Pod Insights Hidden Brain The Secret of Charisma About this episode Charismatic leaders can inspire devotion and give people a powerful sense of meaning. They can also make us vulnerable. This week, we explore how figures across history have gained followers by offering clarity in moments of uncertainty — and why that clarity can come at a cost. Historian Molly Worthen explains how to recognize the spell of charisma, and why questioning it is essential to a healthy society. Then, on Your Questions Answered, Antonio Pascual-Leone returns to respond to listeners' thoughts and questions about moving on after a breakup.
Transcript 14,478 words · 27 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the 1930s, an unlikely man from rural Louisiana rose to political stardom. Huey Long appealed to working-class Americans with fiery speeches and a populist agenda. He promised free textbooks, better infrastructure, and redistribution of wealth.
0:21 Speaker 01 That while we might have millionaires, and men worth 2 million, and men worth 3 million, maybe, and men worth maybe 5 or 6 million, but that nonetheless, there must be a limit on how big any one man could get.
0:40 Shankar Vedantam? Thousands gathered to hear him speak. His promise to make every man a king soon earned him a nickname: the Kingfish.
0:50 Shankar Vedantam? But Huey Long also made powerful enemies along the way. Critics saw him as a dangerous demagogue. They warned that he was crooked, cunning, and completely unconcerned with checks and balances.
1:05 Shankar Vedantam? He fired those who opposed him, took over state agencies, and appointed loyalists.
1:13 Shankar Vedantam? When Louisiana State University published a newspaper article criticizing him, Huey Long saw to it that the seven students who wrote the piece were expelled.
1:26 Shankar Vedantam? Huey Long wasn't just popular. He was magnetic, dangerous to some, divine to others. He rewrote the rules and dared the system to stop him.
1:39 Shankar Vedantam? In 1929, after he became governor of Louisiana, Huey Long was impeached on charges of bribery, corruption, and abuse of power. Rather than prove his innocence, he orchestrated a political blockade in the state senate. He persuaded senators to sign a letter vowing not to convict him, which made a trial pointless.
2:01 Shankar Vedantam? He went on to become a US senator. His popularity didn't just survive, it soared.
2:13 Shankar Vedantam? Today on the show, we take a deep dive into the psychological forces that draw us to charismatic figures in the worlds of politics, sports, and religion. The science of loyalty and the building blocks of devotion. This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Farmers Insurance. At Farmers, they believe insurance should be in terms you can understand. Like with coverage on a page, you get a clear view of what is and isn't covered in your policy in plain, simple language, so you're not left with any surprises. Does your insurance do that?
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4:13 Shankar Vedantam? We often turn to history to understand how the world changes. We examine the lives of leaders who sparked revolutions and gather thousands behind their cause. We ask, what made these leaders so powerful? What explained their influence? How did they manage to change the course of history? At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, historian Molly Worthing explores how individuals inspire change, create movements, and sometimes change the world. Molly Worthing, welcome to Hidden Brain.
4:45 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me.
4:46 Shankar Vedantam? Molly, I want to talk about some unlikely leaders in American history. Let's start in the 18th century. Jemima Wilkinson was born in Rhode Island in 1752. When she was 23, she fell ill and was on the brink of death. When she recovered, she claimed to have undergone a profound spiritual transformation. What did she say happened to her?
5:10 Speaker 03 She reported that she had seen two angels, and they had delivered this amazing message to her. They told her that her body was a vessel for the Holy Spirit, that in fact, Jemima Wilkinson, the 23-year-old human female, had died, and now her body was a vessel for this androgynous divine presence. She stopped dressing like a conventional woman of her time. She stopped using female pronouns whenever she could, wore her hair long, and wore a
5:49 Speaker 03 large gray felt hat, began dressing in a smock that concealed her figure, looked a bit like a dressing gown, sometimes wore a purple cravat, and she launched a preaching campaign.
6:07 Speaker 03 Her message in the context of the revolution, right, this is 1776, that she has this attack and is reborn as the public universal friend, is a kind of vague one that is compatible with a lot of different theological questions and doubts about existing churches, questions about the end times, that a whole range of followers were having in this era. And she begins speaking to all kinds of crowds of people who are out of sync, I guess you could say, in some way or another with the prevailing
6:49 Speaker 03 rhythms of society. So she goes to funerals, she speaks to prisoners, she also addresses kind of open air markets. If a sympathetic minister will give her his pulpit, she takes advantage of that. And some wander in to hear this unusual person who they can't quite place, maybe they can't quite figure out if this is a man or a woman, they can't quite make out the actual import of the kind of vague theological pronouncements.
7:20 Speaker 03 Some find it ridiculous. They see this as a young woman who's kind of put on a costume. But a surprising number, I mean, eventually a few hundred people, are compelled by the public universal friend's invitation to step out of whatever role you've been handed by your place in revolutionary American society, and find something new.
7:52 Speaker 03 And so, we're talking about followers who range from young women, who perhaps had not quite landed in a family arrangement that was acceptable in society, to very established, kind of senior men in the community. One of her most prominent followers is a Rhode Island colonial judge named William Potter, who puts a lot of his, his personal fortune to the service of her growing ministry.
8:27 Speaker 03 By the 1790s, she is leading a crew of about 400 followers to found a utopian community that she calls New Jerusalem in upstate New York to to fully break from the rhythm of life in ordinary communities in revolutionary era America.
8:55 Shankar Vedantam? I want to jump forward to the 19th century. Marcus Garvey was born in 1887 in Jamaica. He spent his teenage years working as a printer's apprentice and eventually joined a nationalist club that promoted Jamaican independence. He spent some time in Europe, working as a journalist, and then founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and moved to New York. I understand that he was an unlikely leader, Molly, not a great speaker and with lots of critics.
9:25 Speaker 03 Absolutely. The type of African American leader that the mainstream media, black and white, paid attention to in the early 20th century tended to be college educated, tall, lean, fair-skinned, handsome, eloquent by the standards of upper-middle-class, white-educated, English speech. Marcus Garvey was none of these things. He shows up in Harlem in 1916. He's fairly short, kind of built like a wrestler, very dark-complected, not a great public speaker. I mean, we know that he got heckled whenever he went to the street corner to try to practice. He was fearless, though. He just kept at it.
10:09 Speaker 03 He had no financial resources. I mean, he lived on cans of corned beef hash and beans in this tiny, squalid apartment while he was beginning to try to interest African Americans in Harlem at this time in his message of Pan-African unity.
10:31 Speaker 03 Which, as it emerged through his speeches and his publication, The Negro World, was, I think it's clear, a really creative combination of previous iterations of this message of the dignity of African people and the need to unite, with other kind of spiritual and economic and political strains that proved to be this kind of amazing combustible mix.
11:06 Speaker 03 Especially when enacted with Garvey's flair for ritual and uniform. He really, he himself loved to wear a plumed helmet and purple, gold, and green sashes in a kind of military regalia. So this movement, over just a few years, developed significant momentum.
11:35 Shankar Vedantam? So he also had unconventional views about black liberation. I want to play you a clip from one of his speeches.
11:42 Speaker 04 We want to unite the Negro race in this country. We want every Negro to work for one common object, but of building a nation of his own on the great continent of Africa.
11:53 Shankar Vedantam? So that recording is not great, Molly, but what he's saying is he wants African-Americans to leave America and build a homeland in Africa. Now, wasn't that also what white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan might have said?
12:06 Speaker 03 Marcus Garvey was, we would say, a separationist. He had meetings with segregationist politicians from the South, with Ku Klux Klan members, to discuss their mutual interest in keeping their races pure. He wanted, in the context of America, he wanted African-Americans to achieve economic autonomy with an eye toward eventually returning to Africa and establishing political independence for people of African descent on the continent. The African continent, often framing it in a way that was rather condescending to the Africans already living there.
