Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Massive, Underappreciated Power Of Apology | V (Formerly Eve Ensler) (Co-Interviewed By Dr. Bianca Harris)

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

How learning to apologize can upgrade your life.V (formerly Eve Ensler) is the Tony award-winning playwright, author, and activist. Her play The Vagina Monologues is an Obie award-winning, Olivier-nominated theatrical phenomenon that has been translated into 48 languages and performed in 140 countries. She is the author of numerous books, including the recently released bestseller Reckoning (2023), heralded by the Washington Post as “gutting and gorgeous.” Other best-selling books include The Apology (2019), translated into 20 languages, In the Body of the World, and The New York Times bestseller I Am an Emotional Creature. She starred on Broadway in The Good Body and, most recently Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in the critically acclaimed In the Body of the World.  She helped create That Kindness: Nurses in Their Own Words, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in collaboration with theaters across the US, as a tribute to nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. V is currently writing the story and co-writing lyrics for the musical Becoming (formerly WILD), which made its world premiere in December 2021 at The American Repertory Theater. She recently wrote This is Crazy, a play about mental illness commissioned by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her film credits include The Vagina Monologues (HBO), What I Want My Words to Do to You (Executive Producer, Winner of the Sundance Film Festival Freedom of Expression Award, PBS), Mad Max: Fury Road (Consultant), and City of Joy documentary (Netflix). She is the founder of V-Day, the 26-year-old global activist movement that has raised over 120 million dollars to end violence against women, gender-expansive people, girls, and the planet—and founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries, as well as a co-founder of the City of Joy, a sanctuary and revolutionary center for women in the Congo who have survived sexual assault.  She writes regularly for The Guardian. In this episode we talk about:V’s 4-step process for making an apologyWhy she doesn’t believe in forgivenessHer concept that the wound is the portalAnd much more. Related Episodes: What To Do When You’re Angry | Matthew Brensilver, Vinny Ferraro, Kaira Jewel LingoSign up for Dan’s newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/v-868See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? When people talk about strategies for happiness, apology does not normally top the list. But my guest today makes an extremely compelling case and it comes with an equally compelling personal story. Apologies are interesting because it's so easy and so common to do them poorly. I'm thinking of classic non-apologies such as I'm sorry if I upset you, which

never fails to piss me off. Anyway, my guest today is going to talk about how to apologize well and why it is very much in your interest to get into the habit of making fulsome apologies. But she's gonna start with a powerful personal story. V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, recently put out a book called The Apology in which she wrote herself an apology from the perspective of her dead father

who had viciously abused her for much of her early life. In other words, she never got an apology from the man himself, so she wrote one herself. A little bit more about V before we dive in. She's a Tony Award-winning playwright, author, and activist. She's perhaps best known for her play, The Vagina Monologues, which has been translated into 48 languages and performed in 140 countries.

Also, just to say before we dive in here, my wife, Dr. Bianca Harris, joined me for this interview where we talk about V's four-step process for making an apology, why V does not believe in forgiveness, her concept that the wound is the portal, which really struck me, and I'll let her explain that, and much more. We'll get started with V right after this.

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onepeloton.ca. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. Maybe you're daydreaming about hitting the slopes or maybe you're just craving a change of scenery.

While you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money that you could put toward the trip. I'm a huge fan of Airbnb. My family and I have been talking about going to the Galapagos, but that is super expensive. So maybe putting our house up on Airbnb is a way to raise some money for that trip. I do love renting houses with my family and several other families and getting together. It's so much more intimate than a hotel. So I'm a fan for sure on the customer side. Whether you could use some extra money to cover some bills

or for something a little bit more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. V, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Happy to have you here. Dr. Vee, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here as well. I'm not sure I believe that, but...

Well, for Vee. Yeah. Well, okay. So Vee, let me start with you. And if you're comfortable, it feels like maybe the right place to begin this conversation is with your personal story, which I know is quite wrenching. So if you're cool with it, I'd be interested to hear your story that you tell in the apology.

Oh, we're gonna go right for it. I think the way I would describe it is that I was kind of, I was boiled in a stew of violence. You know, like I was made in that stew of violence. My father was, you know, a corporate executive and charming and handsome and all those things that the world is always praising. And on the outside was one thing and inside he was something else. You know, when Always when people say, oh, but he was such a nice person and after he's killed like whole family or something,

it was that kind of thing. My father just had two personas and inside the family, he was tyrannical and dictatorial and violent and angry and alcoholic. I was saying the other night, if you grow up with a very, very intense personality as your mother or your father, your personality is formed in relationship to that. You either become defiant or you become passive or you become mutated in some way around it, but that's the kind

of forming element. And my father was very adoring of me when I was little to the point where I think he couldn't handle his feelings because he had never been prepared in any way to have those feelings and he crossed a line and he crossed a boundary and he sexually abused me from the time I was five until the time I was ten and then whatever happened whether it was he was being found out or it was getting too weird or whatever it was he stopped but to kind of it was getting too weird or whatever it was, he stopped. But to kind of prove to everybody that he didn't have those feelings for me and to prove

to himself, he became very, very violent. And I would say from that point on until I left home, my life was just in dread, in terror, that at any moment he would explode, he would beat me, he would throw me against a wall, he would give me a bloody nose in a restaurant. And it had obviously an impact on my life. I think it took me years to just even begin to have feelings because I learned early on to drink them away, drug them away, have sex, you know, sex them away, do whatever I could not to have my being by body, not to feel my feelings, not to remember what had happened to me.

