Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Hard Feelings: Daniel Smith on Embracing Shame, Envy, Annoyance, and the Wisdom in Dark Emotions

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

In this compelling episode, Dr. David Puder sits down with New York Times bestselling author and psychotherapist Daniel Smith to explore his latest book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions. They dive deep into the often-avoided world of "negative" emotions like shame, envy, and annoyance, revealing how these hard feelings carry profound wisdom rather than being obstacles to banish. Drawing from Smith's personal experiences, they discuss double binds, screen memories, dissociation, and the freezing response that shame can trigger. The conversation also covers annoyance as a temperament trait tied to highly sensitive, hyperpermeable nervous systems, noise sensitivity struggles, links to traits like idealization/devaluation in borderline patterns, and much more. Listen now for raw, insightful reflections on emotional authenticity and mental health.   By listening to this episode, you can earn 2.0 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog Link to YouTube video

All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Daniel Smith. He is a psychotherapist in New York. He is also a New York Times bestselling author. Previously, he wrote Muses, Mad Men, and Prophets, and Monkey Mind. And today, I'm going to be talking about a book he wrote called Hard Feelings. Daniel Smith is someone I know. He is a psychotherapy cohort member. So, you know, weekly we get to hang out, talk about reflective function, talk about psychotherapy. We've been doing that for about seven months now, so I feel like I know Daniel Smith pretty well. And today we're going to be talking about envy, annoyance, and emotion. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So you said this was a hard book for you to write. In the email, you said it was a very difficult book. Yeah.

Yeah, it was hard in a bunch of different ways. You mentioned two books I'd written before. The first one, Muses Mad Men and Prophets, was about hearing voices, the experience of hearing voices, and partly memoristic in that my father heard voices. There were like, and I was very young, I was in my 20s when I wrote it, so there were difficulties there in sharing what was essentially the family secret. Monkey Mind was easier because it was, I mean, there's no,

easy book to write, but it was straight memoir. And it was a little, I was able to be a little bit more humorous. And it was about one subject and had sort of a clear mission, which was, I looked around and I was like, there are no, there are lots of mental health memoirs, but weirdly at that time, there had been, I think only one other memoir I know of about anxiety and none that I thought adequately described what it feels like to kind of go through the world in a body that's hardwired for that particular experience. So the mission seemed pretty clear, and the narrative arc was clear. It was kind of structured like a class of comedy, right?

Like it was going to end, it was going to end with a marriage, my marriage to my first wife. So I knew the arc. But this book, it ended up being like seven or eight books in one. Because I knew that there were particular emotions that I wanted to die. into but each um diving into each emotion was opening up an entire new world and delving into the literature of each one was kind of like starting starting anew so I kept having this feeling like I was like I was writing many books all at once and that's I mean that's one of the things that made it Arjoum's another one is that you

mentioned I'm in this cohort with you and I'm a fairly new therapist so I went to graduate school while writing this book sort of made the decision a few years in of writing this book to go back and become a therapist and becoming a therapist changes a whole lot of things including one's angle of approach how people view you the sense of vulnerability you feel when being autobiographical essentially self-disclosing in between the covers of a book. So there were all sorts of things

that made this book like a lot, a lot weirder and harder and more prolonged. Yeah, you are a therapist, I can tell, from your writing, but you also are a writer, which I think, like for those of you who, after this, get to enjoy the book, it's not like you're reading a psychotherapist write about stuff.

It's colorful. It's very honest. It's like palpably, you know, I think a good writer can draw you in to a memory, to a time period and kind of make you feel what it felt like. Actually, I should probably, I was thinking I might read a little bit to kind of like get people into some of the experiential piece of it here. Okay, here we go. An early memory, I am seven or eight years old. My father and I are at a stationary store in a nearby strip mall, buying gum or crowns or stickers.

I have just gone grocery shopping. We have paid, and I'm dragging my feet before we leave, thumbing through the Spider-Man comics on the thin, wobbling wire rack. As I spin the rack around, I notice a boy, only slightly older than I am at the register, and he's buying a candy bar. That is, he is trying to buy a candy bar. He has brought a little plastic bag with coins in it, and he has emptied the coins onto the counter. The clerk, an old man with a bulbous, pocked nose, counts the coins, slides each from one side of the counter.

to the other. He shakes his head, not enough. The boy is 20 cents short. A line has formed behind the boy, impatient grown-ups with their pens and greeting cards now. In view of these staring others, the boy must gather the coins from the counter and place them back in his plastic bag. This is not an easy task. The coins are hard to fit from the smooth countertop. He levers them up with his grubby fingernails and they clatter back down. I watch him. He knows full well that he is being watched. His face is like a Macintosh apple,

molted with shades of red. When he has finally managed to get all the coins into his flimsy plastic, he rushes to the door. His shoulders slumped his eyes on the linoleonium flamium. floor, the door dings, it's jaunty welcome as he leaves. I'm feeling embarrassed that I can't say linoleum. Linoleum, there we go. It's tough word. I'm feeling shame as I'm reading this. Now, all at once, I am ashamed. I'm ashamed for the boys vicariously ashamed. It feels like the

shame is mine, like it is owned by me. His shame is now my shame. in my body and mind. My face is a glow. I don't want to look at anyone and certainly not at his eyes. What do I want? I want to get home as soon as possible. Hurry to my room and get under the covers. I want to cry, but out of sight, a confusion, a kind of psychic haze overtakes me. I've forgotten what I meant to do or what I want to do. The comics no longer hold my interest. They are frivolous or simply absent. My father is outside in the breezeway. I can remedy this situation. I realize the boys and my own. And by the way, in reading this, I so want you to remedy the situation. All I need to do is to ask my father for 20 cents. Find the boy and hand it to him.

I resolve to do this, but I find that I can't. The act, however charitable, Seems terrible and extreme. My father will detect my oversensitivity. He will see and judge my susceptibility to the emotion of others, my girlishness. Already I have a reputation in my family. I'm the crybaby, the tattletail, the wuss. My father asks me what is bothering me. I start to tell him.

I can see how the boy now, at the end of the breezeway, getting on his bike, but the words won't form. they won't cohere. I say that nothing is wrong, nothing, I'm fine. Can we go home now? The blood rises in my face again, my ears and my neck. For I know that I have missed an opportunity to do good. I've proven myself a coward without speech and without action,

full of nothing but useless, pitible, pointless, pointless emotion. Yikes. I felt that. I felt it again too. I felt it, but oh. There's something about shame and the contagiousness of it, right? That, like, I imagine

the audience is feeling some of that too. You know, it's like almost, you feel the embarrassment, multiple layers of it, right? For the boy, not being able to, having to pull up those coins from the countertop. For you,

both your shame of telling your father out of a sense of your own sensitivity, that he would shame you for having that sensitivity, for the historical prior experiences of you being shamed for that sensitivity. And then for, it's almost like I'm put back into my own shame of my dyslexia, the difficulty of pronouncing some words. And then, you know, and then on top of that, I think it's, you are drawing the listener in. They're feeling it as well, right? And so they're, you are imagining their feeling, you know, embarrassed that you didn't speak to your father, right?

Courageously. Yeah. It wasn't courageous at that time, of course. Hindsight is 2020. It was, you know, you, you know, you know. knowing the repercussions of sharing emotion would be worse than sharing it I mean I'm not sure I guess I bristle a little bit inwardly at the word courageous because what becomes clear to me hearing that it's it's useful hearing it from someone else sort of having it externalized is is is the double bind like there was no way there really was no way out of the shame. If I, if I spoke up, I would feel ashamed at my sensitivity. If I didn't

speak up, as I didn't, I would feel ashamed at not speaking up and doing what I felt was authentic to me, which was, I felt empathy for this kid. I felt, I felt for this little boy. And I'm, and this is this is this is truly a kind of indelible memory for me that has just been sitting around for 40 years or so and found the right place for it but there there was there was no way and I don't think my father would have I don't think he would have shamed me but but that almost doesn't matter because there's there was a kind of ambiance of shame I had already been taught I'd been socialized into some belief that I was over-sensitive, that this was weakness.

