Stay ConnectedWriter Elise Loehnen explores life’s big questions with today’s leading thinkers, experts, and luminaries: Why do we do what we do? How can we understand and love ourselves better? What would it look like to come together and build a more meaningful world?
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"How do we center the voices that traditionally and historically we know existed, but were only marginalized in the tradition? And that does feel like holy work. And for me, in part, when I encountered a tradition that was so driven by male stories and male voices, I felt so alienated by it when I first began to encounter it. And I had this moment, which I think lots of women faith leaders have, which is maybe this just isn't for me. I mean, I'm not intended to ever even read these texts, let alone teach these texts. And then I had an awakening where I realized, not only is it meant for me, but I have an obligation. It was waiting for me. It's waiting for me and for so many more people because there's a void until our voices enter this space."
So says Rabbi Sharon Brous, a wise and wonderful friend, and the founder and senior rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish community founded to attend to critical questions. As Rabbi Brous writes in her beautiful new book The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World, “How can our Jewish tradition help us live lives of meaning and purpose? And: Given our faith and history, who are we called to be in this time of moral crisis? We launched IKAR—our best attempt to address those questions—on a hope and a prayer, with no funding, no space, and no business plan. What we had was a shared conviction that faith communities needed to be spiritually alive and morally courageous at the same time.”
I read Sharon’s beautiful booklast summer, and could not wait to talk to her about it. So we recorded our conversation early, before the Jewish High Holidays, at the beginning of August, months before October 7th. Rabbi Brous’s work in general is highly prophetic and brave—she has been a fierce and vocal critic of the increasingly right wing Israeli government, even as many Rabbis try to steer clear of politics. This conversation, which is not about Israel, is also highly prophetic and brave: It’s about the dire need for interfaith conversation, for chipping away at the calcified belief structures of religions that don’t fully serve our broken world, and for being with each other, particularly on our most painful days. This, in fact, is the theme of The Amen Effect, which is about an ancient mishnah, or overlooked piece of Jewish law that instructs us on the sacred act of circling—and tending, face-to-face, to each other’s agony and grief. In today’s conversation Sharon and I also talk about social justice and responsibility, a conversation that I’m hoping to pick back up with her in the new year, as so many of us feel a little lost and confused. While Rabbi Brous and I thought about doing a second episode as a fast follow, we decided to wait a beat—if you want to hear her talk about Israel and Gaza, I highly recommend you listen to her conversation with Ezra Klein, where the two talk about how some of Israel’s actions are indefensible even as Israel itself must be defended. Her sermons are also stunning, and available on the IKAR website.
I think Rabbi Brous is incredible, and I’m not alone. She offered the blessing at both Biden and Obama’s inaugurations, and led Hannukah at the White House this year. She manages to teach and model what so many of us need to learn how to do: We must learn how to hold each other close even through disagreement, disappointment, and despair. The Amen Effect offers some ideas for how this work might begin.
MORE FROM RABBI SHARON BROUS:
The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World
IKAR’s Website
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“If you have a reaction to a stranger or someone in the media or someone in politics or someone who's just providing this kind of blank slate because you don't really know him or her, then it's a projection. And yes, there's often a sensation in the body that's negative. It could be fear, it could be distrust, it could be disgust, right? And then there's the flip side. There's positive projection, which happens in the spiritual universe a lot. When someone is looking for a charismatic leader, then they're going to project their own awakening, their own compassion, their own wisdom onto the leader, the clergy person. So the content of the projection can be anything, what we view as negative, what we view as positive.”
So says Connie Zweig, a Jungian therapist and author who has focused much of her career exploring and teasing out the implications of the shadow, which is how Carl Jung referred to the unconscious. Chances are that you’ve been hearing more and more about shadow work—it’s having a moment—in part, I’m convinced, because it’s a concept whose time has come. As I’ve written about a lot in my Substack newsletter, we are swimming in collective shadow, unable and unwilling to process our share of it. When we don’t take on this unconscious material, or darkness, our tendency is to project it onto other people and groups, to get away from it as quickly as possible. But, of course, it doesn’t work like that—our shadow is ours. It’s our blind spot. When we’re willing to face our shadow, to access it, to allow it to emerge, we often find that it’s full of gold. In fact, Jung believed that the shadow is the source of all of our energy, the main mechanism for growth—ask anyone who has gone through hard or dark times and they will likely tell you that the experience propelled them forward in unexpected ways, often for the better.
