The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Be More Greedy, Lazy, Envious & Angry—And Completely Transform Your Life with Elise Loehnen

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Tips and action steps for tapping into your power as a woman after society & culture has manipulated you into not having access to it. why you might struggle to identify what you want your life to look like how to stop feeling so much pressure to be productive  all of the ways society has taken women’s power + exactly how to reclaim it where a lot of our guilt (including mom guilt) stems from + how to quell it how to redefine envy + identify what the feeling is really telling you  why we love some celebrities and hate other ones (and what it says about our society) what an MDMA therapy session is REALLY like  concrete tips to change your relationship with your body a practice that will completely change the way you look at money & wealth guiding questions for tapping into your true sexual energy what we get wrong when talking about sex on a societal level tips for expressing anger in healthy ways (+ what your anger is trying to tell you)  and so much more! For more from Elise, check out her new book On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good and head to her website www.eliseloehnen.com. To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. This episode is sponsored by: AG1: visit athleticgreens.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  Ness: head to nesswell.com/liz for an extra 5,000 points when you apply for the Ness Card today.  Reliefband: go to reliefband.com and use code HEALTHIER for 20% off plus free shipping.  Seed: go to seed.com/lizmoody and use code LIZMOODY for 40% off your first month. Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the healthier together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're getting science-backed tips for beating burnout, learning practical ways to find more fun in life, or uncovering the health effects of alcohol that no one is talking about. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives. Today, I am so excited to welcome Elise Loonen to the podcast. Elise is a writer, editor, and host of the podcast pulling the thread.

She's co-written 12 books, including five New York Times bestsellers, and her incredible new book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Paid to be Good, just came out yesterday and could be found anywhere books are sold. Elise has been featured in major publications, including Today, E, Good Morning America, and the early show. and previously she was the chief content officer of Goop where she co-hosted the Goop podcast and the Goop Lab on Netflix and led the brand's content strategy and programming. I struggled to figure out how to frame this episode because it's one of my favorites that I have ever recorded and I haven't

been able to stop thinking about it since Elise and I talked, but it's very hard to fit it into just a topic or a box and sometimes it's easier for people to recognize they want to listen to an episode when you can tell exactly what it's about. So I'm going to glad you're here and I'm glad you're listening and I know that you're not going to be disappointed. I would say at its core, it's really an episode about power, all of the power that we've been manipulated into giving up and how to take that power back. It's truly going to blow your mind and inspire so many conversations. We get into why you might struggle to identify what you want your life to look like, how to stop feeling so much pressure to be productive, all of the

ways society has taken women's power and exactly how to reclaim it, where a lot of our guilt, including mom guilt, stems from and how to quell it, how to redefine envy and identify what the feeling is really telling you, why we love some celebrities and hate other ones and what it says about our society, what an MDA therapy session is really like. Concrete tips to change your relationship with your body, a practice that will completely transform the way you look at money and wealth, guiding questions for tapping into your true sexual energy, what we get wrong when talking about sex on a societal level, tips for expressing anger in healthy ways, and what your anger is trying to tell you, and so much more.

Elise and I would both love to hear your thoughts and your biggest takeaways as you're listening to the episode, so definitely screenshot and tag me. I'm at Liz Moody, and Elise, she is at Elise Lunan on Instagram. And if you love this episode, please share it with someone in your life. As soon as you listen to this one, you're going to be like, oh, this is a cultural conversation that we need to be having and you will see the need to share it far and wide, both to begin to move the needle of society. And also, honestly, just because you're going to want to have someone to talk about this stuff with. So thank you for always spreading the word about episodes. It's truly the best way to support the podcast, and it is so appreciated.

Okay, now let's get right into it with Elise Loonen. Elise, I'm so excited to have you here. It's been such a long time coming, I feel like. Yes. I feel like we have been planets orbiting ever closer to each other and kind of in the same world. Yeah. The same universe. Even with this, your book is coming out just a few months before my book, which is really interesting.

It is like a weird alignment thing. And I'm really happy for it and happy to finally meet you. When do I get my dirty little mitts on a galley of your book? Are they out yet? No, we don't even have a cover yet. So don't worry, you're not missing out on anything. Your cover is spectacular. It's really, really gorgeous.