It took a long time to find my way back in, and a lot of extreme situations to find my way back in. But I think it also made me driven to spend my life and devote my life to ending violence against all women and girls on the earth because I know what that violence does. It's not a moment, it's a lifetime to recover, to come out of that. It's in your body, it's in your soul, it's in your being.

You have to struggle and struggle and struggle. I mean, I was listening to AOC talking yesterday about her assault and worrying about being pregnant. And I just looked at her face and I could tell it's still in her, it's still around her, that experience. You know, there's a way in which you live in the present, but you're always in that past time, you know?

So I think it shaped a lot of who I am and a lot of what I decided I wanted to do with my life, which is to write and to find a way to stand up against violence. I'm sorry that happened to you, although I think the world is, in some way, the beneficiary of you transmuting it into something really positive. Thank you.

I want to pause and just check in with you, Bianca. That's a pretty intense story, and we've only just started. Any reflections from you as you listen? I mean, I have a tremendous amount of gratitude for you, and of course, your writing is formidable. I think for me coming to this book in 2019 was sort of one of the top five or ten books that was really transformative for me in the last 10 years or so. And there's more about that to discuss later, but part of it was just your ability to be so open with what had happened and to take this very, very unique perspective on things.

And I know we haven't even introduced the book yet, but it's very difficult to, you know, speak about what you went through without thinking about your words on the page in describing what you've been through. And so for that, I thank you in a million ways. Thank you. I think the apology was, well, it was one of the hardest things

I've ever done in my life, but it was also, I think what happens to survivors or people who've been through enormous violence is that you are always in your predator's narrative, right? Even when you're resisting it, even when you're fighting it, you're always in their story. And I realized, you know, around 2018, I didn't want to be in my father's story anymore. I didn't want to be reacting to him, proving to him I wasn't the stupid person he said I was, proving to him I wasn't a slut and I wasn't a whore, proving to him or just being angry at him, just being angry at him because

all that anger got transferred onto the world and I suddenly realized I want to be in my story. There could actually be another story outside of this thing that he created. And one of the great things about writing The Apology was, it broke me out of his story because I was finally willing and able because it took me years to be able, and I think it takes survivors as long as it takes you to get prepared to do what you need to do. I was finally able to see my father beyond the monster.

Not to justify his actions, never but to understand them because I think that understanding is liberation. I think when you come to understand things, you get free. And taking that journey was such a powerful thing because I climbed into my father. I climbed into him. And you know what? It didn't take a lot because the reality is our perpetrators live inside us. I can tell you more about my father than my father knows about himself. I literally would listen to the sound and the weight of his footsteps to know if I was going to get beaten. I can tell you from his laugh what he was feeling. We all can read our perpetrators because we

are in tune to the terror, in tune to their moods, in tune to what will happen. And so when I kind of summoned my father in at the beginning of writing the book as an ancestor, because he was dead 31 years at that point, I feel like he came and I feel like in some way we wrote this book together. And he would literally wake me up at four in the morning and say, go to your office, I'm going to tell you a story. And I would go and I would write things I had never heard in my life before. Right? So I think there is a way that I say this in the book, that the dead need to get free too.

The dead need liberation if they haven't done the work in this lifetime to address their misdeeds, shall we say. Bianca rightly pointed out that we hadn't really introduced the book, although I will have done that in the introduction to this podcast. But it might be worth getting you to say a little bit more about the conceit of the book, which is, I'll tee it up and then you can pick it up from there, that you never got an apology from this man, and you figured, maybe I'll write one myself.

Yeah. I think I waited my whole life thinking that day was going to come where my father, particularly when he got older, you get a little more vulnerable when you're older and you want to patch up your life. I dreamed that call would come and he'd say, come and I want to tell you all the things I did and why I did that and it never came. Ironically, even after he died, I would go to the mailbox sometime thinking there'd be a letter from the ethers with that apology.

I can't tell you how many women I know in this world who are waiting for an apology. It would just be like, if you ask them all to come into the streets of every country in the world, the streets would be filled. I finally said, well, I'm not going to get that apology for him, but what if I actually wrote his apology and said all the things to myself and told all the things to myself that I needed to hear? And the minute I decided that, it was like everything began to line up. Like I said, my father, the spirit of my father, the ancestor version of my father showed up. It was a nine-month process.

I didn't really leave this office where I'm in. I've slept here. I ate this book. I drank this book. I was just in it. It was excruciating at moments, and it was unbearable at moments. The last line of the book is, old man be gone. I don't know who wrote it at that point, my father or me.

But when I said it, it was like my father went shh and disappeared into the ethers. And he's really never come back. We're done, we're done. And I have no rancor, I have no bitterness, I have no rage, we're complete in this world. But I have no desire to be connected to him anymore either. Thus the name change.

You said something before that seems relevant to what you just said, which is understanding is liberation. Can you maybe unpack that a little bit? Yeah. I think for so long, I didn't want to know what motivated my father to beat me or to molest me or to abuse me. It was just like he was a horrible person

and that was that. I didn't want to know anymore. But I was still caught in that story because I was still in reaction, right? And when I wrote the book, I began to see the antecedents of my father's life, what tracks got laid down in him emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, that allowed him and catalyzed him to ultimately behave the way he did with me. And seeing that my father grew up in a patriarchal household, seeing all the elements of my father's life that turned him into somebody who was adored

but never loved, was honored but never cared for, who was abused by his brother, who never had any opportunity to share his feelings, to share his vulnerability, to speak from his heart. I saw the journey of my own father to close his heart, to become a dis-compassionate person. And it made me realize the biggest takeaway for me of that whole book was it had nothing to do with me, right? Whoever was standing in that position in my father's life would have been the person he put that rage on, adoration on. It was not about me, my soul, my personality, my being. And that was the greatest liberation because I think for many of us who've been