12:48 Speaker 03 But it was a message that had a great deal of appeal, and it was a spiritual message as well. I mean, he was very interested in awakening in people of African descent a spiritual power that he said had been dormant. They had been in a state of amnesia, you could say. When I listen to him and read his speeches, I hear him as kind of a combination of Moses and Napoleon and Dale Carnegie, the kind of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you know, aspect of that message.
13:26 Shankar Vedantam? So the effect that he had on his followers was magnified following a very dramatic incident in October 1919. He was in his office in New York when a man burst through the front doors. Tell me the story of what happened next, Molly.
13:40 Speaker 03 This man is clearly in a fury. He's searching for Garvey and is armed. He gets off a couple of rounds and fires at Garvey. Garvey falls to the ground, appears to be mortally wounded. The man takes off and is later captured by police. And it is widely reported that Garvey is killed. And his followers are grief-stricken, in mourning. And then, a few days later, Garvey appears, limping with a cane, to greet his followers at a rally. And many of his followers, especially since they've read these newspaper reports suggesting
14:23 Speaker 03 that their leader had died, view this as a miraculous, clearly a divinely ordained survival. And so, that assassination attempt, if anything, it solidifies Garvey's power over his followers and their faith that God has selected him for a specific mission and that he has a kind of invincibility that ordinary mortals do not have.
15:09 Shankar Vedantam? So we've looked at a spiritual leader in the 18th century and a political leader who was born in the 19th century. Let's jump forward to a completely different world, the world of sports in the 20th century. In the 1960s, Tim Galway was a nationally ranked tennis player. He was captain of the Harvard tennis team. After graduating, he began teaching tennis in California, but he became famous for his unusual coaching style. What was his approach, Molly?
15:37 Speaker 03 He really burst onto national consciousness in 1974 with a book he published called The Inner Game of Tennis. And his message was quite counterintuitive, I think. Essentially, he said, "You've got all these coaches advising you to pay close, deliberate attention to every detail of your forehand and backhand and your serve, and to drill down until you're absolutely mindful of every detail. I'm telling you, that's the wrong approach." And that successful tennis is an exercise in self-forgetting, in silencing the ego mind. This is a phrase he used.
16:22 Speaker 03 He brought to bear, on first tennis and then later sports and subsequent books, kind of vague mix of Buddhist and Hindu ideas, notions from mid-20th century pop psychology regarding self-actualization.
16:39 Shankar Vedantam? So Tim Galway suggested that high performance comes from quieting the mind and trusting your natural intuitive self. I want to play you a clip that ABC News filmed, featuring one middle-aged woman who said that she had not done anything athletic in 20 years when she took part in a group lesson with Tim Galway. She surprised herself when she started to hit the ball beautifully.
17:02 Speaker 05 I was just sort of like floating along, you know, and doing what came naturally, you know? And I said, "Ah, I'm playing tennis." You know, it's really, really beautiful.
17:12 Speaker 06 The key of all the exercises in the inner game is to focus the mind's attention somewhere where it will not interfere with the body's ability to hit the ball automatically.
17:24 Shankar Vedantam? So there's something wonderfully seductive about that idea, Molly. If we can only get out of our own way, you know, skills come to us effortlessly.
17:31 Speaker 03 That's right. And this idea of your leader or your coach as someone who is helping you unlock your potential, that there is inside you this authentic flame of who you really are and your true capabilities, and it's already there. And all you have to do is nurture it and release it. It's a very late 20th century way of thinking about personal identity and the relationship between leaders and followers.
18:07 Shankar Vedantam? When we think about powerful figures in history, it's easy to explain their influence by pointing to their unique personality traits. Barack Obama was confident and optimistic. Steve Jobs was intense and visionary. Martin Luther King Jr. was a brilliant speaker with strong convictions. But there's an important part of the story we don't explore. That is the story of how charismatic people awake something in us. You're listening to Hidden Brain.
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20:25 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We often conflate charisma with likability. When we think about charismatic people, we think of people with beautiful smiles, great social skills, and relatable backgrounds. People like John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, or Oprah. At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, historian Molly Worthen offers a different view. She says that charismatic people in history aren't always charming, or beautiful, or even inspirational. Rather, she argues, we are drawn to them not because of their traits, but because they reveal something to us about ourselves.
21:07 Shankar Vedantam? Molly, I think it might help to first understand what you mean when you use the term charisma. What is the history of this word?
21:15 Speaker 03 If we go back to the way the ancient Greeks used the word and bequeathed it to the authors of the Bible, it's best to think of charisma, or charis, as a kind of grace, a gift from God or the gods that, in the ancient Greek context, brought with it power that could redound for good or for ill. It was power that the recipient could not completely control, a gift that the human recipient didn't necessarily ask for. And the word remained in that Christian theological context for really 1,900 years. I mean, it was a fairly obscure term. You would only have occasion to use it
22:00 Speaker 03 or know it if you were, you know, very active in church, or you were a professional church historian or theologian.
22:07 Shankar Vedantam? How did the term come to be secularized, Molly?
22:11 Speaker 03 Around the turn of the 20th century, the German sociologist Max Weber was casting about looking for ways to describe all the complicated changes he was seeing unfold in Western modernity. He was really interested in leadership and in the way particular individuals could turn into disruptive forces. So he borrowed the term charisma. He heard it in a lecture when he was a student, a lecturer in church history, and he borrowed it to describe a particular kind of authority that he saw manifest in both religion, but also,
22:51 Speaker 03 importantly, in politics. A type of authority that he said was different from authority based on institutions, like, you know, the institutional role of a president or a prime minister, different from authority premised on a society's tradition, and separate, too, from authority that comes with military power. Charisma, instead, is the quality of an individual seen by his followers, that this leader has superhuman qualities.
23:26 Speaker 03 And therefore, can promise for them a new path forward that is totally impossible, except for his leadership.
23:41 Speaker 03 By the late 1950s and the 1960s, American journalists start picking it up and kind of playing with the word charisma as a way to describe contemporary politics here.
24:00 Shankar Vedantam? When I think of the word charisma, Molly, I often associate it with people who are magnetic. Has that been a part of the meaning of the word for a long time?
24:10 Speaker 03 I think one reason the word charisma is so interesting is because it's a term we punt to when we are observing a dynamic between a leader and followers that we can't quite make sense of. We know something's going on, but we can't account for it by pointing to a policy proposal that this person is making or some other kind of common sense quid pro quo arrangement. And I think as Americans have played with the word charisma, it's gotten a bit muddled together with the ideas of charm and celebrity. And it surprised me to observe how few of the figures I ended up studying
24:54 Speaker 03 across four centuries of American history were particularly charming. I found myself again and again writing about individuals who were not that good looking, who were not reported to be amazing public speakers, whose presence was maybe better described as polarizing rather than universally magnetic.
25:19 Speaker 03 If we think about people who are really good at working the room at a cocktail party, they have the ability to invite you into a conversation that quickly starts to feel like an exploration of your own best thoughts and experiences. I think that's really the secret of charm, and it's important. But it is not enough to launch a new religion or build a political movement. The leaders who do that, I think, have to offer something much more powerful and disorienting and compelling.
26:05 Shankar Vedantam? Can you talk a moment about the very interesting idea that likability can actually be an impediment if you're trying to break through social norms and customs?
26:15 Speaker 03 Humans are storytelling and story-making creatures. We're constantly looking for ways to organize our chaos. And the most successful politicians and religious leaders are brilliant storytellers who not only offer a set of slogans, a critique of the other side, but a plot arc, a story of where we have come and where we're going, who the villains are, who the heroes are. And they invite certain people in. But a narrative only has tension. It's only worth being a part of it if there are also people who don't belong,
26:56 Speaker 03 who are or who are cast in rather undesirable roles.