Are you happy with it? Yes, I'm thrilled. It's this guy, Valero DeValle, who did the cover art for my podcast also did my book cover. And it was one of those things where I was hoping that they would go to him. And then when I finally asked, they were like, oh, we have dozens of concepts and sketches from Valero. So they were already way ahead of me. Can you tell me where the idea for this book came from? It's such a unique concept and take. And I just kept reading it and being like, how did she come up with this? And particularly as someone who grew up in a progressive home in Montana, outside of popular culture, at least, with a very strong mother, et cetera. And I didn't grow up in a religious household at all. And the subject of the book, the super strong mother. as the seven deadly sins. And so I would theoretically think of those as so far away from me.

There's no way that those sins could possibly live in me, particularly as a system. So the aha moment for me with the book was, oh my God, this is culture, this is alive in all of us. It came to me because of two themes. One, I have an anxiety disorder that probably by no coincidence started. with my first job in New York City in my 20s. And I'm a chronic hyperventilator. And for people who have never experienced that, and there are people who have experienced it that don't know what it's called. So I'm sure people listening will say,

oh, my God, that is me. So chronic hyperventilation is not breathing into a bag. It is actually having a body that's oversaturated with oxygen. You're over-breathing, probably mouth breathing, etc. I have a little bit of subtle asthma too. But the sensation in my mind is that I cannot take a deep breath, which then causes me to over breathe again because I try to fill my lungs and I hit a cap. And the only way I can take a full breath is by yawning. And when this first happened to me, I went to the emergency room because I thought I was going to die. Ironically,

my dad is a pulmonologist, just putting that out there. They told me that it was in my head. They were very patronizing but kind, but they essentially gave me some Xanax and sent me home. And this has popped up in my life at various points, typically around stress or fatigue, a lot of travel if I'm over caffeinating. But I have had a few periods of it where I will do it for more than a month, really. And so I was in my car. This is shortly before the pandemic. And I had just been in therapy and I was in the middle of maybe a 30 to 45 day hyperventilation period. It's exhausting.

And you appear to the world like you're really chill and sleepy. And inside it's this consuming feeling of like, when can I breathe? When am I going to be able to breathe? I've had sort of a breakdown. I would argue maybe a breakthrough with my therapist where he was noting my exhaustion. And I was expressing, like, I don't understand I have done everything in my life to outrun this. I am high achieving. I have a prominent career.

I have two healthy children. I'm married. I am the primary breadwinner. When will I outrun this feeling of not being on top of things. things or not being enough, at what point can I get my arms around this and feel like I have enough control over my life that I am safe. And when will I ever feel good enough, really? And it was interesting because at this moment, there couldn't have been more external markers that I was good enough and theoretically safe and secure. And yet the opposite was happening in

my body. And I was like, I have to solve this because I literally could. cannot live like this. And then at the same time, I was observing culture and observing patriarchy, which we think of as this sort of boogeyman. Like you hear patriarchy, you're like, whatever, I don't know what that is. I could identify patriarchy. I could push against it, but it's hard to identify it in external factors. Like I wasn't encountering a lot of misogynistic men or overt symptoms of this system. And yet, here we were. And it's not that I was dismissing what other women were reporting, but it didn't match, it doesn't match where we are. And so I was sort of looking at that disparity of, well, if it's not overt patriarchy, is it covert patriarchy? Is it

internalized patriarchy? And where does this live in me? And I started looking for signs of this, what I was doing to both sort of police myself and police other women. I hosted a podcast at the time, the good podcast now, but I was interviewing Lori Gottlieb, who had a small moment in maybe you should talk to someone. It wasn't a big theme, but it said that she tells her clients to pay attention to NB because it tells you what you want. And there was something about this that was so alive. And I asked her about it. I was like, do you think that envy is more present in women? And she said, I don't know. I don't have any data. But I can say that women are much more cautious and ashamed of feelings that they think are unacceptable. And envy is unacceptable. And I just couldn't get this

thought out of my head, Liz. For months, I was like, is this envy? Anytime I had a reaction to a woman that seemed outsized. When I would find myself judging someone, criticizing someone, that phrase, I just don't like her. And which we throw around very socially acceptable, part of the way that women are conditioned to interact. And then I was speaking to Glenn and Doyle. This is a little bit after this. And I asked her about what Gottlieb said about envy.