Connie and I explore all of these concepts and then some, as she’s one of the most prodigious writers in the space. She co-authored Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow, which are essential anthologies and texts, and then more recently wrote Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, which explores what happens when the shadow, or darkness, is unresolved in spiritual and religious communities. She’s also the author of The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, which is an exploration of the shadow of aging in our ageist culture. I’m hoping she comes back to the podcast soon so we can discuss that book at length.
MORE FROM CONNIE ZWEIG, PHD:
The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul
Romancing the Shadow: A Guide to Soul Work for a Vital, Authentic Life
Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature
A Moth to the Flame: The Life of the Sufi Poet Rumi
Connie Zweig’s Website
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Today, it’s just me. I thought I’d round out the year by trying something different, and offering five big things I’ve learned this year.
THINGS I REFERENCE:
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“Nobody wants to be somebody with a serious substance use problem. Nobody wants to be addicted to a substance. I mean, it doesn't feel good. Dependency doesn't feel good. And we end up in there anyway, right? So I think if we can bring compassion and understanding to, wow, it must really be working in a way that's really powerful for them to keep pursuing it. And then you've got the physical effects of substances, right? So then our bodies physically get dependent, you know, so it starts out as like, it's probably working for an emotional or something in our life and then we become physically dependent on it. And then it's a whole nother host of things in terms of how do you stop it? And people don't fully understand treatment in terms of there's medications available.”
So says Carrie Wilkens, PhD, a psychologist who is attempting to change the way we think about and address recovery and treatment—specifically by simply presenting evidence for what motivates change. AFter all, she is the co-president and CEO of CMC: Foundation for Change, a not-for-profit with the mission of improving the dissemination of evidence-based ideas and strategies to professionals and loved ones of persons struggling with substance use.
As you’ll hear in this conversation—and throughout the entire series—we have not collectively been served by the mono-myth of addiction, that it’s only solved through harsh intervention and confrontation, that addicted people must hit rock-bottom, and that any involvement from concerned family and friends is inherently co-dependent or enabling.
As Dr. Wilkins explains, this simply isn’t true: In fact, evidence overwhelmingly suggests that harsh confrontation and intervention works AGAINST recovery, and that there is a very specific and meaningful role for family to play in what can often feel like a family illness.
The CMC:FFC team’s Invitation to Change approach is an accessible set of understandings and practices that empower families to remain engaged and be effective in helping their struggling loved one make positive changes. The approach has been widely used across the country and is utilized in trainings with laypeople and professionals.
She is co-author of the award-winning book Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change, a practical guide for families dealing with addiction and substance problems in a loved one based on principles of Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT), and co-author of The Beyond Addiction Workbook for Family and Friends: Evidence-Based Skills to Help a Loved-One Make Positive Change.
Dr. Wilkens is also the Co-Founder and Clinical Director of the Center for Motivation and Change, a group of clinicians serving all ages in NYC, Long Island, Washington, DC, San Diego, CA, and CMC:Berkshires, a private, inpatient/residential program for adults.
Dr. Wilkens has been a Project Director on a large federally-funded Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) grant addressing the problems associated with binge drinking among college students. And she is a member of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies and the American Association of Addiction Psychiatrists.
MORE FROM CARRIE WILKINS:
Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change
The Beyond Addiction Workbook for Family & Friends
Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:
PART 1: Holly Whitaker, “Reimagining Recovery”
PART 2: Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., “Breaking the Addiction Binary”
PART 3: Maia Szalavitz, “When Abstinence-Only Approaches Fail”
ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”
TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”
BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?”
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“I think what's interesting about healing, psychological healing, is there's always a narrative that helps. So sometimes when you go to therapy, and you tell a story, and in the story, you locate your despair, and it's a knot, and then with the therapist, you work through the knot, you feel better. And was all the pain really attendant to that knot? Or did you just kind of load up that knot with some of the despair that comes from being alive and then you kind of work through it and that story helps you live life better. And I think that's true also this idea of how we look at the different personality states and we can name them and we can give them ages and it's a story that helps us understand ourselves.”
So says Akiva Goldsman, an Oscar, Golden Globe, and WGA-Award winning screenwriter whose credits include A Beautiful Mind, The Client, Batman Forever, A Time to Kill, Practical Magic, Cinderella Man, I Am Legend, The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, Insurgent, and I, Robot. He’s on Pulling the Thread today, though, to talk about Apple TV+’s The Crowded Room, a psychological thriller starring Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried on which he was both the writer and the showrunner.