I'm gonna mess this up because I don't, I'm not well-versed enough in the terminology, but there's a, maybe you know it better, there's a term Freud has called screen memory. Do you know this? No. I'm gonna, as I said, I'm gonna mangle it, but it's a sort of, it's a memory from childhood,

childhood that is kind of really bright in our minds and that sticks. And if I'm getting this right, he believed that those memories are a representative of certain larger conflicts in the childhood. Yeah, yeah. It's like there's often a multiplicity of similar memories, right, that consolidate or that make that certain memory that's memorable, something that sticks. Yeah, and I think that, yeah, I like how you talk about that as a double bind, because a lot of my patients get in double binds in their marriages, you know, if I'm vulnerable, you know, something bad happens. If I'm not vulnerable,

something bad happens. And then they freeze, right? And then there's a freezing. Yeah, in the double bind, there's a freezing. Yeah, it's interesting. As I was reading it towards the end, I started to feel a little bit like a haze of dissociation even. And just dissociation and shame, I always say shame is the shadow of dissociation. You know, it's like it's what follows, right? There's always there. And I know dissociation is there in my patience,

when I feel the shame, right? It's thick. It's really fascinating that, because I felt that as well, like after all these years and having written it, which is to say to kind of, of externalize and objectified and turn it into a narrative, which is often a good way to, like, diffuse it somehow. But I, too, sort of found myself zoning out towards the end of the

anecdote and getting confused and dissociating a little bit. Today, as I was reading it, oh, yeah. Interesting, yeah. Okay, so maybe I was, either I was picking up, either you were picking up what I was feeling, or I was picking up what you were feeling. that's like that's what interests me about shame and like is is the kind of atmospherics of it right the ambiance of it yeah it's almost in a in an environmental way in a kind of like atomized or diffuse way and and i think that the the the very sensitive person has a lot of behaviors that are bent on reducing the the potential of shame in others.

And it's very hospitable. And we even, you kind of go into that with, in your envy chapter, which envy is a topic I really want to talk about. It's like so thick. In how your wife introduces people to your home. Okay. It's almost as if like, so,

so the backstory is, it's a beautiful home. And she, And so the chapter on envy is like, okay, how do we reduce the potential envy of my visitors to the home? Right? And is that part of why there's kind of this elaborate

telling of the issues of the home, right? Yeah. So that anyone who comes to the home may feel a little bit less envious, right? Or less shame. Shame would also be part of that. I would imagine I'm adding that in, of course. Reducing the, I mean, the backstory is we had a second child.

We were growing out of the place that we were renting. We needed to buy a house. We felt we needed to do it pretty quickly for a bunch of reasons. And my wife's family has some wealth, and they were able to help us to buy a house. and and the house has a bunch of problems with it still. So my wife would, in her sense that it was kind of, there was something wrong socially to have a large house,

given the kind of our friends being artists and journalists and cartoonists and maybe don't have the same privilege. but her going through that over and over again whenever someone came over was either to reduce their potential envy but to reduce her fear at her at their potential envy. Not that they had envy. They might not have had any envy whatsoever, but her apprehension,

her sense that any envy would be dangerous somehow to whatever the social structure that had been established over the course of years and years. You know, it's interesting, a lot of these thoughts are not fully formed as I sort of do these interviews. They kind of come up in the midst of it. Sure.

But the prior chapter on annoyance, a lot of the story of annoyance that really resonated with me and just seems like absolute torture, was you trying to write in, in like these apartments where you could hear so many sounds around you. And I actually bought you some like noise dampening headphones, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I like research like the highest decibel.

I think I've got a pair here, like the kind that they use in construction. Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about painting them really nicely for you, you know? Yep. That's exactly, those are, that's the exact one. That's the exact one. Of course, I hadn't got into the chapter on when you bought a home yet, right? An ice home. And then I didn't know if you would want them.

Or if the feeling of the around your ears would become a new annoyance of sorts. But in the midst of that chapter, I felt so viscerally like annoyed for you. just by the neighbors pounding music or just like all the awfulness of construction and you know all these all these different noises that was just like um it reminded me actually i watched um a youtube recently on the data centers and the you know the AI data centers that are going up in towns yeah and the the the sound and the hum and the vibration of you know the AI data centers that are going up in towns yeah and the the sound and the hum and the vibration of you because there's so much noise coming out of those things. Yeah. It's overwhelming to these people. And you hear these stories of these people talking about what it's like to have a home where you can never be, it's never quiet, right?

And so I'm reading that and I'm feeling for you like, oh man, this is so unpleasant. You know, your nervous system needs like to live in the woods. you know it needs to live in a cabin of like quiet and nature and solitude like i'm wanting that for you right and so when we got to this chapter on your home and getting this home i was i was just like i was just like oh thank god you know like this is great i'm so happy for you it helps it helps in it and i mean i often say to my wife that my nervous system is is not built for the city and her Her answer is always, maybe, but you'd always find something. Like your nervous system is such.

I mean, that chapter, the way I structured those chapters, and I think it's explicit in the book, is that there are different levels at which emotion operates, right? The annoyance chapter is about temperament, that which is or seems hardwired into our nervous systems, the way our nervous system operates, probably the way it operated since birth, so that if I moved to upstate New York, I might be driven up the wall by birdsong or, or like, the chittering of squirrels or whatever it happens to be, you know, someone with a snowblower. I don't know, but I kind of suspect that she's right

like I'm happier being here than I am living across from a from a loading dock but I still am prone to annoyance in a way that

others I know are not to this degree I think that's a real thing my son actually is higher in annoyance than my daughter and me and my wife like it just naturally

uh... higher disgust, higher experiences of like pickiness with food, highly sensitive child type thing. You talk about the chess, chess not the game, but chess the author who wrote about the kind of the difficult child. Yeah, it's a little bit. 10%. We talk about that a little bit in my episode on Borderline Persia Sciolius Order,

which I don't think they all become Borderline Persia Soror, but actually some of the kids that are highly difficult, and this is right out of the womb, highly sensitive, not harder to console, right? 10% of kids, they end up with more disciplinary issues. Sometimes they end up with more aggression. But I think what you were pointing at is there are people that are just physiologically more sensitive to annoyance, right?

to like, like, they're more sensitive souls. They're hyperpermeable, right? That's a good word for it. Hyperpermeable to affect. Yeah. To emotional contagion. And you know what? A lot of them make really good therapists.

I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad to, I hope that's true. It's, yes, it is, I mean, there's always two sides to the coin, but. having a kind of very tenuous locus of control is, you know, it's a tough way to live. It may be that it also increases one's capacity for empathy. But when you were talking about the stellar chess and the borderline, it does make me wonder, and this is also sort of an unformed thought or an ill-form thought, but about whether there's something about that, that high sensitivity, that, like slipping of locus

control that goes along with idealization and devaluation. Because I notice in myself, in my own therapy, in my own work of becoming a therapist, and becoming more sort of self-reflective, how quickly I toggle, or frequently I toggle between an idealization, of the self and a devaluation. And I wonder if that's at all tied, not listening to you talk with, I wonder if that's all connected to a sense of, oh, my nervous system is now intact.

Like, I can control it. I feel safe now. But when it's not, when it feels permeable, then the devaluation comes in, rushes it. What's wrong with me? And a sense of sort of, I know a frantic sense. Yeah.

What I've thought is that different types of, you know, people who are higher neuroticism in the Big Five, they tend to be. And you've seen my Big Five. I've seen your Big Five. I don't know if you'd feel comfortable. We could pull it up if you want. I'm high in neuroticism.

Let's just say that. But it's like the, stress reactivity, right, is higher. Now that could change. I've seen people decrease with, with good psychotherapy, their neuroticism, like two standard deviations. I've also seen those same people probably go backwards at other points of their life. You know, so stresses can re-evoke a neuroticism in some people. It's not as permanent in all people. Yeah, okay. It's about maintenance, right? I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's about, it's like, I mean, so much of this book for me was about a kind of self-knowledge, self-acceptance,

avoiding what Buddhism calls the second arrow. Do you know this idea? Go ahead, explain it to people listening. Well, let's see if I can get it right. The first arrow are the pains that life inflicts that you can't avoid. I mean, I think the Buddha himself was talking about physical pain, but metaphorically, analogically, it covers all pain. Things happen.

