When Life Falls Apart: How To Break Old Patterns, Rewrite Your Inner Scripts, and Find Purpose | Dr. Suzan Song

Why "how am I feeling?" isn't always the right question, why resilience doesn't mean what you think it means, and how rituals can steady you. Dr. Suzan Song is a Harvard- and Stanford-trained psychiatrist, humanitarian researcher, and adviser. For more than two decades, she has dedicated her work to building resilience in individuals and communities affected by adversity. She has a private practice in Washington D. C., is a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, and is a sought-after speaker on the science of healing. Her new book is Why We Suffer and How We Heal: Using Narrative, Ritual, and Purpose to Flourish Through Life's Challenges https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/726239/why-we-suffer-and-how-we-heal-by-suzan-song-md-phd/. In this episode we talk about: How a violent attack on her father shaped her life's work Why we recreate the painful situations we swore we'd avoid Why chasing stability causes so much of our suffering Three tools for hard times: narrative, ritual, and purpose How to spot and rewrite the scripts running our lives How people heal in countries with almost no therapists Why validation has to come before asking someone to change Why purpose is about being needed, not achieving more Why she thinks we've gotten "resilience" all wrong Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter 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: Run, Run Pure Beauty https://open.spotify.com/album/6tEKOTU8xDuIabBbNTkoam This episode is sponsored by: Planet Visionaries: In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, listen to or watch Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts. Warby Parker: Our listeners can buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at WarbyParker.com/HAPPIER http://warbyparker.com/HAPPIER — and using our link helps support the show. #WarbyParker #ad, No Small Endeavor: Search for No Small Endeavor http://nosmallendeavor.com/ wherever you listen to podcasts. Tonal: Right now, Tonal is offering our listeners $200 off your Tonal purchase at tonal.com http://tonal.com/ with promo code HAPPIER. Oura Ring: Wear your best life with Oura http://ouraring.com/. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

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

• 0:03Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. In preparing for today's episode, I came across a phrase coined by my guest today, and the phrase is "chasing the illusion of stability." I'm gonna say that again, "chasing the illusion of stability." When I read that, I realized that pretty much explains all of my anxiety about my family, about my work life, about the world. I just kind of want to be able to control things. But that, of course, is not how the world works. And so my guest today is going to talk about how we can have a different relationship with uncertainty, with change, which all ladders up, of course, to resiliency.

• 0:48Dan Harris?

  My guest is Suzanne Song. She's a Harvard and Stanford-trained psychiatrist, and she's got a new book, which is called Why We Suffer and How We Heal. Dr. Song, welcome to the show.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:00Dan Harris?

  It's a pleasure. So your work, at least in this regard, in the book, seems like a classic case, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a classic case of research as "me-search," as I often hear from researchers in the psychology space. And it seems to be rooted in your own personal experience, starting with some really hard things that happened with your dad when you were younger. Are you comfortable walking us through that story?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, and I think you're right. It was probably research as me-search, though, of course, I didn't know that at the time. So I'm a psychiatrist and a social science researcher. I do policy and research in humanitarian settings. So I was working, doing a study in Burundi with former child soldiers on intergenerational stress. And I think it was my third year there, and I essentially had a scene where one of my former child soldiers had turned on me and threatened me for my life, so I had to go into hiding. And I was sitting and hiding in this room in Burundi, and I thought to myself, like, how the hell did I get here? I am a Korean-American woman now, and hiding for my life from former child soldiers

• 2:11Speaker 01

  in a small country that nobody really knows. And the first realization that I had was, oh, it's dad. So when I was 15 years old, my family owned a liquor store outside of Baltimore, and one of the robberies had gone too far, so my father was assaulted. He was carjacked in an attempted murder, and he later died. So as a teenager, I didn't really think it affected me that much, honestly. This was a time when I didn't go to therapy. I didn't really talk to anybody about it. You just kind of keep going. And the thing that I knew I needed was just stability.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Like, I needed to keep my grades up, to keep doing my activities, so I could get to college and just keep working and achieving. And that would lead to a very stable life that would protect me in some way from what I don't really know. And so I did. I worked my three jobs. I went to college, med school, grad school, all the things. And it really wasn't until this, almost two decades later, that I'm in Burundi, and I realized I had essentially recreated another scene of violence. This time, it was towards me. And so now I would have the ability to stop the violence, to have a different ending.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  And I think that really led me to a lot of this work and trying to understand, like, what is it? How do we people actually, not just thrive and not just survive, but how do we engage in the world? Like, what happens to us after we experience major instabilities? And how do we connect the dots of all the experiences in our lives to create something of meaning and understanding?

• 3:59Dan Harris?

  First of all, I'm really sorry about what happened with your dad. I know it was a long time ago, but that's a horrible thing to happen to anybody, and especially for you as a, at such a formative age. I'm curious to learn a little bit more about how that searing experience, which clearly, for very justifiable reasons, you didn't fully metabolize at the time, how exactly that lands you in Burundi. I believe you have a term that you use in the book, repetition compulsion.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:30Dan Harris?

  Is that the apt term? And yeah, what should we know about it?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so essentially, it's when we live our life in cycles. We have these patterns. You know, when I was a teenager, my brain, my psyche, didn't have the resources and the capacity to, like, actually understand what's going on. So I couldn't really touch down on the hopelessness, or the fear, or the sadness. And so I just focused on over-functioning and not really understanding what had happened. My father did pass away. He, what I found out, actually only recently, in writing this book, I had always thought that he was murdered. When I was writing this book, my agent actually said, you know, "Tell me more about your father."

