Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 347: What You Can Learn About Your Relationships from a Former Neo-Nazi | Shannon Foley Martinez

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

We’ve got a provocative but deeply practical episode today. All of us have people in our lives — whether it be our personal lives, our professional lives, or even just people we see on TV — with whom we disagree. So how can we coexist, or even reach a state of mutual understanding, with these people? It’s not an overstatement to say that your personal happiness, as well as the future of the planet, may rest in part in our collective ability to hone these skills.  My guest today has done this work in some of the most extreme ways imaginable. She is a reformed neo-Nazi by the name of Shannon Foley Martinez who now works to deradicalize extremists. She’s also a consultant at American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. In this conversation, we talk about how she got into the white power movement, how she got out of it, her methods for de-radicalizing people who are still in the movement, how she applies those methods to more mundane conversations across the many lines of differences that run through our society—and how you can, too. Just a quick note - you’ll hear some background noise, from a lawnmower and a barking dog— but that’s just the reality of recording podcasts in the middle of a pandemic. Also, as you might imagine, we hit on some pretty sensitive material here, including discussions of hate-fueled violence, racism, sexual assault, and homophobia.  We also want to deeply thank and recognize mental health professionals for your support. For a year's FREE access to the app and hundreds of meditations and resources visit: tenpercent.com/mentalhealth Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/shannon-foley-martinez-347 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, we've got a provocative, but I think pretty practical episode today. All of us have people in our lives, in our personal lives, our professional lives, even just people on TV, with whom we disagree. So how can we coexist or even reach a state of mutual understanding with these people? I don't think it's an overstatement to say that your

personal happiness as well as the future of the planet, may rest in part on our collective ability to hone these skills. My guest today has done this work in some of the most extreme ways imaginable. She is a reformed neo-Nazi by the name of Shannon Foley Martinez. She now works to de-radicalize extremists. She's also a consultant at American University's polarization and extremism research and innovation lab. In this conversation, we talk about how she got into the white power movement, how she got out of it, her methods for deraticalizing people who are still in that movement, how she applies those methods to more mundane conversations across the many lines of difference that run through our society and how you can too.

Couple of notes before we dive in, you're gonna hear some background noise from a lawnmower and a barking dog. That's just the reality of recording podcasts in a pandemic. Also, as you may imagine, we hit on some pretty sensitive material here, including discussions of hate-fueled violence, racism, sexual assault, and homophobia.

So just a heads up about that. One very quick item of business, as you may know, may is mental health awareness month over the past year. Mental health professionals have been working incredibly hard to help lots of people whose lives have been turned upside down. Of course, these folks, these mental health professionals have also had their own lives turned upside down along with the rest of us.

So we want to thank and recognize and salute mental health professionals. Our way of doing that here at 10% happier is to offer our years free access to our companion app, which is loaded with hundreds of meditations and other resources. If you fit the bill here as a mental health professional or if you know somebody who does, just go to 10%.com slash mental health.

All right, here we go now with Shannon Foley Martinez. Shannon, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me and inviting me on. I think perhaps best to start with your story if you're comfortable with it because I know it's quite a yarn. How did you end up in the neo-nazi movement?

I am 46 years old now, so I've been out of the way power movement for over 25 years at this point. A lot of what I understand now about how I ended up there are things that I have grappled with and have been part of my healing and understanding process since I left the movement. But I grew up during the late 70s, early 80s, and from the outside, my family looked very much like, you know, the typical, upwardly mobile, middle class family. But one of my earliest memories is that I felt like I didn't really belong in my family.

I felt very much like I was the black sheep in my family that I seemed to come wired to ask why. I wanted to know why the rules were, what they were, like why did I have to do homework if I could already get A's on tests? Why did I have to go to bed at 9 if I wasn't tired until 10? It was very important to me to understand how things fit together. And in my family, that conformity was one of like the overarching value sets that was

there. That was like, you just go do school, do your best, head down, don't make waves, don't rock the boat, just get your education, go on and lead a successful life. But I didn't really come wired that way at all. My parents are still married. They've been married 52 years. I have a brother who's 2 and a half years older than me. There was no drug or alcohol abuse in my family, but both of my parents came from families where there was addiction. And so they brought some of that dysfunction along with them. There was no child abuse or physical abuse. There was corporal punishment, but it wasn't outside of like the cultural norm

of what was happening during that time. But when I was very young, it's like, I lived in this neighborhood, there were lots of kids, I played lots of sports, I had all these other places that I could go where I felt like I fit in, where I understood the structural hierarchy. One of the things that I would come to understand about my childhood in my home was that, I never really felt safe

that the rules were always very fluid. Something that might be okay, you know, my brother and I doing something making ourselves laugh ridiculously at 11 o'clock during the day, as the adults got tired at seven o'clock, that same thing would be a punishable offense or whatever. And so for someone who came wired to want to know how things work and that that was very crucial to my understanding and existence in the world that I felt very unsafe all the time. And I didn't feel like I had a successful means of like navigating successfully through my family. So I kind of felt like afraid all the time. When I was 11 years old, my family moved from where we lived just outside of Philadelphia