27:04 Speaker 03 So I think if a leader is too preoccupied with being all things to all people, that can result in a message that is not activating, that doesn't grab and elevate a certain subset of the people hearing or reading him to the point of really building a movement. Really breaking through and building a movement is going to involve eliciting quite a lot of disdain and anger from people who are not part of the story you're telling.
27:39 Shankar Vedantam? You say that there is a paradox of charisma, and it has to do with the dual urges we have to feel like we are in control of our lives, but also to fear the responsibility that comes from having that control. Can you unpack that idea for me, Molly?
27:54 Speaker 03 Most of us want some feeling of agency, some sense that we know what the point of all of this struggling and suffering is, that it hasn't been for no reason at all. But we don't quite want the responsibility of being wholly in charge of it all ourselves. And those two impulses, wanting that sense of freedom and control, but also wanting that security, they exist in tension. But I think that they're always there. And the most successful, at least briefly, not always over the long term,
28:35 Speaker 03 but those religious and political movements that have really made a mark on American history have been led by individuals who mastered the art of that balance.
28:48 Shankar Vedantam? You see that religious leader Joseph Smith exemplifies this paradox. How so, Molly?
28:56 Speaker 03 Joseph Smith was a child of kind of poor New England homesteader, farmer, family members who couldn't really make a comfortable life in the context of the turn of the 19th century America. They were constantly scrapping and struggling to make a living materially. And also, his parents were seekers who were frustrated with existing church options, really interested in the supernatural side of life, prone to having dreams and visions, but unable to really find an institutional home.
29:38 Speaker 03 And that's awfully confusing and disorienting. Joseph Smith had this genius. Mormons would say he received revelation that helped him to diagnose the gaps, the ways in which the existing religious story, way of understanding the Bible and the relationship between humans and God was...
30:04 Speaker 03 Just leaving, I guess, a critical mass of early Americans feeling frustrated and lost. And so he offers, as he's reporting his revelations and interpreting these golden plates that he says he's been led to find in a hill in upstate New York by the angel Moroni. And then he spends the next few years kind of spinning out what this new religious community built around this new scripture will look like. In many ways, he offers a deeply American form of Christianity that is very much in line, I think, with the desires
30:48 Speaker 03 and anxieties of Americans at this time. They want, they want to have their free will celebrated and recognized. And the Mormon faith is kind of the ultimate free will faith. I mean, it's very clear in offering a roadmap for earning your exaltation and your access, essentially, to different stages of heaven. So it is this, it's this story of both tremendous empowerment, but also an invitation to subsume your individual struggles and your efforts to scratch out an existence on your little homestead in upstate New York or Ohio into
31:33 Speaker 03 this broader story that God has ordained in some meaningful way. And so that, I think, is a great example of that, of that paradox of offering both empowering, agency, and security.
31:49 Shankar Vedantam? As you're talking, though, Molly, it feels so clear to me that when charismatic people have these followings, it's clear they have these followings because they're unlocking something in the people who they are leading. The people are hearing something about themselves in this message. So it's, you know, even if the charismatic leader is not charming, and is not good-looking, and is not likeable, the point is, the message makes me think differently about myself.
32:14 Speaker 03 That's right. And Joseph Smith is a great example of this. I mean, some people who met him in person found him really physically compelling. He was tall for the era. He had these electric blue eyes. One follower said, "Just by shaking his hand, she felt the Holy Spirit electrify her whole body." But then you can also find skeptics who encounter him and say, "This guy is a clown. He has this dishonest face. His hands are kind of fat. I wouldn't follow him to the grocery store, you know, let alone to found a new Zion on the banks of the Mississippi, as his followers did in Nauvoo, Illinois."
32:57 Speaker 03 And Joseph Smith's story also was an early case that helped me understand in my research that the power of charisma resides much more in the story and the message than in the individual.
33:19 Shankar Vedantam? One of the elements of charisma that you explore is that charismatic people often promise to pull back the veil on a secret truth. I mean, that was true of Jemima Wilkinson. That was true of Marcus Garvey, even true of Tim Galway. Talk about this idea that in some ways charismatic people offer to show us a vision of reality that is in some ways behind the reality that we are seeing every day.
33:44 Speaker 03 I think charismatic leaders, in many different contexts, are positioning themselves alongside the message that people are getting from established sources, from tradition, from institutions. And the charismatic leader says, "You think you've been told how the world works. You think you have a full picture of reality, but you don't. You've been denied some crucial facts about your existence and your relationship to the powers, both material and supernatural." And that can, that can take the form of a very legitimate revelation of...
34:31 Speaker 03 True access to the full picture of what it is to be human. So I think this is one way we could understand Martin Luther King Jr.'s message, that he is someone who destabilized complacently and a willingness to just suffer Jim Crow by reorienting the way that Americans, black and white, saw what was possible, saw the reality of who each person is as an individual and the vast chasm between the lived experience of black Americans in the mid-20th century and what justice really consists of.
35:13 Speaker 03 So there is a case of a pulling back the veil that was absolutely rooted in a true revelation, if you will. But I think this can take darker forms also. And this is where I think the word charisma can trigger, perhaps, in our mind, a kind of negative connotation, because it can sometimes go along with a false story about reality, an effort to undermine the news people receive from the mainstream media or what they're told by experts.
35:51 Speaker 03 And sometimes that can cross over into the realm of pseudo-facts. So really crucial, I think, in how we use this information in our everyday lives, how we evaluate leaders, is to be constantly holding up the story that leaders tell us against other sources of information. And doing our best, although it's never possible to be perfect at this, to discern, is this leader really showing me something that is true and that changes everything and that I have to take seriously? Or perhaps do I have reason to be skeptical?
36:39 Shankar Vedantam? Charisma is a powerful force. It has the ability to inspire, unite, and give people a profound sense of meaning and purpose. When a charismatic person speaks, their followers aren't just hearing a speech. They are seeing a new way to understand their own lives. When we come back, the different forms that charisma has taken over the years and how and when we should question it. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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38:04 Shankar Vedantam? Throughout season six, Alex brings together extraordinary change makers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
38:25 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
38:30 Shankar Vedantam? Do you have personal stories about being drawn in by a charismatic leader? A question about charisma and how we can be swept up in the spell of a mesmerizing person?
38:42 Shankar Vedantam? If you'd be willing to share your question or story with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone. Then email the file to us at [email protected] . Use the subject line Charisma. Again, that's [email protected] .
39:04 Shankar Vedantam? Charismatic people draw followers in, shape movements, and alter the course of nations. At the University of North Carolina, historian Molly Worthen is the author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History: From the Puritans to Donald Trump.
39:22 Shankar Vedantam? Molly, I'm wondering whether you can talk about the idea that charismatic people sometimes fuse their personal story with their message. So, long before Donald Trump became president, for example, he was crafting a narrative that fused personal mythology with his worldview that America was being taken advantage of by the rest of the world. Can you talk about this idea that charismatic people are very good at placing themselves in the flow of the stories and the narratives that they're crafting?
39:51 Speaker 03 I think that's exactly right and a crucial step for a charismatic leader who's offering a story that is supposed to draw followers into a special relationship with him or her as an individual. Looking back over Donald Trump's career long before he formally entered politics, I think he showed a real instinct for doing this. And if you go back and read his conversations with tabloid reporters in the 1980s, or you can find old footage of him on the Oprah Winfrey Show in the late 1980s, and you find him talking about his experience with all kinds of evil actors
40:33 Speaker 03 who have tried to take advantage of him and rip him off. That's a phrase he uses a lot from early in his career.
40:42 Speaker 07 I think people are tired of seeing the United States ripped off. And I can't promise you everything, but I can tell you one thing. This country would make one hell of a lot of money from those people that for 25 years have taken advantage. It wouldn't be the way it's been, believe me.