• 5:20Speaker 01

  And so I went back, and I started looking up if I could. I mean, he died pre-internet, so I was trying to find anything I could. And I found a small Baltimore Sun article, and it gave me the dates. And actually, his attempted kidnapping was a full year later before he had actually passed away. And I thought he had died immediately. And so I asked my mother, I said, "How do you make sense of this? There's a whole year gap in between." And she said, "No, no, he came home after the assault. He lived in our house. Like, you played violin for him, you made dinner for him." Now, I did not remember that entire year. That's all out of my memory. And so the memory, like, our brains do something very protective for us.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  The problem is, is when we never really address what had happened. When we have these fragmented stories, these fragmented narratives, and we don't have a way of understanding what's happened, it has a way to repeat itself. That same theme will repeat itself, subconsciously, unconsciously, in the future, in other aspects of our life. So for me, it was recreating another scene. But this happens all the time. You know what? It's not uncommon that I'll have someone who comes and they say, you know, it's a woman who says, "I will never marry anyone with an alcohol addiction, because my father was an addict, and I don't want to deal with that." And so she marries, and it's, the guy is not an alcoholic, but it ends up that he has a work addiction.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And she has the same feelings, and she's trying to win back his love in the same way that she did her father. We all have these, even in the workplace, this happens. So I was working with someone who is kind of C-suite, and this is her third job where she's second best. And I asked her, like, "What is the pattern here? When's the first time you experienced this being second?" She kept saying it was second best. And her brother had an addiction when she was growing up, and so the family always focused on the brother. And so she always felt second best. And now, here it is, playing out in her workplace. So it's these patterns that we have, and we don't quite understand them, as I didn't understand the relationship between Burundi and my father.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  We have to sit back and actually, even like, map out the experiences to say, like, is there a pattern here? And what's driving that? And oftentimes, it's repetition compulsion.

• 7:37Dan Harris?

  So why do we do it? I know it's subconscious, but do we do it as a way to recreate the conditions so that we can finally deal with them successfully?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we want mastery. We just want control over the situation, because we didn't have control back then. And so I couldn't engage with or find mastery over the helplessness that I might have felt as a child, the fear. And so we create a very similar environment and scene, but this time around, we think, "Oh, I'll control it now. Either I will find safety, or I'll make this person love me, or I will prove to everyone that I'm a good person. I'll show them." And so the problem is, is that rarely is the case. We never really get the outcome that we're wanting. And it just repeats itself until we cause awareness. We bring the unconscious to the conscious, so we can say, "Okay, there is a pattern here.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Let me pause and think about this."

• 8:31Dan Harris?

  What is the connection between this repetition compulsion, in your case, violence against your father, subconsciously creating a situation where there's violence directed at you, or threats of violence directed at you? What is the connection between this very human repetition compulsion and the very human desire for stability, even though stability is not really on offer?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Our brains are predictive machines. Like, we want to know what's going on and what's going to hap-- we like the foresight. We want to be able to strategize and say, like, "This is going to happen." And so the repetition compulsion almost becomes-- Like our baseline of stability, right? We say, okay, we know that there's going to be, we know this pattern, so we're going to make the pattern happen again. That's our form of stability. On the surface, on the outside, we say to ourselves, this is the instability. How can I be in this relationship again where I'm married and it's like someone with an addiction? I told myself I would never do that again. And so we say like, we're tired of all these life instabilities. But actually, it's our brain wanting to not have a predictive error.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Our brain is wanting to know, like, what is predictable? What can I control? What can I manage? And so it's going to keep giving you the same lesson. And you have to just learn it at some point.

• 9:51Dan Harris?

  We're going to come back to how we can deal with repetition compulsion. But let me just step back to your, your core thesis, which is, as I said, in, at the beginning, like this, this chasing the illusion of stability. I've said this before on the show, so I apologize to loyal listeners who've heard me say this. But it just seems like a fundamental design flaw in the species, that we live in a world of unremitting change, where stability is, is truly, as I said, not on offer, at least not for an extended period of time. And yet, we want it so badly. How do we explain this, this tragic mismatch?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it is because we have been groomed, society has groomed us since childhood, to thinking that stability, one, is possible. Like, there is a state of permanent stability, which we know is not true. But also that stability is success. And so we're told at a very early age, this is the school you should go to, the grades you should get, the person you should marry, we should get at this house, this is the job you should have. And make sure it's a stable job, because that will secure you for the future in some way. And that is the social narrative that we're all absorbing. So that if success is stability, it's supposed to protect you from the major life challenges. And of course, we know that's just not the case.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  But if that's the foundation, then anytime some major disruption happens, like illness, or divorce, or our kids aren't doing well, we almost want to get away from it as fast as possible. So we want to just get over it and just keep on moving and just go past it. But then we miss this opportunity to really say, well, wait a minute, what is our natural way of engaging with hard things? Like, we all have very individualized ways of coping through things. So what is that for us? Because if we learn that now, that will help us the next time something major comes along. And it will. So I think the more that we understand that

• 11:56Speaker 01

  stability really is an illusion, the more we can take a step back and say, okay, given that, how do we actually engage in the world? Like, I work with refugee camps. And I'm always surprised, because people can be displaced, and living in a refugee camp, they can also love, they can laugh, they can learn new skills, they can contribute to the community. So how is that? They're living in these times of chronic instability and unrest, and yet, they can still engage meaningfully in the world. Like, I think that is beautiful, and I think it's very compelling. That's actually why I wrote the book. Like, how were they able to do that?

• 12:38Dan Harris?

  If you are anxious about the upcoming midterm elections in the United States, you are not alone. I certainly feel that way. So we are going to do what I always advise people. We're going to never worry alone. We're going to do that together. I've got two live video guided meditation and Q and A sessions coming up, one on Election Dan on November 3rd, and the other on November 4th. These are available to anyone, whether you're a subscriber to my app or not. The one on Tuesday, on the 3rd, I'll be doing with the great meditation teacher, Vinnie Ferraro. Again, we'll meditate with all of you and then take your questions. And then the, the one on the day after, I'll be doing that one solo. Like I said, this is totally free to anyone, whether you're a subscriber to my app or not.