to rural Southern Michigan, just north of Toledo, Ohio. And when we got there, I didn't have the same hairs everyone. I didn't have the same clothes. The kids there asked me if I was from England because my family accent was so strong that they thought I was like from a different country. And so the sense of not really belonging inside my family expanded out into the greater world. But I still like played a bunch of sports and stuff. And I had some good, strong connections with a lot of my coaches. When I turned 13, I had to decide about what to do about high school. Was I going to go to the public school where we lived in Michigan or was I going to go over the border to a private high school in Toledo that had like better academics and things like that. And I ended up

choosing to go to this private school. One of the side effects of that was that there was a law in place at the time that if you went to high school in Ohio but lived out a state that you couldn't play sports. So there's this sort of like last lifeline that is severed there. So it's like we move at 11 and this was something that I only learned later that like the Disney movie that I only learned later that like the Disney movie inside out, that the main character in that movie is 11 years old. And that the reason that they chose an 11-year-old is that that turns out to be an incredibly fragile psychological time for big changes. Because when I got to Michigan as an 11-year-old girl and through my early adolescencecence that part of the process of early adolescence is grappling with your identity and the identity that you are going to begin deposit in your world. What are you going to keep from your family? What are you going to reject?

What pieces of yourself are you going to like independently choose? And because I felt so much like an outsider that I was really drawn to counter culture as a means of positing an identity. And initially, it was actually like 1960s like anti-war culture that I immersed myself in. And then through that, I ended up drifting into like skateboarding culture and through skateboarding culture into the punk rock scene.

So by the time I'm entering high school, I'm going to the punk rock shows, I'm doing crazy stuff with my hair. At the end of my freshman year, just a couple weeks before the end of the school year, my birthday is in June, so just a couple weeks before I was about to turn 15. I ended up doing what so many kids do,

and I went to, you know, I lied to my parents about where I was going, and I went to a party, and when lied to my parents about where I was going and I went to a party and when I got to that party I started drinking. By the end of that night I would be sexually assaulted by two men. There were white men, sometimes people ask that, you know, because that would make this trajectory a little more linear, but stories into like hate and violence are very rarely straight lines. When I woke up the next morning after that had happened, my first thought was like, did that really happen?

And then when I was like, okay, yeah, that really happened. My very next thought was that there was absolutely no way I could tell my parents that growing up in my household that whenever my brother and I were sick or hurt, that their first response was always shame and blame. That you would come in with a bloody lip or whatever, and they'd be like, how many times have we told you not to play tackle football in the backyard? How many times have we told you not to climb trees barefoot? How many times have we told you to wash your hands? If you'd been doing that, you wouldn't be sick right now or whatever. And so there was this part of me,

very unconscious part of me, that knew that I couldn't endure the trauma of what had just happened, in addition to the trauma of being blamed and shamed for what had just happened. So I took all of that trauma and just shoved it down completely unprocessed. We know like unprocessed trauma doesn't dissipate it festers. And in my case, it festered into deep

self-loathing and deep self-hatred and that it was expressed mainly through rage that I didn't understand and I didn't have the tools or skills to deal with. I hated myself. I wanted to hurt everything and everyone I came in contact with myself and anything that I encountered. I was so desperate to like project this stuff up out of me and get you know get this sense of rage and self-loathing out of me. On the periphery of the punk scene where I hung out were the neo-nazi skinheads that they were at like every punk show There were always fights and I think the rage within me really resonated with the rage that they displayed I

Started spending more time hanging out with these guys. I started listening to The music that they were listening to began to borrow some of the books and literature that they were reading. What I didn't realize that I was doing was that I was constructing an echo chamber where more and more of my life was spent immersed only in these spaces and only engaged in these ideas. And everything that I encountered in the world, I began to filter through this lens, which was then normalized inside this very closed ecosystem that I was in. Interestingly, during that year, so I was 15, and so I was a sophomore in high school, I was actually elected student president of my class

during that time. So during this period that I'm like radicalizing, I was actually like president of my student class. That's important because we tend to want to dismiss hates and racism and anti-Semitism as things that uneducated people do or whatever. And so in my case, and I have found with people who I mentor that that is often very often not the case at all. By the time I was 15 and a half I ended up leaving that private school and I went back to the public

high school where my parents were living and eventually they moved from Michigan where we were living down to Augusta, Georgia and one of the very first things I did after we moved was to leave home. I hopped on a Greyhound bus and went back to Toledo to go hang out with these people that I had been hanging out with. Over the next four and a half years or so, I would end up living all over the country in these very closed cells of other white power folks. And so often my relationships while I was in the movement were incredibly violent. And that oftentimes there would be a breaking point

where I would just reach out to my parents to ask them if I could come home. And my parents felt this legal obligation that because I was under 18, that they had to report me as a runaway. And so there were multiple times that I was actually picked up as a runaway and either put on a bus or a train to like get sent back home. So I had this ebb and flow of like going back home and then meeting new people in the

movement and then moving throughout the country to go engage in these spaces. Um, who are engaged in pretty high levels of violence, physical fights, physical alterations, refeeding and fliring of places of worship and historically black neighborhoods, and attacks on gay nightclubs. The levels of violence were incredibly normalized. Let me just, sorry, I just want to ask a question about that period of time. I read a story where you and your compatriots, that's even the right word, through tear gas into a gay nightclub and then waited at the back door for people to exit so you could beat them up.

