Good Life Project - Dan Tomasulo | Learned Hopefulness

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

The incoming Academic Director and core faculty member at the Spirituality Mind Body Institute (SMBI), Teachers College, Columbia University, Dan Tomasulo holds a Ph.D. in psychology, MFA in writing, and a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He authors the daily column, Ask the Therapist, as well as the Learned Hopefulness blog for PsychCentral.com, and developed the Dare to be Happy experiential workshops for Kripalu. His award-winning memoir, American Snake Pit tells of the first experimental group home releasing inmates from America’s most notorious asylum, Willowbrook. His most recent book, Learned Hopefulness, The Power of Positivity To Overcome Depression (https://amzn.to/2WuXKFc), is needed now more than ever. Even more amazing, before heading into the world of psychology and writing, Dan started his career in comedy and was hailed by the legendary Improv as one of four top comics alongside people like Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman.You can find Dr. Dan Tomasulo at:Website : https://www.dantomasulo.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/drdantomasulo/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Okay, so how does a stand-up comic, Dan Tomasulo, hailed by the legendary improv as one of the four top comics, alongside people like Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman, end up leaving it all behind to pursue a PhD in psychology and MFA in writing, a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, then build a decades-long career in clinical practice, land a gig as the incoming academic director and core faculty member at the Spirituality Mind-Body Institute at Columbia University, and become a leading voice in the world of positive psychology, positive education, psychodrama, and positive psychotherapy. And how exactly along the way does that same person build a career as a writer,

penning an award-winning memoir, American Snake Pit, along with a companion screenplay that has since racked up awards at more than 30 film festivals, all while deepening into teaching, researching, helping thousands, and now bringing to the world a new book, Learned Hopefulness, the power of positivity to overcome depression at a time that we need these ideas more than ever. How does one person do all of this? And what is this thing he calls learned hopefulness? This is where we go in today's conversation. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations,

iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die.

Don't shoot him, we need him! y'all need a pilot flight risk so i was a comic i was a stand-up comic uh for years and um if you go back and look on the 20th anniversary of the improv uh they picked uh four top comics at the time you know it was robin Robin Williams. We had Andy Kaufman. We had, you know, it was all like that. And then four of us who were up and comers. And I was one of those guys. The other three have gone on to marvelous careers. And I have decided to blend a little bit of comedy with the real world. And during that time I was writing, but I was also finishing my PhD in psychology. So I was writing comedy. You know, it takes about an hour to write a minute of comedy. You have lots of bad jokes that don't seem to make it. And then performing, you know,

pretty much every night and then on the circuit a bit. And so what happened was this tear came. And the tear was sort of like, oh, geez, you know, to finish a PhD and then to be four in the morning in Hell's Kitchen doing comedy to a bunch of other comics, something had to give. And what gave was I got introduced to psychodrama. And that was back in 1980. And that just blew me away. It was like, oh, wait, I don't have to sacrifice, you know, what I love about performance and comedy and writing for psychology and vice versa. And so I was probably a little, you know, I thought I would

learn everything there is to know about psychodrama in about a year, but it took me 13 years postdoc to learn all that. And then that was very powerful. That opened me up to like the possibility of deeply exploring healing, the use of humor during therapeutic encounters. I ended up becoming a trauma expert and then a positive psychology. And I think the humor has informed it. And then somewhere along the line, I became more serious about writing because writing jokes takes, you know, a certain skill,

but writing a 1500 word essay is something a little more. And then, then I went back to the new school to get an MFA in writing because academic writing will destroy your brain. So I had to go back and get a little creative. Yeah. It's funny. I have, um, writing to me is still my first expressive a different way to write and freestyle and storytell. I'm curious about psychodrama because I don't entirely understand what it is. Can you share a bit more about that? Sure. Well, just a little historical perspective. So back in Vienna at the time of Freud, there was Jacob Levi Moreno. And Freud was trying to recruit people into his new movement on psychoanalysis. So Jung was part of that from Zurich.

And they tried to enlist Moreno as Moreno was developing this really theater-based approach to healing. And there's a famous encounter between Freud and Moreno where Freud tries to get him over, you know, to the psychoanalytic side. And what Moreno says, you put people on a couch and analyze their dreams. I put them on a stage and teach them to dream again. I think that was the last time they talked, you know. So, but just, you know, importantly, Moreno went on to be called the psychiatrist of the century in the same century as Freud, just to let you know his impact. He developed social network theory, which is what Facebook is based on. And really all forms of group therapy emanated from psychodrama. And it's an action-oriented form of therapy. So if you say you're upset with your mother in regular therapy, then we talk about

it for an hour. But in psychodrama, we'd put an empty chair and invite your mother into the room. And what happens during that kind of an encounter is that you're activating memory in a different way. And you're activating the possibility for transformation in a different way. Because it's what's called embodied cognition. It basically means when I play a role, and I play that role as deeply as possible, my brain changes. So what I became fascinated with is the idea that psychodrama can move very quickly and we can see healing things if it's done right in the same speed of time that you can see trauma happen. And so I applied it to people who've been traumatized, who had great, great difficulty to get some relief

sooner rather than later. Yeah. I mean, that's incredible. I know I'm familiar with like one of the modalities that's been talked about a number of times over the years in out of positive psychology, the gratitude visit. But I know you have an interesting variation, which until now I didn't realize, I guess, is steeped in sort of like the overlay between positive psychology then and psychodrama, which sort of like takes that same empty chair approach. Yeah. Well, man, you've done your homework. I'm impressed. Yeah.