• 13:21Dan Harris?

  All you have to do, if you're not a subscriber, is sign up for my newsletter at danharris.com, and then we will send you the info to join me and our community on Zoom on November 3rd and on November 4th. It's free, it's in the afternoon. It'll be a great way to calm your nervous system. We'll see you there. We all, of course, want to stay healthy for as long as possible. With Aura, getting started is effortless. Aura Ring measures more than 50 health metrics, including your sleep, movement, stress, and heart health, all from your finger. The Aura app shows how it's all connected and what to do next. The more you can understand your body, the better you can live in it. Wear your best life with Aura.

• 14:06Dan Harris?

  I have this memory of, I was not a humanitarian. I was a journalist and spent a lot of time in conflict zones in my younger years, post 9/11. I remember being in Ramallah in the West Bank during the Second Intifada, so this would be 2002. And the Israeli army invaded. And I was not embedded with the army. I was actually embedded with a civilian population, staying in a house in Ramallah with a bunch of other journalists. And, you know, just bombs going off on our street, and tanks rolling down the streets, and it was super gnarly. And at some point, there was a, an eight-hour ceasefire called.

• 14:49Dan Harris?

  And everybody went shopping. It's like the, the urge for normalcy just reasserted itself in such a powerful way.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and sometimes, look, and we need that sometimes, like, in, in every humanitarian setting, one of the first things we do for children is we get schools open, we build schools, to get kids back into a sense of normalcy as soon as possible. So we do need, like, humans need a baseline of security and stability, like, that's foundational. But then beyond that, I think a lot of what, you know, a lot of our suffering, I think, is due to this desire for life not being how we want it to be. It's this disconnect between, like, where our reality is and what we want our life to be. And normally, we want our life to be stable, because then we can control it. We can predict what's going to happen. And as we see right now, I mean, look at right now,

• 15:48Speaker 01

  we've got like, AI threatening everyone's jobs, we have climate crises, the political turmoil going on. I mean, we are living right now in times of chronic unrest. And so I often find myself saying, like, I can't wait for life to be stable again.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Then we, like, put off living. Like, we can still learn to engage in, in the world. And, and so these examples, like, of yours, in these war zones, and the people I've worked with, I don't know, I feel like, if you want to learn something, you learn from the most extreme. And these are people who are living in some of the most extreme settings possible, and they're still able to thrive and engage.

• 16:31Dan Harris?

  There's, I don't know who said this. I just heard this, you know, after hosting the show for more than 10 years, I can't remember who said what to me, but something like, the problem isn't the problem, the problem is your relationship to the problem. And is, is, is that apropos in this context?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  There is the event of what's happened, and then there's how we live with that event. Right? And so, suffering, there is some suffering that there's no amount of, like, mindset change that's going to make it any better. Like, I work with survivors of torture, trafficking, hostage, like, that's human rights violations. It's just suffering, pure and simple. But then there are the more, kind of, common, ordinary stressors that we all go through, like the breakups and the job loss, and the, you know, normal life ruptures. And that suffering is oftentimes the gap between what's going on right now and just what we want. Like, the world is not as we want it to be, and that's causing the suffering.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  And that should hopefully give us a lot of hope, because it means that we have a lot more agency in our suffering. I think so much, so many times, we think, like, our despair is just, oh, things are so bad, and that's just how it is. But actually, we do actually have a lot of control over whether or not we suffer.

• 17:51Dan Harris?

  So, so the book is called, and I mentioned this in the intro, of course, but the book is called, Why We Suffer and How We Heal. So I think we've, unless you disagree, I feel like we've pretty firmly established why we suffer. But the bulk of the book is really focused on how we heal. And your concept is that there are these three ways to change our relationships to uncertainty, and you call them the three friends of winter. What does that mean?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so these are the tools that I've seen people across cultures and contexts that they have called upon to find ways to engage in the world, a sense of mastery among the chronic instability. So narratives are essentially the stories and explanations we have about our reality, what's going on in the world. They are the logic, kind of, operating system that underlies all of our thoughts, our actions.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  So narratives are useful because it gives us insight. Insight isn't enough. We need something for behavioral change. So the rituals come in because rituals embody our insights into practice. They give us movement. They connect us to ourselves. They connect us to people across time and space. And then purpose is what gives us direction. So purpose is something of meaning that's larger than ourselves that tell us how to use our time, our resources and our energy. And I call them the three friends because one of the things that I've learned in my work abroad is that healing is relational.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  It's not like Americans, we're very, very individualized in our suffering and in our healing. Like if, if someone loses a loved one, they get a week off of work. They're told to go talk to a psychiatrist or a therapist through a one-on-one insight therapy. And then to come back and to be productive, like be good now. And it's very individualized. What I see in other contexts is that healing is very much relational. It's through a sense of belonging. It's through being needed. It's through mattering to another person. And I think we lose out on some of that. The three friends of winter in and of itself is an Asian art motif. They're bamboo, pine and plum blossom.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  And so these are these three very hardy winter plants that thrive in the harshest of environments.

• 20:26Dan Harris?

