it another time. Or more commonly, I would say nothing.

• 47:16Speaker 04

  And then for the next 24 hours, I would search for all the other ways in which she shows me that she doesn't love me. And then I would explode. And then I would respond with a bigger explosion. But I got really brave in that moment. And I said, what did you mean? Like, what are you trying to get at here? What are you saying?

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Basically, you're like, are you okay? Do you mean something?

• 47:38Speaker 04

  Exactly. Like your friend. I'm totally, I'm taking that. I'm using that. Are you okay?

• 47:44Speaker 03

  And I was like, what is happening here? I'm not used to having to be accountable for the things that I say in this kitchen. Like, yeah, it was, I was shook.

• 47:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I got back into my therapy session and we sat down and had a conversation. And it was so great. I got brave enough with myself. I respected myself enough to stand up for myself. This, this like base foundational layer of self-love. And I realized that it was like the first time in my life that I ever stuck up for myself. That I ever really stuck up for myself in the moment.

• 48:21Dan Harris?

  Wow.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  And that was such a eye-opening experience for me that I was like, whoa. And then the respect that I felt for myself and then the self-love that I felt for myself because this brave action. So I don't remember the actual question you asked because I went down like 17 different side tangents. But I hope that answered.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  The chase.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  The chase.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  The chase. It's like attachment theory. It's whatever, I'm going to say it wrong. This is how I understand it. Whatever you were taught is love in your family is what you think is love later. So if your body and your mind and your heart were taught that love is, I'm the seventh kid. I have to chase down attention. I have to chase people who are literally walking away from me all the time. Then you are later going to find people who are literally walking away from you all the time. And you are going to chase them because that's what your body understands as love. So when somebody says to you, I love you, like Abby thought I was delusional. For me to say to her, I love you, you're fine. Like, I'm good. I'm not going anywhere. She had a version in her of that old comedian who was like, I don't want to be

• 49:31Speaker 03

  part of any club that'll have me. Like, you don't have good enough expectations. Like, that, she doubted my judgment.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  And she still does. Every night, would you say?

• 49:40Speaker 04

  Every, yeah, every couple of days.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  At least every couple of days, she'll go, I cannot believe that you married me.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  To the point where like, should I be worried about this?

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, like self fulfilling prophecy is happening, for sure.

• 49:55Dan Harris?

  My wife and I went to this couples counselor, Michael Vincent Miller, who's really brilliant. And he had written a book many years ago, has a title now that sounds a little harsh, but he wrote it pre nine 11 and was called intimate terrorism. There was one passage in there that haunted me in the same way that the passage that started this portion of the conversation haunted me, where he talked about people who feel unworthy will often hook up with people who make them feel like they're taking a test all the time, that they're destined to fail.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:26Dan Harris?

  And I was like, oh, well, I'm the aloof guy, you know, I'm the, for my own childhood reasons, afraid of, he often talks about how like, one side is often afraid of abandonment, the other is afraid of engulfment and.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 50:40Dan Harris?

  And so, you guys recognize yourselves in that diagnosis, yes, so.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 50:45Dan Harris?

  Although it sounds to me, Glenn, and like you are actually making incredibly reassuring noises that I've only learned late in my life to be able to make of, like, you're good, you're safe, like, I'm not going anywhere. I don't, I'm comparing myself unfavorably to you.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, the first, the first, like, two years of our relationship, anytime she would have a grievance with me, she learned that she would have to approach the conversation with, I love you, I am not going to leave you.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  But can we talk about the dishwasher?

• 51:19Speaker 04

  But I need, we need to talk about.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  That's how every conversation had to go. I'm not going to leave you, but can we talk about the laundry? And then after a while.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  I started to believe you.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:28Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes. Well, we're pretty much out of time, but it does land me back on the notion we established earlier, which is that it is possible to change. That's why we each do our shows and write our books and because it is possible, but you need to be reminded and reawakened on the regular, even the people writing those books. So, thank you for continuing to do everything you both do. And it's always a pleasure to talk to you.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Dan, you're the best.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  You really are.

• 51:56Dan Harris?

  Right back at you. Congratulations on the new book.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 52:03Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach. Always great to hear from both of them. And a reminder to go check out our live meditation mini-series that will be happening every afternoon from Monday, May 19th through Friday, May 23rd at 4:00 PM Eastern. You get all the details over at danharris.com. As mentioned earlier, this will be centered around the Buddhist practices, the four related Buddhist practices known as the Brahma Viharas. I will guide some meditations and then take your questions. Come check it out, danharris.com. And if you can't afford a subscription, just let us know, we'll hook you up. Thank you as well to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is

• 52:47Dan Harris?

  handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the awesome Andy Rock Bad Islands wrote our theme.

• 53:49Speaker 05

  ...