You know, you get into conflict with someone. You lose a job. Someone dies. Whatever, your tire pops on your car. That's the first arrow. And you feel the emotion. You feel fear. You feel shame.

You feel anger. you feel envy the second arrow is feeling bad about feeling bad right oh yeah okay okay yeah and that's the self-inflicted one that's the that's the arrow that you pull out of your own quiver and the neuroticism the sort of trait annoyance the the the temperamental annoyance this is me like I know this and so I'm the instrument. If I know my instrument, like a musician, how do I tune it?

I was reading a guy I read this long profile of Willie Nelson recently and he's got this guitar this broken down guitar he's been playing for decades and it's got a hole in it and it's got very particular

sound and resonance. He knows what it needs in order to keep playing it and playing it well. He knows how to maintain it. He knows which Luthier to bring it to to fix it up. Like, what is your temperamental instrument? What do I need in order to continue to stay at a level of, I don't know, equanimity or within that a band of equanimity and disequilibrium that allows me to connect,

allows me to do the work I want to do, to write, to not fall into states of hypersensitivity or shame or whatever it is that I know that I'm prone to after nearly five decades of life. Right. I think it's like the first initial experience of the emotion is not necessarily the thing that we shouldn't feel, about that it just is right yeah it's not bad or good you fly you have anger you have shame you have envy it's like okay is you i found that if i can in my better states act curious instead of

judgmental of right so it's like the guilt the added guilt the guilt about the initial emotional experience is um it's the second era right it's the the added thing. You know, it's the, I'm thinking that the thing that I probably would challenge you the most, though, with your understanding of emotion,

is I think Ekman had some validity with the micro-expression. And here would be my, like, here would be my couple little pieces of how it actually fits better into your system that you've put here. is I think that the micro-expression or the flashes of emotion

occur on the face as someone starts to talk about something and then the degree of their awareness of it is sometimes there, sometimes it's not. So what I'll see is I'll see the flashes and then I'll see the defenses come. So the flashes are

you know, basic things like anger, fear, disgust, you know, I had pain in because there's some newer research to show what pain looks like on the face. It's one-tenth of a second. Blind people have it. And so this is my like contention against the arguments against Ekman is that actually congenital blind people flash the same micro-expressions as normal people who have been inculturated to view other people's emotions throughout their life, right? So it's not like we're just mirroring people.

So when I learned about this, I actually filmed a, bunch of my friends and watching YouTube videos, and they would flash micro expressions watching certain scenes. And one thing I learned was that some people flash more than others. Some people flash different ones than others, different types of scenes. There was one guy, who was a friend of mine, who flashed very, very few emotions the whole time. And he has one of the most flatest demeanors. He's had a really hard time dating. He's a really hard time connecting with women. And he's very flat emotionally. Like we're talking about one expression of sadness and one expression of anger pretty much the whole time where like a more my wife who did it, he's very

empathic, highly permeable. She flashed all sorts of emotions. She also flashed dissociation. Because some of the things were actually, you were actually watching like scenes of child abuse. You're watching scenes that we would like, really awful scenes that we found that we wanted to evoke emotion. And so that would be one point of evidence. Point evidence, too, which makes me believe it's true, is Gottman's study where he filmed newly married couples one hour, and then he followed them years later.

And the amount of different types of micro-expressions predicted months of separation and somatic illness. Oh, wow. Okay. And so there was a predictive validity that I think this study showed of microexpression.

Just the amount of fake happiness expressed, you know, fake happiness is like you're smiling, but not with your eyes. It's just with your mouth, you know, it's like the eyes don't, you know, smile with it. Disgust, predicted things. So, you know, wrinkling around the nose. So that was the predictive validity.

And the third piece that convinces me is probably just my own experience of doing psychotherapy and specifically with psychosomatic patients. So psychosomatic patients, they're experiencing emotion in their body, like migraines, and there's actually studies that show

psychosomatic patients are not as good at reading other people's, like emotions. and they're also not as good at reading their own. Okay, so they have more elixothymia. So there's a whole research on elixothymia and micro-expression and, you know, that they're not as good at reading emotions. So, okay, but I think this fits into your paradigm,

maybe a little bit different than you would imagine, okay? Because, for example, annoyance, you could say like, oh, annoyance is anger. So we'd always expect a micro-expression of anger, you know, down and together, quick down-and-together, the eyebrows. But actually I would say no, because annoyance is complex, right?

Annoyance is multi-layered, and yeah, I agree with you. It's probably more, there's a multiplicity of micro-expressions you would find in someone who was more easily annoyed. You would find more disgust, right? When the waiter comes and brings you a cup

and their hand is too high, it's like, wait, I'm about to sip out of that cup. That's very annoying for me. It stirs up micro expressions of disgust. So you would have disgust, you would have micro expressions of anger, which is kind of like a little bit of tingees of frustration, right, different things.

You would have micro expressions of fear, like maybe like fearing the, you know, differently. So you'd have like a multiplicity of the micro expressions. A lot of people, when they have these flashes, they don't know that they're having them. And a lot of people who are watching, people, they don't know that the people they're watching are having them, but they mimic

them. And so there's a whole science of mimicry as well. People are more likely to mimic the other person's micro-expression if they're trying to focus on emotion. If they're focusing on what the person might be doing for a living or something external, they don't flash as much of the person

that they're watching's micro-expressions. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so that's... I'm not sure that our our views on emotion are all that different because when you're when you talk about micro expressions

you're talking about them in a highly contextual way right to see if I can get this right I mean my objection with Ekman

is with the theory that there are set sort of neural programs for different emotions and emotions that across cultures will be universally recognized. Those are the two poles of basic emotion theory as Ekman and his cohort laid them out that I think that people like Lisa Feldman Barrett and people who have a theory based on the brain as a

as a predictive organ, as a fundamentally predictive system, have done a good job of debunking. But... Well, see, that, I would say debunking, like, okay, let's go study by study. Okay, let's go step by, yeah. Because I'm actually very critical of, and I've been working on, like, a rebuttal episode

to her theories for quite, for quite a time. Yeah, yeah. So it's something that I've thought a lot about. Okay. I feel like there's a loss of nuance. So, for example, okay, with the Ekman, you said first, universally, all cultures can potentially label certain pictures as like emotions, right? And I would say, I see it a little bit differently.

I see it as universally people across all cultures and actually animals as well. flash one-tenth of a second type of flashes of emotion probably pretty universally now do they know how to describe them the same absolutely not is there a correct way to describe it probably not right are are universally people good at recognizing this i don't think so i actually think it takes a lot of training and it's it's very unusual for me to find someone who's naturally very good at reading micro expression So it's a little bit different. If I can just jump in there, I mean, I think what Barrett would say is that when animals show what we're calling expressions and you're calling emotional expressions, are they in fact emotions? She would say that you need a conceptual act.

You need a contextualized conceptual act in order to sort of make the thing an emotion. that what you're recognizing are along the axes of pleasant or unpleasant, negative or positive, when you're looking at human expressions. When you sit across from someone in therapy and you see a micro-expression, well, you've already understood the context of it. You know this person's history. You know what's going on. You know what emotions they've been acculturated into.

You know what they're prone to. you know what they're dealing with. So you're able, given the knowledge that you have, the very deep knowledge that you have of this person, to sort of approximate the label of what this person may be feeling and disavowing or not articulating. But that doesn't mean that that's discussed, anger, frustration.

There might be a lot going on underneath that expression. That expression to you, is a kind of, I don't know, an on-ramp to further elucidation of what's going on internally in that person, correct? Okay, so I think you're talking about this one study of hers in which she changed the, she gave a pre-story, and it changed how people interpreted

the emotions of the actors. And so, you know, in my mind, a study more of bias exists, you know? Like if a judge is being a judge after he's eating a large meal, in the afternoon, he's more critical of the people he's judging, right? If we're primed with a bunch of words denoting old people, and we walk out of the research room slower, right, than we would otherwise.

So we're quite easily swayed. but I think what she would what she's saying is therefore there's no objectivity with emotion and the expression of emotion like there's no one visual thing of micro like in a micro expression of anger for example like this doesn't exist but then I would come back to like well okay so without context right the newly met the newly married couples who had more negative expressions expressions expressions expressions micro expressions. It predicted, you know, things in the future, months of separation, physical issues. And people who are born blind who never see other people's faces, who never learn other people's, what emotions look like from other people's faces. They themselves have these flashes of emotion in the same way as a person not poor blind. And so I think there are these building blocks. But what I think I also, I think what we agree with is that the building blocks come together in a very idiosocratic, unique way for an individual.