  Winter in this analogy is hard times, instability. And these are three friends, meaning there are three ways to weather the various inevitable, unavoidable storms that happen in every life. And again, there are narrative, ritual and purpose. Let's go through them. When you say narrative is a friend of winter, in other words, a tool we can lean on as a way to deal in a more subtle and sophisticated way with life's vexations. What do you mean specifically? Like, we can, we can tell a different story that's more empowering?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  I'll give an example. So I commonly see in my practice, mothers with young children who are also working full time and, you know, doing all the everything. Early in the family life cycle, right? It's a hard time for the whole family. And I'll often come in saying, I know that I need time off. I know I need just a break to go one hour at the gym. I know that's what I need. And my partner will help me with that. Like they're encouraging that. And yet I feel like I'm just not a good parent. I feel really guilty if I take that time for myself. Like this is extremely common. And so that's hard because the narrative that she's telling herself is, she understands the logic of it, right?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  I know that I need to take care of myself in order to take care of my child. She understands what she needs to do. Like, I know I want to go to the gym or have an hour break for myself. But the guilt is getting in the way. Well, what's that guilt about? And oftentimes it's this internal script that she has absorbed from culture, from society, from the way she was growing up about what a mother should, what a good mother should be, what she should look like, how she should act. She should be self-sacrificing. That's like martyrdom of motherhood. And so that internal script is running her life. It's like someone else wrote the script for her and now she's playing it out and she's confused because it's not working for her. We all have these internal scripts of what does it mean to be, you know,

• 22:29Speaker 01

  good at work for me? Like, what does it mean to be a good physician or a good, you know, parent? And once we understand what our internal scripts are, then we can say, okay, is this working for me? Is this what I really think? What do I think a good mother should be? And we can even like write that out to start rewriting some of the narrative to reclaim some of our, our own actions and our own values and beliefs.

• 22:56Dan Harris?

  How can we start to? Because I feel like there are probably seven or eight subconscious scripts that are running in my brain that are making me do stupid shit on the regulars. Like, so how can we figure out what these scripts might be?

• 23:10Speaker 01

  One is to first just notice when you're feeling that, you know, like we all have this, like the pang of resentment or anger. Like whenever you feel like a big emotion that seems disproportionate to what's going on. So if we're really like resentful that, you know, somebody at work said something about us or they're requiring more of our time, like what is that about? And is there some threat to our identity? Is there some role that is being threatened right now? And what is that role? We write it out. So maybe it's, you know, worker or whatever it is. We write that out so we can start to understand what is this role about? Who wrote this?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Where did I get this from? And what do I want to be like? I mean, we think about who am I, but who do you want to be? And that will give us some direction to how we want to live our lives.

• 24:06Dan Harris?

  So it really goes back to like rewriting the script. You identify the script. And one way to figure out which script is, is running your life is to like tune into the suffering. Like where am I feeling resentful? Where am I feeling misaligned? And that can be like the portal to figuring out, like I've got some story in my head. And then you can, you know, use, you could literally sit down, pen in hand, write out the old script and then write a new one.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and writing the new script, you know, we write it and then we actually iterate and like try out new things. So there is a researcher named Hermenia Ibarra, who did this, this series of studies on staff who were being promoted into managerial roles. So they were technical and now they're being promoted into managerial roles. And she found that the people who really struggled were the ones who couldn't let go of their, basically their script of what their job should be, what they were good at. So people who, who believe themselves to be very good at the technical aspect. And they didn't think they would be very good managers.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Of course, they had a really hard time leveling up there. And so even if they took the job and they wanted the job in the managerial position, they kept thinking, well, I am known as being good technically. And until they rewrite the script and say, okay, I can actually be a manager. But then they iterate and they try it out. They try different things. You say, okay, well, this is working. This one's not. And so it's this iterative process to changing how we behave and, and changing our roles and responsibilities in that identity.

• 25:58Dan Harris?

  I find it so fascinating. And I come back to the scene, this theme so often on the show because I find it so fascinating. I just can't get over the fact that we are talking to ourselves all the time. And we're telling ourselves stories that we're aware of or not, that are making us, often making us unhappy. And it is possible to rewire this inner talk track in ways that are extremely beneficial.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yes. And I think, you know, I'm very thankful that early, very early in my career, when I was training in the US as a psychiatrist, I also had this parallel career doing policy and research in humanitarian settings. And so we see that Americans, we are obsessed with our thoughts. Like we love to just take them out of our brain and put them under a microscope. And we do all the cognitive restructuring and reframing. And, and that's very important. Like studies are very clear on the benefits of psychotherapy and mindfulness, meditation, right? At the same time, I was working and living in these other countries and contexts where there are no therapists. Right? Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi, they all have like one psychiatrist

• 27:10Speaker 01

  for the whole country and there are no therapists. There is a lot of suffering there, but many people are doing okay. So how are they healing if they don't have the same relationship with their thoughts and, and they don't have therapy as the main intervention of healing? And that's when I really realized that when we get outside of ourselves, because people that live in these relationally interdependent communities, their identities and their self is defined not by the individual, it's defined in relationship. So if I go to, let's say, I remember I was doing this evaluation in Sierra Leone, and I asked people, like, how are you doing? And they say, good or bad?

• 27:53Speaker 01

  And I say, OK, like, really, how are you doing? And they'll say, well, I'm bad because I can't get a job for my family. I can't provide for my family. It's all in relation to their roles. And here in the US, I think we're very focused on our thoughts, our feelings, our experiences. That's not necessarily the same case in many, many cultures around the world, where, yes, they're still ruminating, and they still have thoughts that they're constantly churning in their mind. But it's not as much of an evaluation. We do a lot of self-evaluation. It tends to be pretty negative judgments.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  So there's still rumination, but the content is very different. It's very focused on outwards, on other, because the whole concept of self is enmeshed, embodied in another.

• 28:48Dan Harris?

  But for those of us who don't live in those kinds of cultures, we live in this, and I'm sitting in New York right now. I live in a culture that really does center the self. What can we learn very practically from this other model? And how do we apply it in our lives?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is one of the benefits. It's that sometimes we can try to expand outwards with our thinking. So let's say we're going through a really hard time. What we tend to ask ourselves is, how am I feeling? Or how am I doing? Maybe we ask that, but the next question can be, who can I help? Where can I engage in the world, outside? Where can I engage in my community or in my workplace? Who do I matter to? Who do I want to matter to? These are all questions that get outside of our individual experience. We still acknowledge it, and we're not ignoring it.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  We're just also bringing in a whole nother community, like, a whole nother sense of our identity as being connected to humanity at large.

