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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Polling the Thread.
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I m thrilled to welcome today s guest, science writer Florence Williams, whose stunning book, Heartbreak, A Personal and Scientific Journey, is the focus of today s conversation.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context,
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the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks on their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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It s OK to not be perfect.
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I don t want to be judging myself for my imperfections.
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I actually want to be accepting myself for my imperfections.
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And that s really liberating, actually.
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You know, I think so many women
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We grow up thinking we are supposed to be perfect and we internalize, you know, excelling at everything and being good at everything and, you know, curating our appearance and, you know, being the perfect mom and doing everything right and doing everything right and doing everything right.
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And just the realization that I was like so over that.
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And feeling like it was actually getting in the way of my having a more authentic understanding of who I was.
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That s when I think a corner really started to be turned.
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So says Florence Williams, the author of The Nature Fix and Heartbreak, A Personal and Scientific Journey, which is a beautiful exploration of the end of her marriage and its impact on her health and her soul.
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Florence met her husband in college and had never lived alone, much less alone as a middle-aged woman.
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Their divorce and her corresponding heartbreak turned her upside down and filled her with incapacitating amounts of anxiety and fear.
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The resulting memoir offers a map as she returns to herself.
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Ever the science writer, though, this isn t just a treatise on her feelings of rejection and loss.
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This is also a thoroughly researched guide to the implications of heartbreak on our hearts, full of learnings for all of us.
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OK, let s get to our conversation.
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I loved Heartbreak.
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I am watching this tendency in myself to only commend, not only commend, but I love memoirs that are structured in a way that support these bigger conversations.
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And I m only watching it in myself because I feel like there s like this feminine instinct to be useful all the time and to make our lives
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helpful for other people when sometimes living your life is enough, but I will say thank you for using your own heartbreak as a way to talk about what happens to us.
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I think anyone listening has been through this cycle and to honor it with a scientific survey of what is happening to us makes it a pretty fascinating read, I have to say.
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I m sorry that your life had to go up on a pyre in that way.
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Yeah.
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But I m glad if you found it useful.
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That s definitely helpful to me.
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And it s part of the healing process, as I learned, right, that if you can make your story more universal, and be vulnerable in a way that encourages other people to be vulnerable, too.
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Yeah.
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It s helpful, the sense of purpose that it engenders in me is helpful and hopefully it s helpful to other people too.
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Well, and we re meaning making creatures, right?
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And so to actually use our lives to create a different story or to revise our story.
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But obviously, this isn t a book that you ever thought you would write.
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No one sets out to trace the arc of I mean, you guys started dating in college, right?
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Yeah, we started well, I met him my first day of college.
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So I was 18 day one.
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We started dating about three weeks later.
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And then you find yourself with kids and the end of a marriage unexpectedly.
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I mean, you do a beautiful job of sort of describing what I think many of us would witness.
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And I will say too, like I m not heartbroken currently and hopefully, and my marriage is intact and strong and hopefully durable, but we never know, right?
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This is all around us, sort of like a sea of wreckage.
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Yeah.
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where you re like, I didn t as you were you were writing about that to sort of like the revelation to people who were shocked.
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Yeah, I mean, I think we were very happy.
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I think we had a very good marriage for a long time.
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But, you know, it was 32 years long by the time, you know, including the dating.
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That s three decades of life.
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Things change.
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You know, things happen.
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And yet, heartbreak, you write about it, I love this at the beginning, where you say, having never been heartbroken before, I tended to dismiss portrayals of it in popular culture, literature, even by my friends, I m sorry to say, as overwrought.
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But one of the first stages of heartbreak I soon learned is feeling stunned, even if you shouldn t have been.
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I ve been used to feeling in control, but you can t game heartbreak.
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And
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Can you talk a little bit about that?
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Sort of this, the course that you go through over the book of, does it follow any, it s not like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross  stages of acceptance, even though she later said, you know, grief is not a stage process and it s not tidy.
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Is there, in your work, and I was looking for it, and I feel like you didn t make it, Pat, right?
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Like there is no core journey?
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I did write the book to follow a loose chronology of heartbreak.
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I wouldn t say everyone s heartbreak is going to fit into that, but it was kind of the order of my heartbreak.
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So I start with this state of shock, you know, that really has a dramatic effect on one s body.
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I guess for me, you know, I had like the symptoms of shock and that is partly what inspired me and surprised me and freaked me out.
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that I could feel the heartbreak so intensely in my body.
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So anyway, I started out talking about shock, and then I move into grief and loneliness, and then the things that I tried to do to feel better.
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you know, with kind of science weaving its way in through all these threads, you know, and then finally, you know, some kind of resolution, not necessarily a tidy Hollywood ending, but resolution as it kind of really is in real life, which isn t
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always a tidy bow.
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Yeah, we certainly we love those stories.
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And it s so tempting to wrap it up.