Yeah. Where the individual then is describing them. And so what I found is despite my ability to read someone's micro-expressions very accurately, and I build a whole training course on how to read them accurately. Yeah, I know. Which I need to have you go through. It might change your mind even further. No, I actually have been thinking that, that I wish that I had been able,

the time to take that course before this because this is a complicated topic for me and kind of this is the hardest part of the book to write so it's it's it's it's it's open to having my mind changed on this i'm i'm for your i don't think it changes much of your points in the book and the thrust of your book at all because i still agree with kind of the the place where you arrive to right and this idea of like how do i diminish the second arrow or the the the impact of the second arrow. Yeah. But the,

but I think it's value, it's a valuable dialogue because I think that it allows for an understanding of, okay, there may be some starting points, starting blocks, right? And there may be people who for whatever reason have less of micro expressions that will pop on their face at all. Or more, maybe they're more prone to dissociation.

So there's a whole spectrum of people out there, based on the personality, right? But if I were to tell someone in my office, like, hey, you just flashed a microexpression of anger, it doesn't go well. You know? And so in my training, that's not like, that's not what I train people to do.

But it's like a piece of information, you know, like just all other pieces of information we gather from someone. It's like, huh. Okay, so like, for example, I had this 16-year-old in my office, and he's had this role in his family as a peacemaker, and he is flashing micro-expressions of anger in regards to something. But he's not talking about anything, anger.

So I kind of had a curiosity, like, well, let's slow down there. Let's tell me some more about that. Is there anything, you know, and it gave me like a curiosity. like, okay, and what ended up being the case was he was telling me the first 20 minutes of the session more facade than reality. And once we got to the reality, he was really upset. But this upsetness was dormant as a protective mechanism as the peacekeeper of the family to subvert any upsetness. You know, it was a disavowed, it was a disavowed anger and emotion. I don't think Barrett would disagree.

I mean, in a way, I think, I mean, we don't need to get into the sort of Ekman, rest in peace, and Barrett fight so deeply, that's sort of their battle. But I think the, I think the objection that she really makes is ultimately, I don't speak for her, but neurological. the sort of the idea of dedicated emotion circuits in the brain and the idea that there is sort of inside-out

Pixar-like programs that we have internal experiences that we have feelings interoceptive experiences and mental representations and that these flashed in our face, that we have, you know, very highly intricate muscles in our face that show what we're feeling. I don't think she would dispute that.

And we use it all the time as signs. I think her argument is more about how we actually produce emotions. And in a way, it's more of a philosophical point about what emotion. even is, which is why it took me so many months to write that chapter. Because it's, it gets pretty

abstract, but, but I think what you're saying is, is indisputable that if you pay, that you have to pay close attention when looking at someone to what's going on on their face, what's going on with their body, to what they're saying and not saying, and that if you pay close attention, to what flashes on their face, that might give you a clue to what's not being said. Okay, I have an interesting actually. So you talk about the still face experiment, which I'm glad you did.

One of your favorites. One of my favorites. Yeah. And you talk about it in the context of shame. Yeah. And I actually had people watch the still face experiment and recorded their micro-expression. patients of yours

friends friends okay friends friends and uh they flash a lot people flash a lot of distress watching the still face experiment right and um

a lot of happiness and the reunification and there's this uh there's a common thread though of like okay is there a larger emotional experience right so there could

be like these little microcosms of like frustration and you know fear for the child and so and so on and so forth right but shame you know sometimes people look down sometimes people look sad but it's also like the bodily there's a bodily experience of like like how you describe it in the story of like cowering you know or like curling up in a ball right and um this child inevitably you know like the the body contorts, right, in the midst of the mother having this still face in the midst of the distress, of the disconnect, of the not being able to reconnect. The baby, it's like, the baby, like, kind of like that, right? Where it's like, oh, like, I have to move away.

Yep. And the baby goes through this kind of like playfully trying to reconnect and then angrily trying to reconnect. And then finally, it's more of like this dissociated, like, An implosion almost. An implosion, yeah. And that's, is that the experience of shame that you kind of like link to,

to this experiment? Or is it the experience of maybe having a still face growing up? It's like internalized a deeper shame. Can you ask the question again? I want to make sure I'm clear about it. Draw the connection just for me, again. Like, what about the still face experiment,

experiment specifically elicited in you this kind of like evocative memory of shame i mean i think it's exactly what you say and tronic tronic tronic he is a very um optimistic view about it it's it's about the optimism of repair the power of discord i think he calls it and yet at the same time that that sense of being not met face on for what your needs are for expressing your needs and having the person on the other side become you know the bad object and how that that is productive of shame in a way that will continue to loop forward in throughout your childhood, that not being recognized for what you're actually feeling. I mean, when I think of that experiment now, I feel shame as a parent for the ways in which I can recognize when my children

have emotional needs, but because of what's ever going on for myself, I'm unable to meet them where they are. And that as important as repair is, if you have that experience repeatedly, you might gain a sense of yourself as somewhat, as your own needs as wrong, your own needs, your own emotional needs, as devalued,

as sort of globally problematic, I'm not sure I'm putting this in exactly the right words. Right, and maybe, and maybe the, you know, like going back to the story that I read, the inability to tell your father due to you being a more highly sensitive child, and somehow that the needs were not something that were enthusiastically met, but rather like, don't be a girly man, don't be a wussy, wussy man type of thing that messaging is shame in it of itself

right it's like a very sort of like and it the repetitive nature of that messaging and then you internalize the sense of I am there's something about me this part of me is bad right I am bad

that I think that's that internalization there's also a confusion that comes in as in that anecdote are my are my natural instinctive needs going to be met with acceptance or someone going to turn away and the inability to rely on that may create an internal confusion about the validity of those feelings that's in itself productive of shame i mean there's no way around this really because no parent is perfect. But there are some parents that,

you know, if they have postpartum depression, if they have, you know, at Tronix show this, like they react differently. The child reacts differently in the Stelface Experiment, if they've had a postpartum depressed mother. So I think there is this kind of like, yeah, sure, every child probably goes through periods of micro moments of,

not perfectly being attuned to. Absolutely. There's no way that we can get around that. And if AI ever perfectly attunes to children, it will probably create a pathology that's a brand new pathology that we've never seen, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let me put this another way that's maybe clearer when it comes to what I was thinking of in my book. I grew up with parents who, for their own reasons, experienced a great deal of shame. And for whatever moments of attunement that they were able to provide, there was a kind of ambiance of shame in the household.

And an ambiance of shame is an ambiance of hiding away. It could be in some, it could be rage sometimes. That's one way of hiding. There's a kind of shame, rage cycle. that occurs. But in its quieter form, it's a kind of, a kind of wall, a kind of shrinking away. And the child is so sensitive to that

that what I saw in the still face experiment was the way in which that transmits across generations. Oh, okay. The way that the parents' chronic shame, may produce in the child his or her own shame. Okay. Through repeated blankness, a sort of a moving forward into this space that isn't able to take it in because that parent is feeling shame. And so the child, that shame then gets repeated in the child.

Okay, so it's like that hyper. I'm sure I put it more clearly in the book. Hyperpermeable. Like this, you're absorbing. And I think you actually talk to you. Yeah, okay, so I'm seeing that connection with how you even talk about your own kids, right? You're afraid that your own issues

will get kind of absorbed by them or have been absorbed by them, right? Rather than the reality, which is your friends say you're a good father, you know, you engage your kids, they notice that, right? But it will get absorbed into them. They will pick up on it.

They will inevitably be formed by who I am. And there are some parents who wear that burden more lightly than others. And I think I'm a little highly attuned to that difficulty of being a parent. the fact that children have these incredibly sensitive antennae coupled with an inability to really introspect. And so their vulnerability is just enormous emotionally. And, you know, avoiding the second arrow, I think, is one way of improving ones parenting. I mean, we keep circling back to shame.

and I wonder if that's the kind of master emotion and in all the work that I did on this book. Not name simply naming the emotion and noticing it without collapsing into the self. I mean, what was happening with that woman in the still face experiment? When when when she goes blank, the still face is the face of shame as I see it. that's what happens with shame you're sort of there but not there it's like a profound dissociative moment you know that's right yeah and i think that's something that has made me resonate with that as well my mother struggled a lot with dissociation and i think that that video evoked something in me pretty deep when I saw it, which is kind of like drawn me to it, you know?