I went through a really rough time about 10 years ago and nothing really worse than a depressed psychologist. People would talk to me about their depression and I'd be like, huh, you think you got it bad? You know, I didn't actually say that, but you know, I was in therapy and supervision. And then a friend of mine said, why don't you go see what Marty Seligman is doing over at UPenn? And I went. And when I got there, it was like, oh my goodness. I was originally trained as a researcher and I went, and when I got there, it was like, oh, my goodness. I was originally trained as a researcher, and I was like, man, if even a half of what they're doing is true, we've really got something, and I signed up for, you know, the master's program.

I didn't really need any of the academic degrees, but I figured I know me. If I'm not committed to something, I just won't get it, you know. And I went and, you know, saw Marty's work. And, you know, that was a big thing to study this gratitude visit where people, students, his students would write a letter of gratitude and then actually deliver them. And I remember like literally the first day saying to Marty, that's a great start, but what if the people you have gratitude for

aren't available anymore? They've passed on, you've lost track of them. We have this rich resource of gratitude that could be harvested if we did it in a psychodramatic way. So I started to experiment with that. Most of psychodrama was about unveiling and releasing negative emotions. And so most people have heard of that as a

catharsis. But when you go back and look at what Aristotle said, there was two kinds of catharsis. We never talk about the other one. There was a catharsis of ab reaction, which is basically a purging of negative emotions. But then there was this catharsis of integration. And integration basically is what happens when we have a positive emotion. When there's something really good that's going on, we want to find ways to bring it in and hang on to it. We don't want to purge that. So I developed this technique called the virtual gratitude visit. And basically what happens is that people will put an empty chair across from themselves and they'll identify who it is that they want to express gratitude toward.

And then they find the words that go with that. And it's extraordinary to watch. I've probably done 500 of these now. We do research on this sort of stuff. It's very powerful. And then what happens is they reverse roles and become the other person. See, that's the part positive psychology that hasn't really been fully embraced. And that's where I do a lot of my work. When you reverse roles, this embodied cognition allows you to receive the gratitude that you were sending. That is where the catharsis of integration happens. And then they come back to their own role and close it out. Can I just tell a quick story on this? Yeah, please. Yeah. So there's a, so Dan Lerner and Alan Schlechter have this great course at NYU and every semester I'm invited to do a virtual gratitude visit. It's usually around Thanksgiving in the fall and right after spring

break in the spring. And every year, it's 500 students. So it's an amphitheater. And I've had a lot of training in psychodrama. So I know how to set it up, get them ready, you know, blah, blah, blah. Then we pick a volunteer. A volunteer comes up. And inevitably, every semester for the last, I don't know, 10 years or how long the course is running, all the students and the people on stage, they're crying

once they do this thing. And I guess it was the last time I was there, someone had gotten special permission to come into the class and they wanted to see me do this thing. So the guy came in a little bit late and I was already right in the middle of this drama. And he opened the door and every single person is crying. And I could hear him because you could hear a pin drop. He goes, oh, I'm sorry. I thought this was positive psychology. And they go, yes, it is. So that's a catharsis of integration.

That's the way that stuff works. Yeah, I mean, so powerful. I haven't done this yet, but I actually want to do it. I'm going to spend some time trying to think about it. And also it's, I love that way you've taken a tool that was sort of like out there and explored. And, but there was this really one substantial blind spot, which is what if this person either through passing on or through geography or through just, you know, the complication of communication is not available to you to actually, you know, like be with, you know, you're the traditional approach to the gratitude visit where you, you know, like you actually have them and

you're like sharing your gratitude. You lose the, all of that potential to gain that same experience. But, and then the addition of being able to feel the integration side by switching roles, so powerful. Yeah. And it makes so much sense. But I think that's what sometimes happens, right? With different modalities, when you're sort of, you know, we tend to exist in silos to a certain extent, and we go narrow and deep into our field of expertise. And then when we have somebody who can sort of come into our orbit and say, well, this is fascinating. And, and I have expertise in this different, but complimentary thing of what happens if you couple the two together. Yeah. I think that's partly what has happened in the

fusion of my, my different backgrounds and skills is like, okay, so can we do this with writing? Can we do this with psychodrama? Can we take the best of what we know can happen with people and use it as an exemplar or create an experience where people aren't just learning about gratitude, like, you know, the charts and diagrams, but can they feel the transformation? You know, the clinical division of the International Positive Psychology Association has been very supportive and very kind when they've seen this work. And that's been very helpful as well, because along the way, I had won a couple of awards for doing something new, an Innovators Award and that kind of thing. And what I like about it is that, you know, a lot of people who are doing the research are giving us some incredible data. And I sort of see my role now is how can I make this come alive?

How can we take this and make it simple, accessible, powerful so that people have that capacity? Last year, by the way, in Australia, I did the flip side of the virtual gratitude visit. I don't know if it's quite the flip, but it was the embodied cognition version of self-compassion, because this is with another person, the virtual gratitude visit. But with self-compassion, you actually have an encounter with your benevolent self, that aspect of you, that part of you that would treat you like a good friend. And again, I just took the work that was there, Christine Neff's work on compassion, just beautiful work, but it really didn't include the use of a role reversal. Even some of her work had an empty chair kind of tucked in there, but it's the role reversal where you play both sides. And then what happens is you come back

to your space more whole. And that's really something to watch too. You see people kind of do a three to five minute role play. And when they're done, they're whole. And that's cool to watch. Yeah. And don't we need more of that these days? True enough. True enough. I'm curious about the writing also you mentioned. You eventually went back and you got your MFA.