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And I feel like there was a thread of anger.
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I m just thinking of the grieving stage.
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Did you have to burn through your rage in order to access your grief?
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I think, you know, for me, the predominant emotions were anxiety, and grief.
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The anger came a little bit later.
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It actually took me a while to kind of really own the anger and feel it.
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And I felt like that was a necessary stage in order to get to a more healing stage.
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But I was definitely able to feel a lot of anxiety and grief before the anger came, interestingly.
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That is interesting.
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It s not surprising.
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I mean, I feel like anger can be instinctive and defensive in a way, and a protection, in my experience, sort of like the ice on top of the lake of grief, and you have to go into the anger in order to access the sadness.
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But I can also imagine it the other way, particularly because women are
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acculturated to be more comfortable with sadness than with our anger, that you have to sort of get to the anger.
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Yeah, that could be.
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Yeah.
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You know, I was so still caught up in these complicated feelings that involve love, right, of my departing spouse.
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And I think I was in some ways projecting the anger onto other parts of my life before I was able to really project it onto him.
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But that was necessary.
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It was necessary to be able to do that.
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I did feel rage and anger about the state of women in general as I was going through this process.
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I mean, I was very aware of kind of the inequities of
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of the law, the inequities of divorce as a process, how it so inequitably affects men and women, you know, on everything from, you know, the division of property to how your friends and peers kind of view you.
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They permeate everything from, I think, how your community views you differently in the breakup to the division of property and who ends up with more resources after divorce
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And then to even dating, right?
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You know, that s the next stage.
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If you if you want to get back into the game as a middle-aged woman, you are so much more handicapped than your middle-aged husband.
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And I was, you know, just extremely aware of that.
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Plus, you know, I had come from a legacy of divorce myself and I had seen it.
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You know, in my own family, I had seen it in my friends  families, the women are the ones who really get the short end of the stick often after divorce, certainly economically, but also, I think, just culturally and socially as well.
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I m Rachel Martin.
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After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.
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So we made a new podcast called Wildcard, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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And how did that show up in your life?
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I mean, we re all aware of the tropes of, you know, older men dating younger women, et cetera, but within your friend group, you know, was it that, was there just an aversion towards like wanting to be around anything that felt messy or sticky?
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Or did you feel like people were actively taking sides or were they not taking sides?
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And that was sort of the problem.
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I think there were a lot of different responses.
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My close friends were very supportive and right in there with me and bless them because I really needed them and I needed their support.
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And that was terrific.
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But I think in my looser ties, sort of my broader social group, there was definitely this sense of I am maybe contaminating
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You know, there may be something contagious about divorce.
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You don t want to necessarily be too close to it.
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And then I think there s this weird dynamic that, you know, my divorced women friends and I talk about of your couple friends don t really want to have you over, you know, at the dinner party because you re sort of the one single person.
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It kind of messes up their feng shui of their social event in some ways that I haven t really fully plumbed.
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I haven t really fully figured this out.
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Is it that as a single woman, you re sort of threatening because now you re kind of available in a way, or is it just that there s this unevenness of gender?
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I don t know.
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I m not really sure what it s all about.
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But the weird thing is that, you know, when I was married and having dinner parties, I also tended to invite couples.
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It was kind of an unconscious thing.
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I didn t really think about it until I was the one who wasn t really getting invited to the dinner parties.
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Yeah, no, it s fascinating, and I m sure incredibly painful.
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And as with all of these things, and what so much of the book is, is like tracing these threads of sort of our natural, innate response to what happens when you lose connection or are pushed out of the circle, or sort of the need for connection that drives us.
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versus the culture and distinguishing between the two, right?
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The way that we, our lack of reverence for older women, our fear of women who are aging, even that the threat of like, is my partner gonna suddenly decide, oh, divorce looks good on her, she s available, I ll leave my, whatever it is that lives in us.
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And then figuring out from that, what is who we are versus like the culture that s driving these narratives.
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And by the way, I think it s not just true for divorced women who are treated that way, but also widows.
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They also don t get invited to the dinner parties.
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There s also something contagious about them.
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I think that it just magnifies the isolation and the loneliness and the grief of this experience.
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And I think it s really unfortunate.
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And this idea of, you know, and I think as someone who was single through most of my 20s, the sort of lingering odor or this like, what s wrong with her?
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There must be something wrong with her.
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Like there is something that s being rejected.
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And the way that we assign that defectiveness to women and not to men is such a bad cultural
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hangover.
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Do you know the roots of that?
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I do, but I think it extends beyond that to a kind of defensive posture on the part of those who are married who don t necessarily want to be reminded that marriage is problematic, too.
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What are you talking about?
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Perfect.
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Yeah, exactly.
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I mean, it s like anything.
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It s like how judgmental we are of each other s parenting, all these kinds of things.