40:54 Speaker 03 His account is one of himself as a self-made man, really glossing over the degree to which he inherited his business empire from his father. And instead, he describes it as this brilliant exercise in entrepreneurial creativity, one that has required him to evade at every turn people who would try to take him down. And it's required him to develop a facility in working the system.
41:27 Speaker 03 Because the system is fundamentally corrupt. And why do laws that have no legitimacy deserve consistent, you know, good faith, respect? That's a line he's always walked very carefully, I think, never, never suggesting in his own narrative of, of his career that he broke any laws, but at the same time suggesting that someone who doesn't take advantage of loopholes in the tax code, if you don't do all of those things, then you're kind of a fool. So, you know, he, he has crafted this story of himself as this master of this kind of
42:11 Speaker 03 working the system and taking revenge on people who are bad actors. And so it was really not a far leap at all to cast himself as he trained his eye on national politics as the hero of the forgotten man, of the hero who would really rectify injustices and go after all of the people and the powers and the institutions that are rigged against the average American that have screwed people over, you know, to use another phrase that he's used frequently. And so he, he set himself up, I think, quite brilliantly to fuse his personal story of
42:55 Speaker 03 triumph in the business world with the revenge and justice and ultimate triumph that he promised to offer his supporters if they elected him president.
43:14 Shankar Vedantam? Do you think his story in some ways mirrors the stories of other people that you have looked at, other charismatic people, and that, you know, there are followers of his who, you know, almost quite literally are willing to die for him and believe so deeply in what he stands for? And simultaneously, there are other people who look at him and don't know whether to roll their eyes or just to throw their hands up in disgust. You know, he seems to evoke extremely strong passions in completely different directions.
43:43 Speaker 03 Absolutely, and it was observing those very polarized reactions back in 2015 that helped send me down the path of trying to understand the phenomenon of charisma across the centuries. And I absolutely did find that that polarizing effect on people is echoed, you know, all the way back into colonial times, up into, up into the present.
44:12 Shankar Vedantam? I'm wondering, Molly, when you think about someone like Donald Trump, you know, his, his views have actually been fairly consistent about some of these issues for a long period of time, and well before he became president, his, his sense, of course, that he's being ripped off, that the country's being ripped off, that you have to, you know, take on these institutions and these elite forces that are, you know, arrayed against the common man. These are all views that he's held for a long time. Do you think that charismatic people carefully select their views to figure out what will be effective in driving their followers? Or are they really accidents of history, which is that they happen to have a set of views and beliefs and perhaps even personal stories, and these happen to fit, almost
44:55 Shankar Vedantam? like a key into a lock, into the needs of the people who are around them at the time?
45:02 Speaker 03 That's a great question, and I think that charismatic leaders have to have a kind of genius, an instinct for reading their time and identifying the driving anxieties and desires of their cultural moment, especially among people who are not being served by the narratives currently on offer in the culture. But I have never run across a charismatic leader who struck me as 100% pragmatic and just adopting, you know, some, some mix of views and, and making up some story willy-nilly purely because it seems like it will play well.
45:45 Speaker 03 Instead, I think you're right, that there, there has to be this kind of magic, this, this synergy between the leader's natural self-understanding and aspects of his or her own story, and the way he connects specific parts of that story to this, this grander picture.
46:14 Shankar Vedantam? As a reminder, if you have questions or comments for Molly Worthen that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at [email protected] . Use the subject line "Charisma." Again, that's [email protected] .
46:39 Shankar Vedantam? Molly says that we live today in the age of the guru. I asked her what defines this type of charismatic leader.
46:47 Speaker 03 I think it's interesting to play with the term guru in a broad sense. And to remember, too, that charismatic leadership very rarely exists in a pure form. It's often combined with other kinds of authority. So the frame of the guru as a radically anti-institutional figure, who is positioning himself as the gateway to truth and knowledge, that's a useful frame, I think, for understanding Donald Trump, while of course also recognizing that he has conventional institutional authority as the President of the United States.
47:35 Speaker 03 But I think it's a broader cultural phenomenon that we can see manifest across the political spectrum. I became fascinated by the story of Oprah Winfrey and the kind of personal do-it-yourself spirituality that she developed alongside her media career. And I think much of her effectiveness and popularity, you know, really rocketing to fame in the mid 1980s, when she was in her 30s, lay in her ability to convince many Americans that what you were seeing on her show was her authentic self.
48:19 Speaker 03 It was just, you know, straight shooting, asking the difficult questions, pulling back the veil on reality that, you know, more polite talk show hosts would ignore.
48:32 Speaker 08 I say this on my show all the time. Can you really forgive if you haven't gotten angry? If you haven't dealt with how you really feel? I don't know if you can go from having been abused to forgiveness.
48:44 Speaker 03 But it becomes folded into this broader story of how you should be in the world that draws on various new age religious influences. You know, Deepak Chopra. And really, she's a sort of omnivorous consumer of all kinds of religious and spiritual tools. You know, everything from her own Christian heritage, you know, what she grew up with, to more kind of eastern religious techniques, to just a way of talking about shopping and acquisition as self-empowerment and a way of actualizing your potential.
49:28 Speaker 03 These are all a way of recasting religion, not as joining a traditional community, you know, deciding to obey an institution, but rather think of it as a toolbox or a smorgasbord, if you will, of options that are just all about suiting yourself.
49:49 Speaker 09 Because only you have the power to take responsibility to move your life forward.
50:02 Speaker 03 And so it's a whole picture of reality that I think she offered her most devoted fans. And it's part of why you encounter in Oprah's fans a sense that this woman is laying out a path, a way of being. You know, she's not just a talk show host. So I think that frame of the guru helps us make sense of this whole cultural picture and people as disparate as Donald Trump and Oprah.
50:39 Shankar Vedantam? I think what I'm struggling with, Molly, is I'm trying to imagine what if I was somebody living in Nazi Germany in 1936, and this messianic leader comes along and basically tells me a story about lost glory and the glory that is achievable if Germany were to achieve its full potential. And I'm inspired by this story, and I want to follow this person. What should I be doing when I feel like I'm gripped by somebody who has the story that feels like it's unlocking something within me, and I feel like I need to follow this person? What are the questions I should ask myself that I don't have the luxury of hindsight of waiting 30 years to see how something has turned out, but in
51:24 Shankar Vedantam? the moment, what kind of questions should I ask myself to determine if I'm on the right path?
51:30 Speaker 03 Boy, that is, in some ways, the question, right? And I think part of what your question has to compel in all of us is recognition that even in these cases that in hindsight seem kind of black and white morally, if you're in it, it can be very hard to tell up from down and get your moral bearings. I guess I have two main thoughts. One is that there's a real power to being embedded enough in a longstanding, ancient philosophical or religious tradition that you can avail yourself of all of its resources and perspectives
52:14 Speaker 03 on a range of different challenges in human experience. So when I think about the small number of German Christians who resisted the Nazis and remained deeply critical of Hitler, even in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer attempting to assassinate him, I see that clarity of moral vision as a reflection of staying grounded in the whole of the tradition, not whatever kind of attenuated, useful version of this old tradition the leader happens to be endorsing. The second needful thing is to ask, who is this charismatic leader
52:58 Speaker 03 casting as my enemy? Who is he telling me is the villain?
53:04 Speaker 03 And what do I actually know about those people? What are my sources of information? In most cases, right? I mean, that that set of questions was not at top of mind for for Germans, you know, who were looking the other way or directly complicit in the Holocaust. But for for the minority that that helped save Jews and worked in the resistance, that personal knowledge of these victims as as individuals, as, you know, multi-dimensional humans, was absolutely crucial in inoculating them against Hitler's antisemitic propaganda. So, you know, in our in our current moment,
53:49 Speaker 03 and, you know, I don't, I certainly don't want to accidentally draw analogies. I think we always have to be very careful in drawing historical analogies. But certainly, we live in a time when very few Americans know in a personal way people who are on the other side of this of this political divide. And those relationships are are hard to come by for all kinds of reasons. But at the very least, even if we don't have access to those relationships, we can remind ourselves of of that dearth of information. The fact that human beings are complicated, and any kind of monolithic story of the other side
54:33 Speaker 03 has to obscure far more than it clarifies.
