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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“Like family relationship has obligations that go both ways. Hopefully there's unconditional love there, but it's also the, like your re your family and, and, and the other people in your family see you as family too. But in a job, if you, the, the whole family thing goes one way, you're supposed to give and give and give and give and, and, and, and feel this like guilt and obligation to your company and your coworkers, your company at any moment can sever those ties, you know, your is at will employment in, in this country. And, and, and so, like, that's not part of a, a family thing. That's not unconditional. Your job is totally conditional.”
So says Charlie Warzel, who together with Anne Helen Petersen, wrote OUT OF OFFICE: THE BIG PROBLEM AND BIGGER PROMISE OF WORKING FROM HOME. Petersen and Warzel, ditched New York City for the promise of a better life/work balance out west a few years ago, which gave them a headstart on understanding the reality of working from home—before it became a reality for the rest of the world through the pandemic. Both culture, media, and technology journalists for Buzzfeed at the time, they found that the promise of work from home was not a panacea for more time to spend in nature: Like the rest of us—just earlier—they discovered that they were spending even more time PERFORMING their work, showing their managers back in New York City that they deserved the privilege of being untethered from a traditional office. Being out of the office only added to their anxiety and overwhelm.
So when COVID hit, they were already aware of both the the pitfalls and potential of work from home—their fantastic book, which just came out, offers a survey of how we find ourselves in this intractable bind today, where for too many of us, our jobs have taken over the center of our lives, and how we can use this opportunity to reshape workplaces for a more sustainable future. In our conversation we talk about how we don’t prioritize the art of managers, how the idea of time and output is problematic for so many people who are not, actually machines, and what a more inclusive and human HR structure might look like, if it weren’t engineered to avoid abuse and instead could focus solely on providing support. Let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM ANNE HELEN PETERSEN & CHARLIE WARZEL
OUT OF OFFICE by Anne Helen Petersen & Charlie Warzel
CAN’T EVEN by Anne Helen Petersen
THE BURNOUT GENERATION by Anne Helen Petersen
“Galaxy Brain” newsletter from Charlie Warzel
“Culture Study” newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen
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“Outside the legal context, I'm urging readers and listeners in this case to think very deliberately about whether that high standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is really necessary before a person will believe so to speak, will feel confident enough to offer, let's say, support to a roommate or to a coworker. And I want to suggest that we should actually require much less by way of certainty and confidence in order to offer that kind of support to someone who is in an informal setting coming to us as a kind of first responder, because this is how most allegations surface. People rarely go to the police. First more often, they turn to a trusted confidant, someone within their inner circle. And it's the response of that individual that's likely to affect the trajectory to come” so says Deborah Tuerkheimer, a Harvard and Yale-educated lawyer, former New York District Attorney specializng in domestic violence and child abuse protection and current professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law where she teaches and writes about criminal law, evidence, and feminist legal theory. To say she is impressive is a massive understatement.
Today she joins me to discuss her book, CREDIBLE: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers. We dive into a conversation about credibility and sexual assault: What makes a credible victim? How do culture, law, and psychology shape our judgement? And how can our systems be more responsive to the needs of survivors? In the court of cultural opinion, Deb says, we disservice so many victims by dismissing and discounting their pain that sometimes, the aftermath is almost worse than the event itself. We talk about the myth of the false accuser, underreporting as a reflection of our cultural credibility context, and the dangerous archetypes of the perfect victim and the monster abuser.
Finally, we discuss the push for restorative justice processes, which must begin with an acknowledgement of responsibility from the offender, and then go on to ask: “What will it take to repair the harm?”, ultimately turning to the victim and their community to answer that question.
Please note that today’s episode contains information about sexual assault and/or violence which may be triggering to survivors - I encourage you to care for your safety and well-being.