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We don t necessarily want to hang out with people who are doing it differently because there s this assumed critique then of the way we re doing it.
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I think that s very much true in this realm of divorce and marriage.
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I mean, long-term relationships, look, they re really tough, right?
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Even when they re good, they re really tough.
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We all know it.
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But I know as someone who was in a marriage for 25 years that you don t really want to go there.
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You don t want to necessarily acknowledge that.
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You re putting your head down, you re doing the best you can, and you don t really want to entertain the possibility that this could end at any moment because that s so destabilizing.
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It s much easier just to keep going and not think about it too much.
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And the reality is, and I m sure this was your experience, for 25 years, and I ve been married for 12 years, something like that.
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So I m a bit behind you.
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But as in any relationship, it has its fallow periods and it s really rich.
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renumerative periods.
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And there are certainly times where you re like, this is kind of an emotional wasteland, like where you re doing too much parallel play, and everyone s busy.
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And then when you come back together, you know, for my husband and I will like go to away for a weekend to a wedding.
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And we re like, Oh, my God, we love each other.
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This is so fun.
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But
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There is an assumption baked into it that a marriage is durable and can withstand a fair amount, particularly when you have young children.
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And so I think it is incredibly destabilizing to recognize, oh, there s a bridge too far.
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There comes a moment that s imperceptible where you re like, how am I on the other side of the door?
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And I think what s also really destabilizing about that is that it s often unevenly felt.
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I kind of knew, yes, we were in this period of disconnection, as we had been in before, as all relationships go through.
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And I kind of thought, yeah, of course, we ll come back together and it ll be fine.
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And he didn t.
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He was like, for him, it was the bridge too far.
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It was like, actually, I d rather be connected to somebody else.
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Thanks.
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Bye.
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And so it s not always evenly felt.
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No.
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I m looking for this passage where you write.
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This actually felt like a moment to me where you really get in touch with your anger.
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And I want to say that it was after you get off the river because you have this river trip that s very sort of wild-like where you re on a river by yourself, which I love rafting.
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But I like rafting with other people, Florence.
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Yeah, you were.
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Good idea, at least.
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I don t know why that didn t occur to me.
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Not like Vipassana on a boat with a toilet in the back, which I know you ditch, but you talk.
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Do you know this moment?
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I know it s been a minute since you wrote your own book, but it s such a beautiful moment where you don t delineate what
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he did when you started renumerating the inequity in your relationship, too.
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I mean, I know he said, like, very painfully, I m going to go find my soulmate.
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Did you feel like he was your soulmate?
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Or do you feel like you haven t met your soulmate yet?
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Or do you even believe in that as a concept?
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Wow, I think I used to believe in it as a concept.
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And I think I thought we were, you know, our souls were
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were joined, right?
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That there was this shared destiny that we had.
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I don t know if I would have used the term soulmate necessarily.
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It s not my kind of term.
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It s definitely his kind of term.
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Good question.
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I don t think I really believe in the concept of soulmates now.
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I do believe in love.
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I think love of lots of different varieties, you know, familial love, community love, landscape, nature love.
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I believe all of these are so much a part of being human and being optimistic and living well.
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But this like long-term relationship, like you re going to have a soulmate for six
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60 years.
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I struggle with that one.
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No, I get it.
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But I also struggle with the way that our culture thinks about because you could say, well, we did 25, 30 years together.
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We had two amazing children.
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And I love how you write about sort of the the family, the long legged.
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How do you describe them?
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Sort of this like the kids that you have and the way that to divorce like makes it so difficult
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And particularly the way that we look at it and the pain that it obviously causes, but it makes it impossible to integrate in some ways like a lot of your life, right?
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Like what do you do with that black box of too painful to the touch memories?
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Or after a certain point, are you able to sort of go back there where you re not cutting people out of picture frames?
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Yeah, I think I am more able to go back there now.
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I think there is this sort of radioactive quality to those memories for a while.
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And I think that s sad because a lot of those memories really are happy on their own and it s too bad that they get sort of poisoned for a while.
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But I m happy to say I do think they re less radioactive now and I do feel like I m better able to integrate them.
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better able to understand that some of those feelings are gonna stay complicated and they re gonna be emotions layered on top of each other.
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But I can look at a photograph and be like, oh yeah, that was a sweet time.
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And also be like, goddammit.
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It sort of points south.
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But now, you know, I m just at the point now where I have, I think, fewer regrets, honestly, about the divorce.
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I think, I do feel like I ve kind of integrated the pain of that enough to know maybe it was for the best, actually.
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And I value so much the growth and self-discovery, even though it was pretty sucky to go through it.
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Had I come out the other side, I am a different person in ways that I value, you know?
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Well, I want to talk about that.
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I want you to read this section to us because I thought it was so beautiful.
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And this moment, which I think we can all recognize is so painful and difficult when you have to say goodbye.