Yes. Unfortunately, yes. The police came and so we fled before that happens, but that was the intention and you know in the world that I was living in it was like there were weapons and guns and That somebody might just happen to have a canister or tear gasling in the back of their car but yes, unfortunately that is something that we engaged in How did you extricate yourself from this?

something that we engaged in. How did you extricate yourself from this? So my parents, they were living in Augusta, Georgia, and there is a military base that's there. And often, when I would end up back home, the cycle of meeting new people would begin again. And most of them were in the military. So this is definitely not a new phenomenon at all, probably like 30 of my contacts while I was in

were active duty military. And I ended up meeting a guy that was in the army and he went home for Christmas Exodus. So like there's two weeks during Christmas and most of the base goes back to visit their family and I got one of my friends to agree to like, hey, let's go visit, he lived in Texas. I was like, let's go visit him.

Like, let's go on a road trip or whatever. And so while I was there, I met his mom and his little brothers and stuff. And then when I got back two weeks later, my parents were just like, you left home again without telling us and you're above age now. So you just can't live here anymore. Like we can't do this anymore.

Which was fine with me because we didn't get along, but I didn't really have anywhere else to go. Very luckily for me, this guy's mom said that I could go live with her and her younger son. She was a single mom she had two 11 year old twins and a nine year old son. I only found out a couple years ago that she didn't know what our ideology was.

But like when I showed up on her doorstep, it was like, I mean, I looked like the vial creature that I had become. Like I mean, I had just so much like rage and anger in my eyes and just had this like very gruff physical appearance. But somehow she chose to look past that and see this struggling young woman

who simply needed a place to stay. I wasn't very well connected with the white power scene in Texas where they were living. So upon walking in that house, my echo chamber begins to break up, that now a lot of my time is spent with this family who does not hold these beliefs or ideas at all. And anything that I would have engaged in or whatever couldn't be normalized

through the people that I was associating with. You know, I started to play Frisbee and go fishing and camping and stuff with the little boys. I was reading them Chronicles of Narnia before bed at night. And it was like, oh yeah, like this is like what people do. Like this is like what a life is. My life had been so immersed in like hyperviolence

that I had become so disconnected from all of the other pieces that make up a life. That I didn't feel joy or wonder in awe or engage in activities simply for joy. I had a place where I belonged, I didn't have to espouse an ideology, I didn't have to prove myself through violence. All I had to do was do the dishes sometimes. It was like the part of me that needed somewhere to belong so deeply that it was like, the part of me that needed somewhere to belong so deeply that it was like, it was being met much more authentically

and effectively in this family unit than it ever had in the white power movement. As well, she began to connect me with resources like tangibly so I could begin to move my life forward and to begin thinking about future. That while I was in the movement, I only thought about my future in terms of the movement. What could I do, what could I sacrifice,

what could my life possibly benefit this movement that I was so disconnected from any sense of having a personal future? And she's like, don't you wanna go to college or are there things that you wanna do with your life? But then she was also just like, so if you're to go to college? Aren't there things that you want to do with your life? But then she was also just like, so if you're going to, you need to write these colleges. Here's, let's go to the library.

We'll look up these addresses or give you, here's a stamp. I'm going to put this in the mailbox for you. You have to go take your SATs. Here's a number two pencil. In your hand, get in my car. I'll drive you there. That it wasn't just like, you need to better your life. She invested in me and connected me with those things that I would begin to need to move

forward. So, is in that environment where I think there was enough stability in my life that the space around me kind of expanded so I could shift and begin to examine like what my life had become and just be like, is this really who I am? Is this really what I believe? Is this really what I want to invest the rest of my life in? And it was in that environment that my ideology began to fall away, which happened probably

over the course of about four or five months. At which point, I was like, OK, I think I want to go to college. And I began to make some plans for some of my immediate future stuff. But it would take me another three years, at least, to really begin some of the sole work involved in this. My ideology fell away and I was like, okay, I reject this ideology. I don't want to invest anymore of myself in this. I think this is bad and this is harmful. But I still didn't have

communication skills, interpersonal skills. In fact, it would be until I was like 20, almost 24 that I would frame what happened to me when I was 14 years old as rape. Like up until that point, I simply was just like, well, I lost my virgin, I needed to amen it up. Hardy when I was 14 years old. That I still wasn't inputting that as sexual assault in the story that I told myself. So these intervening years between 20 and 23, like my life was still a mess. And so it was like, I went to college and I did okay. But my interpersonal relationships, while I was in there, were like a disaster.

