The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better) by Lindo Bacon

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better) by Lindo Bacon Too many of us feel alienated from our bodies. This isn't your personal failing; it means that our culture is failing you. We are in the midst of a cultural moment. #MeToo. #BlackLivesMatter. #TransIsBeautiful. #AbleismExists. #EffYourBeautyStandards. Those of us who don't fit into the "mythical norm" (white, male, cisgender, able-bodied, slender, Christian, etc.)—which is to say, most of us—are demanding our basic right: To know that who we are matters. To belong. Being "othered" and the body shame it spurs is not "just" a feeling. Being erased and devalued impacts our ability to regulate our emotions, our relationships with others, our health and longevity, our finances, our ability to realize dreams, and whether we will be accepted, loved, or even safe. Radical Belonging is not a simple self-love treatise. Focusing only on self-love ignores the important fact that we have negative experiences because our culture has targeted certain bodies and people for abuse or alienation. For marginalized people, a focus on self-love can be a spoonful of sugar that makes the oppression go down. This groundbreaking book goes further, helping us to manage the challenges that stem from oppression and moving beyond self-love and into belonging. With Lindo Bacon's signature blend of science and storytelling, Radical Belonging addresses the political, sociological, psychological, and biological underpinnings of your experiences, helping you understand that the alienation and pain you are experiencing is not personal, but human. The problem is in injustice, not you as an individual. So many of us feel wounded by a culture that has alienated us from our bodies and divided us from each other. Radical Belonging provides strategies to reckon with the trauma of injustice; reclaim yourself, body and soul; and rewire your nervous system to better cope within an unjust world. It also provides strategies to help us provide refuge for one another and create a culture of equity and empathy, one that respects, includes, and benefits from all its diverse peoples. Whether you are transgender, queer, Black, Indigenous or another Person of Color, disabled, old, or fat—or you more closely resemble the "mythical norm"—Radical Belonging is your guidebook for creating a world where all bodies are valued and all of us belong—and for coping with this one, until we make that new world a reality. Dr. Lindo Bacon is a researcher and former professor, and for nearly two decades taught courses in social justice, health, weight, and nutrition. Dr. Bacon holds a Ph.D. in physiology with a specialty in nutrition, and master’s degrees in psychology and exercise metabolism. Dr. Bacon has mined their deep academic proficiency, their clinical expertise, and their personal experience to write two bestselling books, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight, and the co-authored Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, or Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight. Their newly released book, Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better), takes their inspiring message beyond size, to shaping a culture of empathy, equity, and true belonging.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this boss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another podcast uh be sure to go to the cvpn.com subscribe to online podcasts that are over there you can also go to youtube.com forward slash chris voss hit that bell notification button and you can

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The NEO is the new wave of digital sound listening for your desktop, music, gaming, and bleeding-edge Bluetooth, even MQA audio file decoding. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion,

and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. Today, we have a most excellent guest on the show. They're the author of a new book that's come out called Radical Belonging by Dr. Lindo Bacon, PhD. Dr. Lindo Bacon is a researcher and former professor and for nearly two decades taught courses in social justice, health, weight, and nutrition. Dr. Bacon holds a PhD in physiology with a specialty in nutrition and master's degrees in psychology and exercise metabolism.

Dr. Bacon has mined their deep academic proficiency, their clinical expertise, and their personal experience to write two best-selling books, Health at Every Size, The Surprising Truth About Your Weight, I'll be interested to hear about that, and the co-authored Body Respect, What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, or Just Plain Fail to Understand About Weight. Their newly released book, Radical Belonging, the one we'll be talking about today, How

to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World While Transforming It for the Better, takes their inspiring message beyond size to shaping a culture of empathy, equity, and true belonging. So, Linda, welcome to the show. How are you? Man, that's a loaded question in these times, huh? I feel like I'm just an emotional rollercoaster. And anytime you ask that question, I could give a wildly fluctuating answer you know from moment to moment so um right now i am just trying to be present with you and gear up for this interview we should be able to have a fun talk but i gotta say coming into it on in a low space you know so it's taking

a little bit of energy to just let go of that be here there you go well i think we're all kind of there in the pandemic we're all kind of we have that kind of darkness presence maybe going on or is looming but hopefully we're getting to a better place i'm going to hold up a copy of your book here uh radical belonging and give us the plugs that people can take and look this up on the interwebs um well you can could find, I just put in Radical Belonging. You'll find it come up all over the place. I'm really happy to see it's been getting great reviews all over the place. I've been on dozens of podcasts at this point, and it's really fun to see the book being wildly discussed. But the easiest way to find out info is to head over to my website which is

lindobacon.com and that'll then help you to find places like my instagram and facebook and twitter pages there you go uh so linda what motivated you want to write this book I think mostly it was because of my own history of unbelonging and just recognizing how this can be such a painful culture there are so many ways in which people feel as if they're judged negatively by others and denied opportunity whether it's because of your skin color, your size, your age, etc. And it's painful. And that painful stuff becomes physically embodied in us. It makes us much more vulnerable to disease, makes us much more vulnerable to coping behaviors like substance abuse and eating disorders, both of which I personally fell into. And recognizing that a lot of the pain that we feel comes from a history of belonging was powerful to me because it also provided a solution.