And she said, the thing about envy and what we want is that women don't know what we want because we've been conditioned to not have any wants at all. And so that night, I was in Miami to interview Glennon for a conference, and I was flying back to L.A., and I was like, this is it. I'm going to write a book about envy. This must be it. And I was like, it's not everything. It's part of it.

And I was like, where does it come from? And then I was like sloth, envy, pride, gluttony, greed, love. anger. Holy shit. This is a punch card for what it means to be a good woman. And if there's anything that women are programmed to be, it is good. Men are programmed for power. Women are programmed for goodness. And it's like out of the air in the sky on American Airlines. I was like, I see the system. I see this system of morality and how it's like, it's like, I'm not. It's like, lives in me and in all of the women that I know. Do you feel like women redefining their relationship with these seven, or you actually have eight sins because you included sadness, which was

deleted, like it was eliminated for the list, which is so interesting. Yeah, this is what's also wild, which I didn't know. And I don't think actually that this is common knowledge. The sins were not actually in the Bible. They emerged out of the desert at the same time in the fourth century, the same time that the New Testament was being canonized by an Egyptian monk named Evagrius Ponticus, who was also credited with being one of the early authors of the Enneagram. So Evagrius came up with this list. There were eight demonic thoughts, but not demon in the way that we would think of it today, but instead as demon as distractions.

So whatever would pull you out of prayer theoretically. And sadness was on this list. And then it traveled throughout the desert, through all these deserts, fathers. He wrote them down in this little chat book. And then it was in the sixth century that Pope Gregory I turned them into the cardinal vices, made them seven. It's unknown what happened to sadness, but it's interesting that Avagoras Ponticus wrote about it as a feminine quality. Pope Gregory I took these seven cardinal vices and assigned them all to Mary Magdalene, because in the New Testament, she is referred to as the one from whom Jesus casts seven demons.

There's no connection to these sins, but there you have it. And in the same homily that he turned the vices into the seven deadly sins, he assigned them all to Mary. He conflated her with the woman who annoys Jesus' feet with her hair, and he turned that woman into a prostitute. So all in one fell swoop, Mary Magdalene, who theoretically should have been the first woman. first apostle for various reasons that I won't get into here was dethroned, turned into a whore

and assigned all of the vices. And she wore that reputation until the last few decades, until people started re-looking at this history, more or less. And now she's the apostle to the apostles. But as we know, it's hard to shake these reputations. But yeah, sadness felt essential to me to include because I think it has primarily lodged in the minds of men. And I think the primary symptom of this denial or this being cut off from feeling is toxic masculinity. It's this like desire to live forever and defy death, this up into the right, all of this resistance against the reality of our planet and our bodies. And as more, more, women are extolled in our culture to behave more like men, I think that that's what's required

is cutting off feeling in a way that, like, we've got to stop doing that. So do you think that women redefining their relationship with these deadly sins is sort of the secret to feeling like enough or to reclaiming that power? Yes. Because these are all human instinct. natural instincts, they connect us to our desire, what we want, our appetite, our needs. And in their denial, we are living not only at half-mast, but we are disconnected from ourselves. And then this idea of baseness or that goodness must be achieved and that it's not already innately baked

into each and every one of us is another terrible hangover, really. It's not that the book is an argument for let's get really lustful and really greedy and really lazy. It is balance. How do we actually bring this stuff out of shadow that we've been suppressing and repressing so that we can feel our full humanity and express that into the world? I love that. I want to go through each of the sins and ask you a few questions about it. each one so we can start to express that, start to bring that into the world. Let's start with sloth, as you do in the book. I think that's one of the ones where it's more clear what those messages are and grounded in the puritanical notions of productivity and things like that. How have those

messages made rest difficult for us? It's exactly what you said. It's this puritanical ideal of productivity and measuring our output and doing, doing, doing, and then it's compounded for women because not only do we need to do for our families, and if you're a mother, do for your children. In fact, one of the calls for women is to subjugate all of our wants to other people's needs. It's an insistent call, and it's really hard when it's a cultural edict like that to push against it. But then there's this idea that we should do the same in our places of work, that we can never do enough. will never do enough. And what I've observed in women all over the place is that this just ratchets up.