• 29:56Dan Harris?

  So this would be a way, if we're running self-limiting scripts, one way to step out of them, we talked about rewriting them, but another way to step out of them would be to focus on other people?

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, to redirect, to say, you know, maybe right now, I don't have to ask about how my, and look, I am a psychiatrist, right? So like, feelings, emotions, all of that, good. And also, sometimes we need to step outside of that. Like, there's a lot of talk around mental health right now. Great, we don't want to stigmatize mental health issues. But a lot of the discussion around mental health is focusing on this lowering of symptoms, of depression, of anxiety, et cetera. But an equal question I think we need to be asking is, how is a person living? Because I know plenty of people that have mental health symptoms, depression, anxiety,

• 30:56Speaker 01

  and they're also able to love and to belong in a community and to engage and participate at their kid's school, right? And I know a lot of people who have really no mental health symptoms, and they're isolated, and they can't actually engage in the world at large. So just because we're feeling better doesn't mean that we are being well, right? There's a difference there. And so the more we can take ourselves out of ourselves and remind ourselves that we are part of something larger, and we actually get a lot of healing and kind of agency when we embed ourselves in other relations around us.

• 31:40Dan Harris?

  I've seen that play out in my own life many times. On the show, we talk a lot about how to train your mind, tame the inner critic, and build habits that make you happier. But a big part of that equation is asking broader questions about what actually constitutes a good and meaningful life. That's why I want to share a podcast with you. It's called No Small Endeavor, and it's hosted by Lee C. Camp. On No Small Endeavor, Lee brings together world-class thinkers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and authors to explore what it means to live a life worth living. They dive deeply into topics such as resilience, character, connection, and joy, not in a high-minded, dusty textbook way, but with incredible nuance and practical warmth.

• 32:25Dan Harris?

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• 33:09Dan Harris?

  If you're interested in mindfulness, emotional resilience, and intentional living, No Small Endeavor is a great companion to what we do here. Search for No Small Endeavor wherever you listen to your podcasts.

• 33:25Dan Harris?

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• 34:07Dan Harris?

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• 34:38Dan Harris?

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• 35:52Dan Harris?

  In the section of your book on narrative, you talk a lot about memory and how many of us are dogged by unpleasant memories. And there's actually a way to flip or change the script on those. Can you talk a little bit here about how we might do that?

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so our narratives are really built off of our memories. We imagine, though, that our memories are like a video recorder, and that when we recall a memory, you're just like hitting play on that video recorder. But actually remembering a memory is a process of reconstruction. So memory is just a little neurobiology. Memories are essentially stored as these patterns of connections across these neural networks. So if you imagine two people playing tennis, these are like the neurons, and they're volleying back this electrochemical signal. And now you have thousands and millions of neurons, like, playing tennis with each other. They become more efficient.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  And there's a saying, it's like, the neurons that fire together, they wire together. So the more efficiently they play, the more easy it is to retrieve and recall this memory. But if you and I are playing tennis, and I just had an argument with a friend, or I felt sick the night before, I'm not going to play as well. And so all these external factors are going to affect how I remember, how I recall this memory. In the same way, when we're all telling a memory of something that's happened, yes, there's the true facts of the event or what happened. But there's also the story and the emotional valence we put on the memories that change constantly.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And so memories are this process of reconstruction. They're very suggestible. And so this is why so many couples are arguing of like, what actually happened, right? Or in the workplace, like, people are fighting because they don't remember the same event in the same way. And that's because we all see and remember stories that are aligned with what we need to be true. And sometimes that's really hard. That's one of the things that really gets in the way of our ability to rewrite a narrative or to engage with a changed memory is that oftentimes we need these narratives to be true.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  And if there's some new information, either a memory or someone telling us some feedback that we don't really like, it threatens our sense of self, of who we know ourselves to be. And that's really hard. It's hard for us to change our, and update our narratives.

• 38:36Dan Harris?

  So how do we do it? Or should we do it?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's say there's a spouse and the spouse comes home and they say, you know, I just feel like you haven't been helping out around the house as much. And the spouse is thinking themselves, first of all, I pride myself on being a good partner and provider. I actually am doing quite a lot in this house. And they're like listing through, I did the trash the other day, I did bedtime for the kids last week, like all of the things. And so our first instinct is to explain ourselves. And then when we get tired of that, we then defend ourselves. We say, but also I've been really busy at work and have all these things. And we go into like, what's happening at work now to deflect.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  So what's happening is, one, we might have the memories of the past that are coming into play. And we also then have this sense of the information that's coming at me is threatening who I know myself to be as a good partner. There's this late psychoanalyst, Selma Freyberg, who had this, coined this term that I love. She said, "A mother cannot hear her child's cries until the mother's cries are heard first." Something like that. And it's really that when we're feeling threatened, when our core identity of who we are, the stories of who we believe ourselves to be, when there's a threat to that, we are not able to hear it.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  We can't update that. We can't change our story until we're feeling safe and protected in that. So what we do, and I call it the porcupine, like these porcupine quills go out. And so we want to attack, or we defend, or we blame the other, all because that soft underbelly is really vulnerable. And so the more that we can go to that underbelly and we say, okay, look, I know you're a really good partner. This is where the validation comes in first. We validate what is the story that they need to be true about themselves. We validate that. You're a good person. And then we ask for change. This is a whole dialectic, right? Validate and then you ask for change.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  And I think that's kind of the prerequisite from, in order to like help someone change their own stories.

• 40:58Dan Harris?