I still didn't like have skills and tools. I hadn't yet really sat with shame and feeling like the shame wash over me of like what I had been engaged in and even begin the process of like processing that shame. I ended up having two babies during that time that I placed up for adoption because I was just like, I still felt like I was really worthless. So I felt like such a wreck of a human being. When I was 23, I ended up getting pregnant again. And I would end up keeping this baby

who would, you know, he's now the oldest of my seven children. He just turned 23 a few months ago. And when I had him, I was just like, I knew only two things. I had never even changed a diaper. I had no idea what I was doing. But I was just like, I know that I don't want to parent my kids the way I was parented.

And I know that I never want my kids to grow up and be like me. And so that began this quest for me to, you know, like, okay, like, what does it take to cultivate human beings who thrive? What does it take to cultivate human beings who will never look to hate or violence as any legitimate expression of anything going on

in their lives? And so that began for me this process of like, okay, we gotta do this work of like, how did we get here? Like, how did I end up in this movement? What happened? I need to like begin to like come to terms with the harm that I actually caused. How do I gain better skills, better tools? How do I gain better empowerment and emotional well-being? And again, like this is a process. It would take me 10 years after I had my oldest child to get a diagnosis of PTSD.

It would take me another almost 10 years to get a diagnosis of complex PTSD. So it has very much been a process, which I assume will continue on for the rest of my life, both gaining a better understanding of my healing and being positioned to make meaningful amends. I want to talk about the amends and the help that you're providing, other folks who are captured by this various ideologies in a second, but going back to this woman who took you in, who sounds incredible. who took you in who sounds incredible. What I'm about to say is gonna sound a little for me uncharacteristically grandiose, but it seems like

what saved you here, and it didn't save you all the way because clearly you had lots of struggles after your time with this woman, but what got you out of the movement at least initially was love. Yes, love and connection and compassion that it requires that someone is able to meaningfully connect with you when you are immersed in pain that you are both feeling and putting forth that in order to begin the process of leaving that state of pain that it absolutely requires empathy and compassion and love. That brings us to questions about whose responsibility is that, right?

Like if we're talking about violent white supremacists, whose responsibility is that empathy and connection that is necessary? Because I believe that that is not the responsibility of their former targets and victims, right? Like those former victims and targets may choose that as a path of their own healing, but that we cannot societally make that the responsibility of their former victims and targets. And so for me,

that that is part of why I feel responsibility to try to make these empathetic connections with people who are leaving to stand that gap to take on that responsibility of empathy and compassion. It wasn't just that I was dehumanizing other people while I was in this stuff that the process of dehumanizing others also dehumanized me. That because there was this lack of outward empathy, I feel like empathy is one of the things that is inherent in our humanness. And because that was so broken in me that it was like that allowed me to dehumanize other people, but the process of doing that also dehumanized me. And so this woman allowed for this process of rehumanizing me.

Yeah, yeah, there's a poem coming to mind. I'm way out of my comfort zone today. Now, I'm going to quote poetry, but there's some poem that's been quoted to me before. I think by Sharon Salisburg is a great meditation teacher, but it's about re-teaching a thing. It's loveliness and it sounds like she began that process for you. And I really, I'm struck by this thing you said about how dehumanizing other people harmed you because you have to kind of shut part of yourself down in order to shut other people out. And I wonder, do you think that happens? Your case is an extreme case, but hatred, dehumanization, contempt?

I mean, that's happening on a garden variety level, societally now. And we're seeing it in all sorts of ways. Do you think that we're all harmed by the tribal wars that are raging in America as we speak? Oh, yes, absolutely. Pain is isolating, right? It's like whether it's physical or emotional or spiritual pain, it tends to cause us to want to turn and focus inward. It's very difficult to connect when you are in pain. And I think it is additionally challenging

to recognize that others can be in co-equal or even greater pain and hold that at the same time. That when we hurt, we are just like, oh, I need to deal with my stuff. It's very isolating. But to know that that's kind of like a human condition can be very freeing and allow us to see connection through our anguish. There's this quote in Brian Stephenson's just mercy and he's sort of like paraphrasing a quote from Thomas Merton

that's like that we're all bodies of broken bones. And this idea that being broken is what makes us human. When we can find no other ways to connect, we all have the worst things that we've done and the worst things that we've done to us. That it's like the source of our common humanity. And that's where we look for comfort and meaning and healing. And that is something that we all undertake. And so the challenge is to exist in your own pain, comfort and meaning and healing and that that is something that we all undertake.