The more we can figure out how to help people to feel like they belong, like they're accepted and valued for who they are, rather than trying to fit into this mythical ideal of who we're supposed to be. Well, that's the solution. And certainly we're seeing that really vividly right now. We're seeing things like the racism of our time front and center on the surface. It's not like it's never been there. It's always been there, but now it's much more visible. And we're recognizing the toll that that takes on all of us. So I think the book is really quite timely because it looks at that oppression, that the trauma of being left out as trauma.

And it helps us to understand the impact that it has on people, and it helps us to see that the solution is basically community care. It's not about self-help. It's not about self-love, learning to love your body even when it gets rejected by other people. Because yes, that stuff is valuable, but you still keep going back into a world that's going to treat you poorly because of it. And so you also need to develop the skills to be able to manage the discomfort and the injustice. And we need to create that culture so that you can find places places of love and belonging is there a way to fix our culture so that we can have that is or or do we do we have to learn to just basically rebel against culture because in reading your book and listening to some of your interviews you know you talk about how we about how we have trauma from a lot of different experiences.

And I guess I never thought of what I experience as trauma so much, maybe some of my stuff from my childhood. But what you talk about in your book is how sometimes identifying it in that way is a better way to start on the road of recovery of like, okay, I have trauma, maybe acceptance, and here's how to deal with it. Right. I know we're so used to conceptualizing trauma as say like a singular event, you know, like witnessing a murder or being raped. And yes, those can be traumatic experiences. But there's a much broader definition of trauma that includes the fact that we're all constantly experiencing smaller microaggressions, and that these total up in us and build into trauma and affect us in the same way as a singular event can. So, for example, if you're sitting at the dinner table and your parents say to you something like, do you really think you should be eating that?

And, you know, immediately you're feeling like I'm too fat and everybody sees this and it's a judgment and there's something wrong with me. Right. And the more you have events like this, the more vulnerable you become to them, because it just keeps getting reinforced. And after a while, this stuff embeds in you biologically, so that you're looking for it all the time, you're hyper vigilant, you're expecting people to reject you before it even happens, which is based on some intelligence because you've gotten that rejection before. And so it's likely it's happening. We're always getting those cultural messages of who's acceptable and who isn't. So that vigilance makes sense. It's human to develop it.

And it's's good protective response and and that's that's very true i mean i i uh i i didn't really think about some of the different concepts that you talk about in the book and and when you did i started exploring how that works because i've had a lot of people especially young women are usually deal with the trauma of our culture or advertising you know that teaches uh you teaches that you must look a certain way, you must be a certain way. I grew up in a cult that programmed the religious state of mind and everything outside of it that didn't believe in that thing was evil. But one thing you talk about a lot is the shame of that and how that's a portion of what that builds. And I think,

I think our parents sometimes try and do the right thing with us as children to say, Hey, don't do that. But there, sometimes there is, like you say, an element of shame where, where we carry that as trauma. Exactly. And to use some examples that I was talking about in the book, one of the things that I did was I tried to write the book through a lens of understanding my gender identity. You know, when I was a kid, I never really felt like a girl. And yet, to my parents, exhibiting femininity was important, and they really wanted me to be something that I wasn't.

I would get criticized when I would try to wear my brother's hand-me-downs and refuse to wear a dress. My parents really wanted the best for me. And in their minds, they thought that if I just fit in more and did what a girl was supposed to, boys for exhibiting masculinity, and punishes people that don't fit into that category. And so it was with good intentions that my parents tried so hard to get me to fit in. And, but yet, if I did fit in, then I never get the opportunity to be seen and valued for who I am and loved and appreciated for who I am. It's all just a farce and a game that we're playing. So it's quite painful not to belong. And we have to struggle, I think, as we age to try to figure out ways to take pride in those aspects where we're not getting the positive reinforcement from other people and to own

them and to love ourselves despite the messages that are out there. And that's one of the things you talk about in the book is because with that trauma, sometimes we turn to ways of coping with it. So alcohol, drugs. I know a lot of young women that have cut because, you know, they're in their teens, they're doing cutting because they see the advertising in the world. They see, you know, people that maybe were born with better DNA. I mean, there's been studies that have shown that the better looking you are, the more likely it is you're going to make more money in business and be more accepted in society.