54:48 Shankar Vedantam? In the best of times, charismatic people can make a chaotic world feel more orderly. They can imbue our daily lives with purpose and meaning. They make us feel good, and we want to be close to them.
55:03 Shankar Vedantam? I was in New Orleans some months ago, and word got out that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were eating at a private room in a restaurant. Word leaked out, and soon the crowd started gathering. The intersection was soon swamped with hundreds of people. All they wanted: a glimpse of their heroes.
55:24 Shankar Vedantam? It made me think about the connection between charisma and romantic love. When we fall deeply in love, the person we adore seems to walk on water. Every gesture they make is beautiful. Every word is a pearl. When you think about it, we relate to our lovers as if they were imbued with charisma. Their quirks, their habits, their sense of humor, we find every aspect of them to be fascinating and charming. So what happens when one of these relationships comes to an end? Breakups are devastating because they demand that we wrench ourselves from the orbit of someone we found irresistible.
56:02 Speaker 10 It becomes something like, oh, you're not entirely the person I thought you were. I thought that you would honor the relationship the way I hope to honor the relationship.
56:19 Shankar Vedantam? When we come back, we dig deep into the psychology of breakups as we respond to listener questions about the end of relationships. Stay with us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
56:42 Speaker 11 What's up, sports fans? I'm Rachel Damita, here to tell you about my show Courtside Club. If you love hoops and hot takes, then you're in the right place. Want to hear about Katelyn Clark's unstoppable rise in the WNBA? How stars like Wemby and Luka Doncic are dominating the NBA? Or maybe you just want the tea on this week's most viral sports moments. Don't worry, we'll keep you updated on all of it. So grab your popcorn and come hang with us. Courtside. You can listen to Courtside Club wherever you get your podcasts. Oui et ah.
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57:42 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
57:46 Shankar Vedantam? There are certain painful experiences almost all of us will have to go through. We'll have uncomfortable first days at a new school or a new job. We'll fight with dear friends. We'll grapple with the grief of losing a parent. And unless we're very lucky, we'll break up with someone or have our heart broken by someone we love.
58:09 Shankar Vedantam? In movies and on TV, breakup scenes often make us laugh. It seems so obvious to us, the audience, that this relationship is doomed. But in real life, there often isn't much to laugh about when you're in the middle of a breakup. When you're the one sitting across the table from the person you love, hearing them say, "I'm leaving you," can be an agonizing experience.
58:34 Shankar Vedantam? The period that follows the initial shock of a breakup can often bring its own distinct heartache. You start to question everything. Did they really love you? What did you do wrong? Could you win them back? Was there someone else? How long will it take you for you to stop thinking about them?
58:55 Shankar Vedantam? At the University of Windsor in Canada, Antonio Pasqualeone studies how we process breakups and how we can make this particular type of loss less painful. Antonio joined us as part of our recent Love 2.0 series. If you missed that episode, it's the one in this podcast feed titled "How to Move On." Today, we welcome Antonio back to respond to listeners' thoughts and questions in our popular segment, "Your Questions Answered." Antonio Pasqualeone, welcome back to Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shankar. Antonio, after we released our episode with you, we heard from listeners who shared how they had struggled or were continuing to struggle with really deep sorrow in the aftermath of a breakup.
59:39 Shankar Vedantam? I'd like to start with this message we received from a listener named Molly. She went through a breakup about 13 years ago, and it took her a long time to get over the loss of the relationship.
59:49 Speaker 13 Why is it that if I were dating this person and he died, I would be allowed and in fact even expected to continue loving him for the rest of my life? But because he is not dead...
1:00:04 Speaker 13 I am expected to get over it, to stop loving him, to move on. What I don't understand is sort of, what is the difference? I mean, isn't a breakup essentially a death? That relationship is dead. The person that we knew is dead to us now. Why are we supposed to approach breakups differently than an even more permanent kind of loss?
1:00:34 Shankar Vedantam? So, Antonio, I think Molly is looking for permission to continue to grieve well beyond the point that others think she should stop grieving. Is she right?
1:00:45 Speaker 10 I mean, I think it's an interesting question. I can hear the pain in Molly's voice and how she sort of has been sitting with this for 13 years, over a decade, right? And part of the problem, you know, let me just answer her question, which I think is, the first part is, are breakups the same or similar to somebody just dying? And I mean, they're both going to be very hard, but you break up because someone doesn't want to be in the relationship. Someone is unhappy and someone wants it to end. So there's a difference in vision. And that has to be dealt with and has to be accepted
1:01:30 Speaker 10 by the person who's being broken up with, right? In death, it's possible that both people are really happy. And then somebody dies. And so it just has to be accepted. You know, you might feel like the universe is unfair, but it's not a struggle between two people's visions of what we could do together.
1:01:55 Shankar Vedantam? Right. So when someone dies, we may grieve them, but we don't necessarily feel rejected by them. But in a breakup, the person who splits up with you is still walking around, still doing their thing, perhaps now with someone else. You know, I can see in some ways how that can be more painful.
1:02:10 Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, you... Have a disagreement, a difference in how you see things, right? There's the relationship has expired or turned sour or run its course. You know, the other piece that Molly kind of points at or that comes to my mind is it's been a long time, right? And of course, one's resources, emotional, cognitive and otherwise, are trapped, kind of stuck on this. And there might be more life to live, right? It's important to end something so that one feels freed up to explore new possibilities.
1:02:58 Shankar Vedantam? Antonio, a listener wrote in with a hypothesis about why things often get worse before they get better after a breakup. Carlos Alberto saw something online that said that after a relationship ends, people may experience a withdrawal of sorts from their ex-partner. Essentially, the post suggested that the struggle we feel after a breakup might be similar to the cravings of someone experiencing an addiction. Here's Carlos Alberto.
1:03:26 Speaker 14 And I feel that this view is very reductive of the relationship and it doesn't really encompass all the complex things that are going around. But on the other hand, I do feel that it makes sense in a certain way. So my question is specifically if there is value in this understanding of breakups as recovering from addiction, or if this is a rabbit hole that is not really worth exploring.
1:03:53 Shankar Vedantam? What do you think, Antonio? Is the comparison between breakup grief and addiction withdrawal on the money?
1:03:59 Speaker 10 You know, when you first introduced it, I thought, well, I don't know. And then the first thing Carlos said, I realized Carlos and I were on the same page. It is a bit reductionistic, right? You know, there are some things that are just very sort of functional in terms of getting over an addiction that might be similar behaviorally in terms of getting over a relationship. You're gonna have to change your lifestyle. You're gonna have to change who you hang out with. So there's some similarity there. But I think the issue of relationships and grief become also more complicated. It is reductionist, just think of it as just that. Because as Carlos was kind of hinting,
1:04:41 Speaker 10 there are other issues of personal meaning, of attachment, of identity. And, you know, there's no correlate there with respect to drug addiction.
1:04:57 Shankar Vedantam? Antonio, a listener named Cliff reached out with a question about how to know when we might be stalled out versus taking time to recover from a breakup. Cliff and his wife got together when they were teenagers and they were married for 25 years. But eight years ago, Cliff's wife asked for a divorce. It threw him for a loop and he says he's still struggling to move on. Here he is.