That was at the New School. And I believe you also either were taught by or mentored by somebody who's an old friend of mine and a friend of the show, Danny Shapiro. Oh, yeah, sure. She was my she she was extraordinary. And my mentor at the at the new school. Very, very wonderful woman. Yeah. So part of my fascination is that the choice to go back and get an MFA in writing. I mean, granted, you have a lot of degrees now. But, you know, that's not, I understand the desire to learn how to work with words to help is just a joy, a love of writing, a love of creative expression, a love of storytelling.

Because, you know, it shows up not just in the fact that you've penned memoirs, but also books and playwriting and screenwriting. And so this is independent of its sort of utility in, you know, helping figure out how to get people better outcomes, it sounds like it is a true creative channel for you as well. Yeah. My father wanted me to go into the electrical union when I was a teenager, because I really wasn't college material. And so I failed the test to go into the electricians union. So we had friends and they tried to get me into the carpenters union, the tin knockers union. And I remember taking the test for the plumbers union where they escorted me out of the building. They said, you know, this young man should be allowed to flush a toilet by himself,

but if he has to fill a tub, there should be assistance, you know. So I didn't really have any other skills. And I somehow, I went to college on a little wrestling thing, which didn't last very long. But I remember taking the creative writing course and I was like, they teach courses in this? Telling stories? This is awesome, you know? And I didn't realize the power of it. I knew that writing was something that was inside of me and, you know, wanting to communicate stories. But there's a big difference between telling a story verbally and writing a story and then communicating a tale. These are just different skill sets. And I knew I had some ability with that, but I was also very much aware of some of my favorite writers. You know, you look at David Sedaris and it's like, oh, my goodness, you know, and even people, crossover folks like Oliver Sacks or Irvin Yalom, when you see that you can have people who are deeply informed at one level who can tell stories for transformation, that just ignited me. And so I went to a new school. I'm glad I went when I did. I think I went in the first year they had opened. I don't think I could get in now, to tell you the truth. It's so evolved. But I went in and I'll tell you

the training there was extraordinary. And after the first year, I was kind of like known as, oh, it's the psychologist guy who tells jokes. And so it was, you know, and then I got to Lucy Greeley's class, Anatomy of a Face. You know, we had to take memoir classes and Danny's class and memoir. And Lucy said, you're not going to pass my course unless you write the darkest thing you've ever written. And I said, then I'm not going to pass your course. I don't really need the degree. I don't care about the course. We had a little back and forth. And she was like, well, it's okay with me. It's just like, you already know how to write something funny, but I don't think you've had enough experience writing about something dark. So she challenged me and I told her, okay, you want dark? I live all day in dark.

I'll do that. So for this whole semester, I wrote one story. And this story was about the night my cousin died of an overdose of heroin. And this story had no landing gear. It goes from that moment where we're having about as much fun as you can have having dinner. And then he goes home, shoots up, dies. And the next morning I'm at his wake. And my life, I was in that PhD program. I was doing comedy. I was doing all that. And so I wrote that story and I said, there you go, Lucy, you want dark? You got dark. And she submitted that for the university prize and it won. He worked at a bar called Kettle of Fish, the famous dive bar in New York City. And that was the title of the story. And that's what got me an agent and got me this and that. And, you know, and so Danny, Danny

Shapiro was just an extraordinary person because she was on the other side of that. You know, she was helping me like think things through more thoroughly, more deeply deeply using different elements of story to make a point and so yeah I could be funny but it doesn't matter after a while unless you have a punctuation point and so my first memoir uh confessions of a former child included that story about my cousin and everybody when they read that book appreciated the, but it was the balance of the pathos that gave it the richness. So I can't say enough good things about the new school or Danny Shapiro. Yeah. And what I mean to be able to work with both Lucy and Danny sort of like at the same time. I mean, two legends in this space with just so such deep wisdom and so much to share.

It must have been so impactful. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. It's so interesting also that the idea of you being able to tell, you know, like that particular story and being wired for comedy. Like one of the things that popped into my mind as you were just sharing that was Hannah Gadsby's performance. Not the,

not the recent one, Douglas, the one before them, just now blanking on what the name was, where she goes from making people, you know, like really laugh then to going to a very painful, dark experience that was absolutely extraordinary, that left people in tears. And maybe they showed up thinking that they were going to a comedy show. But to the one, people who I've known who have seen that have been just profoundly moved and been thankful for the experience.

And I think there's such an interesting line and it's so thin between those two extremes, you know, like that the extreme darkness and, and just pure humor and dancing between those in a way, which is cathartic and integrative, right. To go back to what we were talking about, I think, what a powerful skillset to be able to develop. I remember being so fascinated with George Carlin, you know, and,

you know, from my era, my time, you know, you start looking at people like Car breath and then you know take the a transition or a bridge comment and take you all the way back to see something uh so uncomfortable and um again you know uh i was a george carlin freak and uh you know he passed away before his his book had been finished, which was a memoir. His brother actually reads it and his brother sounds very much like him. But part of the interview and part of the material that he had, he talked about the fact that as he matured as a comic, he learned to put people into very, very, very uncomfortable places and then give them a release. And the comedy ended up being a way to sort of pulsate the emotions, which I think has tremendous value because he could talk about abortion or, you know, problems in the church. He could talk about all or, you know, problems in the church.

He could talk about all this stuff and make people almost cringe and then tell this, you know, ridiculous story or this anecdote that was just hysterical. if you if you remember but they have something called comedy cover where they have actors portray other actors doing comics like classic comics so i i forget who it was but they were doing al with the night he died uh they they had uh he an actor doing al pacino uh mimicking a story of ge George Carlin's talking about baseball. They gave him a baseball in an Al Pacino voice. So that stuff intrigues me. I'm going to have to check that out now. Actually, I had never heard of that before.