But it seems like there's these pockets throughout our whole society of different ways of either being accepted or not. There's different groups there's different i i would refer to them as maybe mobs or or um what's a probably better word than mob though uh tribes and so there's these tribes and and we all don't want to belong to different tribes like for me i grew up in a in in a very um you know heavy religious cult that you know hey it's a shame if you leave this one there's certainly many others like a jane join that do the same thing i'm an atheist now and there still is you know a bit of like well you're wrong and you know that sort of thing so um with with the trauma this and and coping do you want to talk a little bit about you know coping and

then some of the issues surrounding that and how we deal with it? And am I describing it right by what he said earlier too? Sure. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense that people don't want to feel pain and they protect themselves from pain. And I know when I was a kid and I would feel that my parents were ashamed of me because of how I was presenting in some ways. And actually, I should say that overwhelmingly, my parents were quite, quite proud of me. But there were aspects of me where they were ashamed. Actually, let me just tell you a little story because I'm sure people might be able to relate to this. It's a story I tell in the book. I remember when I was a young teenager and my parents so desperately wanted to figure out how to get me to look and act like a girl. And my mom saw this advertisement that said something like, be a model or just look like one. And it excited her because

he figured, oh, they could train me how to look like a girl, you know, how to apply makeup, how to walk in heels, and you know, all these ideas that they had of what a girl's supposed to be. And so they sent me to modeling school, which I'm sure you could imagine was just like horribly painful for someone who didn't really identify as a girl. And it, after a while of just these horrible sessions, the people who are running the program just gave up, you know, and we we had a great compromise where my parents would drop me off. They would usher me to a back room, give me some books to hang out so I wouldn't disrupt the class, you know, and they didn't have to worry about having it on my makeup or, you know, the fact that I was going to like ruin their set. And then, you know, a few minutes before my parents were to show up, they'd bring me back into the classroom. We'd all pretend as if it was OK. They would put my makeup on. So my parents would think I'd applied it.

Anyway, what nobody was counting on was was the fact that there was a graduation ceremony that we all had to participate in right and so what this is is we're all supposed to act like models on the runway and the modeling program like did it up in style and they actually had a lot of people in the audience who were agents who you know and the models were going into this thinking this is my chance to be seen you know and they wanted to show off their stuff so they dress me up put makeup on me you know give me instructions to just follow the model in front of me you know walk across the stage um don't do any of the modeling thing then just follow everybody else off the stage. Right.

So I do as little as possible. Right. So we're doing it. But the problem was I had no clue how to walk in high heels. Right. And as I'm walking, I'm kind of stumbling and my heel gets caught in the light. And I try to pull it free and the lights are attached to the backdrop and it ends up that the whole backdrop comes tumbling down on this whole line of hopeful models and me

I mean we're laughing now right one one girl actually had to be rushed to the hospital oh no broken arm oh no right and you can imagine like how humiliating that was for me for my parents and the audience and it ruined the show you know and like there were all these hopeful models that had like built up this event it was a big thing for them and the set was destroyed and it was like a hard recovery from all of that. And so you could imagine the car ride home with my parents. I was like so ashamed. And my parents, rather than like feeling compassionate to them, they were feeling their own shame about, you know, that they couldn't turn me into, that i just wasn't who they wanted me to be right now that's pretty extreme story and most people like most people don't have that kind of

explicit trauma in their background i mean you can imagine what it was like for me to feel like all these people i learned i had ruined their potential for being seen in a career. And, you know, and kids talk about it and the joke. And, yeah, it was pretty horrible. And it was hard to show my face for a long time afterwards. And this whole feeling of like, now everybody sees me that, you know, that I'm not successful in what I'm supposed to be. And who I am is something that I'm supposed to be ashamed of. Yeah. So can you look at it now and say, well, you brought the house down?

That's awesome, Chris. And I think you're bringing perspective right and i think you're bringing up a great point is that that was trauma then right and now here i am i'm in community right like you can relate to the the fact that there was something wrong with that culture that was created it wasn't that there was something wrong with me, you know, and it's finding community and finding places where you belong, where you can kind of recognize that the culture was the problem. It wasn't me or my body or anything else. And it took getting away from that and finding that there's a different world that I do belong to where I get accepted and valued and seen for who I am. And we can laugh together at how messed up that old world is.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like the older I i get the more i get to laugh at stuff when you look back on it you get that perspective of life but it's it's very traumatizing as a child and when you're growing up you know your parents are shaming you um one of the things that but i also want to just bring up the point that and that point that world still complete continues to have power over us it doesn't have as much power over me because i have so many power so much power in other ways and so much confidence but you add on other marginalized identities in addition to gender you know and like black trans women are getting killed these days for just existing, trying to exist.