And so the challenge is to exist in your own pain and fear and alienations and anxieties and then allow for connection to that experience in the people around you as well. And I think that social media and media and political parties and stuff that they exploit that, and that rather than saying, hey, we're all living this shared experience of pain and trying to ease that pain and find meaning in that pain, that they overwhelmingly use that to create groups of others to blame for why that

pain exists in the first place. And I mean, there's reasons for that, right? Because if we are empowered through this shared experience of humanity, well, that's going to probably change our relationship with power and power structures, right? So it's there are billions of dollars spent trying to create and exploit groups of others as the reason to blame for this pain and anguish and struggle that we each personally feel. Yes, all, I mean so much of that is so interesting and I I keep finding my mind going back to I mean, there's so much in this idea that when you do humanize other people you are hurt

Obviously, it's true in racism and sexism But I keep coming back to tribalism in part because I see people in my own world and I suspect without any Ton of evidence that there's a psychology that can take hold where you're like, yeah, I'm just a regular person doing my thing. I may be, you know, in a tribe. In other words, I watch X cable station or I read X newspaper and I don't read Y. But you know, it's not like on my mind all the time, but you know, vaguely, I don't consider myself to be part of the problem.

But you know, whenever tribe I'm in, I look at the people from the other tribe as complete idiots. I would not want my child to marry somebody from that tribe. I would never really be friends with them. But again, it's not totally salient all the time in my mind, but I'm not organizing my life around my tribal identity, but I'm walking around with a significant amount of contempt for people who see the world differently than I do. Even that, I think, can take a psychic toll. And it's a lower level of radicalism than what you, Shannon, identified with.

I'm not throwing tear gas into nightclubs, but I am walking around, writing off tens of millions of people and diminishing their humanity, which whether I see it or not, causes some psychic pain on my, and I'm just trying this theory out, but does that land for you? Yeah, and I think, you know, it's like, as a mom, so much of the way that, you know, I think about things as informed by my motherhood,

that I choose to parent like collaboratively with my children and try to build like co-empowerment, taking the opinion that their input and even their descent, their disagreement is really important and important to help us all to thrive collectively so that I, you know, like, I don't have to parent coercively or whatever it's like, I can build collaborations so that we can problem solve and be creative in our solutions and learn through doing the act of consensus building, right? Which means that I might not get everything that I want all of the time, but that I feel like my needs and desires are heard enough of the time that I'm willing to engage in this process. And so like, I have engaged with people in online discussions and real world discussions,

like say something like guns or whatever. I personally feel land on the side of like, I think there should be more gun restrictions than there are. Engaging in this conversation, say some person just being like, oh, and I need to be able to protect my family. For me, I was just like, oh, well, what are you afraid of?

You're just like, well, somebody's going to hurt my family. I was like, well, talk to me about that, like a little bit more. Because I'm like, I'm afraid of, you know, like, you're just like, well, somebody's going to hurt my family. I was like, well, talk to me about that, like, a little bit more. And, you know, because I'm like, I'm afraid of that too. Like, I don't want my family to be harmed either. And my goal was not to like, change his mind or whatever, but it was like, so we engage talking about, well, like, when we get down to it, our fears are actually really similar. And I think that is true about most stuff. That it's like if you can get past the like, the noise of the argument that we're really talking about

the same sort of we want our families to thrive. We want our children to have a future. We want there to be meaningful work for us and for the people around us and that our base needs and things are actually really, really incredibly similar. And if I shut down from engaging that way, then I am engaging in dehumanizing that other person,

that I'm just taking their ideas as sort of independent, even from their physical body or whatever. I'm just engaged their ideas as sort of independent, even from their physical body or whatever. I'm just engaged with these ideas or whatever, and that it's this collaboration building and valuing the totality of other people that helps us to actually build communities that genuinely thrive, and that by disengaging from hearing and what someone is saying as part of the totality of who they are, that I'm actually really injuring my ability to have a thriving community.

Do you go out of your way to have civil conversations with people with whom you disagree? Yes, I do. But I mean, part of that is some of the work that I do. But yes, Yes, I do. But I mean part of that is part of that is to like some of the work that I do. But yes, yes, I do. I also, for me, it's very important that I'm always vigilance about not living in and creating an echo chamber of just like a different kind, right? It's important for me to make sure that I'm engaging with lots of different ideas and lots of, you know, people coming from lots of different viewpoints. So in some ways, the sort of quite dramatic work you're doing of helping people deprogram

from truly radical hate groups, and also sort of a lower sort of less extreme level on the day-to-day tribal fishers that characterize our society. If I'm here you correctly, you take this sort of deprogramming extreme work and you can bring that mentality into a discussion about gun rights or gay marriage or whatever it is. If I take away the motivation that I'm trying to change somebody's mind and if I change that and it's just like I want this to be an experience for both of us to honor one another's humanity inside of here to see and feel the connectedness that we have, it completely changes the way that I engage. And that because I feel like the more we can build

and experience that connection, that person now, they can't just be like, well, everyone that believes this is an idiot or whatever, because we just had a very meaningful conversation in which I wasn't just trying to like change his mind or whatever, where it was just like, oh, okay, I understand from your point of view how you can see that, and I really empathize with the things that have drawn you and led you there, that

everyone has a story behind how they've gotten to wherever they've gotten. behind how they've gotten to wherever they've gotten. And if we can take time and create the space to hear that story, it is my absolute firmest belief that we will be better able to generate functional solutions that aren't harmful in themselves. So I've been very influenced in this regard by the work of a group that you may or may not have heard of called the Brave or Angels. It used to be called the Better Angels.