So first, some warnings: Yes, there are spoilers, though in my opinion, nothing that will markedly change your experience of watching the show. In fact, knowing the back story made it easier for me to get through the first, very stressful episode. (It gets easier, and by episode three, I was riveted.) And also, a trigger warning: The Crowded Room and our conversation today explore childhood sexual abuse, which is also part of Akiva’s personal history.
MORE FROM AKIVA GOLDSMAN:
“The Crowded Room” on Apple TV+
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“I think it's really important for, you know, people to realize that you can totally be an absolutely excellent parent of a traumatized child and the trauma had nothing to do with you and you couldn't possibly have prevented it. So I think, you know, assuming that there is trauma in somebody's addiction history, which is not always the case, but if there is, you should not immediately assume that it was bad parenting because sure, that could be the case sometimes, but again, there's so many different ways that people can be traumatized by so many different people. And it's also the case that so much of addiction has to do with people's temperament that will set them up for things. So, if you are incredibly sensitive to stimuli, something that wouldn't traumatize someone else might traumatize you. And again, that's not your parents fault. That's just how you were born.”
So says Maia Szalavitz, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and author of two fantastic books about addiction. Her New York Times bestseller, Unbroken Brain, tells the story of her own heroin and cocaine addiction as a student at Columbia University in the ‘80s—she was expelled for dealing and barely escaped prison time—woven together with the decades of work she’s done as a journalist in the addiction space after entering recovery in her early ‘20s. In it, Maia offers a compelling case for why addiction should be thought of as a learning disability, in part because so many people “grow out of it.”
Maia’s latest book—Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction—taught me so much and challenged so many of the stories about addiction I was holding onto. Ultimately, it’s an optimistic book in the face of what feels like an overwhelming cultural challenge, a challenge that only seems to get worse every month—Maia explains why we’re trending in this direction, and more importantly, what we can do to shift our collective fate toward recovery. And what an expanded idea of recovery might mean.
MORE FROM MAIA SZALAVITZ:
Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction
Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary Way of Understanding Addiction
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog
Read Maia on The New York Times
Maia’s Website
Follow Maia on X
Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:
PART 1: Holly Whitaker, “Reimagining Recovery”
PART 2: Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., “Breaking the Addiction Binary”
ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”
TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”
BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?”
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“As you grow older, your brain is able to keep rewiring all the time. And so we have this impression that the flexibility of the brain decreases as you get older. But in fact, it's just because your brain's job is just to figure out how to get by in the world and do a good job in the world. And once you've figured most things out, like, oh, these are different kinds of personalities, and this is how I need to do something at work, and this is how I use email and phone and whatever, then your brain does less changing only because it has successfully done its job, and it doesn't need to keep changing. The brain changes when there's surprise, when there's something that happened that it wasn't expecting, then it changes up. So, you still have plenty of plasticity even when you're 90 years old. It's just that most people aren't using it at that point because they say, Oh, I got it. I know how things work.”
So says David Eagleman, renowned neuroscientist, podcast host, and the author of many bestselling books about consciousness and the brain—along with more than 120 academic publications. Besides his perch as a neuroscientist at Stanford University, David is the co-founder of two venture-backed companies, including Neosensory, which is a pioneering wrist device that enables the deaf to hear. Yep, that’s right.
David is fascinating, and hopefully this conversation lives up to his capacity: We discuss the malleability of the brain to adjust to its inputs, the roots of synesthesia, how those who are born blind and deaf can now use touch to see and hear, and why we dream. Ultimately, we explore just how it happens that a brain trapped in a dark vault can create the vibrancy of our existence.
David is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow, and serves on several boards, including the American Brain Foundation and the The Long Now Foundation. He is the Chief Scientific Advisor for the Mind Science Foundation, and the winner of Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication.
What’s cooler? He has served as the scientific advisor to several television shows (including Westworld and Perception).
Ironically—considering we both host podcasts and David is a neuroscientist—we had some technical difficulties during our conversation, but the hope is that this is not perceptible to you!
MORE FROM DAVID EAGLEMAN:
Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
David’s Podcast: “Inner Cosmos”
David’s Website
Follow David on Instagram
David’s Company: Neosensory
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“I want to say that it's not just some idea about suffering, it's also a function of social and economic systems that are deliberately weaponizing an individualized view of suffering as a technique, as a strategy. I found across eras and eras and eras in the book is that addiction supply industries, which is what one scholar calls them, like the alcohol industry, the tobacco industry, they constantly come back to this hyper individualization in saying, you know, like, the problem is not in the bottle, the problems in the person. If so many people can drink, quote unquote normally, that means the problem is really with these sick people over here. And that happened with tobacco. And then very directly and deliberately, things like the processed food industry and other modern addiction supply industries have used the same language.”