So all of this really swirls together to create sort of like a blend, this beautiful sort of combination of interests, expressions, impact for you. You mentioned earlier that about a decade ago or so, you personally landed in a dark place and really, I think, had to revisit, well, how do I, not only how do I be of service to, you know, to a, you know, daily clients as they show up, but how do I, how do I, you know, like now that I'm the client, the patient, now that I'm in this space, how do I emerge from that? And it sounds like that was around the time that also the foundation, the early work around what you've now come to call learned hopefulness really begins to emerge.

Yeah, I think one of the things that I've noticed as a pattern in my life that I wouldn't have known was a pattern because I think when you're living it, it's just the next damn thing that comes up. You know, you're not really preparing yourself in such a way. But just like I started before talking about, I'm really not going to be a tradesman. I don't have that skill. I don't think that way, you know, that kind of thing. And sort of having the door shut on you. And then somehow a little squeak opens up. Okay, well, you're going to go do this now. And then this little tiny, you know, fragment of light says, oh, come over in this direction. Then you get there and maybe that isn't what you thought it would be.

But it opens up yet another door and another door. So I've learned to know it's important to honor the pain that it's there. And it's probably a lesson of some kind for you to cope with. And, you know, on the furthest end of the extreme of that kind of discomfort is, is there something about me being able to tolerate this that's important to learn? Is this something that I have to end my experience with and move on? Or does this start a quest for me looking for a better way? So it's taking a deep sense of honoring pain as a teacher and then a motivator. And then just like a rocket ship would have a booster rocket that falls away, it gives a boost. And then once you get away from the Earth's gravity, something else pulls you. That's been my

experience that I'm often motivated by profound discomfort. And this discomfort then ignites a spark that has to be dealt with in one way, shape or form. And then, you know, as you collect more and more of these experiences, you learn, do I stay too long in uncomfortable situations? Probably. But it's also helped me gain tremendous tolerance for other people's pain. So, you know, it's like, it's not always all bad, all good, but you develop a it's like, it's not always all bad, all good, but you, you develop a way of thinking about it that can be very helpful to move you along to the next step. Yeah. I mean,

I'm, so I'm, I'm familiar with the concept of learned helplessness. Hope is interesting, learned hopefulness. And the fact that it actually fact that actually to be able to think about, okay, so you started from a place of darkness, your own struggle that launched you into this deeper exploration, which, you know, years over the process of years built into theory and practice and tools to work towards this thing called learned hopefulness. What are we actually talking about here? What is this thing? Yeah, so again, I was just very lucky. I went to, you know, UPenn at the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology

and, you know, was a student. And literally the day that I graduated, the next day, Marty invited me, Marty Seligman invited me to become his assistant. So I've been in that role for about 10 years. And the glorious part of that was, you know, we got every year now, every semester, I was exposed to the latest, hottest, newest research, all the best folks in the field coming to speak at UPenn and, you know, being able to talk with Marty about a wide variety of things. And then about three or four years ago now, I was invited to a lecture that he was giving with Steve Mayer. And this lecture was a 50-year follow-up. Imagine that these two guys were roommates at Penn back in the day.

They did this incredible research on helplessness. It explodes, changes the world of psychology. And basically, those original experiments were animals and then humans. They would put them in an uncomfortable situation, an aversive situation. And in this situation, they were exposing them to chronic adverse situations where they couldn't get out of them. No matter what they did, they were just stuck. So it was all kinds of situations. But basically, if it went on for a while, you would see the animals get really agitated in the beginning. Then they would just basically give up and they would

collapse. And then they would put them later on in a situation where it should be very easy for them. You know, they would put them in a cage where this floor would get electrified and they would jump over this very low partition. They should be able to escape it. It's called an escape paradigm that they use. But what happened is when they were exposed to something that unpleasant, they gave up instantly. They wouldn't do anything. They would just cry and whimper and lay down and stay in a bad place. So here we have this incredible paradigm that blew everybody away because it showed that if you had this kind of learning where nothing you did mattered in this situation,

that it would transfer over to future situations and create learned helplessness, right? Marty's book came out 1975 it blew the world away changed how we think about depression because it was about getting control and and cha-cha-cha so i go to this class and uh 50 year follow-up now back in the 60s and early 70s when they were doing this they didn't have fmris they didn't know what was, back in the 60s and early 70s, when they were doing this, they didn't have fMRIs. They didn't know what was going on in the brain. They had to make guesses about all this. Well, now they know. And what they realized is that they were completely wrong about the theory. I had read the paper, but listening to them, here are two of these extraordinary researchers,

made an incredible career, changed the world. So Nat, we're wrong. So it's one thing if somebody else challenges your theory, but when you're so dedicated to truth, that you say, yeah, we didn't know this back then, but here's what's happening. And they created this situation where they were able to watch what happens in the brain when you're exposed to something aversive. And it's aversive and it's chronic. And what happens is there's literally like a switch in your brain that shuts you down. It's just like my laptop here or my cell phone. If it gets overheated, it's going to shut down to preserve itself. It's like, no, the conditions here are not good.

Let's not waste our energy. We're built for survival. So if we're in a crummy situation for a long enough period of time, we're going to shut down. But now the intriguing part is when you're in another situation, what are you going to do? Well, you're not unlearning something because nothing was learned in the first paradigm. It was really an evolutionary response, right? So now you're in a new situation. And in this new situation, it's risk assessment of the future.