And the more that each of us tries to do or achieve these standards that we're setting, this high bar that's expected of us in every sphere of our life, the more we kill ourselves to achieve it or reach it, the higher the bar gets set. And it's a cultural pressure of more, more, more that is unavoidable. It's not conscious. We're not trying to do this to each other, but that's what's happening because the sloth chapter gets into the formation of this ideology and also this persistent idea that women have never worked or that the women's liberation movement in the 70s was a call for freedom from women to join workforces. And yes, there's some of that,

certainly. But this idea of stay-at-home moms and middle-class existences was a reality for a decade. That's what TV captured for posterity. Women have always worked, always, both in the home and out of it. Certainly women, people of color, women of color, enslaved women, and then women after were working outside of the home and in it. Any woman of a certain class was in the mills, it may be, like this is just a myth, this idea that only modern women are choosing to abandon their families and take to the office. But it haunts us. It comes at us as you chose this. And so if we're going to reward you by letting you be primary breadwinners, you better not let your kids feel the impact of that decision. And this is just some of the false programming

that continues to circumscribe our lives. And again, it's like not something that we're super aware of. And that's what I really want to do in the book is remind people or show people that this is a lie. And our freedom requires telling a different story. Well, and there's the lack of recognition of the work that women do out of the house. And then there's also at the same time this devaluing of the work that's considered in the sphere of women's work. Like, we don't value a lot of the things that we have asked women to do as a society for centuries and centuries. Yes. It's a complete devaluing of qualities that we would assign

as feminine. And I write about this in the book, a fair amount, and I feel like your people, of all people, will understand exactly what I'm talking about, that there are these energies, these qualities of the feminine, balance femininity is care, nurturance, creativity. Balance masculinity is order, structure, truth. These are energetics that are not attached to gender as much as we have tried to do that in our culture. They're not attached to an expression of sexuality or a gender. They are in all of us, ideally equally.

And I think most women completely understand this and live this, even if we're constantly trying to suppress or pretend or move back to our feminine. But you, me, I am directing, ordering, structuring, guiding all day. In fact, my masculine is more easy, more comfortable for me than my feminine. And men have these qualities too. And yet in men, it has been. so suppressed and repressed the feminine, that in order to balance this in society, the feminine and men has to come up, has to. And that requires, you know, changing culture, but also insisting on it for all of the men who we know. I often, like, joke with my friends. It's pretty serious.

Like, what would the world look like if we encouraged men to cry regularly? Like, I just literally think the entire structure of society would be different. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. You said that you're the primary breadwinner in your relationship. You're also the mother of two boys, right? Two boys, yeah. How has been the primary breadwinner impacted you? It's funny. So my dad is the primary breadwinner, and my mom was a nurse and met him at the Mayo Clinic. And he's a pulmonologist. And so growing up, my mom's labor was entirely unpaid, but she's the most competent, intelligent person I know. And so I very much lived with her unlived life because she came of age on a moment in time when she could have really been someone or done something. But she grew up in a family of scarcity, oldest of seven. It wasn't happening.

She chose security rather than pursuing her dreams at all costs and didn't really want kids. So that's what I was bathed in as a child was this idea. and I was sold this story by society that it was a matter of economics. And I think that was also how I arrived at this book, was recognizing that I had reversed the dynamic in my own relationship, although my husband does work and provides health care for our family. I thought that by virtue of being the primary breadwinner and taking it all on me, that automatically our role, would reverse. And I'm married to a feminist, progressive, lovely, sweet guy who loves our kids. But the culture is so much stronger. And it's not that I am admonished by my husband.