So says Carl Erik Fisher, an addiction psychiatrist, bioethics scholar, author, and person in recovery. Carl is also an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he teaches law, ethics, and policy relating to psychiatry and neuroscience, particularly where they converge with substance use disorders and other addictive behaviors. He hosts a podcast called Flourishing After Addictionand is launching a Substack, where he’ll organize his thinking around treatment paths and modalities. Most pertinent to our conversation today, he’s the author of The Urge: Our History of Addiction, which is a fascinating deep dive into our long cultural fascination with addictive substances, interlaced with his own story, and stories from his practice: In fact, the book opens in Bellevue where Carl is not functioning as a doctor—in this case, he’s the patient, after suffering an addiction-induced manic episode that put him into recovery. Carl is brilliant and kind, and also fluent in all the prevailing science about addictive behavior…science that hasn’t really ruled the day until recent years. Instead, the addiction space has been one of binaries—you’re compulsive, or you exercise choice; you’re normal, or an addict; you have no control to stop, or you have all the control and refuse to use it; and on and on and on.
MORE FROM CARL ERIK FISHER:
The Urge: Our History of Addiction
Carl’s Podcast: Flourishing After Addiction
Carl’s Website
Follow Carl on Instagram
Carl’s Newsletter
Carl’s Substack
Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:
PART 1: Holly Whitaker, “Reimagining Recovery”
ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”
TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”
BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?”
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“I think what one of the things that's interesting to me is like when we think about what causes distress and a life that goes awry, there's so much attention to different causes, but the way that the story, or the diagnosis, or the treatment interacts with our identity, I think, is not thought about as much. Like, the way that the very intervention itself changes our sense of who we are feels like it gets neglected. There's this sense that, you know, the diagnosis is describing something that is always solid and real and less thought given to like, well, how does that diagnosis interact with a mind? And how does the mind change knowing that the mind has been characterized this way?”
You might recognize Rachel Aviv’s name from The New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer for a decade, covering subjects like medical ethics, psychiatry, criminal justice, and education. She’s been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards twice, and in 2022 she won one for profile writing. In 2022, she also published Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, a recipient of the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. In It, Aviv tells the story of four people and the treatment they underwent—or not—for their mental illness. It’s a gorgeously told, layered exploration of all that we don’t know about the brain and the mind, and how various treatment modalities restructure our lives—including the stories we tell about who we are. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM RACHEL AVIV:
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Read Rachel in The New Yorker
Follow Rachel on X
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“For years, I was asking myself whether or not I was an alcoholic versus really asking myself whether or not alcohol was actually providing any benefit to me. And for me, it was just like, This realization when I stopped drinking that I had been asking the wrong question for my whole drinking career and like, why are we not asking the question? We're just like, we're drinking, it's compulsory in our society. It's exceptional if you don't drink. And then it's also this very addictive drug that's marketed to us in a way that totally overrides our ability to like make rational choices around it. It's like the most socially accepted drug that you can use and like, we just don't have meaningful conversations or informed consent or any, you know, so for me, a huge part of me quitting drinking, which I did in 2013, it was this realization of Intellectually understanding I had been asking the wrong question which for me was a huge empowerment and part of the reason I was able to quit.”
So says Holly Whitaker, author of the New York Times bestselling Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol. I had heard about Holly long before I met her, primarily because she was disrupting recovery culture and many people did not like this. But the more I learned about her, the more I spoke to her, the more I witnessed her impact on culture, the more I was completely taken by both her brilliance and her willingness to say the things. Be warned: If you read her book, you’ll never think about alcohol again. In its pages, she recontextualizes the way we’ve been trained to normalize booze—and also the way the current recovery scene is shaped for the consciousness, and egos, of men. She’s created companies in the vein of a feminine-centered recovery, and it feels like she’s just getting started in the way we talk about addictive substances—and addiction. Those who struggle will find a lot of relief in her words, and I understand why.
MORE FROM HOLLY WHITAKER:
Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol
Holly’s Newsletter
Holly’s Website
Holly’s Podcast
Follow Holly on Instagram
Further Listening on Pulling the Thread:
ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture”
TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness”
BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?”
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