  Yeah, like for me, if my wife has a complaint, you know, pretty much a hundred percent of the time, it's a legitimate complaint. And I can be super defensive because I hear her saying, you're a bad person.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:13Dan Harris?

  Even though, of course, that's not what she's saying, but that's my deepest fear. And so therefore I get defensive.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And that's very common because we filter all information through the stories that we need to be true. You need it to be true that you're a good person. We all do. Depending on how, it's not even depending on how the information's coming at us, it's also how we're feeling that at that moment, right? Like, it's all going to affect how it's received. And so the more that we can just see, like bear witness to the soft underbelly first, that will give us the best chance of, you know, being able to rewrite.

• 41:54Dan Harris?

  Is this maybe the time to talk a little bit about practical steps for repetition compulsion? Would this be an appropriate time to come back to, and I know we started with that, the fact that we tend to recreate the conditions we say we don't want? Is there more to say about how we can maybe not do that?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so repetition compulsion, the first step is always to notice the pattern. We have to know that we're in a repetitive pattern first. And so it's to understand the next time that someone says, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I'm in this again. Right? That tends to be the cue to say, okay, let's pause there. Like, what is the actual pattern that's going on? And so we identify what that pattern is. What's the experience that's happened? And it's not just the experience. The driver of repetition compulsion are the feelings that were never dealt with. They're the feelings that were pushed under the rug.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Helplessness, vulnerability, I didn't have power or control, I felt unloved. Those we need to pull back because that's what's actually driving the repetition compulsion. So we identify the pattern. We identify what the feelings were that were completely ignored. Once we bring it to light, it starts to lose its power. And then we sit with that emotion, whatever it may be. And we say, okay, I was so scared of it before. That's why it has so much power over me. But now with almost like exposure therapy to the emotion, well, now I realize I have more control over it. I'm not dying from this emotion.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  And then we can say logically, how do I want to engage with this pattern? Do I want to break it? And if so, how? So in my work, for example, you know, let's say with this woman who is now married to someone who has this work addiction, we can say, okay, what's the pattern? What were the feelings you were experiencing with it? Now feel the feelings. You have control, so you're diluting the power of that. Now what do you want to do? Right? How do you want to engage in this? Doesn't mean she has to leave her husband. Right? There are lots of different options there. So she can talk to her husband, say, hey, I've noticed this pattern in me and I'm having a hard time with it.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Or she can say, I want a different type of relationship. In her basket, she can put out all these different possible solutions. And just expanding that is a way of breaking the cycle. And then she gets to choose one and try it out and see what happens. When we bring it to conscious awareness and we say, I'm going to intentionally deal with this, it starts to lose a lot of power.

• 44:39Dan Harris?

  It's incredible how that, how that can happen. Okay, so as, as we established early in the, in this discussion, there are these three friends of winter. We just talked about one, which is working with narrative. The second is ritual. So maybe say a little bit about how ritual can, can help in this regard. Because I think many people, and for a long time I felt this way, yeah, I hear the word ritual and I just think of, you know, pagan stuff or something like that. It doesn't seem like it's relevant to my life.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did too, actually. So rituals are a set of actions that really connect you to yourself or to others. And they're powerful because they really bind us across time and space and they bring us closer to, to what your dreams are, actually. So rituals, we all use them. And I think one of the ways in which we use them, there are two ways. So one is through emotion regulation. So let's say any athlete, most athletes have some sort of rituals to help regulate. Steph Curry does a tunnel shot before his games, like Serena Williams, I think she bounces a ball five times before her first serve, two times before her second serve.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Like, these are all just rituals that help us find more control, predictability, and they regulate. So they can do, they can help with emotion regulation. They can also help with emotional scaffolding during the times when things are just so hard, we can't think through anything. We think about losing a loved one. A lot of times we've lost a loved one, time stands still. We don't know what to do with ourselves. Like, where do we go? Who do we talk to? What are we supposed to be doing? So most every culture has some sort of ritual around how to go through the grieving process. And that ritual is important because it connects us to others, kind of, it's this community telling us, okay, we're all in this together.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  We've all experienced loss before. And also it helps to guide you when like, we really can't think about what to do. Rituals can also help us when we reintegrate into life. So let's say either it's after divorce. Like, I think after a divorce, so many people go off and they have their new rituals or hobbies that they do. Or people going through the change of retirement, right? Like, sometimes we need some kind of a marker to ritualize that. Or people returning from military service, they need to do a ritual to help them kind of engage. Even- In my work, sometimes, the days are hard, like dealing with kind of torture survivors, hostages,

• 47:25Speaker 01

  and also CEOs. And it's just a very emotionally complex day. When I then go to see my kids, I need a ritual for me to re-enter that home life. And so I, before I go back home to see kids, I do a 10-minute walk. I don't think about the day or about what I need to do. It's just, I actually think about draining my head from my brain to my toes. And I imagine just flowing out. And I wait until, it used to be a bucket, now it's a big swimming pool, until that's full. And then I go back home. And that's my ritual, just to reintegrate back into my normal life.

• 48:06Dan Harris?

  For those of us who've just gone through something hard or who just have difficult transitions that we need to make during the day from work to home, how would we even begin to think about creating rituals for ourselves?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Well, I would say first start, we all have rituals that we do every day, personal, professional rituals, even things like birthdays, let's say. My daughter just had a birthday. You take a candle, put it on a cake. There's no meaning behind a candle or the cake. It's just what we as a society have said, like, this is what you do. This is the ritual. We all, like, think about any families, family rituals that you might have. So Friday pizza night, Saturday movie night, what do you do on holidays?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  How do you mark the beginnings or the ends of things? Like, we have so many rituals, or we used to have. I think we're in a ritual deficit right now, our society. But rituals are so important in just regulating all of us, our society. And because they connect us to other people, they remind us, they embody all of our insights, our values, our beliefs. So they're really useful for our society and just kind of grounding us in our home, of who we know ourselves to be. So if you want to include more rituals in your personal life, I think, think about, where are the transitions in your life? Either the daily transitions or over time? And what do you want to do for those?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  So I work with college kids. When school is out, the last day of school, do you want to have a ritual that kind of marks the end of a good academic year and going into the summer?