Anyway, there, one of their leaders has been on the show before. His name is Bill D'Arri. If people want to go back and listen to that episode. But there, there, what they do is they run these sort of encounter sessions between reds and blues. And one of the principal rules is, do not try to change anybody's mind. And instead, what the goal is to arrive at what they call, and I love this term, accurate disagreement.

And the net effect is humanization. You don't have to walk away with agreeing with somebody about who they voted for or why, but you understand that their reasons hold together. And you see them as a whole person who has a story that makes some sense. And hopefully it goes in reverse. And it sounds like you're naturally applying the same approach in your discussions with people with whom you disagree. That sounds incredibly similar, yes. Yes. And I mean, and this is something that I engage with in my family too, just with my kids and my everyday life. Like that at

this point, this is just how I exist in the world. And it sounds like you learned this from I keep toggling between two levels here. There's the level that we haven't quite fully explored yet, which is your work with people are coming out of hate groups. And then the level of you're just sort of talking to other people who are not in a hate group, but you may disagree with them. It sounds like you learned it from the former. And I'd like to dive into that in a deeper way. What does it look like to somebody who's pulling themselves out of a

QAnon hole, call you up and say, Hey, I need some help reintegrating. How does it work? There's a couple different pathways. Every now and then, if somebody's about to be doxed or have their information put out very publicly through local activist organizations, but there's some exceptional circumstance

for this, like maybe they're young or that there's been some talk of maybe them beginning to have like some remorse or whatever. Sometimes the like local community activist organizations will reach out to me to make contact with these folks and just be like, okay,, let's do some work together. So rather than like doxing and making their information really public and targeting their place of employment or whatever with this information that they'll begin basically just having

dialogue with me or whatever sort of like like mentor-mentee relationship as opposed to this sort of like community defense model or whatever. So sometimes people come to me that way. Sometimes people do in fact reach out to me through multitudinous ways that they can get in touch with me saying like, I either want to leave or I am in the process of leaving or I have left and I would love to like connect with you.

A lot of the contact that I've had, especially over the last three years and very much so since January, our concern family members or friends or peers of people that are immersed in these spaces. And for me, like, I generally, when people are still immersed in these spaces, my approach is to try to empower their families through information, getting them to do some work, to identify if there's potentially toxicity in their relationship with this person and to gain their knowledge set, but also their emotional and communication skillsets that I don't tend to generally like go into places and try to like get people out or whatever because I have found that

it's just not a very good use of time and energy that when you're in the like height of being entrenched in the echo chamber, you have ready made defenses for any objection. You're not even engaging with it. Any objection that somebody brings up, you already have an answer for that it's not hitting the, hey, you have this broken needs set that needs to be better filled. It's really just arguing ideas. And so I have found it to be incredibly ineffective and not a good use of time or energy. And so I try to spend that time and energy

helping their families to have better skills and resources so that they are positioned to be able to assist with this off ramping and disentrenching and transformation in this person's life, should they get to a point where they want it? Because I don't actually think there's anything super special about the work that I do. I think that if people had the skills and the tools and the knowledge and that there were some support structure within communities and social workers and probation officers and mental health professionals

and school administrators, and if there were people like that who had this information and some training, that they're already positioned to do this work. It's just a matter of trying to figure out how to get this information and the's just a matter of trying to figure out how to get this information and the skill sets to hyper-local people because disengagement actually happens on a very hyper-local level. And most of the people who disengaged this early process that they often have trouble

identifying while they're in it that I just heard another former today called The Void, that there's like this couple year period a lot of times where it's like you're not positioned yet to begin to do the like, okay, how did I get here? The work of like grappling with the shame and seeing how you got there and understanding the genuine consequences of the actions that you were engaged in. And so like that support is really, in my opinion, best done by people that are already and an immediate adjacency to people's lives. I was struck when you said your work isn't super special. And I think what you're alluding to

is that you're not pulling off SEAL Team Six style rescues of people at neo-Nazi encampments in the woods. But instead, you're on the level of human relationships because you saw what happened with you, which was you were traumatized, major vulnerable, ended up in a hate group. What saved you was somebody showing you love and compassion and care. And that brought in your horizons and allowed you to engage in the long process of getting your life back on track. It sounds to me that you're just running that play with other people.

You know, the stories into hate and violence are incredibly personal. That they're very, very personal individual stories, but they're happening inside a larger societal and cultural story and cultural realities that are happening as well. And the impact of these very personal journeys is very external. Holding all of that complexity all at the same time, it's like, okay, there's lots of different things that we have to be doing all at the same time. That it's like, we have to be dealing with cultural and societal realities and transformation that needs to take place. We have to be dealing with containment and disruption from a policy level.