So the example I can give you is like if I'm about to cross the street, right? And I start to cross the street and I get clipped by a green car and it breaks my leg. They take me to the hospital. I'm in there for a couple of weeks. When I come out and I go to cross the street, I am going to be a little bit, you know, wondering what can I do? What can I do? What can I do? If I find myself right back at the same corner I was where I got hurt, there's nothing about the past that I have to unlearn. I'm going to start making a risk assessment of, can I get to the other side of

this street now in this moment? Are there any cars coming now? The risk assessment is a prospection. It's the future. It's not about the past. The past might inform it, but what's going to pull me forward is if I can make an assessment about the future and then believe I have control over it. And they called this loop in the brain that shuts off and turns back on the hope circuit. I remember them saying it and I almost bolted out of my seat. It's like, sorry, I have to go write this book. So that was the origin of it. That was the inspiration. And then I just reviewed all the research on hope and all the theories. And I found they were all like the blind man holding the elephant.

You know, the one guy grabs the tail and says, oh, hope looks like a rope. The other guy grabs the leg and says it looks like a tree. The other guy grabs the ear and says it looks like a bird. And I said, well, instead of me challenging all these theories, what if they're all right, but they just have different pieces of it? What would hope look like if what we know from medicine and we know from social psychology and we know from educational psychology and character development personality, what if they were all right? What would hope look like? And then that's where learned hopefulness came from. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of the integration of all these different worlds, but also the, you know, the underlying, the awakening that it's not a process of unlearning and relearning. It's really a process of activating

to a certain extent. And also that it is an intentional thing. You know, like there are decisions that you can make, there are tools that you can use, and there are actions that you can take to go from a place of having, you know, like feeling like you've given up to actually a very different place, which is interesting too, because, you know, if we think about, you know, in a clinical setting, so many people who are living with depression, and one of the huge overlays with that is this feeling that this will never end. Like this is in fact the way I'm going to feel forever. There's a vanishing of hope from that experience. So if the idea that you could potentially do things that would reactivate hope, which

isn't going to cure you immediately, but maybe that's the thing that allows you to start to see a sense of possibility in that setting. And then, you know, that's super powerful. And then I guess my broader curiosity too is, you know, we as a society, as we have this conversation, we are living through a moment, you know, we have layers of things that are both happening now on a public health level, and that have been going on for generations and generations and generations on a systemic oppression level. And I wonder how this reframe works in the context of those bigger things too.

So it's like my curiosity spans, you know, the immediate experience of somebody who is in some way suffering to this much broader experience of like is this involved in some way reshaping larger change at scale yeah boy there's a lot lot there that's like a 15 layer question so but let me let me just start at the core you used a great word about intention and and i think if we can just hold on to that for a moment, because if we try to understand the origin of someone's intention, it? And because the intention is really based on a belief. And everything we know in psychology that has to do with well-being or devastation

has to do with belief systems. And so it was William James who said, my experience is what I agree to attend to. So now it's like we have lots of possibilities about what we're going to believe, right? But the question becomes, what are we going to pay attention to? This is sort of like, where am I going to shine my light? You know, if I walk into a dark room and I shine the light on the floor and I see mouse droppings and bugs and things like that, my interpretation of the entire room is that it's infested in bad and negative, right? But if I take that same light and I shine it on

the wall and there's a marvelous, marvelous work of art, Monet or Rembrandt. And oh my goodness, that's what this room is holding. So the question becomes, how do we do what I call belief modification? You know, in the 60s, we had behavior modification. It's like belief modifications at the core of this. And our beliefs are, they're so central to our health and well-being politics social development they're so central to it that we can all not see the forest for the trees kind of thing if you take a look at something like medicine right and a new drug well what what do the pharmaceutical companies have to go up against in order to prove that this medicine is good or important or valuable? Well, they have to go up against our belief system. They have to go up against the placebo effect, right?

And what is the placebo effect? It's people believing that something has property to it. So the belief system in a placebo is that there's something good that's going to happen here. And in a nocebo effect, which is the opposite of that, it's like something bad. And if you've ever gotten a new drug or medicine or something like that, you Google it and you read the side effects, you're going to get all those side effects. So part of it is to help people recognize that they have a choice and that not to make a decision to change is a decision to remain the same. Either way, there's an incipient moment that we can either repeat or we can challenge.

And bringing that core awareness to people's attention is really what Learned Hopefulness is about. To recognize when you're making a decision to do things the way they were being done, that's a choice and something that can change. And, you know, a lot of the different exercises and things that are introduced there are about helping people challenge their perceptions so that change is possible. Yeah. I mean, you also make a really interesting distinction between hope and faith, which I thought was fascinating. Yeah, yeah. Well, people use hope, optimism, and faith in the same breath, like they're all the same. And while I understand that, and I've certainly done that myself over the years,

I had to learn the nuances. So with hope, you're saying that, I believe I can influence the future. I can have an effect on that. I can control it. I can do something about the future. I can make something happen. That's very different than optimism, where you are just under the belief that something

good is going to happen tomorrow. I think it's going to work out. There's no sense of agency there. There's no sense of personal pathway that you can make something happen. It's something good. It's more generic. forces that are going to manage the outcome, not you. You're going to have power and control up to a point. And then something else, it could be a government, it could be a higher power, it could be other people, could be your parents. It depends on where you are and what format that is. But at some point, you have to recognize that what you can control is no longer going to influence the future, something else will. You know, there was a great

interview back in the day for Catfish Hunter. He was a pitcher into the Hall of Fame. And he talked about all of his training. And he talked, oh, you know, how he took care of his arm and worked out in the off season and this and that. And, you know, practice in different weather and, you know, in the rain and this and that so that he would be prepared. And I remember listening to this interview and he said, but at some point. I've got to let go of that ball and then I don't have any more control. So I want to bring as much control to that moment as possible. Then I have to let it go. And I thought, oh, man, what a wonderful metaphor for life. Yeah. Kind of like the serenity prayer to a certain extent. Very,

very true. Very, very true. Right. That's why that prayer has been around for a very long time. Yeah. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology. It's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA.