abused, we can't help but believe it's our fault. We did something to bring it on, particularly when you're a child, because it's so much easier to blame yourself than to blame your father. He's your parent. He's the person you love. There must be something intrinsically wrong with you. Why else would he do this to you? Right? And why else would he have adored you for so long and then turned on you and then suddenly beat you out of nowhere? Like, you must have done something to evoke this. And I think writing that book, understanding who my father was, understanding what his journey was, freed me to understand it had nothing to do with me. Right? So I think sometimes we don't want to get close to things

because it's too much and it hurts too much, but also we nurture our revenge, we nurture our rage, we nurture all the ways, it keeps us alive. But for me, my desire for liberation is the strongest desire I have in the world. It's just to be free, to be free, to be free. And that book was a huge step in moving towards liberation. And I highly recommend it to people. A friend of mine told me in his group therapy,

they're using the book now for patients to write apologies to themselves. And it's really been very successful. And it's City of Joy, which is this huge place we run in the Congo. They're using the same method for young women who have been sexually abused to write their perpetrators' apologies to them. And it's been very successful in releasing a lot of things that people have been carrying around.

There was something you said there about your desire for freedom, you know, psychological freedom, liberation is the word you used, and not wanting to walk around nursing your desire for revenge consciously or subconsciously. And it reminds me of something another guest on the show said recently that's been knocking around in my brain. So I'll say it and see if it lands for you, V. The guest in question here, his name is Matthew Brentsilver. He's a Dharma teacher on the left coast. He said,

there's no such thing as a closed-hearted happiness. Mm-hmm. That's so true. That's so true. And the thing about it is wherever your heart is closed, right, that's where you have to do the work, right? Wherever there's in Buddhist practice, I used to practice, they would say that aversion to something aversion to a person in your life is a sin. Like not being able to go near them. And that's where your heart is closed, right?

Where something has hurt you so badly that you've shut it off. And I think the journey of the apology was going back and going, we're going to open up all these places that have been closed. I didn't want to see my father as a vulnerable child. I didn't want to weep over the fact that he had been categorically shut down as a child and not allowed to feel, and not allowed to be vulnerable or open, and that no one ever occurred to anybody that he needed to be held or embraced because he

was independent and he was fine. And I think that led me to opening the last portal, one of the last portals of my life where I was closed, which had to do with, I'm not going to get into because I don't talk about my other family member, but had to do with my brother, which I just finished like that surgery recently, of really like, why couldn't I feel? What was going on in me that I had to close that in my heart? And I think, you know,

the more we can allow ourselves to open up the parts that we've determined off limit, like we're not gonna ever go there. We're not gonna touch that. You know, the wound, the wound is the portal. That has been proven over and over in my life. You know, the wound is the portal and what we're resisting, I used to have a friend,

you know, used to say, what we resist persists. What we resist persists. It will become the thing that eventually takes over whatever you refuse, wherever you refuse to go. And we do have to be careful here, and I suspect you'll agree with what I'm about to say, which is, yeah, you wanna open your heart, but you also wanna have smart boundaries

so you're not inviting a victimizer back in or somebody who hurts you in any way. Oh no, I'm not saying that you should open your heart to that person. Let me be clear. I'm saying you have to work with somebody or work with people who will help you clean up inside yourself. I'm not saying go open yourself to your perpetrator

if your perpetrator hasn't changed. Absolutely not. No, no, no. I'm talking about the inner work that you're doing. The inner work you're doing with yourself through therapy, through spiritual work, through writing, whatever it is. I don't really think it's necessary to do it

with the person who's harmed you in a weird way. I think all of the people who have harmed us live inside us. We can have plenty of dialogue with them and rearrange the way they exist inside us if we do the deeper work. That's my experience anyway. Amen. Biak, I wanna do a pulse check with you.

Any thoughts on any of the four going? I mean, I have so many thoughts. Just trying to figure out which ones are relevant to this discussion versus, you know, to take to my own therapist. Oh, bring them up, bring them all up. I will spare you, Dan, I promise. Oh, bring them up, bring them all up. I will spare you, Dan, I promise.

You know, I feel blessed not to have had, obviously, the trauma that you have had specifically. And so, you know, anything I say now about how your story and your writing relates to me, just to say that I'm not putting myself in that category to at all minimize what other people have gone through in terms of how I am also trying to relate to my father or my parents and using the tool that you've given us to do so. Because I think what is just so generous of you is that this story is for survivors

and is just for people. Your book came to me at a time where I really wanted to investigate my own personal narrative. And I think this was the first time that I really saw that that narrative, I did know that it certainly came from my, you know, formative experiences in life with my parents, but I never assumed that their narratives had nothing to do with me. And you use the term double narrative or triple narrative even in order to understand your own if we truly are double and triple narratives. I mean, you can't, you just cannot without understanding theirs to the best of your ability.

And when this book came to me and I was having a reckoning with all sorts of issues around, you know, my body and the setting of breast cancer and walking away from medicine, which was a huge identity issue and my father getting diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, the ability to ask questions and get answers from the outside were really kind of becoming closed in and impossible to get. And you know, we all, like you closed in and impossible to get. And you know, we all, like you said, are waiting for apologies. And so I actually did recognize a lot of my father in what you talked about, you know, without all the same facts, and he was mostly a pretty docile human being.