• 49:50Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I had one. It was called a keg party.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Right. Right. And even the keg party, that's binding you with other people. Like, you're bringing them together to all say, we're going to celebrate this together. So back to this sense of belonging and community and being in relation with others. That's the beauty of rituals.

• 50:13Dan Harris?

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• 51:30Dan Harris?

  Okay, so that actually leads to the third friend of winter, which is purpose. So just to reset, we're talking about these three ways to deal with the non-negotiable uncertainty and instability of life. The first was working with, telling a different story, flipping the script. The second was creating rituals for emotion regulation in the face of life's ups and downs. And then the third is creating a sense of purpose. So what do you mean by purpose? And why is that so important?

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so purpose gives us direction. It's something that's larger than ourselves of meaning. And I think it's often misunderstood. So many people think that purpose is a goal habit or it's achievement or it's passion. But purpose is a thing that guides our actions. It tells us why we're doing something, what it's all for. It doesn't have to be something large, like saving the world. Or it can be something like helping your parent if they have dementia, or raising children, fixing up the neighborhood. It's around being needed. And oftentimes, I see people, when they're at their peak of their career, they've already accomplished all the things. And then they come to me and they say, you know, I just feel really dissatisfied.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  I'm not sure why. I mean, I've accomplished all these things. And they can still accomplish more goals. All they do is set a goal, they'll reach it. But they'll say, like, I don't feel fulfilled. And that's because they've lost their purpose. It's not that they've defined it. Most people are already living out your purpose. So if you think in your life, like, where am I feeling resonant in the world? Where are I the coherence? Where am I just vibing with the world? Where are my thoughts, my actions, my values? They're all in alignment with what I'm doing. Maybe it's like you're in the flow of something. That's going to give you some signal to where your purpose is. So maybe it's someone at work who's working on a meaningful project.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Or it's when you're volunteering at your kid's school and you're just like, you know, this feels really right. That's a signal to your purpose. And then we can ask ourselves, sometimes our purpose is through a corrective experience. It's needing to repair something of the past. Also, not uncommon to have someone who grew up in relative poverty and their life's work is working for a very mission-driven organization. It's like, we're trying to repair something we didn't get in our childhood. You know, the person who grew up with very critical or emotionally unavailable parents, their purpose in life is to make sure that their child feels listened to, that they're attuned to their kids.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  That's their life purpose. It's this corrective experience. And then we can ask ourselves, well, gosh, who do we matter to right now? And if we answer that, that's probably telling us something about our purpose. And if that's not who we want it to be, we can say, well, who do we want to matter to? It doesn't have to be one person. It could be a community or a culture.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Where do we want to make a difference? Where am I needed in the world? And I tell you, that, especially for older adults who are dealing with the loss of the structure of being needed, like in a job, let's say, or the grandchildren have grown up now and they don't need them as much.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  It can be very, very hard to lose that structure of meaning and of being needed. And so when we can insert that and say, okay, where are you needed? I have seen that save a life. That really can be so powerful, just to say, like, you are needed, you belong here.

• 55:16Dan Harris?

  I'm sure everybody watching or listening is doing what I was doing

• 55:21Dan Harris?

  while listening to you speak, like, trying to figure out,

• 55:27Dan Harris?

  based on my childhood wounds and where I feel most aligned and in flow and where I matter the most now, like, what does that say about my purpose? I was just thinking, like, for me, my childhood wounds are probably, I had very loving parents, but like, my most searing memories are like my mom's first day back at work when I was two, which is too young to have memories, but I have a very clear memory of that day. So I don't know how to explain that. And then also, tons of trauma around

• 55:59Dan Harris?

  being at summer camp and feeling trapped and abandoned. I needed my parents and they weren't there and I couldn't get out.

• 56:07Dan Harris?

  And so where do I feel like I matter the most now? Where do I feel the most energy? Parenting and being kind of like a connector socially in my world. I have six, seven, eight recurring lunches and dinners with different groups of friends that I'm central to organizing, some of them around the Dharma and Buddhism and some just a bunch of people I like getting together. And so that, you can pretty much draw a straight line from feeling abandoned, unmoored,

• 56:44Dan Harris?

  disconnected, anxious, to engineering, community, belonging, and mattering now as a grown-up when I have control.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  And that's beautiful, that you, I mean, it takes a lot of intentional effort. I would assume for you, it takes a lot of effort and energy to say, I'm going to create something. Like, I need this. It probably didn't just happen that you create all these communities. And what you've done, it's this ripple effect. So now other people feel a sense of belonging and a sense of inspiration. Like, oh, he's done it. Well, now maybe I can do that, too. I mean, that's what I'm hearing, listening to you. I'm like, oh, my gosh, that's brilliant. I want to do that, too. I want to have, and so it spreads. So it becomes contagious.

• 57:34Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I'm laughing a little bit because like I, people often, people who participate in these events will often say, thank you so much for doing it. And I often think, well, I'm not doing it for you.

• 57:48Dan Harris?

  Myself. I mean, I love that you're at the, it's not, I'm not actually being an asshole, but I don't think I am in my head. But I do feel a little bit of sheepishness because I think my initial impulse is a kind of a healthy version of selfishness.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's, that's fine because you're not hurting anybody, right? And you are inspiring and supporting other people's lives.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  It spreads this, like, when you can feel a sense of belonging and

• 58:21Speaker 01

  it's almost this like collective agency that grows and develops and that spreads across. And that collective agency helps people find their personal agency. So it's a win-win for everybody.