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later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. It's interesting to me also, one of the things I learned is sort of exploring life satisfaction and is this sense of intentionality, a sense of agency, and the phrase locus of control. We tend to do better, to flourish more, to thrive,

when we feel like that we have some ability to exert control over the outcome that we seek to achieve. And yet, you know, other data shows that when you look at communities of faith, they very often register amongst the highest in terms of being satisfied and content with their lives. And they have probably also the highest amount of a certain surrender of a sense of locus of control and just, you know, really leaning much more towards the faith side of the spectrum. So it's interesting to me that you can, you sort of like have those two things going on simultaneously. You know, it's really been interesting and something has, has just, just happened that I'll just share where I've been invited to become the academic director for the spirituality mind body Institute of Columbia.

So I I've been teaching there pretty much right from the beginning and they invited me to come and you know, sort of help move that program out into the community and offer workshops and that kind of thing. So that's been really lovely. But it's also given me pause for thought about this blend between positive psychology and faith and religion and, you know, all of this kind of stuff, because I'm in a position now where I'm working with religious leaders and spiritual leaders and like that. And along the way, they invited me to speak at St. Patrick's Cathedral, which blew my mind. It was like, holy mackerel.

Which for those non-New Yorkers, this is this legendary, legendary place in the middle of Manhattan. And I remember walking in and thinking, oh my goodness, you know, I wish my mom was alive now. I don't know that, you know, and I think even my father would have said, yeah, you know, you didn't become an electrician, but at least you're speaking at this place. So that was really intriguing. And they had invited me in to talk about the difference between hope and faith. And I think one of the things that I really wanted to share during that presentation was this idea that there's a sort of a handshake between the two, that you have to be doing your part. Hope is a matter of staying engaged and being able to achieve your goals, have purpose, you know, move forward. And at the same time, recognize that it's like faith holding its hand out to you. That once you can show that you're moving in the right direction and you can feel

that, that's basically an extension of saying you're doing the right thing, not just for you, but for the greater good. And that to me is probably the next area I'll take a look at, this idea of how hope and faith intersect. Yeah, I think it's kind of a fascinating interplay. One of the things that I think is really interesting also in sort of the exploration of hope, I know that you've referenced numerous times, is that hope, and tell me if I'm getting this right, hope actually requires uncertainty, which is a little counterintuitive. But then when you go deeper, you're like, oh, no, I think I understand that. But it's almost like a prerequisite to hope.

Tell me more. Sure. I think when you start to study positive psychology and positive emotions, it's sort of like, woohoo. It's like, OK, we're going to figure out about how to have more joy in your life, more happiness in your life. But the thing that really piqued my interest was that hope is the only positive emotion that requires negativity or uncertainty to be activated. See, if I'm not uncertain or negative, I don't need hope. If I am

sure of what's about to come and I'm okay with it and I'm, you know, I don't need hope because that's not even on the table. But the uncertainty and negativity is an activator. And once you have that degree of activation, that becomes this incipient moment, this moment of choice. What are you going to do with this uncertainty and negativity? You know, in Mandarin, there's a symbol for crisis is opportunity and danger. And I took a deeper look at where that came from. And really what it means is there's a moment here of choice that you have to make. What is it are you going to do when you're confronted with this negativity or this uncertainty? And that choice

point is a decision. You're either going to decide to see this as an opportunity and a challenge and move toward it, or you're going to collapse under the weight of it. And that's that fulcrum point between learned hopefulness and learned helplessness. It's like, I'm going to shut down from this because I don't think I can have any effect. Or I'm going to start recalibrating my goals. I'm going to start seeing this as a challenge. What can I do to bring about a change? And that spot ends up being, to me, super, super fascinating. Super fascinating. Yeah. And I mean, doesn't it in a way also circle back to that original, using your language, the fulcrum between comedy and tragedy?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I feel like I'm just sort of haptically going through life, sort of feeling my way, you know, it's like, oh, wow, there's a pattern here, you know, you know, it's, and, and I don't think it's, you know, if I take a look at the larger thing, I was a trauma expert, now positive psychologist, it's like, oh yeah, I guess it's, you know, but there's a great saying in Buddhism, you know, you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other. So I don't talk about positive psychology now without talking about the difficulties, you know,

and I don't talk about trauma without talking about the hope that comes with it. So I think that that's a very astute observation on your part. Yeah, one of the other things that you explore So I think that that's a very astute observation on your part. Yeah. One of the other things that you explore and you write about your most recent work is this idea of the role of noticing beauty, noticing blessings, and how we tend to arrive at whatever moment we're in in our lives, wired through experience and whatever it is that brings us to that moment with often profoundly different noticing skills, like the things that we actually see. And I guess it speaks to what you were talking about before also to a certain extent, you look down and then you look against the wall. But I think my curiosity around this also is that