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I think anyone can tap into that moment when you are actually shutting the door on a relationship, revivifying, or even just like staying emotionally or mentally connected to someone, even when it s painful.
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And so it felt,
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I think you were on the river or just off the river near the end of the book when you seem to have this like completing moment.
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So if you could read this to us, I would love it.
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OK, sure.
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I found myself resisting saying goodbye to the marriage to him.
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to the life I d enjoyed.
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I opened a notebook.
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I made a list of all the things I loved about him.
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And then I wrote down all the things I didn t love about him.
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What I admired, his apparent ease, his sunniness, his competence, his enthusiasm for adventure.
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I loved our family unit, that these tall, kind, lanky humans were all my people.
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And I loved the happy delusion, such a delusion, that we were surrounded by a special force field of safety and fine weather.
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What I didn t admire, I won t enumerate his failings here, except to say the biggest one, the one I didn t miss at all, was his ability to make me feel that I wasn t quite worthy of him.
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That was bad enough, but the bigger problem was that I had started believing it.
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But the bigger problem was that I had started believing it.
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And as long as I still believed it, the worse my life looked alone.
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Mm, it s beautiful, Florence.
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And in that moment, in that revelation, was that a new revelation or something that you knew had been sort of playing with or eyeing or trying to get your arms around?
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And like, was there a sense of closure where you, in that moment, chose yourself?
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I think all of the above.
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I think there was this quiet understanding for a long time that I felt judged by him, you know?
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And I didn t like that feeling.
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Hadn t liked it for a long time.
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But when I really articulated it in that way, that I was also judging myself kind of through his eyes and how just damaging that is, I think understanding that and being like, you know what, it s okay to not be perfect.
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I don t want to be judging myself for my imperfections.
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I actually want to be accepting myself for my imperfections.
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And that was really liberating, actually.
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You know, I think so many women
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We grow up thinking we are supposed to be perfect, and we internalize, you know, excelling at everything and being good at everything and, you know, curating our appearance and, you know, being the perfect mom and doing everything right and doing everything right and doing everything right.
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And just the realization that I was like so over that.
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And feeling like it was actually getting in the way of my having a more authentic understanding of who I was.
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That s when I think a corner really started to be turned.
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And this idea, too, I mean, this is what my whole book is about, but in this hunt for goodness and this quest to be good and to be ordained as good, it s not enough.
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We re never going to get that reassurance from or validation from an external world that we re safe and secure.
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It s only something that we can give to ourselves.
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That s right.
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But I do think it s possible to find a partner who is able to love your flaws and accept you for who you are and kind of support an investigation, you know, into those characteristics, you know, who s willing to kind of take a journey with you.
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And my ex just so was not interested in that.
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Right.
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And do you recognize that as just a quality of who he is or something that you guys didn t cultivate together?
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I think he definitely grew up in a very patriarchal kind of WASP-y culture where you don t air your flaws.
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You just don t acknowledge them.
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So I think it s very much about his culture and frankly, the American culture overall.
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I mean, it s not just the WASP-y male culture, but I think that certainly embraces that.
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So yeah, I don t think he d go there with anyone.
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And I think a lot of men wouldn t.
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Yeah.
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Do you, not to linger on sort of like his emotional state, but I always, and watching other friends go through divorce, I m always conscious of like the one that s doing the work and the one that s prolonging the work or like jumping from Lillipad to Lillipad where I m like, that swamp is waiting for you, friend.
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Like you can get in it now and
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Good luck.
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Or you can, I guess, do it when you re 80.
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And it s sort of not that consoling.
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But when I was younger and, you know, friends would be going through these hard breakups and the guy would seem to sort of like skitter scatter away and like into another thing.
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It was like, just wait, just wait.
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He ll be broken on your doorstep in a year or two or whenever it is that he has to resolve the end of this relationship.
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Like you can t procrastinate and push this stuff.
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It does get you, I think.
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I think so.
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I do think there are some members of our society who seem to be a little more sheltered from deep examination, unfortunately.
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I mean, that s what privilege does, right?
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It s famously insulating.
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It is famously insulating.
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But I think you can only outrun these things always for so long.
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And they have a real impact.
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I mean, that was what was so interesting about the book, the way that you traced the physical impacts of divorce, the way it showed up in your body in essentially unintentional and prolonged weight loss, weakness, just the way it just destroyed you, I think we can all
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relate to that.
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I tend to be someone who stops eating as well in grief.
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Some people have the opposite experience, but that we have these massive physiological impacts that can be studied, right?
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I mean, you were doing your blood work, which I loved throughout.
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Have you done any more?
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Like, can you talk a little bit about what that showed?
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Yeah, sure.
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I was really lucky early on in this kind of divorce recovery process to make contact with a wonderful scientist at UCLA, Steve Cole, who s an immunogeneticist.