• 58:34Dan Harris?

  Let's see if we can put some fine points on all of this. Or it could be just one fine point, but we've walked through some strategies for dealing with life's uncertainties. I believe in your book, you kind of wrap up by with a chapter that's called rethinking resilience and you kind of lay out your definition of resilience. Maybe that would be a good place for us to close.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so resilience, I think, is often misunderstood. I think we define it normally as like bouncing back. But in the people that I work with that have experienced adversity, I always wonder like bouncing back to what. So I would define resilience as more engaging with instability, recognizing stability is an illusion, engaging with instability and finding a way to engage in the world, even when the world isn't as we want it to be. And I think my problem with the term resilience really came from, I used to be medical director of this foster care clinic.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  And it was a clinic for people, children with very, very high needs. So they're in and out of foster homes, sometimes like five or seven placements in one year. And so it's very emotionally demanding work. There was a lot of staff turnover and new staff would come in and inevitably somebody would say like, oh my gosh, these kids are so resilient. And I could not stand that term because it makes me question, well, who is defining that? Who gets to call someone resilient? And who is benefiting from that? Because these children are just enduring. They're just enduring a system and a structure that is not working for them. And when we call someone resilient, it's almost like

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  we're absolving the system of having to deal with it and having to manage it. I mean, there was another time, early, early in my life, when I first started working with Survivors of Torture. There was one guy and I, I just said something about like, oh, you're so resilient. He became very quiet and he looked down and he said, I'm not resilient. I just didn't die. I thought like, yeah, that's actually true. Like, a lot of times we're just enduring and we're just one foot in front of the other enduring a system that might not be the best system for us. So I think true resilience is when we can actually engage with what's really going on at hand and not lose ourselves within it.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  We stay grounded, we find a sense of mastery and we engage in the world in a meaningful way through the instability.

• 1:01:12Dan Harris?

  Before I let you go, we are experimenting here with a new closing segment. And it's called what's good? What is something, could be a book, could be a play you saw, it could be a movie that is good. You down with this?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Great, yeah. So what's good? So this is actually easy for me because I guess I should define good. I feel good when I feel loved, when I smile and when I'm inspired. And so every night, I call this emotional GPS. I hate journaling. I know journaling is good. There are lots of studies on the benefits. I cannot do it. So instead, every night I just have these three columns. And I put a little heart for feeling loved, a smiley face for something that made me smile that day. And then a light bulb for what inspired me. What made me feel loved is actually, you know, I have a friend who sent me a song when they were thinking about me.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  I think that definitely made me very, it was a beautiful song and that made me feel loved. What made me smile, my son, he's nine years old. He, I got him a hoverboard. I also make him do chores. So he hoverboards around the kitchen with a mop so he can mop around. And it's so cute when he does it, so that makes me smile. And then what inspires me? I have a couple of friends who are very active and they kind of organize protests. And I love seeing people live out a moral compass. They live out their values. That, to me, is very inspiring. So those are mine from last night.

• 1:02:51Dan Harris?

  All right. I like that a lot. I do this thing where, I don't like journaling either. I'm a big believer in it, like you. I even made a journal with my wife that we sold for a little while. We might put them back on the market at some point. But I just, since I write memoirs, I don't feel like actually journaling also. But I do do this thing right before I go to bed. I take a warm shower, which helps me fall asleep. And there's some data to show it can help you fall asleep more quickly. And I just eat while I'm in the shower. I just list all the things that I was grateful for that day. And I find it very helpful. But that's not my what's good. So my what's good is much less grand and profound than yours. It's just a record that came out recently that I love.

• 1:03:34Dan Harris?

  And just to say, you know, we're talking about emotion regulation. There's some data to show that one way to regulate emotions, and Ethan Cross is the scientist from University of Michigan, has talked about this on the show. One great way to regulate your emotions is through music. I, my primary use case for music is when I'm working out. I like to lift weights or run or whatever. And, and so I tend to pick high-octane music. And there's this young woman, I think she might be British. Stage name is Frances of Delirium. And I think her, her actual name is Jenna Barich. Anyway, she's got a new record.

• 1:04:17Dan Harris?

  It's called Run, Run, Pure Beauty. And it's got, it actually has just a ton of pure beauty in it. It is a beautiful, she has a beautiful voice. She's a really talented songwriter and it's got enough of the sort of propulsion and

• 1:04:34Dan Harris?

  aggression that I like for workout music. And I highly recommend this record. So not quite as profound as Dr. Song's little nighttime ritual, but I like it nonetheless.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we have to listen to it now. I hope there's a segment, like you have to have a little snippet of the song.

• 1:04:51Dan Harris?

  Dr. Song, you've done a great job of this. It's really nice to meet you. I want to remind everybody of the name of your book, which is Why We Suffer and How We Heal. Do you have like a website or anything else like that that people should know about?

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yes, my website is SuzanneSong.com. It's spelled S-U-Z-A-N, song.com. And everything's on there.

• 1:05:11Dan Harris?

  Awesome. Such a pleasure to meet you. Thanks again for doing this.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 1:05:17Dan Harris?

  Also, a quick ask before I let you go. If you've got a minute, head on over to DanHarris.com and sign up for my newsletter. It drops in your inbox on Monday mornings, often a busy and stressful time for us. I try to write a short essay that has a little bit of wisdom, actionable, practical wisdom that you can immediately weave into your life on Monday mornings. A lot of people find them helpful and I hope you will too. You can sign up at DanHarris.com. It's totally free. Now to the credits. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Barissa Schneiderman, DJ Cashmere, David Hart and Hayden Broome. Post-production is handled by the great folks over at Greenhorn Creative.

• 1:06:02Dan Harris?

  And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you for listening. Deuces.

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