So it's not like we can ignore that world. It continues to exert itself. And so that's another aspect. But I'm taking us off on a tangent. and you were going off on another interesting point. So do you want to bring us back? Sure. I think, and one of the things about shame is like, for instance, with what you were talking about, you were going to the class and they were putting you in the back and stuff. And probably during that time, you're dealing with the shame of,

well, I'm lying to my parents. I'm living a lie. I went through that with my growing up in a religious community where I was cheating the whole time. I would go to the Sunday school, and then I'd be like, I'm going to the bathroom, and I'd just take off and go home for three hours. And every couple months, the Sunday school teacher was saying to my parents, you know, we have seen that curse for a while. Um, it, and so I'd have to go, you know,

do it a couple of weeks and then disappear again. Um, and so for 16 years, I lived that lie. And then finally, one day after 16 years, I just, I just, I had a friend who I want to hang out with on Sunday and his parents owned a bar and were religious. And I was like, Hey, I had a friend who I want to hang out with on Sunday and his parents owned a bar and weren't religious. And I was like, Hey, I want to go over to his house, play guitar and, you know, do all the funny stuff that we do. And, um, and so, but the shame of lying, having to lie as you're trying to live under that cultural, that culture net or umbrella, if you will, if you, do you know what I'm saying?

Uh, it builds on that as well, because then it becomes your lie as well. Yeah, definitely. And I think another thing to recognize in that is that shame is something that is biologically wired into us. It's part of being human. And one can imagine that the reason we develop shame is to keep us in line. It used to be that you had to act together as a community in order to be able to get food and protect one another. And so having a feeling every time you stepped out of bounds to kind of keep you back in the loop so that everybody can stay safe was like it. It made sense from an evolutionary perspective that we developed that.

But the problem is you put that in a culture where there's injustice, where some people have power and other people don't. And you're made to feel shame for things that are not shameful. Like, for example, all of my previous work focused on weight issues. And people feel ashamed for having larger bodies. And, you know, they're constantly told there's something wrong with them. But there's nothing wrong with them. That's just, you know, biological diversity. And over time, there's been all of this cultural attention. And we now blame people, we say it's because of what you eat or your exercise and if only you cared about yourself and you had willpower you would have

a thinner body none of which is actually based on science although it's come to be basic assumptions that many people believe but when you actually examine the science, it's kind of fascinating to see that weight actually, like, for example, dieting, as opposed to being something that is health inducing, or even encourages weight loss, is actually one of the predictors of weight gain over time, right? There's all these ideas we have of what you're supposed to do that you can achieve thinness that aren't based on, on science, but I'm kind of digressing to points when,

when the bigger point I want to make is that there's nothing shameful about having a larger body. It's just a different way of being in the world. It's the culture that attaches the meaning to it. And if we can help people to find community, find places where they're accepted, and also challenge the culture to recognize that thinner people don't have higher value. That's a really good point right there.

Recognizing that people still have value regardless of what culture says that they should be. Right. How many times have people lost out on friendships because they've that they should be. Right. You know, and like, how many times have people lost out on friendships because they've judged someone based on their size and thought that they, you know, won't relate to or like that person?

But yet, you know, you might not be seeing a pretty amazing person that you could be really close to if you didn't apply that judgment. You know, I just had a little bit of an epiphany where a lot of people who have prejudices and they haven't worked through their prejudice and they're, they're having trouble accepting things. And you can probably equate this to our political world that their, their inability to deal with their prejudices and their cultural norms is what they're really struggling with.

It's not so much what we're struggling with. It's what they're struggling with. Like if you think I'm fat and ugly well that's your fucking problem not mine but but uh but you know the fact that we like you mentioned i really i wanted to highlight that point the the value aspect of hopefully as a culture we seem to be moving more as a culture to where we are learning to value more people. And we're recognizing that these are people too. They have human feelings. They have the same experiences, same thoughts,

regardless of their color, their sexual orientation, whether they're from another country that our country isn't in. Whatever these things are, these, I don't know if you call them tropes, but these attitudes that we have, they're cultural. And now we need to identify them and realize that each of us have value. And that's the most important thing. So how do we reach a point? Because I'll give you another example. I grew up with the culture thing of where you got to get married, you got to have kids, you got to settle down, all that sort of good stuff.

I started my first business when I was 18. I'm a tinker. I love projects. I love starting business. I've started over 26 in my life. And I got so busy doing that. I was so busy starting these businesses. I didn't really get into it.