I wonder if we don't realize that those around us, even those closest to us, who we feel we know best in the world, may be wired profoundly differently. And we almost don't understand how they could not see things the way we see them. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, in some of the things

like we talked about a little earlier with the virtual gratitude visit, this idea of embodied cognition at its core is a role reversal. And that means to try and understand what it is that other people are experiencing. There's a really deep ignorance for most of us, myself included, about what's going on with the other person. Most of the therapy that I do and most of the work that I do now is about trying to understand what is that person's experience. I don't have to agree with it. I don't have to agree with it. I don't have to, you know, sanction it. But I'm not going to be helpful or effective or informed unless I can fully take that perspective. That was one of the other person, being the other person for a

while so that you understand it experientially. Then when you come back to being you, you're transformed. You're awakened in a way that you can't do cognitively. If I just say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what your experience is like. No. But if I have a little taste of it, a little bit of that reality, now I have, oh, oh, that's an affective learning experience. Now I get it. Now I understand it. Now I understand it. And I think that's been very much missing in education, very much missing in university work, because there's a lot of education that's done academically, which is certainly needed. But I'm of the mind that that's good. Let's put it into an experience where people can feel what it feels like,

just even if it's for a moment, because now that's going to inform your awareness in a very different way. Yeah. And that makes so much sense to me. How powerful would it be if that was actually something that was built into every college age student's experience in a meaningful way, some sort of, you know, like guided, um, intelligently well-formed experience that, uh, lets you do that. And, and maybe with, you know, a range of people who, um, you saw both as being very similar to you and also radically different to you. And then, you know, being able to go through a process and, you know, like, okay, so let's take a semester and every week we're going to like pick different people.

I can't even begin to imagine how people would be changed by an experience like that. Absolutely. I'll just share two projects that I'm immersed in now that are along these lines. I'll talk about the first one. My second memoir was called American Snake Pit, Hope, Grit, and Resilience in the Wake of Willowbrook. And what I wanted to do there was tell the stories of transformation that people who, you know, on the average had IQs around 40, had a secondary psychiatric disorder, and who were in the worst asylum in American history. And they had created an experiment to bring them out into the community only so that it would fail and they go back in.

So spoiler alert, if you haven't read the book, they do much better than anybody thought. And so I wanted to write those stories. And I also did the screenplay for American Snake Pit because I really believe that if people can see exemplars and this is a this is a social justice book. I mean, I did all the research on the legal background, the Willowbrook Decree, and what happened in New York State because of it. A lot of people don't know that mental health became a civil right in the United States because of the Willowbrook Decree. In other words, they couldn't put anybody in any institution, in a prison, in a nursing home, any institution without having mental health rights. That's where that came from. And, you know, we can talk about the legal stuff and, you know, you've been through enough of the legal things to know that that can be pretty tedious and difficult. But can we tell

a story and can we show a video? Can we show a movie that awakens people's spirit and ignites their own transformational properties? Because that to me is a way of reversing roles too. I might not have had their life, but if I can see a movie and if it's done well enough, if that story is told well enough, I am going to resonate with that story in a way that's going to awaken my story. And now we've got something that's very powerful because you can't watch something like that and not be moved and not be transformed. And that's where I think we have great movies that give you a little glimpse into the life of another person. That storytelling, that I'm really interested in, because we might not always be able to reverse roles. But if the story is well done, movie is well done, you're going to be able to live in that space for a little while and then come on out with an informed opinion. And the second thing I'll mention is we're taking the elements of

the virtual gratitude visit. I'm working with people from the Actors Studio to take the experiential theater to another level where we can set it up properly so that people could have a theatrical experience, an engagement with someone else's real world authentic drama in a very brief period of time, but they'll be moved by it and inspired to do their own work. So I think there are ways, my point about that is that there are ways through storytelling and theater that can help us reverse roles with others, even if we can't live their life, we can understand that at a deep level. Yeah, so agree. It is, I hadn't even really thought of theater as that, but for sure the most profound theater that I've seen

does that to me. I mean, what's the name of the show? The Dog. Oh yeah, Curious Incident. Curious Case of the Dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, this is, you know, effectively a one person or just a couple of, you know, like people

and somebody whose life experience was radically different than mine. And yet the whole time I left changed. Sure. You know, it was just super powerful. The one other thing that sort of surfaced for me looking through certainly your work on hopefulness also is the role of expectation, which I think is kind of fascinating

and how that really has a strong effect. Absolutely. In doing the research for learned hopefulness, I went back and I looked at the studies in hypnosis back in the 60s. And there was some extraordinary stuff. It's carried forward. But in one series of studies, they had hypnotized people and told them that they're doing this experiment on pain thresholds and blah, blah, blah, and that they were going to touch them with a very hot coal and that, you know, they're not going to break the skin, but they're, you know, they're going to be touched with this hot coal and they get them ready. They put them in this trance, right?

And then they touch them with an ice cube. And what happens is they blister up. So you start to think about that for a minute. It was like, oh my goodness. Now we have all other kinds of studies where the expectation itself transforms us biochemically. So they have studies on allergens where they say, oh, this is indeed a ragweed. It's not. And they say, you're going to get this. And vice versa.

They'll take something that has the active allergen and tell people that it's not. And they say, oh, okay, yeah, I don't get the symptoms. The power of expectation peels back to the power of belief. It comes back to Henry Ford, right? Believe you can, believe you can't, either way you'll be right. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing because I think,

it's actually, I think people could probably make the leap between, okay, so my expectation about how something will unfold, I can see how that would track back to me even less than consciously changing my behavior so that I'm more likely to

play an active role in making it unfold a particular way or not. But the notion that simply the expectation of a certain experience or outcome will actually potentially change our biochemistry, our physiology, is both freaky and cool. Do we have time for a quick experiment? It won't take very long. So I'll just ask people, as long as you're not driving a car or something like that, to close your eyes for a moment. And I'd like you to imagine a lemon

that is in front of you on the table. And as you see the lemon, you become aware that there's a very slight wisp of a smell of lemon in the air. Now I'd like you to imagine cutting that lemon in half. And as you do, you'll see little bits of lemon juice come on out. And the smell of lemon actually gets a little bit stronger. And if you pick up half of that lemon, I'd like you to put it right under your nose.