It's such a powerful experiment. I mean, there's a reason that it's resonated for so long. Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting, Edronic, even his narrative on like, oh, of course, like this happens all the time, people repair. They've actually done studies where they bring a kid back to the room where they did that experiment and their cortisol goes up.

Oh, really? And so it's like, well, what if that was a hypomanic defense against the reality that this was actually a very unhealthy experience for these kids? You know, like, I mean, it's possible that kids go through that on a regular basis, parents on their phone or blah, blah, blah, you know, but usually there's some, it's very unusual for the kid to have a completely blank parent for an extended period of time when they're trying to reconnect. Yeah, yeah, it's almost always more mixed than that.

Yeah. Unless you're dealing with a truly depressed parent. Truly, almost, or even like almost like a psychotic, psychotically dissociative, you know, catatonic. But then usually the catatonic is more like chronically like that for long periods of time. I mean, you know, I was writing about that experiment in the context of my father and his sort of, I don't know, his hiddenness. Yeah. So, I mean, it's taken me a little while to get there in this interview, but when I was looking at that and contextualizing that experiment in that chapter,

I was thinking about growing up with someone who was, according to everybody that met him, warm, loving, generous, kind, and yet for the highly sensitive child, also kind of the man who wasn't there. Right? Like there was also a sense of who is this person. What am I not seeing? To have a facade and to be a good, a liar of sorts, right? The most popular kids are the best liars in high school. I'm not saying your dad was a liar, but we all lie, right?

We all can have a facade at times. And like our real emotionality is underneath the surface, right? he was very good at hiding it with people that didn't know him well. Yeah, the mask of shame. There's a book by, I think Leon Wormser called The Mask of Shame. That's what I was thinking of. And not that we all have, to some degree, different facades for different contexts. I'm not saying that's a bad thing necessarily.

But with you, you were hyperpermeable to something else inside of him, right? in psychotherapy we talk about this kind of the countertransference of what the person is saying what the words they're using but then the countertransference of like the objects of the unprocessed objects of their past or the um you know so maybe it's like this like deep profound unspoken emotions that you could feel like anger shame you know all these things that were hidden right yeah underneath the surface but you were feeling it and it's like I heard throughout your telling of this part you really wanted to know like because if you don't know it's a little bit crazy-making right it's a little bit crazy-making

and and and deeply confusing to be met with a mask or to have the sense that what you're being met with is a mask even if it doesn't it doesn't look rigid but the sense that you're not getting some sort of authenticity that that person is holding back who they actually are i mean this happens in marriages all the time oh yeah it's it's i mean it's often the complaint that people come into in with and it's and it's hard for people to articulate like i'm not getting this person i want more of them and and and the the partner may be made crazy by that because they don't even know what that means or how to give it my father when i you know when he was dying of cancer and i asked him and this is in the book you know tell me what you're feeling he flashed out with rage with anger at me because i don't think he knew how to provide that and i think out of a sense of shame so so when I was looking at the still face experiment that's what I was thinking of a kind of

the the parent's hiddenness right like maybe maybe the mitigating factor in in in all of this is trying to be a parent who is as fully human as possible which is to say yeah I'm I'm neurotic. I feel shame. I feel this. I feel that. To actually name the things, to be aware of them,

even if you can't necessarily mitigate the emotion to cope, to sort of cop to who you are. And in some fundamental way, having a parent that can't cop to who they are. And I think he was getting there when he got sick. Would have gotten there. That's the thing that in a way is,

I was trying to probe is maybe productive of shame within families. The shame of hiding the voices, the shame of hiding what was underneath, right? The shame. The shame of witnessing in some way that doesn't yet have words

that it makes sense to hide away, that you're supposed to hide away, absorbing the lesson that you're only supposed to give a fraction of yourself, you know a fraction of yourself, fraction of yourself. And it's interesting that this book is kind of like a behavioral experiment of sorts

and reversing that. Putting out yourself, putting out these parts of yourself that are at times kind of like a confessions of sorts like St. Augustine's Confessions, Probably the first book where someone actually wrote critically about themselves, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You're continuing that genre to the next level here. Yeah, it's not a comfortable feeling, Dave.

But your wife kind of pointed out that you didn't really confess about envy. It's funny, if I was going to rewrite any chapter, I think that would probably be the one. What would you confess? The extent to which I feel envy. The extent to which I envy also. I mean, she says at the end, like you don't. talk about your envy of these writers, of these people, of these people, of these careers, like, you've made this chapter all about me, and you've avoided it. I mean, envy is such a,

envy is productive of shame. To confess envy is to say, I feel inferior. It's to say, I have a deep sense and apprehension of my own inferiority. relative to others, whether it's true or not. And so it's very hard to cop to that kind of vulnerability. And I think writing that chapter, I found myself hiding behind this other anecdote of someone else. And the best I can do to remedy that was to end it with her voice saying, you blew it, man. Which is, yeah, I guess that. Blesser. I guess that in and of itself is kind of kind of the confession, right? Yeah.

But it's a double confession. It's the confession of not being able to confess, right? Yeah. It's the confession of like, yeah, you know, it's interesting. I didn't go there. I don't know why. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

When you share, like, a success with a friend, and the friend flash is a micro-expression of anger, like, for me, I'm always curious about that. Well, what did I say that was frustrating? because in my mind, I'm like, oh, I'm happy. You know? And in some of my close friendships, it is envy. Or, you know, they feel maybe safe enough expressing

that there is a bit of envy there, right? But yeah, in my own experience, what I have found is that envy also is a truth-sayer of what I find important or what kind of like I worship, so to speak, you know. Same more. What do you mean? So the things that I'm envious about are like maybe people who are further along in or who have had even faster success in like podcasting or like intellectually. So I don't think I've ever felt envy for someone having like a Lamborghini or a car. It's just not like my personality. I'm more like ideas.

So if someone can convey ideas in a in a. very articulate way. Like, I may experience envy for that, more than houses, more than cars, more than, you know, things. Yeah, I mean, I know what you mean, but I don't,

I guess I have a less sunny view of what my own envy signals to me. Because I could envy someone who I think has written better or more. And it certainly is valuable to me to write well. I would like to be more productive or to envy, you know, to be in the cohort with you and experience envy because you've been doing it longer and no more and I'm impatient to know more and I want to feel more like an expert,

more like I have a better grasp of the psychoanalytic principles or whatever it happens to be. But my experience of that, that always takes me away from the self, that always de-centers me and places me almost cognitively and emotionally into someone else's life into their journey. Okay. It makes it much more difficult for me to have a sense of, all right, where am I? What are the reasons for where I am? How can I gain an appreciation of that? I felt a lot of envy while writing this book because I looked around at people who were laughing me in terms of publications. At the same time, while writing this book, I got divorced, I got remarried, I had two kids.

I had to deal with the chronic illness of my oldest child. I went to graduate school. I was living my life in a granular way. And envy is, whenever I experienced envy, it was almost, it was weirdly made me ignorant in that moment when that emotion was existent of the particularities of my own life. And so kind of disturbing of contentment in a way that just made it harder to would even achieve those goals, if that makes sense. Because it's distracting.

It's it's it's it's it's it's it's assuming that there is some correspondence between you and another person in the world when essentially there is not. you know it's when it makes you compete with others as opposed to yourself and what your own goals are and what the truth are truth is of your own experience yeah okay i think i think that i may you're also you also were an athlete so you have more of a competitive uh i know my achievement striving is high but i also know that sometimes when i when there's a project that is very close to like my particular passion, it's almost impossible to do it. Can you say that again?