But I really appreciated your insight into what it might have been like for him to be revered and for that to be an incredibly lonely, destabilizing place, because that clue really helped me understand my father and everything that came from that. So yeah, just hearing other people's stories while you investigate your own narrative, I find to be absolutely invaluable. And I did come to it from a sort of intellectual, you know, from that perspective and going for a diagnosis. And I really wanted a nice like Venn diagram or sort of algorithm to describe why I am the way I am. But I think your book in particular, you know, with all the complexities of it,

just sort of helped me like let go of that a little bit and still be able to move forward with some degree of healing, you know, not being able to get the answers from the person that I had hoped to. So that was amazing for me. I think it's really important we talk about apology, like what it is, because I think it's really important we talk about apology, like what it is. Because I think we live in a culture and a country and families, because it's patriarchal, I really have discovered. One of the reasons I wrote the book is obviously I've been involved in a movement to end violence against all women and girls in the earth for 26 years. And over that time, I really waited for men who have been called out.

Then the Me Too movement happened. We keep all connected in our movements. All these men got called out and I kept waiting for one man to come forward and make a public apology. Say, I've gone to therapy, I've looked at myself, I've done self-reflection, I've really come to know myself. Not one man came forward. And then I thought, has any man in history ever made a public apology about raping a

woman or sexually abusing a woman? I looked and looked and looked and looked, could not find one man in history who would come forward. And then I started to think, oh, maybe this is a column, an essential column of patriarchy. Maybe the non-apology is keeping patriarchy in its place. And I started to really imagine what it would be like if we had a world in which men felt safe,

where there was a method, where there was a method, where there was a process that you could go through to take responsibility, accountability for harms done in a way that would free you and the person you had harmed. And I think it's one of the main reasons I wrote the book, to begin to kind of like say, we teach children how to pray, we teach children how to pray, we teach children how to meditate,

but we don't teach what apology is. And I mean apology. I don't mean I'm sorry if I hurt you or I'm sorry if you feel bad. I mean deep rooted reflective apology that involves you investigating your own history and understanding what are the things that went into me becoming

who I am? What exactly did I do? The detailed, detailed details of what you've done because it's only in the details that liberation happens. What was the impact of that short term and long term and how I'm going to change so I don't do that again, right? And it seems we live in a country that's very big on punishment. We have more people in prison than a third world country, right?

We're really big on holding people and containing them and punishing them and making them feel worse. But we haven't created any process, any methods, any pathway for people to get free of the harms they have done and to free the people they have harmed. And to me, you can look at our whole history going back to the stealing of lands in the first genocide that occurred in this country through the 400 years of slavery and what happened to black people and never ever making amends or reparations or apologies for that. And we can just

see the repetition of all that over and over and over because it's never cleaned up. It's never cleared out. No one's ever taken accountability for it. So I think for me, it's so critical that we begin to see apology as a real process that could be part of our liberation, you know? process that could be part of our liberation, you know? I want to go very deep into that, Vee, but just on a conceptual level, I think I'm hearing two things, but I want to check with you. On the one hand, you know, the apology is very legitimately and appropriately focused on your personal experience, and then of course, extrapolating to violence against women and girls all over the earth, as you've said.

And then I'm hearing in some of your comments just now and also in preparing for this interview, I see it in many of your writings and other public utterances, an emphasis on and other public utterances, an emphasis on apology generally, inclusive of violence against women and girls, but inclusive of everything else too, apology generally as, to use your term, a pathway to happiness. So am I understanding this conceptually correctly? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

I think that, let's just begin with violence against women, but you could talk about just about any experience that's happened where a person has been oppressed and hurt and been made to feel less than and destroyed or enslaved. I think so much of our experience, certainly as minors of women, and I've heard this for many women, is not only do you not get apologized to for a harm's done, you generally get gaslit. Like you're made to believe that somehow this was your fault and you bought this on yourself and this was your problem.

So it's always a double whammy. My father would say, as he was throwing me against a wall, this hurts me far more than it would hurt you. And I would think to myself, actually, it doesn't. I'm getting thrown against the wall. You're not getting hurt by this, right? But it was me, I had done something so terrible to my father that he was the one suffering,

even in the face of me getting thrown against a wall. So I think there is something about, you know, I once heard a man read the apology, right? Publicly, I read sections of it. And I was in an audience with women. And I looked around the audience, and all around the audience, women were crying. And afterwards, I asked women what was going on,

and they said, it was so amazing to be sitting in a room where a man was just even reading a text where he was apologizing, where he was being accountable, where he was saying that what happened actually happened, where he was owning his piece of the story, where he was vulnerable, where he was humble, where he was in that moment of humility equal, right?

We were all equals, we were all humans in the room. And I think that's what I'm talking about when I talk about apology. It's a process of excavation. It's a process of humility. It's a process of saying, I'm part of the story and I'm flawed and we're all flawed. And I take responsibility for how I'm flawed.

And I'm not above and I'm not on top. There's not a hierarchy that I'm preserving in this moment. I'm releasing that to be in this equal human dialogue with you. And I think that's all any of us are hungry for. It becomes huge, our longing, because we're never fulfilled. But when you get down to it, I would say 90% of the women I've interviewed over 26 years in this movement, they've said the one thing they want is for their perpetrator to take responsibility for what he's done and own it and look at them and be responsible and say what he's done and actually show them that he will not do this to somebody else.

That's what people want. And it's the most impossible thing to get. So the question is, why is that? Why is that? I imagine most men don't feel safe doing so. And I'm wondering how we change that culture, I guess. Yeah, I think so. Part of it is allowing men to be vulnerable. Part of it is allowing men to get out of this ongoing hierarchical state where they always have to be dominant and above, but where they get to be with and a part of. I saw that with my father. The adoration separated

my father. It removed him from the circle of humanity. He was either above it or in his own self-reflection hating himself, but he was never part of it, right? And I think it's been a huge damage to men that they've been so far removed from the circle, that they don't get to be in their hearts, that they don't get to share their vulnerabilities, that they don't get to apologize because apology is liberation, you know? Coming up, Vee talks about her four-step process for making a solid apology, and she talks about her past and current spiritual practice.