I just really didn't feel that vibe. I had girlfriends, but I didn't really get into the vibe of, you got to do this. And I tried, I was engaged twice. I tried to make that whole thing work and I just couldn't see it lasting five years. And I just, after a year or two of it, I had to say, this isn't my deal. This is everyone else's deal. It's not mine. And so there's several different things between religion and marriage and raising kids and stuff that I've had to kind of somehow get in my own envelope. Atheism, I'm in my own envelope. And be very comfortable with that envelope where I, and you're right, I do feel some pressures from society where every now and then you'll be like, you should be on Tinder getting girls and getting married and being unhappy for the rest of your life. I do jokes. But most people are. But you know, I mean, some people want that. And that's their thing. That's cool. But But

how do we how do we how did I get to that place? Or how do we get to the place that you talk about in your book where we move beyond the shame remove beyond the the cultural things and find our identity our place and our and our comfort in that wow that's a really difficult question um well damn it i thought you were gonna tell me no i'm just gonna like i'll let you go you know because i'm thinking about like all of the roadblocks, like if we don't have representation, if we don't see people that look like us or act like us or our role models for who we are, we can't even envision it as a kid, I didn't even know trans existed, you know, to, so to think that there were options other than male or female just wasn't even something that crossed my mind. So given that I thought there were just these, this, this box I was handed, you know, I was assigned girl and that's all that, that was it. Right. So part of it is you need exposure, um, and openness. And I think that sometimes our pain can bring us to

that place because sometimes it's too, it it's too painful not getting seen and not being able to develop into who we are. If you get into a relationship just because you think you're supposed to, I'm sure it's pretty miserable to marry somebody you don't love, but you feel like the relationship's right for appearances sake, you're never going to feel valued for who you are. And so it can take a lot of courage to be yourself when you don't at first get acceptance, mirrored back. But I suppose that maybe that's the biggest thing, is that people really need to find community.

And that's why I wrote a book about belonging. It's that we can do this for one another. We can create a culture where we're more open-minded to seeing people and making it safe for them, right? You did that for me when in our getting to know one another conversation where you asked me what pronouns I'm comfortable with. You didn't just make the assumption that, you know, there were certain pronouns to apply for me. You made space for belonging right there where most people don't. Most people are making assumptions and they're putting me into this box that's automatically setting me up to feel othered, right? So we can do this for one another. We can start to recognize that the assumptions we have about people aren't about that individual.

They might be part of a particular group, but that doesn't mean that they ascribe to all of the stereotypes and ideas. So we need to be open to figuring out how we can see the person that we're with. I think that's really important for us to learn from a culture. I mean, for me, one of my kind of, I don't know what you call them, a mantra or the thing that I kind of hold to is John Lennon's song, Imagine, where I believe we can all live in peace. We can all be accepting of each other. We try and understand who the other person is um i even try and understand

trumpers which i'm not really sure that you can square you can square crazy but i try um but uh you know trying to understand one another and and what makes people tick and i've been fortunate enough in life where because i grew up with the upbringing i grew up with i've tried to understand why people believe the things they do and why they do the things they do and while i haven't always been as open-minded as i have because i didn't have that what you talk about a library of knowledge now i'm i can i'm more accepting of things when i come across them because i'm like okay well, well, let's see where this goes. Let's understand this more.

And a lot of people don't. Like you say with culture, they just come to their ideas and they go, wait, this person is different. I feel challenged. sort of caveman sort of core of our being where when we meet something different or come across something different we objectify and treat it as is that a danger to me or not you know it's kind of like when you're a caveman and you're like there's something moving the bushes over there i don't recognize what that is is it going to eat me kill me or are we going to be friends and and sometimes we react in a bad way because of that. Is that, uh, am I? That's a great description. And it's definitely true that we're biologically wired to make simple projections about people, because as you're mentioning, I mean, sometimes you just have to

act quickly. Um, you know, in, in the old days, um, you saw a tiger and you needed to run instantly, or you'd be killed. So our brain is set up to make instant judgments. And one of the ways it makes those instant judgments is based on past experience or what it's been told. So if you see on TV every day that black men are thugs and drug dealers and murderers, then even if you don't consciously believe that, your brain is wired to be distrusted as soon as you see a black man. And it may be that then your rational brain can jump in and say, no, you know, that's not true. But it does mean that, that, like, I'm probably more likely to hold on tighter to my backpack when I see a black man than when I see, say, a white woman, right? That threat level, even though it might not be based in reality, it's like programmed into me. Not something I'm proud of, but it's there. And that's one of our challenges as humans is that we're not wired to be completely accepting.

But yet, we need connection, right? If we're not connected with one another, we can't survive either. So we have to keep trying to create that. We have to keep working with the unconscious projections that we have and trying to learn more and get beyond them in order to connect with people. And the awesome thing about that, though, is that our world's become so much richer and more exciting the more we can lighten up and learn about our unconscious prejudices.