1:05:20 Speaker 15 I'm healthy, active, and have a good career. Yet I feel unable to move forward emotionally. The idea of dating again in my 50s, even after eight years, still feels impossible. Being alone feels safer than risking being hurt or blindsided again. At the same time, I recognize that this belief may be irrational. My question for Antonio is, how can I tell the difference between thoughts that are irrational and those that may simply reflect caution or self-protection? Is choosing to remain alone indefinitely an irrational response to my experience? Or could it be a reasonable choice for where I am now? And how might someone in my position, even if I tried dating,
1:06:01 Speaker 15 begin to trust the emotional roller coaster that can come from it?
1:06:06 Shankar Vedantam? So Cliff raises a really interesting point, Antonio. It isn't always easy to tell where the line is between healthy self-protection and irrational fear. Do you have any advice for him?
1:06:18 Speaker 10 My heart goes out to him. When one sort of speculates that it may be irrational, that suggests that it's something that's crossed his mind.
1:06:29 Speaker 10 You know, but there's also no obligation to date other people. You don't have to. There's nothing wrong with deciding, well, I'm fine on my own. That's okay, too. So really, the question sort of becomes, what hurts more? What's missing in your life? Um, is something missing in your life? I mean, life is risky business. Um, so, you know, you date somebody and they might not be interested in you, or you might be not so interested in them. And then there's that whole, I mean, it's a lot of work finding the right person. Um, but you know, we, we don't look for people because it's convenient. We look for people because we want to connect.
1:07:14 Speaker 10 And so I think Cliff, it, it might be useful to sort of consider to what extent am I depriving myself of, of, of possibilities, right? I knew somebody who once said, I broke up with so and so so that I would have the possibility of falling in love again, you know? So, so what do you need, I guess? And what hurts the most? Because it, it costs you something to be so safe as well.
1:07:51 Shankar Vedantam? Many of the most common questions we ask after a breakup are why questions. We want to understand why this rupture happened. We find ourselves poring over our relationship, looking for clues. When we come back, we dig deeper into this process and we'll talk with Antonio about how to know when it's time to start letting go. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
1:08:28 Speaker 11 What's up, sports fans? I'm Rachel Damita, here to tell you about my show Courtside Club. If you love hoops and hot takes, then you're in the right place. Want to hear about Katelyn Clark's unstoppable rise in the WNBA? How stars like Wemby and Luka Doncic are dominating the NBA? Or maybe you just want the tea on this week's most viral sports moments. Don't worry, we'll keep you updated on all of it. So grab your popcorn and come hang with us. Courtside. You can listen to Courtside Club wherever you get your podcasts. Oui et ah.
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1:09:34 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Throughout our lives, we all will experience various kinds of rejections. Maybe we'll be turned down for a part in the school play. Our dream university will say no to us. We'll toil over a job application, only to receive a generic response saying, "Thanks, but no thanks." But one of the worst forms of rejection is the end of a relationship. To have someone say, "I know you, I loved you, but I no longer want to be with you." Antonio Pascual Leone is a psychologist who studies the impact of relationships on our well-being and how we can navigate the emotions that engulf us after a breakup.
1:10:21 Shankar Vedantam? Antonio, when you tell people about your research, they're sometimes skeptical about whether the emotions we experience after a breakup are generalizable. They assume that each person's response is unique. Is it?
1:10:33 Speaker 10 Well, each person is unique. You know, in the details, in the way you experience it and what it means to you, obviously, that's like a thumbprint. That's your unique experience. And at the same time, you know, is it unique? Isn't actually going to be an opinion question. This is an empirical question. There are some common patterns that predict wellness outcomes.
1:11:04 Speaker 10 And, you know, that's probably because we're humans. And humans have a similar parameters for their functioning. You know, you attend to certain, there's a lot of overlapping human needs. It's a funny puzzle, though, because if I were an astrophysicist, I would say, well, it's like this. And people would sort of nod and go, OK, I guess so. I can't, I can't see that far, so I'll take your word for it. But relationships and emotion, everybody, everybody has direct experience. And which is kind of wonderful. But it also means that people hold up what we find against their personal belief system,
1:11:48 Speaker 10 the personal kind of experiences.
1:11:59 Shankar Vedantam? Now, after a breakup, many people find themselves turning things over and over in their minds, a process that is known as rumination. Talk a moment about why we do this and why it can sometimes be a problem.
1:12:13 Speaker 10 Hmm. Well, rumination is almost always a problem, right? I mean, it's tricky to know, am I ruminating or am I getting stuff done? Um, rumination is, um, busy work, right? You, it's emotional, there are emotions there, right? Um, you can think of three kinds of rumination. The anxious rumination is always worrying about the future and creating scenarios, what if this and what if that? When we talk about, about things like unfinished business or losses, relationship losses, you'll get more depressive rumination. Depressive rumination tends to be about the past.
1:12:58 Speaker 10 It's not about problem solving, but it's about if only I should, if only I had, you know, it's regrets, kind of replaying events of the past and if they had been a little bit different. Of course, there's a, an overlap between depressive and anxious rumination. Uh, the third kind I'll just mention to be complete here. I'm sure we could make up others, but, um, when we're talking about relationship is angry rumination. So, you know, but, and these also are scenarios. They tend to be vengeful at, at the end, right? In certain kind of ways, if only I had said that clever thing and, and I hope so and so gets their comeuppance. But notice these are all scenario based. They tend to be a replaying of a scenario.
1:13:43 Speaker 10 It's the plot and characters, uh, being reworked. And, um, it tends to be a very cognitive verbal loop. Keeps you really busy. So especially when it's anxious, you feel productive in some sort of way. And yet that, that verbal cognitive loop insulates you from sinking a bit deeper into what's really going on, which is the present, right? Um, issues of loss, issues of shame, um, that can be very painful. You don't get caught up in those much more maladaptive emotions because you stay on these secondary hopeless, helpless, rageful sort of things.
1:14:29 Shankar Vedantam? We received a lot of listener questions about rumination. I'd like to share a couple of them with you. The first is from a listener named Sophie. Sophie told us that she and her boyfriend broke up earlier this year because of something that she did. Here she is.
1:14:45 Speaker 17 I'm trying to piece together this version of me that loved him so much and then this version of me that did what I did and hurt him. And the two just aren't connecting and it really scares me and freaks me out and makes me question whether or not I am a good person, a person who should be in romantic relationships. Is it possible to truly move on and heal from a breakup that was essentially your fault?
1:15:16 Shankar Vedantam? So Sophie is stuck on the idea that perhaps she isn't the kind of partner or maybe even the kind of person that she thought she was. What can people do when they find themselves in this sort of ruminative cycle, Antonio?
1:15:29 Speaker 10 One thing Sophie's doing is, or at least in this excerpt, right, is thinking of herself in a relatively static way, right? It's like, I hurt somebody, I ended the relationship. So in life and in relationships, you get to reinvent yourself. You have choices now. You get to decide to do things differently. If you have regrets about the way you treated somebody, you can commit to not treating other people in that way. And I don't think you should sit around and wait until you're perfect before you're
1:16:12 Speaker 10 in a relationship because that's not really how it works. Nobody's got it all sorted out perfectly. And the truth is, you grow the most on the contact points, on the boundary line between you and someone else. You grow the fastest. It's hard to compromise. It's hard to negotiate. It's hard to have a sense of we, but that changes you. And so you'll become a different person by being in a different relationship.
1:16:43 Shankar Vedantam? I would imagine that the rumination process is particularly common when a breakup is sudden and you don't know why the other person cut things off. A listener named Frida wrote in about her recent breakup. Her boyfriend ended things with her out of the blue. She writes, "I really don't know exactly why he broke it off. I've asked to talk with him several times and he always makes excuses not to talk. Previous relationships have ended gradually or with a clear reason. I'm having a hard time moving on and still want to talk with him about what happened. Any advice on how to move on?" I'm wondering, Antonio, how can we find closure when a relationship ends and the person who has ended it won't give us any answers?