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I'd love to have you on the show. We also listen to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And Yuval, if you're listening to this, we would also love to have you on this show. So audiobooks, yes. Audible, yes. Love it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial,

and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca. Audible.ca. Hello, ladies and germs, boys and girls. The Grinch is back again to ruin your Christmas season with his The Grinch Holiday Podcast. After last year, he's learned a thing or two about hosting and he's ready to rant against Christmas cheer and roast his celebrity guests like chestnuts on an open fire. You can listen with the whole family as guest stars like John Hamm, Brittany Broski,

and Danny DeVito try to persuade the mean old Grinch that there's a lot to love about the insufferable holiday season. But that's not all. Somebody stole all the children of Whoville's letters to Santa and everybody thinks the Grinch is responsible. It's a real Whoville whodunit. Can Cindy Lou and Max help clear the Grinch's name?

Grab your hot cocoa and cozy slippers to find out. Follow Tis the Grinch Holiday Podcast on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Unlock weekly Christmas mystery bonus content and listen to every episode ad free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple podcasts. go to happierapp.com slash four zero. So I'm really interested as I'll just bring you into my mind as a podcast host, I'm always trying to make sure that every episode speaks to everybody. As important as I think that violence

against women and girls is, and I think it's incredibly important, I'm also interested in apology, just as you keep saying, or as I keep saying, quoting you, as a pathway to happiness for everybody. So let's just go there if you're up for it. Why do you think apology is so important for everybody?

I think that no matter what we do in our lives, to cover up a bad action that we know is a bad action, it's a stain on our being. In some part of our cellular makeup, we hold that in some way. I think that if enough of that accumulates, you begin to get sick, you begin to get depressed, you begin to get worn down, your character begins to change. I think that human beings are fairly low evolved creatures on an evolutionary scale that are trying to evolve. We're deeply flawed.

And apology is what we have to keep going, right? We're gonna make mistakes. We're gonna do things that come out of anger. We're gonna do things that come out of aggression. We're gonna do things that come out of anger, we're going to do things that come out of aggression, we're going to do things that come out of cruelty. That's who we are. But what we have to correct that, to transform that, to alchemize that is apology, if it's done correctly.

And I think it goes for every person in every situation, right, like I kind of outlined this process when I did this TED talk, like a four step process that everybody could go through every time they do something that's bad, right? Or something they feel is unkind or something they wish they hadn't done. Rather than going, I didn't do that, deny it, push it down, let it become a hurtful part of your body, let it move into your body.

What if we had an ongoing process where number one, you could say, I just did this. What in my story, what in my history, what in my makeup, what made to do that? Okay, I just snapped at you and told you, you weren't smart enough to do this job. Okay, you're not smart enough, you're too dumb to do this job. Okay? You're not smart enough.

You're too dumb to do this job. Like I'm sorry. Okay, why would I be so unkind? Did someone say that to me in my own history? Did someone make me feel like that every day? Was I constantly told I was stupid? Was I constantly what? Am I projecting that onto you in this moment?

What is that investigation of my early life that led me to this moment where I could harm you in this moment? Like, what is that investigation of my early life that led me to this moment where I could harm you in that way? Then what did I do? What exactly did I do that harmed you? I screamed at you, I put you down, I made you feel bad, I belittled you, I made you feel less. I did that.

And that was cruel and that was harmful and I take responsibility for it. And then what is the impact of that on you? You're going to walk around feeling terrible. You're going to walk around feeling stupid. You're going to be raging at me for making you feel that way. And then obviously the last thing is to really apologize and to clean it up. And I think if we were regularly doing this with each other, if we had a process that we just did ongoingly,

even if we had like groups where we could do it, or we just got in the habit of it, it would change our lives so fundamentally that we wouldn't recognize them anymore. Because so much of what we do is build up. It's build up. You don't tell someone they've hurt you, or you hurt somebody over and over again

without taking responsibility. That person moves away from you. They stop talking to you. You don't know why they'd stop talking That person moves away from you, they stop talking to you, you don't know why they'd stop talking to you. You feel bad that they stopped talking to you, but nobody ever shares why, right? There's no process where we can keep cleaning up our relationships.

And I think if we could develop that in our families, in our friendships, in our places of worship, in our schools, where, you know, even as a child, if somebody hurts somebody, you stop and you say, let's look at why you did that. Why did you grab that away from them and hit them with that? What was going on in you? So that you become conscious of your behavior and why you're doing that behavior. And maybe you begin to develop the mechanism so it will prevent you from doing that behavior because you brought consciousness to it. You know, I remember a great therapist once said, whenever you bring

consciousness to anything, it changes, right? So it's like, how do we create that process of ongoing consciousness? And apologies would absolutely do that. Step one is, why did I do what I did? What in my history led me to do it? Step two is, what did I do? Detailed accounting. Third is what were the impact of that on the person I harmed? And fourth, to make a true apology, indicating you would never do that again. Is a true apology the same as making amends? I think it's different. I think it's different. I think apology to me is rooted in a fundamental humility that says,

I am going to go to the bottom of my being to look at how I have harmed you in a way that you will feel heard and seen and felt in that doing so both of us will be released from that action. Which is why I don't necessarily believe in forgiveness. Okay, I don't really like that word because I think it feels like a posture. I think if you go through a true apology process, you will be released from the rancor, the bitterness, all the things you carry. Often I hear survivors or people just saying, why don't you just forgive?