Do we need to sit down more and go, well, who am I? Fuck culture. Who am I? And what am I about? Explore that. Right. And I think that one of the best ways to learn that is by also asking the question, who are you?

That the more we can kind of meet other people and learn about difference the more it kind of opens us up to be more accepting of ourselves one of the one of the challenges i had and you talk about this with community and finding your community one of the challenges i had was i grew up questioning religion and cultism and going why do you do this and i don't know why i was born with this brain there seems to be a lot of other people that are just kind of like okay we'll do that but i was born from three years old going uh so i'm trying to logically put these two dots together and then they're just not going together well you got a faith chris well okay well that's great but i'm still working on that faith part but until then can you explain to me how

how uh jesus and you know all that stuff right and uh and so a long time for a long time i felt very persecuted and and and you probably just changed the topic for what i was going through for what other people go through. But I was feeling persecuted. I was feeling shame. You know, people would be like, you just, you know, you just got to have faith and turn off your brain and just be who we say you should be and do what we say you should do. And a lot of times I felt alone. And you felt suicidal at times. And you just felt like you're an island.

And then I discovered George Carlin. societal at times uh and you just felt like you're an island and then i've discovered george carlin and i started seeing him and he became what you talk about my community or finding more in my community i start i found i went holy shit there's somebody else in the world who thinks like me and is not crazy and it's actually fairly successful so they're not you know they're not someone who's insane well i mean carlin may have told you he was insane but you know what i mean so finding that community and then of course finding other people in that community sam harris and other people um there were atheists uh doc dock, etc, etc. And then finding out that, okay, there's other people in the world who have the same questions than I do, and all that good stuff. So I guess it's

really important when you talk about with community, in finding that community so that you don't feel alone, you feel accepted, you feel that belonging and everything else. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that gives you the power to, to go back to communities that are less accepting and to feel more confident, just radiating your power. Yeah. It's, and that really saved me.

I mean, I, I've often thought of George Carlin as my second father, my stepfather, sort of, if you will, because he really saved me from the madness.

Because I lived in, at the time, I was growing up in Utah, which is very heavily religious. And so everywhere you go, it's just everywhere. It's pervasive in the community, at least especially it was 40 years ago when I grew up. And so I had a really hard time. I mean, it was just everywhere. And you feel like you're just alone. But like you say, finding my community, finding places in the world where it's like, hey, I'm not totally off the map.

And let me find out about this. So how do we, once we find that community, how do we fix that trauma? And how do we start patching those holes well i think about that about how um like i've been on speaking tour all around the world and i've been to some of those small very conservative communities and what i could find what i find is that the more I enter into my vulnerability, the more I tell my story and people see me and, you know, they respect me. And it allows them to open up to seeing someone who's very different than who they are and to recognize just our common humanity. And everybody can find ways in which they feel rejected or wrong or ashamed. I mean, that's just so human. And that's how we come together.

It's in our vulnerability that we can connect. And I think the more that we do that, the more we're creating safe spaces where people experience belonging and it changes them and they want more of that in their world they don't want to go into an exclusive world where they can't have that kind of connection with other people. So I think it's possible. And I think that the key is go back to places like Salt Lake City, you know, in all of your current day confidence and magnificence, because people there need to see you. And that's how we change things. There you go.

There you go. There you go. One thing I heard you talk about in one of your interviews that you did, and I believe you talk about in the book, is when you're dealing with the things you're using to emotionally cope with trauma, you know, drugs, alcohol, whatever, eating, etc., whatever your vice is that you use to try and emotionally patch that hole. What's a better way to approach that? There's a way that you talked about that's a better way to maybe identify that and go, okay, what am I doing right now? And how do I build something better? Well, I think before we go to the place of building something better, it's helpful to recognize the beauty in those coping behaviors.

You know, when I was a kid and feeling so alone, I'm really happy that I discovered cocaine. You know, it gave me access to kind of escaping my world and feeling good at a time that I didn't have any other skills or resources to do that. Same thing with my eating disorder, like it helped me get through difficult times. And it was later in life that I also realized that while they were valuable for me, right, they also brought some negative stuff, too. And so I had to look for other ways that I could soothe myself. And so it was recognizing that it wasn't that there was something wrong in reaching for drugs or food. It was magnificent and beautiful that I was reaching for something to take care of myself. And that's a good thing. And that those were just two ways to take care of myself. But there were plenty of other ways I could take care of myself. Like one way would be talking to a friend and, you know, getting some love and support that way.

One might be journaling. One might be, you know, playing with my dog. There's lots of ways to feel good in the moment and to, you know, take ourselves out of that pain temporarily. And so the more we can expand our options of ways to love and take care of ourselves, and, you know, let's look at things like drugs as a way to take care of yourself, right? Instead of just putting all the negative stuff, let's recognize the beauty in, like, you know, wanting to feel better. And maybe that's what we need to identify. That's what we're doing.