MORE FROM DEB TUERKHEIMER
CREDIBLE: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers
More Books, Articles and Op-Eds by Deb Tuerkheimer
DIG DEEPER:
RAINN: the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization
National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800.656.HOPE
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“I think what COVID did was it really made people realize that the state of their emotions, the state of their relationships, all of those things that felt very optional, meaning they were important to people, but in the rushing around of daily life, you, you could kind of ignore them a little bit. Um, you know, you didn't have to really think about them or face them. They weren't, a mirror was not being held up to you in the way that it was during COVID. And so I think that the, the good thing that came out of all of this is that people really said, oh, I want to understand this better.”
So says Lori Gottlieb, one of my favorite conversation partners. Lori is a psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE, which is a brilliant exploration of what it means to be in therapy and be a therapist—in her storytelling, she manages to touch on everything from existential anxiety to inconceivable loss. She’s also the co-host of the DEAR THERAPIST podcast, a brilliant show that tackles peoples’ real problems, like narcissistic partners and parental alienation. In today’s episode of this podcast, Lori and I get into the impact of COVID on our partnerships, the often uncredited grief of single people, and how we can come to deepen the intimacy of our most important relationships, whether they’re with lovers, friends, family, or even co-workers.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
MORE FROM LORI:
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: The Workbook
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“The NRA and gun owners then signified, you know, the sort of comradery, responsibility, safety, sort of a bygone, I don't know, sort of an Americana, right? The Campbell soup can sort of Americana. I don't remember ever seeing or hearing about the impending demise of the Republic, or how evil every Democrat was, or how we should hate our neighbors, or how we should arm ourselves for an eventual civil war or an insurrection. That was never, that was never a part of my upbringing.”
So says Ryan Busse, author of GUNFIGHT: MY BATTLE AGAINST THE INDUSTRY THAT RADICALIZED AMERICA. Busse, who spent decades running gun sales for Kimber in Whitefish, Montana, which focused, until recently, on crafting hunting rifles and other firearms for sportsmen, quit his job last year after he realized that his dreams of transforming the gun industry from inside—or at least being a consistent voice of reason and morality—were fantasy. He watched as the industry he used to love became increasingly toxic, distorted, and militant.
In his book, which is a fascinating look at the forces within the NRA and the way they’ve radicalized America, he deftly explains all the reasons we are where we are today: Where our children are forced to practice active shooter drills at school, and where other kids—like 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse—can buy a semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle and kill two people while wounding another. And then be acquitted for self-defense. As he argues, we are on the brink of a Civil War with gun-owning, far Right militants. I know we’re scared, and he believes we have every reason to be.
Like Busse, I’m also from Montana, and know many people who hunt—growing up, guns were present but never abundant. Now, responsible gun owners are being pushed aside by militant couch commandos, who are desperate, to quote Busse, “to shoot a democrat.”
While Busse is no longer in the industry, he is firmly in the movement for common sense gun laws, arguing that our best chance for reform is to bring hunters and sportsmen on-side. As he explains, it can be done—and we can bring the NRA to its knees.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
MORE FROM RYAN BUSSE
Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America
Follow Ryan on Twitter and on Instagram
DIG DEEPER:
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - Michael Pollan
FBI background checks, a proxy for gun sales, surged in 2020 - The Economist, January 2021
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Since she was a little girl, Carissa Schumacher has always seen and spoken to dead people. She pushed all of that aside, went to Brown and got her Neuroscience Degree, tried to have a normal life and career, and then Spirit made the call and she put that down and started working as an empathic intuitive and forensic psychic medium. She led retreats in Sedona, and worked with clients around the world, including doing a lot of pro bono work on crimes. This was all well and good until October 2019, around the time when I first met her. When Carissa was little an angelic presence told her she would be a channel for Yeshua of Nazareth, which she didn't think about much at the time. She wasn't raised in a religious household, she didn't even know what it meant. But then Yeshau “birthed” in her channel.