It's not actually up to me to forgive. That's really not my business. I don't know how to forgive somebody. I know how to go through a process where someone takes responsibility for what they've done, or I take responsibility for what I've done and that person hears it and feels it and in doing so, whatever that energy is, that dark energy is, it gets freed. And I think that's pretty great.

I don't think we need much more than that. But I don't know how to forgive someone. I don't even know to forgive someone. I don't even know what that would mean. I really appreciate you saying that because I've had a difficult time with that word as well, particularly because understanding our perpetrators in all different forms doesn't necessarily make the feelings go away, right? You can understand or you can have, you know, parents, as I'm sure our kid will say as well,

who did the best they could based on their circumstances. But it, you know, the fact that I felt like, you know, I was in a vice my whole life and I understand why doesn't sort of negate the fact that I've been suffocating, you know? Exactly. So that sort of release, I think, is a really helpful way to look at it because it's really what you need for yourself to just kind of move forward

and it's not really actually about the other person. You know, it's the gift to yourself. I've made apologies to people where I don't know if they've accepted them or not, but I know I was as true and as deep as I could possibly be. So I was freed from that, right? And that's all we can be responsible for, is taking responsibility. I've seen so many survivors, this mandate, this pressure to forgive, it becomes another form of violence in a weird way. Like you have to forgive. No, you don't have to forgive anybody. It's not up to me to forgive. I don't even understand that. It's up to us each to do the work of self-accountability

and being true and honest about what we really have done and really exploring that deeply in ourselves that frees up both of us. And that requires action. That requires commitment. Apologies are not for the faint of heart. You have to really make a commitment to that. This is all very much reminding me of sort of a new teachings that I'm experiencing now from adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families, which is really based on the 12 steps of AA. And my therapist actually recommended this to me 10 years ago and I was in no place to relate to it, and I am now. And I'm not so into it that I could tell you what all the steps are, but obviously one of them is making amends.

that I could tell you what all the steps are, but obviously one of them is making amends. And so this really came up for me in the last two months, just observing myself one day in a moment of suboptimal communication with Dan on something. And I had all the reasons not to communicate well. I was tired. I had pneumonia. I was, you name it, I felt justified. But I heard myself, I'm sure he pointed out first what was frustrating. And I remember reflecting on it as not like the biggest point of contention in whatever squabbles we may have ever had, but really like looking at it for the first time for what it was. And that took me back to this recommendation and really looking into it. And so yeah, that accountability for who you are, even if it came as a response to whatever was inflicted upon you that you didn't ask for, is the only thing you can do.

So there will be amends coming your way, Dan. I don't know when and I don't know about what, but I really do appreciate that perspective. Like you just can't, you can't unsee these things. And I don't know about you, but whenever I make that apology, it feels so good. That's the thing to remind people. Like you don't walk away feeling bad.

You feel cleared, you feel bad. You feel cleared. You feel clean. You feel like the other day I got on an airplane and it was like a horrible, horrible moment. I got to the desk and they said, oh, your seat is not available. I had been given beautifully this business class seat that I was very happy to have and it was gone, right?

As I got to the desk and I tried not to go into airport rage and I tried to calm myself down. And by the As I got to the desk, and I tried not to go into airport rage, and I tried to calm myself down, and by the time I got in the plane, I was just in a miserable, bad mood. And this lovely flight attendant was being so nice to me, and I was being so not nice. And I called him over later, and I said, I am so sorry. I was just being so mean and so unkind and I'm so sorry. And he took my hand and he said, it is the nicest thing in the whole world that you apologize to me. And for the rest of the ride, he kept bringing me treats

and he kept bringing me, and I thought, this is so simple. It's so simple. We can just be jerks sometimes. We can be terrible people sometimes. We can not get our needs met and then be like in our animal nature, give it back to me. But it can also be remedied if you just go deeply into yourself and take a moment and apologize, right?

And I really made a deep apology to that guy. I love that story. I love that story. I just want to challenge you a little bit on how simple it is. I mean, I guess on some fundamental level, it is simple. But as somebody who experiences tsunamis of defensiveness and underneath that, you know, a huge riptide of shame, like, it doesn't feel that simple always.

The act of it is simple. Getting there is a different story. I mean, you know, I want to just even speak to that. Like I think in some ways, apologies are the hardest thing in the world to do because people aren't doing them obviously, right? Like there's something we're holding back, but the act of it once you do it is very simple.

If you understand the distinction I'm making. And I just want wanna say about shame, about just even admitting you're wrong, the vengeance you feel that will come rain down on you as a human being to say, I'm wrong. We don't live in a society that welcomes people's confessions or admissions of failure and wrongdoing. Part of what we also have to do is create the space

where people can do that without being shamed, without being attacked, without being, like you'll be in the middle of a fight when I used to be in relationships and someone would apologize and then the other person would be like, exactly. And then they would start going on and on and on and revving off all the things you've done wrong.

And you were like, no, no, no, wait, I just apologized. I'm not going to be condemned now for my apology, right? Cause people then go off on you. And so part of it is we have to also create space where people can make apologies without being then attacked and attacked. You know, that's a part of it. Yes. There's something happening in your brain there, but that you don't want to share.

There's always something happening in my brain, but it's usually less than you think it is. What was happening in my brain? I really feel fabulous like being in between you two. You like to make guests feel as uncomfortable. You're the only thing defending me from being torn apart. So I appreciate you being. That's not a good look for me. She just said she's making amends to you.