It's not that he's asking me what's for dinner and did the kids do their homework. It is that I find myself continually rising not only to the challenge, but overachieving out of some internal cattle prod, really, where I cannot let myself off the hook. I am constantly brating myself for not being a good enough mother, even though like per Winnicott, I am a good enough mother, but I am not winning any awards. And it's interesting and just observing the culture, too, even at a very progressive school, that the calls for volunteers, it's always, ways out to the moms. All of this labor falls on the moms. There are a few men who show up, but I was asked to volunteer for three pretty considerable things. My husband was asked to volunteer

for nothing. And this is so entrenched in our culture, even in places where we would think it would not be. And I've noticed, obviously, with his parenting, he gets constant affirmation of his wonderful parenting. Nobody is giving me trophies. Nobody is giving me awards, Liz, even though I definitely do more than he does. I don't have children, but I am the primary breadboarder in my relationship. And I find that it is so much more of a complicated dynamic. And I'm married to a super feminist man as well. And I think that the messages that we've internalized around that are just so much more tricky

and it creates so many more tricky dynamics than I certainly would have expected. I'm curious with all of that and with everything you research and you learned for your sloth part of your book, how have you been able to personally redefine your relationship with rest? How have you been able to give yourself permission to step out of those messages? Honestly, it's been an extreme conscious awareness of what is happening in my body and watching it and watching it and stopping myself and recognizing that, for example, this week, that if I don't rush to print out and return the permission slip for the field trip and I give my husband more than 10 minutes to respond, that he does it. He does it. And it's been asking and being exceptionally clear where I'll say, this is what I need to do. This is what I need you to do. Can you do this?

But then isn't that still like you doing the emotional labor? Yeah. It's not perfect. But it's better than me resentfully shopping. It's like a retraining. And part of it has been putting stuff down, coaching myself to put stuff down and to leave space. for him to step in. I mean, this is a perverse example, but this summer, I go back to Montana to ride horses and I fell off a horse and broke my neck. I knocked myself unconscious. I didn't know

that my neck was broke. Oh, my God. For a week. And I was in Montana. I flew home. I still managed to pack us. Oh, my God. And I was in a lot of pain, got back to L.A. My doctor here was like, what do you mean? You did not go to the hospital. I ended up that night, spending the night in the hospital, not surprisingly. But it was so interesting to be incapacitated and to watch myself, berate myself. Like when we got back from Montana, I didn't unpack. I was in too much pain. I was sitting on the couch, which is unusual for me. And I was just watching myself have this internal conversation. And then lo and behold, my husband unpacked and did all the laundry. I didn't ask him. He just moved into the space and took care of it. But I think so much of it for me

has been this automatic, compulsive, caring, compulsive reaction. And that if I just stop and give him space, he will step up. And that's been the biggest lesson is just watching myself. and holding myself back. Okay, let's go to envy. Envy apparently was the spark for the entire book, and it's one that I struggle with a lot personally. It's just one of the ones that I keep waiting for the moment in my career or my life where I'll be like, oh, I don't feel that anymore, and it hasn't happened yet.

So I'm curious what you have learned about envy that's changed your relationship to it. What's been most helpful to you in redefining envy in your life? It's great that you can actually diagnose it in yourself because I think for most of us, it's so unsavory that we resist acknowledging it. And then we get into this really nasty cycle with ourselves where we find ourselves from afar, typically shaming or disliking someone else and not understanding that it's because this woman most likely is pushing on a dream that you have for yourself. And so the fact that you can acknowledge it is, excellent because then you can use it. I was talking to a good friend when I was writing the book and I was asking her, you know, who are you envious of? And she was like, I'm past that. And her mom was there and her mom's like, oh yeah, you really outgrow that girls. Don't worry. And I was like, who are you envious of? Who bothers you? And you can't understand why. She was like, no one. And the next morning I was at coffee with a writer friend and I looked at my phone and I had 27 texts.