1:17:25 Speaker 10 Yeah, I think a lot of people get stuck there. Sometimes there's even ghosting or other sorts of very abrupt endings and the person's out there somewhere, but they're unresponsive. In the episode we did, something that we talked about was the idea that although the relationship was a shared project, me letting go and moving on after the relationship is not a shared project. We will not be doing that together, just like we don't break up together, meaning in synchrony, right? And henceforth, it's like, this is my own project.
1:18:09 Speaker 10 Obviously, reaching out, there's nothing wrong with that. Trying to have a conversation, trying to get closure, maybe there are things that you want to tell the person, maybe the things you want to ask. But you will make use of that in the way that's useful to you. And if they're unavailable or unwilling, then that is actually information. It becomes something like, oh, you're not entirely the person I thought you were. I thought that you would honor the relationship the way I hope to honor the relationship.
1:18:49 Speaker 10 So that's another loss in some ways, but the relationship is yours to move on from, is what I'm trying to say.
1:19:03 Shankar Vedantam? A listener named Jennifer wrote in about a situation where a relationship ends amicably, but the two people actually want to stay in contact with one another and try to remain friends. Here's Jennifer.
1:19:18 Speaker 18 I'm really struggling with how to do that because I'm just still working through my emotional baggage and the hurt that I feel. And at some point, I want to do it. Can it be done is my question. What do we need to do to make that happen, each of us individually? Or is it a giant mistake?
1:19:42 Shankar Vedantam? I'm wondering, Antonio, have you seen any success stories of exes finding their way to becoming friends?
1:19:49 Speaker 10 Yeah. That's gonna be a long road, though. It's not gonna happen overnight. And I think it's wonderful when people do. You know, it depends how long ago the breakup has been and if that has been put to rest, right? But, you know, sometimes that's just a way of letting the other person down more easily. You know, one of the puzzles here and one of the reasons why there's gonna have to be some time off, let's say. You know, are we wanting to be friends just because it follows on the heels of a very intimate and tight romantic relationship? Or are we wanting to be friends because
1:20:32 Speaker 10 if I didn't know you and I bumped into you at the library, we might become friends? One of the puzzles, I just want to be really clear about it, is the goal of the relationship. That would be the new relationship. Because you've kind of maxed out in terms of intimacy in the relationship with the person as you know them. You have been together, shared life, had dreams, made love. That's probably more intimate than most friendships. So now you're looking for friendship. So it's kind of to roll back the relationship. It's not gonna be the same relationship. If you're able to become friends, it'll be getting to know the person
1:21:16 Speaker 10 in a whole different context. My parents is a funny example. My parents split up when I was 10. Um, my father remarried. And in some ways, I guess, they kept in touch. Well, for many, I don't want to speak for them, right? But it's like, well, they had kids. That becomes a shared project, right? So when I say redefine the relationship, the relationship becomes then about co-parenting. And that's important, right? We have different goals and there's a different end. Now, my parents are quite elderly. And I remember, you know, we get together for holidays or birthdays. My father, my mother, my stepmother, my brothers. Everybody's at the same table and it's great, right?
1:22:01 Speaker 10 And you can tell these are now, these are friends, right? And there's a sense of community. So there's going to be a reinvention of the relationship for Jennifer, if that's what she wants. And it's, it's, it's not going to happen overnight, right? You're really going to have to give some time. You still have to end the relationship.
1:22:27 Shankar Vedantam? When we go through a breakup, it can feel like we are saying more than just goodbye to our partner. We're also saying goodbye to the future we imagined together. The trips we would take, the life we would build. It's hard to imagine how to move forward, how to fill in all the gaps left behind.
1:22:45 Shankar Vedantam? Up next, Antonio will answer your questions about how to find peace after a breakup and offer guidance on how to avoid a split in the first place. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
1:23:07 Speaker 11 What's up, sports fans? I'm Rachel Damita, here to tell you about my show Courtside Club. If you love hoops and hot takes, then you're in the right place. Want to hear about Katelyn Clark's unstoppable rise in the WNBA? How stars like Wemby and Luka Doncic are dominating the NBA? Or maybe you just want the tea on this week's most viral sports moments? Don't worry, we'll keep you updated on all of it. So grab your popcorn and come hang with us. Courtside. You can listen to Courtside Club wherever you get your podcasts. Oui et ah.
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1:24:41 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
1:24:45 Shankar Vedantam? Antonio Pascual Leone is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada. He's the author of Principles of Emotion Change: What Works and When in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. He joins us today for the latest installment in our series, Your Questions Answered.
1:25:05 Shankar Vedantam? Antonio, breakups are not always a surprise. Sometimes we know that a relationship isn't meant to be, and we pursue it anyway. This happened to one of our listeners named Celine. Her partner recently broke things off, and Celine is coming to realize that her own emotional issues might be playing a role in undermining her relationships. Here she is.
1:25:26 Speaker 20 Basically, long story short, in my scenario, I know why it didn't work out. There was a lot of communication issues and emotional disconnection and lack of effort because of it. What didn't help, and a punch in the gut, was the fact that I was dumped through a voice note.
1:25:45 Speaker 20 So what I'm currently struggling with is a lot of self-blame, that I couldn't get myself to end it. And I guess my other issue is that I fall into loneliness and crave companionships before I get any work done on myself. And basically, start seeing other people before I know I'm ready. And I know myself enough that this is another struggle that is for sure to be expected.
1:26:14 Shankar Vedantam? So it sounds like Celine is aware of what she needs to work on, Antonio, but finds it really difficult to follow through before loneliness compels her to start a new relationship. What do you make of her dilemma?
1:26:25 Speaker 10 I think what Celine is saying is, I hope she feels like it's OK. It's like she's saying, "I'm a work in progress," right? But we all are. I'd say to Celine, "I am too." You know, so there's work to be done. And that doesn't mean one has to change relationships to improve oneself. One is often reinventing relationships as one changes who one is. But when she says about her own emotional issues, whatever they might be, she made reference to sort of a lack of effort. And that piqued me a little bit because, you know,
1:27:10 Speaker 10 sometimes people say things like, "Well, you know, we'll see where it goes."
1:27:17 Speaker 10 When I hear somebody say, talk about lack of effort, or "we'll see where it goes," I cringe a little bit. And I kind of go, "Well..." I can make a good guess where it's gonna go. Because the reality is that the rate of success of relationships is relatively poor. Right? If we'd go by divorce rates are maybe, you know, they're close to 50% depending on where you are. I'm just talking statistics. 50%? Those are bad odds. If you aren't sure that you want it to work, well, now you've given up your only leverage. Right? Relationships work because you lean into them.
1:27:58 Speaker 10 And for that reason, one needs to sort of think about in what kinds of ways am I not leaning in? What gets in the way of me loving someone or allowing them to love me? So I think that's really key.
1:28:17 Shankar Vedantam? Celine's question really highlighted how difficult it is to find a sense of ease when we've gone through a breakup. You've explored strategies that can help in these moments. One idea is to focus on identifying what you call unmet needs. Say more about this, Antonio.
1:28:34 Speaker 10 That's right, yeah. All emotion is about needs. And negative emotions are about unmet needs. And you know, when you get to deeper feelings, I'll call them primary emotions. They're about not just highlighting something's wrong to you, but organizing and orienting you to what you need, right? So emotion becomes procedural. I need to have a sense of camaraderie. I need to feel like understood by someone. I need, I need a sense of playfulness. I need fun. I need fun with somebody where we toss it back and forth.
1:29:19 Speaker 10 Those are existential and attachment oriented needs, right? Often moving on is about figuring out what's missing now. And once you're identifying it, you can kind of put it to rest, the relationship, I mean, and you organize to start looking for that specific thing that you're missing.
1:29:53 Shankar Vedantam? We received a number of messages from listeners who wanted to share their strategies for getting over a breakup. This one comes from a listener named Deb. At the age of 41, Deb went through a divorce. She struggled and felt like she'd never move on. Until about a year later, she decided to try something new. Here she is.