I know, I'm kidding. I'm poking the bear. Coming up with V right after this. What I was going to ask you was, you referenced earlier that you practiced Buddhism for a while and that you don't anymore. And I believe you told Marissa, the senior producer on the show, Marissa Schneiderman, that your current spiritual practice now is to ask a series of questions. So I'd be curious about that whole story. You you left the Dharma, what are you doing now? What are these questions, et cetera, et cetera?

Well, I practiced Nishanand Buddhism for 15 years. I chanted and then I got stage three slash four uterine cancer, which was a really huge spiritual, physical upheaval of my entire being, and it took me in a very different direction in my life. I moved out of the city, I moved to the woods, and I actually became just devoted to the Mother, to the Earth, to this greenness, to this world out here. And I have a practice now, and it's very much a practice of, I have this beautiful place that I go and I sit inside the earth, I sit inside the mother, and my work is to become and realize how absolutely integrated and a part of and one I am with this earth that we live on and

to allow her and it to inform me of what I am to do and who I am to become and how I am to serve. I think I fell in love with the earth 10 years ago. I was late. I was very separated from the earth because I was very separated from my body for a very long time. When I came back into my body, I came back into the awareness of my connection to this glorious Earth that we live on. My practice now is to be in service to her and to find all the ways I can be alive in her aliveness, be connected in her connectedness.

For so many years, I was searching and searching and searching for family and searching and searching and searching for parents and searching. And I found the mother. I found that connected source of life force. And for my birthday, I live on this little commune. My friends built me what I thought was a prayer egg at first, it was just this beautiful outside thing that I go in and now I realize it's my earthship that I get in it every day, two or three times a day, and I pray and I ask the mother to let me see and feel

and know how connected I am to this that is life, so that I can do everything in my power to fight for it, to preserve it, to have joy in it, to spread it, so that people know how much we have to save this precious thing we have. Because I think one of the reasons we're not fighting climate change the way we are and the destruction of the earth is so many people are connected to the earth anymore. And that disconnection is keeping us from doing everything in our power to save it.

So just to make sure that that story lands with folks, you used to practice Nichiren Buddhism, which involves a series of chants. And then you got sick and you moved to the country and you switched to really sitting in nature several times a day and asking big questions about, what's my job here? Yeah. I think what happened was, you know, life is so amazing where it takes you, right? Like you just don't understand that having your body be kind of cut open and having seven organs missing

and 70 nodes and you wake up and you're in this whole other state. It was the first time I was ever in my body when I woke up out of that operation. And I went on a journey where every day I landed in something I had been disconnected from. And when I moved to the country, it was as if this whole door opened to this world.

I had not, I've been a city person my whole life, you know? And I'm a latecomer to it, but I'm a devotee. And I want the rest of my years to be spent learning the trees, learning the rivers, learning the birds, being involved with every little creature that lives on this land and loving them and serving them and noticing them and paying attention to them. And it's a beautiful practice because it keeps me connected to everything that is alive and it keeps me alive.

So I was thinking this morning when I was sitting out and literally yellow leaves were falling like rain just everywhere, just everywhere, just everywhere. And I thought, this is the most glorious thing I've ever been a part of in my whole life. The wonder of it, the magic of it. And it's all around us all the time if we pay attention. And I've gone through my amends to the earth for not paying attention earlier. I spent quite a few years making those amends. So now we're in a new process together.

I'm interested, Dr. Harris, you grew up in Manhattan and got cancer and moved to the country. So do you see yourself in V's story? I do to some extent. And I never thought I would for probably all the reasons that you felt that way. Notably that of all the things that weren't confusing about me being a New Yorker was at the top of the list.

And it was a point of pride and I'd go down with the ship no matter what. And the feeling of being anonymous and embraced by the city and sort of invigorated by the life around me. But then I realized when we moved out here that the energy wasn't really from my life. And that that energy really exists out in nature. I'm not saying I never want to be in this city, but I certainly think that it has helped me in ways that I probably can't even enumerate, find a sense of peace

and understanding truly about all the things I really needed to understand. And I'm not even going out and like sitting under the leaves or walking around that much. I'm inside most of the time looking at them. But as a pulmonologist to breathe fresh air, like I highly recommend it. And I did not know that for forever. So yeah, baby steps, but I really do appreciate it now in a way that I never thought I would.

And I think the longer you do it and the more time you spend, particularly with trees, trees just fill us up. And I was exactly like you. If anybody ever heard that I had moved to the country like 10 years ago, they would have laughed. I was a diehard New Yorker. But I woke up one morning and I didn't like the way it smelled and I didn't like the way

it tasted and I didn't like the noise. And I was like, I am not in love with you anymore. I have fallen out of love. I like to visit now, because we're no longer married. I go and I visit and it's kind of like my lover and I visit it and then I leave. V, one last question for you before we go here. You told Marissa that you've been working on a play

about mental health called This Is Crazy, and you used a phrase that I thought was interesting, so I'd just love to hear your thoughts on it in our remaining moments here. You said you hoped to do for mental health what you did for vaginas. Okay, okay, the temporary title is This Is Crazy. I was hired by the National Mental Health Alliance

to do a play that destigmatized mental illness and broke taboos. And they made a joke and they said to me, we want you to do for mental health what you did for vaginas, which was, I thought, hysterical. Like, no small order. Okay, we'll just whip that up. But I have to say, I've been working on the play for a while now, and we're doing our first reading next week, and I'm very excited. I interviewed a lot of really brilliant therapists and people in the field before I began because I wanted to get their take.