I mean, I abused vodka for most of my life. From my 30s on for a good 20 years, I hit that bottle pretty hard, but I'm a bigger guy, so I could kind of do it. But, you know, it definitely wasn't the best thing for me. And maybe I should have sat down and said, why are we hitting that bottle a little too hard um you know for a lot of times i made the excuse that it was so i could work longer when i was tired and worse that i could you know party more have more fun or you know do whatever but uh you know then then you start losing stuff where you know the next day you're hung over and

you lose a day uh or you're hung over for the week you're so weak um yeah do we need to identify those things and go uh what am i using to divert this pain and and and not face this do we need to sit down and face those and like you say say, come up with better solutions? Right, because that stuff isn't going away. And when you drink, all you're doing is you're temporarily getting by, but you're bringing on more pain. And the original pain didn't leave. It's still there, and it's going to keep rearing up. And so the more you recognize that, the more you kind of expand your toolbox of what you do when you're having a hard time. And I think sometimes we all need to escape.

Life can get overwhelming. And then sometimes, too, we can feel like we have enough courage to sit with whatever's difficult. Right. And the more you sit with the things that are difficult the less power they have over you if you don't run away and instead if you embrace them um then um you know i'm just to repeat what i said like like they don't have power. You realize it's okay. I can tolerate these feelings without running away. I'm okay as I am.

And because pain is part of being human and we all need the skills to be able to just sit with it sometimes instead of feeling like we need to fix it. Maybe ask ourselves why we're running away or why we're trying to resolve that pain or medicate it. And maybe instead say, you know, what is this pain? Why are we doing this? Yeah. And I think that people, other people are some of the best ways of helping us to sit with it.

You know, that when you feel like crap because, you know, like you can't pay your bills and you don't know what's going on, you know, like you don't know whether you're going to be able to buy food and you have all these difficult decisions to do about the limited money you have? I mean, that's real. And alcohol might help you to temporarily cope, but it's not going to go away.

And so talking about it with a friend is going to help you to sit with it. And it might help you to recognize that you're not the problem here. You know, like these are tough times and a lot of people have lost their jobs and it's not a very fair world. And we need structural solutions that are going to make people's lives easier. Right. Instead of taking all the blame on ourselves for our like you know too many people think of poverty as shame and inadequacy without recognizing that not everybody's got the

opportunity for good jobs some people might be extraordinarily smart and work really hard but are going to run into roadblocks that's going to make it a lot harder for them to get opportunities and be able to support themselves, right? So I don't think that the problem is all about the individual changing their attitude, that part of it is recognizing injustice and that we need cultural change to go along with individual coping behaviors. Yeah, I like what you bring to that community because there are times where I've gone through that suffrage and I'll either find out from somebody or talk to somebody, um, and realize that they're either having the same problem as I did. Um, it used to be years ago when I wanted to, when I was

really depressed, I'd watch the TV show cops. And after about two hours of that, I'd be like, you know, my life's really not that bad. I'm not the shirtless guy in the trailer home who's, you know, is going to get taken to jail and he's going to fight the cops. And I don't know, it's a weird sort of car crash way to approach things. But it made me feel better at the time, usually after a couple of glasses of vodka. One thing you do talk about in your book is why self-help won't save us. And I thought that was kind of interesting chapter. You want to just touch on a little bit of that? Yeah, because think of that person that you just felt so much pity for right there, right?

Now, it may be that that person really doesn't want that life that they have, you know, that they would love to have a job where they're able to support themselves and, you know, take a shower comfortably. And, um, but, you know, maybe they grew up in an environment where, um, they had to help their parents rather than go to school, where they were constantly told that they were worthless, where they didn't have the opportunity to shine. And I kind of lost track of where the question is. My cop story was kind of right i think there's an element of i guess where i'm getting at is this whole issue of compassion

and which also brings in self-compassion that if we're disappointed in our lives, like, we need to, like, recognize that we don't have complete control over our lives. And there are difficult circumstances that we keep encountering that are challenging us in creating the life that we want. So self help isn't the only answer, you know, like, someone like Oprah has amazing qualities and perseverance and grit that helped her be become as successful as she is. But hey, one of the reasons she went to college was because she got a scholarship. She had a grandmother that believed in her and you know supported her right so there were resources that contributed to her making it it wasn't just the fact that she's a smart unique person and so self-help alone wouldn't make it um So I can't just say a bunch of affirmations and have my dream board and it's not going to work out, is that what you're saying?