If I have a project that's very close to my particular passion, my particular interest, it's almost harder to do it. And if it's only me, if I'm the one that's producing it. Yeah. Because, and I don't know what that is, but I would say that that's probably for me the dark side of there's you know it's very it's unproductive it's it is it envy in that context i think would be more of like the shame shut down not moving forward um i think there's a there's a more of an aspirational type of envy which is like

okay they're doing here this is obtainable this person's further ahead it's obtainable but i i look up to this person i there's like a gentle maybe idealization but it's not like it's not shutting me down. It's more of aspirational. So I think if it feels unobtainable, if it feels completely unobtainable, then I think that's a little bit different, then I think like it may not inspire envy

because I may just not even go there. But I think as well, when I was, when I've been reading about envy, the link between vulnerable, narcissism and envy. It's very strong, not grandiose narcissism. Because I think the grandiose person is, their defenses are around not feeling envy. Or so they're not going to fill out, they're not going to, they're not going to proclaim envy in some, you know, survey, right? It may be deeper. You may get to it psychodynamically and in therapy over years, right?

But it's superficially not there. But someone who's narcissistic with more of the vulnerable narcissism, they have a lot of envy. And they're totally eaten up. I don't know if you've had a patient like this, but they could be, I mean, everything is envy from the watches that someone else is wearing and this and that. And they're constantly comparing themselves.

And it's everything is competitive. And so there, it's like, and I think that's more of like the, um, Karen Hornay, when she talks about someone who's very neurotic and living in the false self, there's all these shoulds. They're competitive. It's the neurotic ambition. So it's ambition not towards something that they're actually like gifted at, like a unique gifting, but it's more of a general, like I have to win at everything,

you know. And there's a deep dissatisfaction that pervades. because they can't necessarily ever arrive at satisfaction, because they're always in this loop, right, of dissatisfaction. So, yeah, I think that there is no rest, and there is no, like, peace. And that chapter of the book is sort of at the tail end of the different levels of emotional influence. So if annoyance was my way of writing about emotions at the level of temperament, and shame was my way about writing about emotion at the level of the family

and transmission of emotion within families intergenerationalally, envy is my way of talking about the way that emotions are transmitted and stoked within cultures. So vulnerability, the sense of comparison, of invidious comparison, is in many ways the sort of defining feature of Western capitalism, of commercial capitalism. So, yes, if you're sitting across from the vulnerable narcissist, it's a very, very clear. but I think that we all live and increasingly in a world where that kind of envy is being stoked, that kind of aspirational. Envy cells, sex cells. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And yeah, and sex cells probably by way of envy, you know, like, and envy is, is the instrument through which people try to get us to stay on social media platforms, to buy this, to buy that, to stay on the streaming services, envy the sense that you can have the essence of what someone else has, maybe by way of actual consumer goods, almost always by way of actual consumer goods or lifestyles. And since we all have a narcissistic wound, How do you protect against that?

How do you have my, you know, my, my, my oldest child is, is in college. And I've learned that it's the, um, more people have gone out for fraternities and sororities this year in colleges, I think, than in any other. Really? Don't hope me on that, but that's what I, that's anecdotally, that's what I've heard is that the numbers have just increased. And apparently that's because they've so effectively. marketed themselves on TikTok.

That if you have this experience, there's something about it that if you could join in with this experience, you can be valued in the way. You can have the social experience. That's the most highly valuable social experience in college. It's a casting outward into some how you're supposed to be, how you're supposed to live. Interesting.

Yeah. So, like, when I, when I, there's this work of anthropology by a guy named George Foster, and he's talking about this village when they first got windows, and they forgot windows facing the street. And this, this culture that he was, he was studying was so highly attuned to envy and in an invidious comparison that they would, they would block the windows so that people couldn't look in. because they knew they were highly attuned to the danger of envy. You know, every culture, every culture has some version of the evil eye,

the invidious stare, the look that wants, the look that will grasp. And of course, we're constantly looking through windows now all the time, every day. Yeah, social media has. has sped that process up quite a bit, right? And also, I would say, you know, we're also, you know, so what do I do with my kids? Sometimes I'll show my daughter, like, videos on how Photoshopped some of these models are.

And so she is looking at, if she sees a beautiful woman, you know, on a picture, she'll say, oh, I could see that they brushed the skin, and they did this and that, you know, it's like, she's kind of like viewing the picture as not, this is not real, right? Yeah. I think that meta influencers do sell product.

Oh, I don't know if you saw, but AG1, there was a brand new study on AG1 that just came out. Have you heard? AG1 is sold on a bunch of the top influencer podcasts. Okay. And this is a supplement that's supposed to be like a, you know, help you in your health. So they did this study in it. It didn't do it.

It didn't do anything. But this thing is like $70 a month. And you know that like this, you know, people listening to like some of the top podcasts like who that promote this. I don't even want to say their names because, you know, I'm just going to put it out there. But some of the top podcasts. this thing doesn't do anything for your gut flora right and i talk about this in my podcast a while ago with drew ramsie we talked about how really if you want to change your biome you need to eat fermented foods because there's just so much more good healthy bacteria and fermented foods than

ever than you could ever take in a pill right yeah kimchi is the only way man but i think my point is that yeah kemchi fantastic sourcrow you know right kefir good good for you and especially after if you ever have to take antibiotics you should definitely get a lot of that stuff in you okay but my point is that this stuff sells and it's because people want people are influenced by people that they imagine to be you know having this sort of the the the answer right yeah and what's and how do you if not inoculate yourself against that how do you stay alert to it enough that you're not so driven by it I mean it talk about ambiance like like ambient it's it's everywhere envy is is is the way in many ways

that the economy has has developed by way of envy, by way of comparison. That's how consumer capitalism operates. And as you're describing, like, you sense as your children grow up just how vulnerable they are to that. And how it gets at a kind of very core mechanism within a human,

because we do naturally tend toward models. We need models, right? When it's hard, it can be hard to discern between envy and aspiration, envy and admiration. You know, I will admire a clinician who has a lot more experience and knowledge than I do, or a writer who I feel has a certain, I don't know, a facility. or style and that that admiration is a good thing it's motivating it feels sort of nourishing it feels like even talking about it in this way i can i can sense my nervous system settling um because it it maybe maybe because it remains about the self and the aspirations

for the self. But that can very easily tip over into envy, which is wanting to be that other person, wanting to sort of have in some core essence, be in some core essence, what, who they are. And it can be a delicate operation to stay with admiration and not fall over into envy,

which is larcenous in a kind of way, right? I mean, Dante in the Purgatorio, punished the envious by sewing their eyelids shut with wires. So they couldn't see. There's something about seeing that is grasping. You know, if hearing is, is, is, brings things in like you like with with annoyance there's a passive receiver of things vision in this in this sense is a grasping and and how do you how do you avoid in a culture that

wants you to grasp doing it it's a very it i find it to be i don't have any answers i find it to be a difficult thing and something i think a lot about as a as a parent And usually do things like you do, like teaching my children or showing my teenager, talking to my teenager about how social media operates, how algorithms operate, what these companies and the executives and these companies say behind the scenes about what they're actually trying to do. And that helps, I hope. I have an example of this. Because there are, you know, therapy influencers.

There's just one that's selling a course. It's like very expensive. Take this course and you'll get better at this thing, right? I went to their Instagram and they have 15,000 followers or something like that, right? And yet I look at their posts and they have three likes and like one comment on each of their posts. So I know that they're fake followers. Yeah. So you can,

I know because I've had companies reach out and want to sell me on this, you know, and I'm like, no, I'm good. I'll do upbred my own social media. You know, there's bots you can get that do fake comments.

Yep. Hundreds, you know, proposed or whatever. And so here you have kind of like this facade of like, here I have something great to teach you that are a lot of people are following me for. but there's like no real substance.

Now, I didn't look at this. It's like, what is the value acquisition? And I think this is where it's like, I think customers are getting smarter, actually. I think a lot of the youth are a little bit more cognizant of like, you know, kind of the house of cards, you know, that there's this kind of like falseness to a lot of politics that, you know,

there's a lot of corruption. And I think there's a lot of skepticism. I just had a kid in my office yesterday. It was like, yeah, I don't respect any authority. You know, kind of attitude, right? I'll listen to my friends. Those are the people I care about. So there is kind of like a push.