Take that half a lemon and really take in a deeper smell of it right now, and if you would, I'd like you to just bite right into that half a lemon. Grind your teeth into it. Bite right into it, and if you'd open your eyes, my guess is you produce saliva. If you bit into that imaginary lemon and produce saliva, you've changed your biochemistry just by imagining this. There's no lemon, there's no smell. You just allowed yourself to focus on that and it changed your biochemistry can you imagine what

happens when we're having ruminating negative thoughts it's generating almost pure cortisol our adrenals are pumping all of this biochemistry through us because we're worried constantly about it so it's like we're chewing on lemons 24-7 when we're ruminating. And by the way, I'll just tell you the flip side of this. Normally when I do this, I have people imagine somebody they love and that that person is right in front of them and they get a warm feeling in their chest. And I had a student last semester said, so it's really about lemons or lovers. I was like, yeah, kind of, that's it. That's pretty much. Yeah. I'm just so fascinated by how, by the sort of like seamless feedback

loop between our state of mind and our state of physiology and how that can then manifest in everything from hope to depression to illness to positive outcomes and actions in our lives. And even things, I'm fascinated by how we're so unaware of the link between so many things. I remember reading research that showed that people who were holding a cup that was either filled with cold water or a warm beverage and then introduced to somebody new were far more likely to have warm feelings to like the person if they were holding a warm beverage.

And to feel that the person was cold and distant if they were holding a cold glass of water. And we're like, are we really that sort of like simple? Apparently we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's so many different levels of studies on perception and how it influences us and some of it like that, some of it visual. You know, that's the other thing I'll just say about the news. You know, I've been a very strong advocate for people to limit their news watching, because if you're bombarded with negativity, you know, there's a saying in the news, if it bleeds, it leads, right? So if you sit down and are listening to the negativity, watching the images from that without a cap on it. One of

the things that will happen, just like you said, you know, if we could be influenced by the temperature of water and our interaction with others, what happens if we're exposed to, you know, I belong to the media group for psychologists, you know, in Division 46 at the APA. And we say every year, don't show the images of 9-11. You re-traumatize folks. Well, the truth is a lot of the material that's out there can be re-traumatizing. And if you keep it to about 15 minutes a day, tops, you get all the news you need. You get everything.

You'll get updates and probably if you read it it's a little better than being in front of the the imagery because the imagery then influences us another way i'm not asking you to not be informed but to manage your stimulus activation of that because you can stay informed but not overwhelm yourself yeah that makes perfect sense um starting to zoom out a little bit um as we start to bring our conversation closer to an end um and i want to zoom the lens out again to what we kind of touched on a little bit earlier which is like these ideas, maybe even this idea of expectation in the context of the moment that we're in, where, you know, I've had fascinating conversations lately with people who, honestly, for decades or generations, have looked at the state of our culture, of society, of race of uh all these different things that are playing into it and done the work and yet at the same time said they simultaneously don't really have any hope of change and and what the conversations with some of those same people

very recently has changed not that they believe that we are going to see um large-scale change but there's this slightest glimmer that hope has entered the building. Yes. Right. And that there's an, there's not even an expectation that things will change, but there's this expectation that maybe they won't stay the same. And I'm curious how, I'm just curious about how that plays into our experience at the moment.

Well, you know, when I have this thing called the 21 Day Hope Challenge that is based on a host of interventions, most of which are in the book. But the idea about it is that there are seven for the past, seven for the present and seven for the future. And a lot of people don't think about positive psychology in terms of like interventions they just what can I do to feel better but when you break it down there are things from our past that can be extremely helpful for us to go back and re-harvest so the gratitude we have for what happened yesterday that's very specific just Just thinking about that again, changes our chemistry in the moment. It elongates that positivity and brings that forward.

And things like unforgiveness. So people have a pain from the past and they, if they hold onto it, it sort of becomes an inhibitor. So there's like seven of those have to develop that you go back and you can either activate and extend a positive emotion and bring it more into the present, or you can release something that's been an inhibitor. When we get to the present, there's a host of things that can happen there, something called dispositional mindfulness, flow, things that bring us right into the moment. But the number one thing is kindness.

The kindness has got this big bang for the buck. I remember Marty Seligman being asked at a conference, you know, you know everything about depression. What's the fastest way to get out of a depression? He never missed a beat. He said, do something kind for someone else. This idea that kindness can change not only our internal focus, but our external interaction is really powerful because an act of kindness, it comes with it, something called elevation. Elevation is a phenomenon in positive psychology where we seem to be wired for noticing the good stuff.

But it's sort of latent because we're overwired for the bad stuff. If you see a woman helping a man cross the street because he's elderly, you'll notice that and feel this warm feeling. But if there's a guy yelling at a cop because he just got a parking ticket and his voice is escalating and getting closer to the cop and you see that, that's going to hijack your attention because it's a threat with kindness. If we engage in an act of kindness, we're going to feel good. The person receiving it's going to feel good. But the big bang for the buck is that anybody witnessing it will feel just about as good, have just as much change in their vagal tone and biochemistry as the people engaged in it. So this, the one thing that you can do is be kind. And there's actually a protocol that I write about that it's five acts of kindness in one day. And you pick

one day a week. My day is Thursday. So, you know, this means if you drop the book on Wednesday, I say, I wish I could help you, but no, no, no. It's that I just become very focused on that day. You do five acts of kindness in that one day. And what happens is it elevates your awareness to kindness around you. You start noticing it more and it kind of pulls you out of your own dark space yeah love that so it feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well so hanging out together in this container of the good life project if i offer up the phrase to live a good life what comes up to to the quote I used earlier by William James, my experience is what I agree to attend to.

And for a good life, attend to the things that you want to see happen. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life?

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