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And he s made a career by basically studying the effects of loneliness.
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on people s immune systems.
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And he does this by looking at a suite of genetic markers, transcription factors in our white blood cells.
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And these are markers that are tied to inflammation, tied to chronic disease.
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And we ve known for a long time that people who consider themselves lonely have a higher rate of chronic disease.
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They have a higher rate of early death.
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They have a higher rate of dementia, all kinds of
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unfortunate outcomes, really, given the fact that not only are they lonely, but now they re also sicker.
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than most people who are not lonely.
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So we decided that we would test my blood cells at different time points after the divorce.
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And I was trying all these interventions, you know, to feel better, to get healthier.
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I was diagnosed with type one diabetes, you know, not long after the split.
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I was worried that I was going to get sicker.
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So I felt this kind of urgency to figure this out and to try to feel better as soon as possible.
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So I was trying all these interventions, such as the wilderness trip you mentioned, a number of other things.
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And we tested my blood before and after the wilderness trip.
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We tested it at various other time points.
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And it was really interesting because as someone who had written about the tremendous mental and physical health benefits of nature,
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I was very invested in that as a curative.
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I thought, okay, I m going to go on this month-long wilderness trip, and I m just going to be so much better.
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At the end of it, it s really going to cure me.
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Unfortunately, my blood showed, uh-uh, not so fast.
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Actually, you re the same as you were before the trip.
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Even though I felt like I had made a lot of progress cognitively, I had reflected and
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learned to meditate, and done some interesting work.
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I was also still feeling kind of threatened and anxious because I was alone in the wilderness, right?
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Which is not how humans are supposed to feel relaxed and safe.
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No, you picked something quite extreme.
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Yeah, I mean, I think that the main theme here is that a heartbreak like this, when we feel like we ve been abandoned, when we feel like we have lost a major support figure in our lives,
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Our nervous system notices that, and it responds by going into a state of threat.
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And so that s why people get sick.
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After someone dies, after divorce, when they feel lonely, it s because they feel threatened on some deep level.
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You may think, of course, there s no grizzly bear about to jump on me.
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But your nervous system doesn t really perceive it in a rational way.
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in light of everything that you did.
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And I loved the way that you described your, did you do MDMA and mushrooms like some your trip and that your therapist was gently snort.
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I mean, that was amazing.
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She slept through your experience.
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My guide was asleep.
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Yeah.
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I sleep at the wheel.
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But what do you think, when you look at this experience, what do you think has been, and not to say that you re healed and be over it and beyond, whatever, we re so obsessed with that theme too, but what ultimately do you think was the most healing?
3
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Was it time?
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Was it actually studying yourself and creating a story and revising that story?
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What do you think has been
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the most healing thing.
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I think time was a huge part of it.
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And I think time for most people is a great curative, not for everybody.
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And I did not want to take the time.
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We know from studies that it takes on average four years for people s bodies to return to baseline, for their health to return to baseline after divorce.
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I felt like I wanted to speed that up as much as I could.
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it was possible to.
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And I think all the things I did helped a little bit.
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I actually think the thing that helped the most in retrospect really probably was that session of psychedelics.
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And I ll tell you why.
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I think it s because it really addressed my fear, my state of anxiety.
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I was very afraid of growing old alone, of not having a partner to
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you know, look out for me of being financially insecure.
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I mean, I just had been with someone since I was eight.
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I d never lived alone.
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And I had witnessed my mother dying alone and broke and other women in my life whose partners had left them as well.
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And so we know actually from the research, looking at psychedelics and people who are diagnosed with a terminal illness, for example, that
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It s just amazing, interesting things happen in their brains where suddenly they don t feel so afraid.
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And I think that s really what happened to me.
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I was like, you know what?
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What happens, happens.
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It s all going to be OK.
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And I can t it s not really a rational, it s hard to explain but but having such a mystical experience and feeling like I am part of this beautiful universe we re all part of it together.
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You know, so many people struggle.
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struggle comes and goes, everything is transient.
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I don t know, it was like this very kind of mystical reassurance in these bigger truths of the universe that were so much bigger than just like, ah, I m alone.
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And I thought, I feel like it was like the tree and the vine, the way that you started to recognize the way that you were entangled with your husband and sort of how to start disconnecting and
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letting that, getting that not off you, but kind of, right?
3
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Yeah.
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Particularly you guys had grown up together.
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Yeah, exactly.
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You ve never been, yeah, I thought that was like a very beautifully described because we can all, you know, you want that sort of codependence, that like co-mingled root system.
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And then at a certain point, like you saw him as like a strangler vine, right?
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Essentially.
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Yeah.
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I mean, so, you know, we basically grew up together.
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And we became very integrated, I think, in each other s souls and in each other s hearts.
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And so I had this very clear vision while I was taking the psilocybin that I was a tree and that he was so tightly wrapped around my trunk that I couldn t grow.