And at the same time, we have to deal with these very personal, like we are actually talking about individual human beings who are the people who make up these movements, that movements are made up of individual human beings and individual stories. So all of this has to happen on multitudinous levels, all at the same time. Much more of my conversation with Shannon Foley Martinez right after this. Like this short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean?

How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you, but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how

they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. You can also listen to ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. I know you're interested in meditation and Gigiang and yoga. What role have these practices played in your work?

One of the things that I came to understand through my own experience is how very crucial it is for me to engage in activities where I am fully immersed in my body and not sort of like dissociate or you know separate myself from my realities or whatever. It's like learning how to be very anchored in my body, learning how to experience and feel where and how I'm feeling emotions in my body and being engaged in things where I'm not just interacting in the world of ideas or whatever separate from my Physicality that those things are incredibly crucial to me in terms of my healing and That that took me a long time to really understand also that there are things like you know yoga or Jigong or

Hapkido or you know any any of these things where it's just like one of the things when people are leaving extremism or whatever, it's like they have to create new neural pathways. They have to fire new synapses and in trench new neural pathways, you basically have to hijack your brain just like you do when you are making any change in your life. trying to create ways where there's like so much to learn so that you can spend your focus time on learning the information that you need like about these things. But doing that in a way that is not antithetical to your healing, but actually aids your healing. That it's things that also address your body and your mind's like trauma response

and the functionality of your brain and creates an environment where entrenching new neural pathways is easier and more favorable and yields to more holistic ways of engaging in life. I believe I read DJ, one of our producers who talked to you in order to prepare for this interview. Made a note in the notes he sent to me that that one of the current and I found this to be very surprising, but this is something you're observing that one of the portals to QAnon has become for some people yoga. Yes. And the wellness, like online wellness communities. This seems to be particularly true for women, which I find interesting.

Again, as a woman who's had, I've birthed nine babies, I have seven kids. The amount of times that I have walked into a pediatrician's office knowing that my baby won't sleep anywhere but like on my chest or in bed with me or whatever. And being told that that's not true. You know, women all the time go seek help for chronic pain or whatever and are told that we're imagining things or that it's not that bad.

I think that that's a very, very prevalent experience for women, and that that is one of the ways that people end up embracing the wellness community, where they feel like the standard healthcare, paradigm, or whatever has failed them. So that there's this idea where it's like you distrust authority and you distrust a theoritative information or what's presented as authoritative information or sources of information as part of your journey into the wellness community. And if you are inside a community where you already distrust

those speaking or impositions or supposed positions of authority about your healthcare and well-being, that it's very easy to understand how there is a leak that is made to just be like, okay, well, I'm being intentionally deceived. I'm being intentionally misled that this is actually something where I'm potentially the target of something that is intentionally trying to harm me or my family. I have a lot of empathy for how that leak happens. I would imagine it's also the case that people come to yoga or other wellness modalities

with trauma. I think that that is incredibly true. Through many of the wellness communities that I've been a part of, you know, because I share very readily like my hurts and wounds, I try to live very authentically and vulnerably, that people tend to feel safer sharing that stuff with me. And I mean, I have found it to be overwhelmingly true that there is trauma and unresolved trauma sometimes

and addiction issues and violence issues, interpersonal violence, intimate partner violence, that's people are recovering from or whatever, that I have found that to be overwhelmingly true. Just as we're winding down here, to put a fine point on it, you know, it's unusual on this show where we really try to provide folks with, you know, actionable advice for doing life better. It's unusual that we bring in an ex neo-Nazi on the show,

but obviously your story is so compelling and the work you've done is so good. How would you, if it's possible to even sum this up? How would you sum up, you know, the primary learnings from the work you do where you're helping deprogram people and get them out of hate groups. How can you sum that up in a way that would be applicable to the rest of us who are not existing in such heightened circumstances?

My best advice is to engage in emotional learning. Learn how to name your emotions, broaden like print out lists of the names of emotions, that even just naming the emotion that you feel changes how you're interacting with that emotion. Grow your skills to be able to identify and label your emotions. Grow your ability to learn how to feel where in your body you're experiencing those emotions. Learn better communication skills. Learn some nonviolent communication skills that you can take with you into the spaces that you go, whether that's at work, in your families, at home, in your online world. Try to learn better communication skills. Learn better how to understand what your boundaries are

and how to communicate those and enforce those boundaries in a healthy way. Learn how to grow an awareness of how those feelings that you are able to better identify now, how those feelings are being marketed to, that we're being marketed to, that we're being marketed to all of the time. And a lot of them marketing is directed at your fear, at your anxiety, at your feelings

of not being enough, at your feelings of alienation. And that if you can both learn these skills and pass them on to your children, so like, okay, let's talk about how we're being marketed to and how these feelings are being manipulated. That helps us interact with the things that we're consuming in a different way. And that helps change our relationship to the information that we're inputting all of the time. I think engaging in spaces where we allow for dissents and disagreements and do the work of learning how to collaboratively engage and build power structures.