There is a push the other direction that I think is probably inevitably happening. Oh, man. I mean, that sounds good to me. At the same time, I, you know, I, feel i can't help it feel a little skeptical or even cynical about it because consumer capitalism has always done a very good job of commodifying even that that kind of dissent even that kind of internalizing dissent they're very good it's like water you know it always finds its way and so these companies hire very talented social scientists

find ways to all right kids are becoming a little bit more skeptical a little bit more anti-authoritarian a little bit more wily how do we use that okay so then yeah so it's like who's the YouTuber that has that attitude that's captured their attention and then how do we get products that how do we get that YouTuber to sponsor our stuff yeah you know did you hear about how in Japan, they used to not drink coffee, but how they slowly changed them to drink coffee. No. They made coffee-flavored candy. Oh, my God.

And so for a decade, the kids were eating coffee-flavored candy, and then they introduced the coffee. Wow. So when all those kids hit, you know, the age where they would probably actually go to a coffee shop. So, yeah, I think capitalism is very intelligent. and very, very intelligent at being able to woo the next generation. And it's tricky too, because it's not always that they're wooing them into things that are going to be healthy, right? Like vaping and, you know, there's all these, like, new marijuana-type products now,

like, that are legal in some, legal in states where cannabis is illegal, you know. and all these types of things. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah, and I mean, I guess that's what worries me so much is not envy as an interpersonal experience, but envy as a kind of systemic experience. And I just don't know, I don't know what can be done about that. beyond raising, you know, continuing to raise awareness about how it operates. Maybe it is an increased reflectiveness, you know?

Maybe that is part of the answer here because it's how do we properly reflect on what is going on that's leading us to be galvanized towards this specific thing, you know? Like what are the influences influencing us? I mean, here's where I get, I'm sorry if I cut you off. Go for it. Here's where I get a little confused because, you know, part of the impetus for the book is a kind of trying to disempower the moralizing view of emotions. The idea that there are negative emotions and positive emotions. The that valence is is that language is is is new in that sense. It's taken from it's taken from chemistry.

It's taken from the study of electricity, ions, charges, all that. And to say, well, no, there's no good emotion or bad emotion. There are just emotions and and what we need to do is see them in their fullness. But with envy, as I as I write in this chapter, you could you could sort of see the moment at which the the the moral valence of envy shifts right like up to the turn of the 20th century 1910s 1920s all the messages all the cultural messages were envy is bad you know cane killed able because of envy we were we were fallen as human beings because of envy sure Satan is the great envier. And to feel envy is bad. Now, part of me, a lot of me, the therapist and me,

the human in me wants to be like, well, no, no, no, no, it's just an emotion. You know, it's universal. We all feel it and we have to get curious about it. But then there came a point when business leaders, moral leaders, governmental leaders, realized that actually envy can be used. If they change the moral valence of envy, then you could really unleash these animal spirits of the marketplace, and you could really move the economy alone by way of consumerism. And voila, like it worked like gangbusters, right? The American century is in many ways a result of the unleashing of envy and presenting it as a moral good, right? Is it, okay, so this is where I kind of,

I'm kind of like, okay, are people conscious of their envy? Or do they say, do they describe it some other way? Like, for example, like, someone who buys AG1 from their influencer who says like, oh, this is going to help you feel better and have more energy and be more productive, they may not recognize how envy sold it to them, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. But they may be taking it. So it's like, is it envy that is bad or unconscious envy? Like, is it, is the awareness of envy? Kind of like what we're talking about, right? There's the first arrow where like, okay, there's this thing that hits us, and I notice I'm envious, right? And then I think what I was saying before is like,

sometimes it's helpful because it's like, oh, that's what I value, or that's what I may be overvaluing, right? I may be over-worshipping this thing, and it may be actually starving me of my contentment with where I'm at, right? Is it ever good enough, or am I, or can I be content with the influence and the impact and, you know, blah, blah. So, or just playing with my kids, you know? Because envy actually, like with some people, it's so strong. It keeps driving them, and they forget about their kids.

they forget about their friendships even, right? Envy can be all-consuming. It may be completely unconscious for those people that are envious, that it's driving them forward into a sense of destruction, right? So maybe that would be where I would put the moral valence piece is like if it was not serving the person and taking them away from what they would really value, right? but maybe they would consciously not be able to know that it was driving them.

Maybe though with some therapy and some exploration. And maybe if it was driving them in the wrong way, they eventually would have some symptomatology or pain points, right? Like, oh, I have this barrage that's falling apart, or I have kids that hate me, or I have this or that, right? And it's like maybe the pain points lead them to therapy, where then it's like the exploration. and the unfolding.

Or a sense of emptiness, a sense of my needs, my behaviors are kind of feel somewhat, and I've experienced this with patients, they feel somewhat alienated from me. Like I'm being driven by these aspirations that, this is too strong a word, but they were sort of implanted in me.

Like I keep aspiring and aspiring, inspiring or acquiring, acquiring, acquiring, but I don't know really why I'm doing it. I don't really have a sense of meaning in my life. I think that happens a lot with sort of highly successful, highly functioning science. Highly externally. Exactly, exactly. Yes, yes, yes. That's right.

Thank you for the correct. I appreciate that. Very important. Very important. Because I think that they're, you know, and I think Nancy McGuyns talks about there's a deep, profound emptiness and someone with that more narcissism with more higher narcissism traits, right? There is a deep.

And I think the, the, uh, Karen Horan I would say that the true self is like this kind of like wilting flower inside of them, sort of speak. And, you know, like they've watered this facade and this projected. image of themselves, which is sometimes to stir up envy and others, sometimes to just try to prove to themselves or to avoid the feelings of shame. And it has a bunch of shoulds that surround it moral, moral shoulds if I should be this and I should be that. But there's a vapidness. There's kind of like this, there's a valuelessness, right? Meaninglessness. Yeah. I mean, this is a part I

with therapeutically when I'm thinking about it because how do you how do you think about and introduce into the work these these larger forces these cultural and economic forces that are no doubt influencing the person in their views of what they want what they need it might be contributing to the sense of of emptiness or or a paucity of meaning, and yet are so large, so powerful, so much things that you as the clinician can't influence, how do you incorporate that into the work itself? Because I have no doubt that it's there when we're talking about these kinds of of patients, you know, the really highly driven,

highly successful, often very acquisitive patients who then come in with it, with almost an inarticulate sense of longing. How do you make sense of that in that room? It's something I think about and think about a lot and thought about a lot when I was when I was writing this chapter on Envy. because that's not the level at which the therapist works. I mean, I think there are psychiatrists who write critically and try to think counter-culturally and in terms of what's going on in the broader culture and how that's showing up. But keeping that level in mind in the room is something that I wonder about, I'm still trying to make some sense of.

I think it would come down to individual, you know, like you would almost have to catch someone in a, in some sort of individual obsession, and then try to distill the why. And in the why question would be a, you know, there would be a low reflective answer. Right. Well, I don't know,

you tell me why doc and if you told them that would probably not allow them to to enter into that sort of curiosity so yeah maybe it would be a like aocratic questioning you wouldn't know necessarily where you would end upon but i think what you're what you're pointing at is that likely there is a lot of the culture that has biased people to have certain drives towards consumption, which may inevitably not be in alignment with their values, but more of like values that they've absorbed. Yeah, or that in a more even complicated way might have become their values. Become their values, but this is where it's like for most people,

it's probably not their meta values. You know, it's not like, like, okay, like I used to go into the prison, the prisons in medical school, and I would talk to a group of like 15 guys, and I would say, okay, so you guys, like, what do you want to do when you get out? Like, oh, I want to get a good car and I want this, and I want a house. And I'm like, okay, so imagine you are 75 years old and you have the best cars all in your garage. You have a huge house and you're all alone. You're 100% alone. and you haven't seen anyone in your large house

and all of your cars for the last year. And they're like, no, no. I'm like, oh, tell me, what do you want? Well, I have to have my friends there. I have to have some family. I have to, okay, okay, well, that's, tell me about that. So then, like, inevitably, the values that they project is like, this is what I really want superficially

from capitalistic sort of, you know, from the movies they watch, from everything, it kind of falls short if that's all they have. Absolutely. And this is the way in which I think therapy is inherently countercultural, or at least a certain kind of psychotherapy. Because it does, it does, in fact, have its own values. It isn't valueless.