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You know, I was still too, I was too cathected, was the psychotherapy term.
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I was too bound to him kind of emotionally that I couldn t grow.
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And I, and so I had this vision of like literally peeling this vine, strangler vine away from my trunk.
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At which point, the canopy of my tree was able to kind of grow into the light.
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And it was this very beautiful image that I think had a tremendous kind of emotional impact on me where I was like, okay, goodbye, I need to grow now.
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And it just filled me with, I guess, a kind of sense of optimism, the sense that there was beauty ahead of me and that I could find some.
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And then I wanted to find it.
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I love that too, because as you, you know, as we ve sort of covered in this conversation, the cultural stigma attached to divorced women, in particular, middle aged women who are alone.
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And, you know, I love at the beginning when you encounter it s I think it s Helen Fisher, who s giving you or another scientist at one of these events, who s giving me these like,
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incredibly depressing statistics about sort of loneliness and its impact.
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And what is it like divorce?
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It s like widowed, divorced, never married, married in terms of happiness?
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Or is it that an unhappy marriage actually trumps divorce?
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It was actually very clearly looking at mortality.
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So it was a pretty definitive outcome.
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Like, who s more likely to die young, and people who are divorced, like, come out at the very
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At the very end, people who ve been single their whole lives have kind of figured out how to do that and be happy and have a support system, a lot of them.
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People who are divorced sometimes, there s a subset of people who are divorced who really don t recover.
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about 10 to 15%, they go on to have these health effects.
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And that s what s kind of skewing the stats.
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So I did not want to be one of those 10 to 15%.
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And I don t think anyone should be.
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And that s part of what motivated me to write this book.
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I mean, I really feel like if there s anything you can do to get out of the funk and despair of this kind of grief, you ve got to do it.
3
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No, and it makes a lot of sense.
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It s also a hard narrative.
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It s similar to, I think they call it complicated grief now.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes.
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And which people understandably were really upset at even the suggestion that you could pathologize grief after death.
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And I 100% understand that.
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But they re talking about a very specific subset of people, typically who were depressed, I think, before the event.
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who find, who can t even sort of like enter a room in the house that has any memento of the person who, they re so completely unable to function that it has, it does become pathological.
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And the goal is getting people sort of re-engaged with life so they can actually even grieve.
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And I can imagine, I know people who get into sort of
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divorce rut where it is like running their emotional lives and it s a certain stuckness, right?
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It s a total stuckness.
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And, you know, we sometimes tend to internalize these stories that we have been told or the stories from our childhood or, you know, and it basically has to do with we re not worthy.
4
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You know, the stories of we re not worthy, whether it started in childhood or whether it started through a kind of rejection, romantic rejection.
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You just don t want that story to keep being the story of your life.
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It s time for a new story.
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And it s funny, too, how we have an aversion for loss, obviously, culturally.
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But when you think about it, these are the opportunities, this sort of level of suffering is when we do grow and when we do get better.
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It s hard to do the work when there s no real, there s no emotional work to do.
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Does that make sense?
4
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And it sounds perverse, but we all recognize this, that what drives us deeper into ourselves allows us to emerge as a more expanded version.
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And, you know, I think about my 20s when, unlike you, I was sort of getting tossed around in the dryer by getting done, you know, all the things.
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And I do have a fair amount of gratitude for that now, whereas
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I can imagine if I had married my high school boyfriend and had no experience of this too, like how unmooring it would be when it s so high stakes, you know?
4
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Right.
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Like you probably got inoculated a little bit earlier on.
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SPEAKER_00
A little.
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I never had that inoculation.
4
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And I never had thought of myself as having trauma before.
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And once I kind of took that on,
4
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Then I learned about this other concept of post-traumatic growth.
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And it was such a lifeline to know that, even though I couldn t necessarily predict it or see it, just to know that there was something I could swim toward, that there is a very powerful, wonderful, beautiful kind of growth that can happen after we have been ripped down to our studs.
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it s really worth bending your brain to try to get there.
4
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It s worth the work.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
I loved the discussion in the book, too, about this idea of betrayal.
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And both emotional betrayal, sexual betrayal, you detail an experience with a guy that s wild.
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But I know that there s a sense of betrayal in the devastation of your marriage, too, right?
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Where you re sort of blind.
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This idea of feeling blindsided or somehow, like, how did I not know that?
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How were we not living the same reality, right?
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And betrayal to me is like one of those fascinating words because we all know what it is.
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And then the second definition is the revealing of something hidden.
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And sometimes that hidden thing is something that we re aware of, we just don t, we don t want to acknowledge, right?
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We re like, just don t make this something that I actually have to deal with.
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Like, I would much rather pretend like this isn t happening, but it is in that way, it can be a betrayal of self.