How do we build co-empowered power structures and engage in some of those ideas of consensus building and things like that. And not just do that like when we go to work or whatever, but do that in all of the spaces in our life where it's like we learn how to elevate and amplify voices that are maybe unlike our own or that are often kept the most silence. So for me, like a lot of my solution building for individual people are incredibly just like your own emotional learning that it's like because then you can take that healing into the spaces where you go. And I think that that can be incredibly transformative because

I mean, oh my gosh, what if most of us engaged with the world that way? And it's like with healthy emotional and relationship skills and that we learn to like input information in a more complex way, it's like we would live in an entirely different world than we live in right now. Final comment for me is that early in this conversation, you said something the effect of that you're a primary goal and your parenting was to make sure your kids don't grow up like you. I hope that you've changed that goal because it would be good if your kids

and all other kids grew up to be like you. Well, they're already so much better than me. I want them to grow up and just be able to embrace all of the best in the world without having to constantly come from a brain that's rattled with depression and trauma and other lingering stains of the things that I both did and were done to me that they will go into their adulthood with far better skill sets to have you know post-traumatic

growth whenever obstacles and terrible things happen in their lives. I don't know. I still hope they don't turn out like me. I hope they turn out so much better. Well, I think we're saying the same thing in some ways. I hope they don't have to deal with the trauma that you've had to deal with and that they don't make the same mistakes you did, but if they can turn whatever difficulties in their life into the beneficial actions that you've done, then that would be to the good is my point. He said it much better than me.

Before we go, just, you know, if people want to learn more about you to support your work or anything like that, where can we go online or elsewhere to learn more? No, I'm a tear. I'm like the world's worst like self-promoteer. I don't actually even know what my website is. And it's not a very good website.

But if you Google search Shannon Foley Martinez, come up with some stories and videos that are out there about me. I do have a website. I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I'm most active on Twitter. I have a Patreon. Most of the content on my Patreon is accessible to everyone. You know, those are the best ways. And my email address

is on my website. So please drop me a line if I can ever be of help or assistance in any way. To compensate for Shannon's admirable, in my opinion, lack of appetite for self-promotion, we will put links to everything relevant in the show notes So don't worry about it Shannon. Thank you very much. Great job and it was great to meet you and I'm sending nothing but good wishes to your long guy Thank you all so much. Thanks so much for having me and you know, it's spending the afternoon with me Thanks again to Shannon really appreciated her sharing her time and wisdom

at this fraught moment in our history. Before we go one item of business and one announcement for an event that's coming up this Thursday, May 20th with Richie Davidson and that's happening through the New York Insight Meditation Center. I'll tell you more about that in a second. First, though, the item of business, which is in invitation for you to that in a second. First though, the item of business, which is in invitation for you to participate in this show. In June, we're gonna be launching a special series of podcast episodes focusing on anxiety, something I'm sure we're all way too familiar with

or many of us are way too familiar with. In this series, you're gonna become intimately familiar with the mechanics of anxiety, how and why it shows up, and what you may be doing to feed it. We're going to teach you how to have a realistic view of your anxiety and to increase your ability to cope with challenging situations. You're going to learn tools for examining and overcoming your own particular anxiety feedback loops while building the skills of mindfulness, compassion, and courage along the way.

And this is where you come in. We'd love to hear from you with Your question is about anxiety that experts will answer during the anxiety series we're going to do here in the podcast. So whether you're struggling with social anxiety, anxiety about re-entering the world post COVID or if you have any questions about anxiety at all, we want to hear from you. To submit a question or share a reflection, you can dial 646-883-836 and leave us a voicemail. You can dial 646-883-836 and leave us a voice mail. 646-883-836, the deadline for submissions is Friday, May 21. If you're outside the United States, we've put details in the show notes about how to submit a question to an alternate method.

We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you in advance. And also, just as I mentioned briefly a second ago, I do want to tell you about an event that's coming up with my friend, Richie Davidson, who's a renowned author and psychologist and neuroscientist. He's doing an event with New York Insight this Thursday night, May 20th. It's called Wellbeing as a skill. Richie is going to discuss the interaction between Dharma and scientific evidence that suggests

we can change our brains by transforming our minds and cultivate habits of mind that will improve our well-being and the world. The online event starts at 7 Eastern. I put a link to the registration in the show notes, or you can just head over to nyimc.org nyimc.org to search for the event. Richie's amazing, he's been on the show several times and really is a pioneer in terms of using the modern tools and neuroscience to look at what meditation does to the brain. So go check that out.

With all that said, big thanks to everybody who makes this show, Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere, Kim Bykum, I'm Maria Wartell, and Jen Plant. We get audio engineering from ultraviolet audio, as always a big shout out to Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan from ABC News. We'll see y'all on Wednesday for a fresh episode.

Hey, hey prime members, you can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.