It does in fact value connection and openness and reflectiveness in a way that absolutely runs perpendicular to a lot of the culture as it exists right now. And when I feel any dipping of faith about what psychotherapy is or can do, I often find myself returning to that. That therapy as a necessary countercultural force, a place that really can center exactly those kind of values that you're talking about. And finding myself trying to get more comfortable with the fact that therapy is, in fact, value-laden in that way, in that broader way, that that's becoming. more and more important to me.

And as we talk about envy becomes more clear to me as well. Yeah, I like that. There's this like maybe the value of connection, the value of, you know, I mean, what is therapy, but two people trying to connect, right? Yeah. So at the core, it's connection. I would say also the value of family,

friends, the value of connections outside of meaningful connections. outside of the office when it's done well at least. And then the, yeah, the, you know, I tend to think that most mental illness leads to isolation. Yes. Perceived isolation or actual isolation. And so it's like we're trying to get people to move into more connection. Yeah.

So yeah. Absolutely. I can see how envy and shame can kind of make that difficult at times and it can be a hindrance towards that. Envy is in a way that that maybe connects to what I was saying about its relationship to admiration, a kind of severance of connection. because it's because it's because of its inherent inquisitiveness its desire to to sort of grab maybe like shame inherently disconnecting right maybe that's too absolute statement i'm not sure but that's my that's my intuition yeah no i think that envy would lead to envy does lead to i have seen very people who are very envious and it's very hard for them to have male like male very high highly competent males with high envy have a hard time with friendships

when i was working on this book and really in the heart of it and struggling terribly for all sorts of external reasons as well as just the difficulty of writing the book and would talk to a friend, a really beloved old friend who was flourishing in his literary career and was proud of it and wanted to share something with me and I would feel envious. I experienced it as a severance of connection. I experienced it as a failure of intimacy because I could not join him there. because it became about me. It kind of

sort of like bounced back against me and made me lose my intimate connection which creates all sorts of other things, sadness and shame, but if you're not careful, but that's...

But you be, I think the first step is like, okay, that is the first arrow, right? What is the second arrow of envy? The second, the second arrow is always, just to name and notice. The second step is always, I feel envy because I'm struggling

and I'm going through a hard time and I'm lost, and it's reflectiveness is the next step. You're asking, what is the second half? The second arrow is a bad would be the... The second arrow in this is, I should not be feeling envy of this person. Yeah, that it's wrong.

It's a violence to feel envy of this person. It's wrong to feel envy. Or maybe the second arrow would be that which then leads to the disconnection. Right. So be whatever that is. So I would say that... And it's okay if you see this differently, but the way I was thinking, about it was the second era would be putting the, putting the book down, your friend's book,

not rejoicing, right? It consumes you to the point that you can't like rejoice with your friend, maybe. So what is the, if the envy is unconscious and then you put the book down and you don't rejoice, that leads to the disconnection. But then the awareness of the envy, this is the, maybe I'm just thinking out loud here, I would see it. It's like, it almost is like information on like the, the capacity then to pause and to say,

well, I envy because I actually value what this person has accomplished. And I have aspire towards that as well. And, yeah, I would want to celebrate with them out of not a reaction formation, which would be doing the, or opposite action, but actually somehow then finding an ability to move through the envy into more of the other person's experience, right?

It's, I mean, it's mentalizing, right? And in a way, it's, it's seeing that person, slowing down and seeing that friend in his, in his full. in his own narrative, remembering what his aspirations are, what his struggles have been, what his emotions are, what his emotions are, as opposed to sort of tethering your experience to his or his to yours. It really is keeping his mind and his existence in mind, loving the other. the writer Annie Dillard, who I just absolutely adore what one said something like that, but the only real prayer is love them, love them, love them. And in this context, I think of that. I think of when I'm feeling envy, it is, and I don't mean this in a second arrow way, but in a descriptive way, a kind of failure of love.

it is a it is a making this person's experience reflective of my own as opposed to granting them autonomy of their own life and loving them for who they are and what they need at the moment of envy there's a kind of at least at that moment a severance of that

and it feels disconnecting. It feels bad. It feels lonely. Because the fact of the matter is that in no way do I actually want what that person wants, especially in this context, right? If I don't want to write the book that that person wrote, I want to write the book, the whole point is to be original and to find your own voice. When you listen to someone who's a successful podcaster, you don't want that podcast. You want your podcast. You want your podcast to be a reflection of you

and what you find interesting in your own explorations. So the envy in itself is always, on the level of authenticity, false. Yeah. I'm hoping that you felt in this time together that I was able to see the world from your perspective and not just trying to see it through my own perspective.

perspective. Because I realize I have challenged a couple points where I'm looking at it through my perspective, you know. And, um, but I've also seen, I feel like I, you know, I've enjoyed. And like, there's part of me. I know you invited me to your, your book thing. I'm like, I haven't traveled for a long time. I'm tempted, you know, um, I'm very tempted to come celebrate with you. And the, uh, but, but no, I think, I would hope. that you would feel like I have seen you in the midst of this. I'm conscious now of maybe like am I enacting this in a poor way, you know? How so? I don't, I really appreciate the way you've come out. And I've probably been too focused on my own sort of shame in the moment when I haven't been able to articulate points well or I've forgotten points of my own book. That's a funny feeling. It's like I wrote this thing, but I haven't, but I finished it over a year ago. and there's so much in there.

Did I describe what I wanted to say about the still face experiment, the way I wanted to? And as I said, this is the first interview I've done. But I don't know what you're worrying about. I'm probably over here worrying about my own thing. And maybe that's probably that internal reflectiveness that makes you a good writer. Well, yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, grateful to have had the chance to have a long conversation about this book, which is,

you know, means a lot to me and is, is, is, is, it's, it's scary to put a book out as a therapist. That's this autobiographical. So I'm, I'm, you're like, you're like the next yollum. That's, that's, that, that would be my, like, assessment. You're the next. You're the next Yalom. We need like, next one will be Envy's executioner. Yeah, exactly. But I don't, I don't want to envy Yalom. I want to be my, myself. You will surpass Yolm. I have to surpass myself. You will surpass, yeah. I'm like, I'm stoking the flame of envy. Exactly. I'm marketing envy to you. I'm like the idealization of others. No, no, no. I don't want anybody else's essence, or at least I try not to. I'm really, I'm grateful to you, David. I appreciate it.

That's fun. No, we're playing some, we're playing some gymnastics here now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, yeah, no, I, and I, I think that there is, like, I'm, I'm conscious of some envy of how you write, because I will never write like that. Because the way you're, like, be having dyslexia, right? Like, I will, I will always probably be a better podcaster than I will be a writer. That's just, that's, that's truth. but I'm also happy, but I'm also enthusiastic that there are people like you that can write the way that you do,

you know? So it's like I'm, I'm aware, I think, at this point, like, if I write something, it will be, it'll probably be like a, like a syphilis. It'll probably be like syphilis.

Or Sisyphus. It'll be a Sisyphist-like thing. It'll also feel like the, syphilis, probably. Well, there's a quote by Thomas Mann that I love, and I'm going to mangle this too, but it's something like a writer is a person who has a harder time writing than other people.

So it's always Sisyphean, and I was feeling envy this morning for your industry, your voraciousness, your speed. So I have to try to quiet down to remember what I do is what I do. Like I got to work my side of the street. My speed?

What's my speed? How often you produce podcasts and get things out and write, you know, long articles on the website accompanying that. The way that you feel like you can research things, you know, that, horrible tragedy occurs near your house of a therapist getting murdered, and you very quickly get into action and produce a spreadsheet of the ways this has happened and how this has happened in other ways and in other parts of the country in different times. And I'm going to say not envious, but deeply admiring of, and in a way, you know, in a way envious that you have that ability.

I've always wanted that for myself. But don't. That's just not the way I operate. I think part of that is teamwork. I'm pretty good at... You're going to collaborate. I'm good at getting highly motivated medical students. So if you're listening to this and you're about to apply to medical school, reach out to me. I got some projects.

Yeah. Beautiful down there. But, yeah, no, it's... Well, I think we should probably wrap it up right now with, like, I think this is good. mutual enjoyment of each other's successes and just just enough envy to aspire towards our own hard work right the point to what we admire and the other yeah that's good yeah okay all right we'll leave it there for today okay thanks david