4
SPEAKER_00
How did you – and I thought it was really interesting the conversation about like emotional betrayal versus sexual betrayal because those two things are also so present in our culture, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Like there s the act where it s in some ways like, oh, that s – I can understand.
4
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There was a moment of physical transgression.
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But for so many people, it s emotional, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s an imperceptible, nebulous like…
4
SPEAKER_00
Whoa, what s happening here, which I think there s a gender difference in it, right, in the way that it s experienced?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, there are psychologists who are looking at this kind of from an evolutionary perspective.
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I kind of take everything they find with a grain of salt because I ve just learned that a lot of people who are looking at evolutionary biology have so much bias attached to it.
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But some studies have supported the idea that men take sexual betrayal more seriously, and that s because their genes and the passing along of their genes really depends on sexual fidelity.
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They don t know if a kid is theirs.
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Whereas women, there s some indication that women take an emotional betrayal more seriously.
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And that s because they really need to know that they re gonna have kind of the loyalty and support of a male figure.
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Who knows?
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I feel like- I like that you take that with a grain of salt though.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, totally.
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Because I also feel like you can t separate nature and culture and- Right, that s right.
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There are these tropes, right?
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That we re all supposed to follow.
4
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And I also feel like rejection is rejection.
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And as human animals, if you want to talk about the evolution of it, what is true is that we are a hypersocial species.
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We live in a very hierarchical society.
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We live in groups typically.
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And if you get cast out, if you get sort of demoted in the hierarchy of your group, that has life and death consequences for individuals.
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And so we are hypersensitive to social slights, including maybe especially romantic rejection, but about other kinds of rejection as well.
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So I think, you know, it s almost irrelevant whether it s sexual or emotional.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think, you know, you hear people, I think sometimes excusing their behavior.
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It s like, oh, well, I didn t sleep with her, so it s fine.
4
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It doesn t work that way in our brains.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s just very deeply felt.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think for a lot of women, and again, I think there s a question here whether this is a natural instinct or just a cultural bias, but the idea of like your partner having an emotional relationship with someone rather than just like a fling in Vegas, it hits very differently.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, what hurts hurts, you know, regardless of what the studies show.
4
SPEAKER_01
And rejection is, it s one of the most painful and complicating emotions that we have.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
What are you working on now?
4
SPEAKER_01
I have become really interested still in the science of awe, which I talk a lot about in the book.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think it s a really surprising antidote to heartbreak, which we haven t really talked about.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we talked about how the river trip didn t really work, but for me, experiencing beauty and sort of being more open to beauty and to awe
4
SPEAKER_01
has also been incredibly helpful.
4
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Again, it reminds us, I think, that we re part of this larger, beautiful universe, and maybe what happens to our egos on a particular day is not the most important thing in the world.
4
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I would love for more people to get that message, that by accessing beauty, however it is you do it, whether it s through nature or whether it s through music or
4
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through art or through witnessing amazing people in your life who inspire you.
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I think these are the things that really make us feel like we belong, make us feel connected to each other, make us feel connected to a larger world.
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And I just, I hadn t heard that message.
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I hadn t heard, hey, looking for awe is the secret to recovering from loneliness.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it turns out it is.
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And so I hope we can spread that word a little more.
4
SPEAKER_00
Why do you think, you know, I know Dacher Keltner, his book just came out.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I feel like I m probably more like tuned to those radio stations.
4
SPEAKER_00
But so I m aware of it.
4
SPEAKER_00
But why do you think that those concepts take so long to puncture people s awareness?
4
SPEAKER_00
Is it because it s like so quiet in inherently and so personal?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think in terms of the sort of field of psychology, awe was not taken seriously as an emotion until very recently, really until Dacher Keltner and his colleagues started looking at it in the early 2000s.
4
SPEAKER_01
It just hadn t really been studied much before.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, in general, there was a bias towards studying negative emotions, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And then when positive psychology started studying the positive ones, awe was kind of left behind for a while.
4
SPEAKER_01
I do think it s a complicated emotion, so it s not always easy to study.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that s one of the reasons.
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And then I actually think all this work that we re seeing now on psychedelics has really pushed the field because there s a theory that awe is in fact the mechanism by which so many people are transforming.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s the sort of mystical experience they re having within the psychedelic treatment.
4
SPEAKER_01
that is driving this incredibly profound change.
4
SPEAKER_01
One of the things about awe that I think is really interesting is that when we experience awe, for example, imagine that you re looking at the Milky Way for the first time, which a lot of kids are because they grow up in cities and they don t see the Milky Way.
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SPEAKER_01
And then suddenly they go to summer camp or on a Girl Scout trip or something.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I ve actually been with Girl Scouts who are 12
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old and looking at the Milky Way for the first time.
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And, you know, it s, it s incredible right the expression on their face changes.
5
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They suddenly feel like a grain of sand in the universe, they are trying to, they are so full of wonder and amazement that they re trying to sort of understand what it is oh that s a galaxy, it s on its side.