had a minor heart attack. So I was like, someone's dead. What was this friend? Listing. All of these women. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And they were all creatively expressed. They all had brands. They were all sort of West Side moms. And this friend of mine really wants to be a costume designer, et cetera. And I was like, well, there you go. There's the information showing you what you want. But that's it. I write about Lacey Phillips and too big magnetic and this idea that this word of expanders, which I think is such a brilliant reframe. I'm sure people tell you that you're an expander for them. And the idea is to then figure out who is inspiring your envy or who is doing something that you want for yourself if you can't acknowledge your envy. And then you use that

person, not as a voodoo doll, but as a model for what's possible. It's this, if she can do that, I can do it too. And instead of she has that, therefore I can't have it. Therefore, I need to destroy her. I'm genuinely confused how masterclass gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly, like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for. But also, I'm being honest, this is like a use case I don't hear a lot of people talking about. I'll just watch it for entertainment when I want to do something that's far more interesting than scrolling. Christina Aguilera taught me to sing, Shan Boudrum's Art of Master

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in the moments that I can identify that and I can use it to push me forward and I can use it to show me what's possible for my life, I love it. But then I feel envy of people like, I don't know, like this feels silly to even understand. But I feel like envy of like Taylor Swift because I'm like, I'm never going to hear a stadium of people sing the words that I wrote back to them or the Avengers cast who have the power to put on a costume, go to a children's hospital and make a kid with cancer feel extraordinary just because they like walked into the room. I'm like, what a power that is to have. And I'll never experience being able to do that to somebody with my presence. So there's these people that I feel envy of that I feel like there's nothing I can learn from it. You know what I mean? But if there's nothing I can learn from it or glean from it, how can I use that

productively instead of just having that make me feel like crap about the life that I have? Well, that's interesting because I feel like in some ways you are doing this, not maybe at that level, but you're giving people life-changing information. You're connecting them. What I always loved, particularly, you know, when I was at a bigger platform is when people would write in and say, oh, that person that you had on the podcast completely reframed my view of my relationship with my mother. I called her, you know, on and on and on. I'm sure you get some of this feedback, but that you are connecting people to ideas, information, experts, thinkers. that have demonstrably changed their life. So I'm going to say it might not be a kid at St. Jude's. You're not maybe bolstering a child's mood who's going through something terrible, but maybe you're doing something more impactful just by sharing information.

And then the Taylor Swift example, I mean, I see no reason why you couldn't hold down a stadium tour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can write something that people can sing back to me or something like that. So your point is that it may not be a direct one to one with envy. It's not just like, oh, I want this, I want this. It's like there's something there that's sparking this feeling inside of me. I need to kind of play detective for a second and figure out what that is and how I can stoke that fire in myself in a positive way. Yes.

It's like there's some bit of information in there that is touching you. Taylor Swift doesn't inspire anything in me. I don't have that dream. I just want to stay in my bedroom. Who does for you? Someone like Jay Shetty or Glennon, people who have achieved just a tremendous amount of impact hit New York Times bestseller lists. Jay, in particular, and Glennon, an ability to distill information. And I know that is his thing, right? making wisdom accessible and making it go viral. Like, that's his thing. That is not my thing. My brain doesn't work like that.

I'm more into like endless complexity and nuance, which isn't great for marketing anything. But it's also like so needed right now. It's also interesting to me, even as you're saying that how envy in some ways it can spark or cultivate that fire in us, but also in other ways it could shine a spotlight back on some of our unique. attributes that are really cool. Like literally as you're saying that, I'm like, oh, like you aren't

doing what Jay is doing to be, but that's shining a huge spotlight on what you're doing that's so unique and cool and special, you know? Absolutely. And it's like he's doing that. And I don't want to do that. And I envy his ability to do that because I think it is also essential and needed. But pre-book, I might have just wanted to sort of swat at him or dismiss him or. Or, you know, or, you know, be like, ah, he's annoying. Yeah. And I don't think it's annoying at all. I think he's lovely.

And it's funny, I don't want to go on a tour. What he does, the way that he connects with groups, that's in some ways the opposite of what I want. So it's interesting. As you start actually going into it, like, does this resonate? No. Does that resonate? Yes.