What's the most important thing I can be thinking about? Every single one of them said the same thing. The medical model is over. We cannot keep treating people through the medical model. Like if we do not start treating the systems, the thing that is making people sick, we will just keep doing this over and over. So I kind of feel like they gave me my marching orders

at the beginning, like to really think about that and everything that I was writing. And I think in so many ways, whether we talk about this incredible loneliness that is, it just kind of engulfed America, right? The sense of people being isolated and on their own and not connected. It's really the river that we swim in that's sick, right? And that's what we've got to clean up. And that's a whole other conversation, but it's really looking at how do we build community, how do we build solidarity, how do we make everybody feel that they're part of a story.

And whatever it is that you have, whatever illness you've gotten as a result of being in this broken toxic system, it's your particular reaction to it, but we're all on some level mentally unwell. It's impossible to live in the system that we're in right now and not be mentally unwell. So part of it is like, okay, if we're all unwell, then let's do this together and stop pretending that some of us are okay and the rest of us aren't, you know?

I have one last question that I probably should have asked earlier and it is taking us back a little bit more into your story. I hope that's okay. And I apologize too if it's too personal and not where you want to go. But you know, there is obviously a certain kind of violence and silence. And I'm just wondering if you've ever needed or yearned for or gotten an apology from your mother for- I like that question and I thank you for asking it. I did.

I did. And my mother and I went through an amazing journey before she died. And I hadn't talked to her for years, and she wanted to talk to me. I said the only way I would talk to her if she would let me tell her everything that happened. She invited me to do that, and it was very hard.

We walked it through and then she actually called me and said it clearly is true, and I can tell you it clearly is true. And I can tell you why it's true. And she started to lay out all the things that she had seen but not seen, known but not known. And then over the years, she really began to address it, address it, and look at it, and see her partner and own it.

And I have to say, you know, I think about my mother because when I was going through cancer, my mother, cancer came back and I got on an airplane and I flew to Florida and I was bald and I was, I was so sick and I was in chemo and I was a mess. But I was really able to climb into my mother's bed as she was dying and wrap her body with my body and hold her and say, we're done, we're good, we're good. I got who you are and I got what you went through and I got what you believed and I got what you were able to do with me in this lifetime, and I so appreciate it. And we left her and she left this world and we were clean. And I love her for that. And I'll tell you a beautiful story when

we did our first V-Day, which was the production of the Vagina monologues, you know, for a thousand people and all these great actors performed in it. And at the end of the show, I asked everybody to stand who has ever been abused. And usually the end of the show, I ask everybody to stand who's ever been abused. And usually three quarters of the audience stands, just about every woman. And then I ask everybody to stand up who's ever known anyone who's been abused. And my mother stood up.

And I looked at it and I saw her standing and I just... It was like, thank you. Thank you. And of course, it turned out she was abused. And of course, it turned out she was abused. And of course, it turned out she was in denial. And of course, all those things just filter, filter into the next generation and filter into the next generation and we cleaned it up. We cleaned it up. So there's not going to be

any more generations that walk in denial and walk with that hurt. And that's a huge deal. And any family that can do that with each other, like it's changing your fundamental karma and it's changing the fundamental reality for anybody else who follows you. And that's the work we're doing here,

is to clean it up and to get conscious and to be more loving and to learn to apologize so we can be even more loving. That's an incredible story. Bianca, your dad died five days before this recording. Did you feel like that was a clean goodbye? Yeah, I feel like I just, I really identified with what you just said

by your mom, vis-a-vis my dad. There's a lot of hurt and a lot of unintentional hurt, I believe, and a lot of narrative that I carried my whole life that really hurt me the most. And even though I didn't really get him to overtly address that as he declined from dementia, what I did get was perhaps better, I'm not sure, a real sense of gratitude as he was sort of returned back to basic factory settings without the stressors

of life for a short period of time there. And he just, you know, he, he, there was love of a dad for a daughter. And I saw sort saw sort of just the purity of what you can be without all the noise. And so gratitude in some ways was a substitution for an apology for things that he probably didn't know that I was waiting for an apology for. And to then be able to take that and with great love and generosity help him pass quite peacefully last week as a doctor to a doctor at the bedside in the hospital was just a full circle kind of healing, I think. Well, that's so beautiful.

Well done. Beautiful. Thank you. Well done to you, Vy. Thank you very much for doing this interview. It was a huge pleasure. Oh, thank you. Well done to you, Vee. Thank you very much for doing this interview. It was a huge pleasure. Oh, thank you. But just before we let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of this book

and where we can find out more about you if we want to learn more about you? Yes. The book is called The Apology, and there's also The Reckoning, which came out after that, which are similar themes, but addressed in different directions. And it's called The Apology and you can get it anywhere, and The Reckoning. Excellent. We'll put links in the show notes. Such a pleasure to meet you, albeit virtually, and a great conversation.

So thank you again. Thank you. And thank you both. It's just beautiful to ride in the wave of your energy. Thanks a lot. Thanks again to V and also to Bianca. Great to have both of them on the show. Also just to say that I made a reference in that conversation to DJ Kashmir's episode on anger,

which has the Matthew Brent silver quote that I mentioned. I will put a link to that episode in the show notes. We'll be talking about apology in the chat today over on danharris.com. Also, if you're a subscriber, you will have received in your inbox this morning, bright and early, a cheat sheet of today's episode. If you want to take a deeper dive or go back to portions of the interview that struck you powerfully, you can do that via the cheat sheet. If you're not a subscriber, I'd invite you to join us over at danharris.com.

You can do a free version, a paid version. You can do a founder's version where you can give us extra cash. Whatever tickles your fancy, we'd love to have you. Before I go, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

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