1:30:13 Speaker 21 I took out a yellow lined writing pad and pen. And on every single line, I wrote, "Thank you." And then I would fill in the blank for some way, shape, or form that my former husband had made my life better. Five pages later, I had let out from my head and heart all those aspects of my former life with him that made a difference for my stories of the past, my impacts on the present, and possibilities for my future. That's what that letter meant to me. Outside of my new bedroom window, I made a sundial on the ground. And after crumbling up those heartfelt statements of gratitude,
1:30:57 Speaker 21 I burned them and imagined the resulting smoke moving through the air and to its intended recipient, my former husband. From that moment on, I could tell my story without pain, or tears, or anguish. It was fabulous.
1:31:14 Shankar Vedantam? So there's abundant research that finds that gratitude is a powerful tool for many realms of our lives, Antonio. Is it possible that it can also help us with breakups?
1:31:25 Speaker 10 Absolutely. I think it's wonderful. It's very creative, and it's very agentic. And she runs with it, right? So part of it is very action-oriented, to do something. Nobody ruminates with a piece of paper the way Deb was talking about. I mean, at least not usually. So notice that one of the things here is...
1:31:49 Speaker 10 She's committing to paper or to conversation with someone or to write. It's not just in your head going around, turning it around in circles. There's a sense of undertaking a task. And the other piece that Deb mentions is ceremony, right? I mean, there's a ritual, the idea of, right? And I think I'm often saying to people, after you've done all the work, not before, you can't do it at the beginning, but after you've done the work, you still have to decide that it's over. There's a decision point where you say, and I'm going to put this to rest. And that serves several functions. One, it creates a sense of closure.
1:32:32 Speaker 10 Notice the other person doesn't have to be here for this ceremony. It can be private, you do your own thing. It has to be done after you do the emotional work, of course. But it also becomes a reminder, a memento. There was that time, that moment in time and space where I let it go and walked into the rest of my life, which is what she describes, right?
1:33:02 Speaker 10 Then there's the piece about gratitude. In the original episode, we talked about a goodbye exercise where you might write down, what are the good things you're saying goodbye to? What are the bad things you're saying goodbye to? You know, goodbye, good rhythms. And what are the hopes and dreams, right? Because the reality is, we had something together and it was of value.
1:33:25 Shankar Vedantam? This next question is from a listener who is on the outside of a breakup looking in. Her name is Christine.
1:33:33 Speaker 22 I'm wondering how to help a friend who's been through a difficult breakup and seems to be stuck in a never-ending loop of rumination after a year or more, and they just can't seem to move on. How can I be of help?
1:33:48 Shankar Vedantam? What do you think, Antonio?
1:33:51 Speaker 10 Yeah, that's a good question, right? If you care about people and you see them suffering, you want to help them. Depends how long they've been stuck this sort of way. It depends how long the relationship is, right? I think in some sense, if somebody were in a, with a life partner and then the marriage ends or the relationship ends a year after the breakup, they're, they're still stuck with it and working through it. I wouldn't say that's outside of healthy, right? I mean, it takes time and the longer the relationship, the more it's going to take time, right?
1:34:30 Speaker 10 You know, so, so it kind of depends on the context of what we're considering. But let's imagine it is kind of getting a little, it's taken a bit of a while. Maybe the relationship wasn't as significant in this person's life story, but obviously important enough for them to be, feel broken over it. Maybe the relationship was a year long and they're grieving for a year. This is starting to be a bit, well, yeah, it's, that's a long time then, right? And if you're a friend or family member of somebody who's still grieving or is seems stuck,
1:35:02 Speaker 10 I would say, give them company to fill the void. I would say, help them figure out what's important to them. You know what I mean? Often at the end of a relationship, people don't really know what they're looking for. So maybe give them some space to actually do that. The third thing would be, if people are really stuck in a hole,
1:35:26 Speaker 10 that's almost always from a first person perspective, right? I feel sad when I think of myself in first person in this situation, but you can move the person to a third person perspective, kind of like somebody else looking in, right? And that would be you, of course.
1:35:46 Speaker 10 So then one starts talking about a life story, a life narrative, and, and you might have a story that's a sad story, but... Dot, dot, dot. Where to from here? And the story's not yet finished. There's still life to live, so what do you want to do with that? Right? And I, I think that is also important to help shake people up and lift, lift their chin a bit to stare at the horizon.
1:36:24 Shankar Vedantam? We focused most of this conversation on how to cope with feelings that come after a relationship ruptures. But I'd like to end with a listener question about how to support relationships that are not yet at the point of no return. A listener named Lou sent us a question along those lines. Lou says, "I'd love to ask advice on how to break through the distance and silence that occurs when our romantic relationship feels like it's drifting apart. When both parties are feeling vulnerable and unsure of where they stand, what are some key questions we can ask our significant other to bring us back to honest communication?" What do you think, Antonio?
1:37:02 Speaker 10 I think this is a lovely question from Lou. I have already said, if you're just waiting to see what happens, that's a coin toss, heads or tails, right? And is that what you want? Because if that's what you want, then you'll get that, right? And yet, you move through the procedures of life, the comings and goings, and we're busy with work, and we're busy with stuff, maybe you're busy with kids, you have projects. Relationship maintenance takes time. You've got to put time into it, where there's a sense of "we." That's a very strong predictor of good outcomes.
1:37:46 Speaker 10 So, how do you do that? You look at your partner and you say, "How are things?" You make time for the relationship, you check in how they're doing. And sometimes the years roll by, and you actually have to reinvent the relationship. If you think of projects you've done, I don't know, I wrote a book, but people do other sorts of things, right? You renovate a house, or you start a career, or have children. You know, these things, a big project in life takes six to eight years, you know, from beginning to end. And, I mean, if you're having kids, it keeps going.
1:38:28 Speaker 10 But of course, the first six to eight years are really special and very hard. So... You know, if that's true for everything else, it's probably true for relationships too. And if you don't reinvent the relationship every six to eight years, well, then it will probably expire, right? Which is okay too, but if you wanted that relationship, you gotta lean in, as I've been saying, and take the time to find a date night again.
1:39:01 Speaker 10 If you don't have time for that, you have a date breakfast.
1:39:06 Speaker 10 Often, one is kind of rediscovering. I find myself with my wife. We have kids. Our kids are like nine and 10 now. And it's sort of like, oh, oh, that's, oh, that's who you are. That's interesting. That's exciting.
1:39:24 Speaker 10 Be curious. That would be my advice. Be curious. Don't take it for granted.
1:39:34 Shankar Vedantam? You know, I remember hearing someone say, if you don't make time for health, you are going to make time for illness. And I love that line because it suggests that being healthy is a proactive exercise. And as you're talking now, Antonio, I'm realizing the parallels here. If you don't make time for your relationship, you will make time for your breakup.
1:39:55 Speaker 10 It's very true. And it's very time intensive if you have a breakup.
1:40:08 Shankar Vedantam? Antonio Pascual Leone is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada. He is the author of Principles of Emotion Change: What Works and When in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. We also heard today from Molly Worthing. She's a historian at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History: From the Puritans to Donald Trump.
1:40:37 Shankar Vedantam? Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.
1:40:56 Shankar Vedantam? Our unsung hero today is Kelly Rudin. Kelly has worked for me for many years as my lecture agent. She's fielded incoming calls and emails and set up many speaking engagements. She's retiring, and I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for her many years of friendship and service. Kelly is a master gardener, and I expect she's going to get to spend many more hours in her beloved garden. Thank you again, Kelly. If you love Hidden Brain, please be an ambassador for us. Tell one or two friends about the show. Your word-of-mouth recommendations are one of the most powerful ways to connect more people with the ideas and research we explore on Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
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