This means that while she was leading a retreat in Sedona, Yeshua took over her body, and voice, and gave a transmission, or a teaching. Yeshua, as you might've guessed, is Jesus. If it sounds wild, it is. I have been in the presence of Carissa while she's channeling Yeshua many times now. And it is unlike anything I've ever experienced before. I would say that it's incredible, but they've also been some of the most grounded moments of my life. Yeshua is funny, brilliant, kind—an ascended master like Buddha or Lao Tzu. And as he talks, you can feel the codex is of energy behind his words. The transmissions also are not particularly religious. If that makes sense, as he has remarked, he never wanted a church in his name. And the Bible is a series of stories. Some that are instructive, some that are parables, many told by people who never knew him.
Last year. He asked Carissa to turn on her recorder for several days and he brought forth The Freedom Transmissions, a series of teachings about the year that we just experienced, plus how to move forward. It is a beautiful book you can open and flip to almost any page and find something of resonance and need. In today's conversation, we talk about The Freedom Transmissions, as well as other moments from Yeshua transmissions I've heard over the years, including about the one thing that humans actually own, which is time. We talk about co-creation. We talk about the true definition of atonement, and we talk about the idea of freedom and how hard it is to make the leap from the cage. As she says, she is not Yeshua, just one of his channels and a student alongside the rest of us, but she still has a brilliant mind.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
MORE FROM CARISSA:
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Heather McGhee is a designer of, and advocate for, solutions to inequality in America. We discuss her New York Times bestselling book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, in which she seeks to push us all past zero-sum thinking, or the idea that if you get something you want or need, it must mean that I get less. In fact, she points to numerous examples throughout history that show how this framework has made our society more cruel and poorer than it otherwise might be. Heather pushes us to recognize the fingerprints of racism in all of our core dysfunctions, from climate change, to the roots of the financial crisis, to the ongoing fight for universal healthcare.
“We must stop the siloed thinking that racism is great for white people and bad for people of color,” Heather says, “if you pull that thread, that’s exactly the same zero sum logic racists hold, that progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people, that we are at odds, fighting over crumbs…there has to be a better paradigm of mutual benefit.” The Sum of Us is a story of why “drained pool politics”—an idea named after the fact that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, many towns chose to fill in their public pools and lose access to this social good rather than integrate them and share them with Black people—is costing everyone, in ongoing ways. She offers that with multiracial coalitions we can subvert fear mongering about an equitable society and fight for a more prosperous nation for all.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
MORE FROM HEATHER MCGHEE
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
Follow Heather on Twitter and on Instagram
HEATHER’S PICKS:
Floodlines - The Story of an Unnatural Disaster Hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II
Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
The City We Became - N. K. Jemisin
DIG DEEPER:
2021 Voting Laws Round Up - the Brennan Center for Justice
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Check Your Voter Registration Status, Register to Vote, Find Your Polling Place, and more
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“We are living in a world that primes us all for the problem of addiction. So even though some people come into this world more vulnerable than others, simply being alive in the world today has made us all vulnerable to the problem of addiction,” so says our guest today, Dr. Anna Lembke. Dr. Lembke is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. An expert in all things addiction, Dr. Lembke has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries; she sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations, has testified before various Congressional Committees, and does so all while maintaining a thriving clinical practice.
On today’s episode, we discuss her instant New York Times Bestseller, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, which explores the many faces of addiction. Dr. Lembke notes that addiction is a spectrum disorder, and though we often attempt to otherize “addicts”, the exact same mental machinery engaged in so-called severe addiction is engaged in the compulsive over-consumption that afflicts many of us. We discuss the way in which our brain is wired to balance pleasure and pain and how to know when our consumption has crossed from healthy, recreational use to addictive, maladaptive use. Finally, Dr. Lembke leaves us with some strategies for recalibrating our neural-balance, including the perhaps counterintuitive remedy of exposing ourselves to pain in order to treat our pain.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
MORE FROM ANNA LEMBKE:
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop
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“I think it's very important to mention also, Elise, that even if a woman feels permission to be angry, that anger is such a tricky mischievous emotion that it's so difficult to know what our anger means or what to do with it. So we may know that we’re angry and anger activates us to, to act, to take a position, to do something, but our anger does not tell us what the real issue is, who is responsible for what, what is the best way to proceed with our anger…” So says psychotherapist Dr. Harriet Lerner. Lerner is known and beloved for her many best-selling books about women, family systems, and relationships, including the classic Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships, which we explore in today's episode.