You got it. I mean, that's such a naive new age approach that we have right now that people create their own circumstances and anybody can achieve the American dream and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We need to also figure out how we can provide the resources for everybody to have access to the life that they deserve. Hang on, I got to take that off my vision board. No, but I love what you're saying about finding community and going out and finding stuff. You know, I remember one of Oprah's shows, which is the Neverland show. There was a guy who got up and talked about being abused as a child sexually. And the shame and the scars and the way he held that for so many years.

And he realized that, and I can't remember the exact way he said it, but it's really beautiful. But basically, the rendition of it is holding secrets inside ourselves is a poison. And the only person that's really making sick is us. And so I think a lot of times, like what you're talking about, we have to come to the identity of who we are. And then we got to go find community so that we have acceptance, so have belonging which is in the title of your book um and and then we can be more accepting of ourselves and find our place in the world as it were um and find a better place in belonging accepting within ourselves inside of ourselves yeah if you find a safe place to tell your secrets and you meet up with love and acceptance for the things that you feel ashamed about, that's transformative, right?

That gives you the power to feel good and to go out in the world with human fragility right you know but you know even if you do reach for alcohol to solve your problems you still deserve respect in the world you know like that's that's not the only thing that defines who you are that just means that you're struggling, right? And if we could meet up with that, with love and compassion, as opposed to judgment and telling people you're wrong and just say no, and it's your fault, you're in this mess. That's how we change the world. And I like how you put that because when I'm going through problems or issues or different things, I don't really identify, am I struggling right now? What am I struggling with? You're just kind of like worried about money, job, finances, whatever the thing is, maybe that's bugging you.

Right now, we've been living the past year through the pandemic. Like, am I going to die? Am I going to get it? Am I going to lose loved ones? Worry, worry, worry. Will there ever be a vaccine? Fortunately, we kind of crossed that thing. You know, but I never really sit down and go, wait,

you're struggling with something right now. Do you recognize that it is? And for me, I don't know about other people but for me recognizing what that is gives me a better toolbox to go okay so how do we deal with it and then i go watch cops while i'm drinking vodka no i'm just kidding just kidding right and i think that that's the challenge of our times right now is to accept the fact that this is really hard you know like we can't go out and hug our friends it's like we don't have easy access to entertainment anymore or diversion I mean it and so the things that we ordinarily look to that help us to feel better just aren't as

accessible and the more we can accept that then it gives us the power to try to figure out, okay, so within these limitations that the current pandemic is setting for us, what options do I have to feel better? And then, you know, and to have compassion for the fact that we have limited options, and it's going to be harder right now. Yeah. And we need to find our community, even though you're going to have to do that through Zoom. Yeah. It helps to have that outreach because if you're isolated.

But even then, it's still hard for a lot of people, but identifying there's a struggle and everything else. Before we go out, anything more you want to touch on in the book um before i talk about the book i just want to talk about how um beautiful it is to connect with you you know you and i were strangers a little while ago and um i just felt like we just relaxed and kind of had fun exploring some topics together and i love that we all always have that kind of opportunity out there to kind of connect with other people and I was in a lousy mood when we started this conversation and I'm not there anymore you know like I'm I'm feeling in a much better mood and I would suggest that part of it is just because I had this like human connection and that's accessible to all of

us all the time and so maybe I did just talk about my book because that's what I'm hoping for in radical belonging is that in the book people can see themselves you know that they they can as they're reading the book they can have a little bit of epiphany that who they are has value and, you know, feel seen and acknowledged. And I feel like they've discovered, like, whatever their fears and pain is, that all that stuff is just very human, that we all experience it. And the more that we can lean into it and make room for one another, that's where the truth and beauty and salvation lives and lives. And that's, that's how we change lives.

Yeah. And hopefully change the world by impacting that. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. That was a very beautiful set. I like how that all wrapped up. That was wonderful.

It was like a beautiful speech right there. You know, I, I set me up. Thank you. Thank you very much. We, that's what we try to do. I'll take some credit for it. It's all you. This is why we have a brilliant people like you on the show.

You guys do all this work. You guys do all this research and study. Me, I just show up with a mic and go and have funny questions and make stupid innuendos and comments or whatever. Check out their book by I'm going to hold this up.

Radical Belonging by Dr. Lindo Bacon, PhD. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. Check me out at lindobacon.com, and you'll also find Lindo Bacon on Instagram, lindobaconx on Facebook and Twitter. There you go.

There you go. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to goodreads.com Fortress Chris Voss. Follow me over there. Also go to facebook.com Fortress the Chris Voss Show the CBPN online podcast and youtube.com

Fortress Chris Voss. Thank you for being on the show with us. We certainly appreciate what you've shared with us today, Linda. Great meeting you, Chris. Wonderful to have you as well. And thanks, my audience. Be safe. Wear your masks.

We'll see you next time.