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SPEAKER_00
There s this cognitive accommodation that we do when we are experiencing awe in which our brain kind of stops its normal categorization of things.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s a tree.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s a rock.
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SPEAKER_00
It s more like, oh my God, what is that?
5
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And in that moment, there s this incredible window of learning that can happen.
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SPEAKER_00
So when you re experiencing awe, it s an opportunity for you to also re-examine who you are and what your place is in the universe.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I think that s why it s working in psychedelics.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s also maybe why it works for me.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s like this rare window to sort of reassess everything that you thought about the world.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
I think that s really cool.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s amazing.
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It s also so fun to think about people like you with your science-y brain opening a new line of inquiry or insight.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s because you think about where we are at this moment in time.
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SPEAKER_01
I went on a big – I don t know if you ve ever read Ken Wilber.
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SPEAKER_01
a big Ken Wilber deep dive and he s brilliant and his whole thing is like taking paradigms and organizing paradigms and this just like capacious massive brain like literally writing them down on yellow legal pad sheets and like putting them in his house for four years and like putting them all in systems and like it s his point is that in our like system of evolution we have sort of the me we
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It, it s.
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And for a certain amount of time, the it and it s has been so dominant as we ve developed our scientific language and understanding of the world.
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And that we re lagging a little bit or like bringing all of these things together, everyone s speaking a slightly different language.
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And his point is like, you can think about the brain and you can
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Study the brain and look at all the synapses firing and all of the sort of neurochemistry that s there, but you will never know someone s mind until you talk to them.
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And you ll never have a sense of someone or their personality from studying the brain.
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And, but we ve been so focused on sort of the it s part of the quadrant that he delineates.
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And so the mystical, obviously, is the miwi.
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And so thinking about it as a really necessary
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part of our lives that has to be nourished.
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And it s like an extra part of context that we can forget about.
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But it s exciting to me to watch people like you, people like Dacher Keltner, and the psychedelic movement, and the people sort of ancillary to that as they re bringing the mystical and the scientific together.
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I mean, I m convinced it s all the same.
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It s different languages for the same thing.
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and that we ll get there.
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We re like building those bridges.
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And I think we re really hungry for it.
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You know, we have an understanding that we re living this kind of odd deprived life in general right now.
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You know, we re not having enough daily exposure to the moon and the sunset and wild animals.
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You know, I mean, our species used to have, have this daily drip of awe, you know, life was not easy, but we were able to sort of recover from those stresses in lots of ways.
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And awe was one of them.
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Yeah.
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And just the magic, just the ineffable magic of our lives and the strangeness of our existence, and then to also constantly be in our tendency to define that, describe it, attribute it to various factors and just drain
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the magic out instead of being like, these things can be concurrent in us.
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And yes, I m a human biological being having this very physical material experience, but then there s all this unseen, whether it s the Milky Way, being hidden by light pollution or something else, like the something else is so weirdly reassuring.
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Yes, yes.
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And I think a lot of people just feel the absence of meaning.
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I mean, we re just living in an epidemic, right, of loneliness and connection and grief and anxiety.
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I mean, all of these things.
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Yeah.
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I think people are sort of looking.
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They re looking for things that are going to bring that meaning back.
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And so, I mean, you know, and in some ways like heart, heartbreak and grief and talking about it and owning it and feeling it and it s opening a lot of doors.
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So that gives me hope.
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One of the things that Florence explores really beautifully and deftly in Heartbreak is this period of life.
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She s a little bit older than I am, but the 40s and 50s and the way that so many women experience a massive transformation and shift where really I think women become
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more themselves and come to be more to themselves as society chooses to sideline or make older women invisible.
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Although I do feel like there is growing resistance against this.
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We desperately need our wise women to be reinstated and rethroned.
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And she writes,
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Ethnographer Howard Norman once told me about interviewing an Inuit woman who laid out her life story.
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He said to her, I see everything but the years from when you were 50 to 54.
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Oh, I have no words for those years, she replied.
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Why not?
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In those years, she told him, I was a polar bear.
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These are our polar bear years.
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Everything about us is changing physically, hormonally, emotionally.
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Our shifting roles and culture, work, and family upend our identities, even without divorce.
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I told Barnes about my own reluctant transition and my desire to market, recover from it, figure out what the hell comes next.
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She convinced me of the importance of setting clear intentions for my solo self, and I found myself reviewing them during the quiet stretches on Dezzo.
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Thanks for listening.
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I ll see you next week.
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If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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Or follow me on Instagram at EliseLoonan.
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And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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It s an exploration of how women have been conditioned for goodness, men for power, and all the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other according to these cultural ideas of what it is to be a good woman.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cayman s 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread.
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Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legrasso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Ali Brockman, and the entire Kedans13 team for producing these episodes, and to Valero Deval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next week.