Lerner believes that anger is an essential, but oftentimes misunderstood and mismanaged emotion. She set out to write Dance of Anger to tackle female anger specifically, of which nothing had been written at that time. When women are discouraged from discussing their anger, she tells us, they lose a sense of self, as the pain of our anger preserves our dignity. We discuss the stereotype of the unloving, unlovable, and destructive angry woman, and the way in which female anger is only deemed acceptable when it is on the behalf of others.
Lerner leaves us with tips for beginning to work through our anger productively, starting with moving toward assertive self-definition without asking for permission, and ultimately becoming careful observers of our own role in the patterns that keep us stuck in anger so that we may make positive, lasting change on our own behalf.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
MORE FROM HARRIET LERNER:
The Dance Of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Pattern of Intimate Relationships
The Dance Of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships
The Dance Of Fear: Rising Above Anxiety, Fear, and Shame to Be Your Best and Bravest Self
The Dance Of Deception: A Guide to Authenticity and Truth-Telling in Women's Relationships
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Our guest today is Dr. Riane Eisler, social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, attorney and internationally bestselling author of many notable classics, including Sacred Pleasure and The Chalice and the Blade, which I read recently and LOVED—while it came out in the ‘80s, it is incredibly prescient—prophetic really—and more relevant than ever. In it, and all of her books, Riane explores the ways in which hierarchies of dominance—which are NOT our natural state—inform how we live now. “What we’ve been told is simply a false story of our past, of our present, and most importantly today, the possibilities for our future,” she explains. Dr. Eisler joins me today to discuss her newest work, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. In the book, Eisler implores us to awaken to the notion that injustice, inequality, violence, and domination do not tell the full story of human possibility. “We humans were really wired more for partnership than for domination,” she says. Guided by the ethos of partnership, Dr. Eisler’s work challenges each of us to play a role in the construction of a more equitable, more sustainable, and less violent world through investment in human infrastructure and a dedication to raising future generations by different scripts and constructs than those given to us. People’s minds can be changed, she reminds us, but a change in consciousness starts with the knowledge that there are different, better, possibilities.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
MORE FROM RIANE EISLER:
Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future
The Chalice & The Blade: Our History, Our Future
The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics
The Power of Partnership: Sevens Relationships That Will Change Your Life
Breaking Out of the Domination Trance: Building Foundations for a Safe, Equitable, Caring World
RIANE’S PICKS:
My Octopus Teacher - Netflix, 2020
Grandfather's Garden: Some Bedtime Stories for Little and Big Folk - David Loye
DIG DEEPER
More on Partnership Systems and the Partnerism Movement
Courses in Partnership - Changing Our Story, Changing Our Lives
A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science - David Noble, 2013
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“Before our boys have learned to read, they have already read the stoic code of masculinity and are conforming to it.” says Terry Real, world-renowned family therapist, speaker, best-selling author and founder of the Relational Life Institute, where he offers workshops for couples, individuals, parents and therapists. He is also a dear friend. While he’s best known for his couples work, decades ago, he wrote the landmark book on male depression, which I cannot recommend enough. It’s called, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, and with it, Real established himself as one of the most respected voices in the treatment of men and the healing of their relationships with the world. In this episode, we talk about why depression is “illegal” for men, the cultural programming of boys, and forced detachment in the name of autonomy. Our culture of individualism, Real says, has done as much damage as our culture of patriarchy—leaving men little room for the type of connection and relationality that we humans live for. He leaves us with the steps for deprogramming ourselves from patriarchal thinking and parenting as well as the ways in which we can support the men in our lives in service of deeper connection and the pursuit of greater relational joy.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
MORE FROM TERRY REAL:
I Don't Want To Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression
How Can I Get Through To You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women
The New Rules Of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work
Take Terry's Online Course - Staying in Love: The Art of Fierce Intimacy
DIG DEEPER:
Find an RLT Certified Therapist Near You
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