Does this resonate? No. And it helps all of us refine what it is that is actually the information in our envy. I love that. Okay, pride. You used Anne Hathaway as your example for your pride. And I thought it was so interesting because she was such an example of like Tall Poppy Syndrome. You talk about that moment after the Oscars where everybody on the internet just like went off on her, hated her. But she's interesting to me because she's been having this like renaissance recently and everybody's re-obsessed with her. And so I'm curious, what do you think is like responsible for these mass shifts? How do we

decide in mass to hate somebody and be like, this person's too prideful, like, they think they're too much hot shit. We're going to take them down a notch. But then on the other side, like, how do we decide to re-enbrece them later? Yeah. It's a pretty tried and true playbook from what I can tell specifically for women. And in this chapter, Pride, I write about famous women because the chapter is really about any woman. And I write about famous women because I think so often we can sort of shot and Freuda out and look at what's happened to them and participate and feel some glee. Schadenfreude means harm, joy. We don't want them to die, but we want them to be put back in their place. And we want them to be humbled. We want them to stop thinking that they are so great.

We want their big heads to get smaller. This is sort of the cultural messaging. And I'm sure many women in particular have heard this refrain. Don't get a big head. It's dangerous to be seen. in part because you'll inspire people's envy. All of these sins start crashing into each other. And we can say, oh, Anne Hathaway has nothing to do with us, right? Like, this is all in good fun. But what happens is that it ricochets through all of our lives, even though we don't think we have anything to relate to. It is nothing but information for all women that this is what happens to any woman who dares to be visible. And we see this in all spheres of life. We certainly see this in business, startups, women who are the Ascension, celebrated, ingenue, next great thing, so much talent.

We love her. We want to be here at her. And then there is just a point on the trajectory where they get too big or they seem to have too much or they're not expressing enough humanness. I write about Anne Hathaway in context of Jennifer Lawrence, whose complete self-deprecation, bumbling, falling, clumsiness, like, oh, gee, you know, me. And I love Jennifer Lawrence, too. But a lot of it was self-preservation and a wiseness about how she needed to comport herself

to not get destroyed, whereas Anne has a certain earnestness about her, a seriousness about her, a good student. about her that really brought nails out. And I think she had just hit that point. She'd won an Academy Award. And people decided she was this try hard theater dork. You know, she was hosting with James Franco, who was so annoying. Talk about a woman getting blamed for a man's lack of effort. Was that Oscars? Like, it was appalling. And he was like lauded for that behavior. And she was. Well, it also, to me, highlights that on a societal level, we, like, applaud effortlessness more than we applaud trying. Like, we find trying distasteful if you can perceive it. Yes, exactly. And that's a really essential insight list. You can't want it. You cannot overtly want it. You cannot overtly try for it. It has to be sort of, who me? Don't look at me. I'm a mess. I'm a mess. You know, these acts that I think we can all recognize where we dim our own light. And I write about this too in the context of confidence because as women who have been in business,

there's this constant drumbeat of be more confident, ask for what you're worth. And it drives me crazy because the women I know don't lack confidence or competence. I think I'm not saying that we all don't have occasional imposter syndrome, but the women I know understand how high quality they are. and yet all the social science just continues to confirm that women are punished for this, men are validated and valorized, and that we know better. We're too smart than to set ourselves up for a firing squad. So we diminish ourselves so that other people don't need to do it for us. We pretend to at confidence so that other people can tell us to be more confident. It's the worst double bind. It's

maddening. But that's the reality. We're all sort of engineering ourselves for the culture. And changing it requires acknowledging it, talking about it, and then having each other's backs forcibly. And again, that goes to then also being aware of what's happening in our bodies, because I think immediately we go into this retractive, like, who does she think she is? How does she think? dare she? I would never, nobody ever, you know, all of these hazing cycles that we participate in rather than breaking them. So Anne Hathaway is back now. Like she is re-embraced by society. Do you think that means she essentially humbled herself enough that we could re-accept her or what's responsible for that re-embraceal? I think that she's had to talk about why people don't like her and every

single press junket she's ever been on. It's a part. of her story in a way that's insane. And yes, this is the thing. We love to revive people after. After we feel like they've paid a certain amount of penance. I mean, look at Princess Diana or Amy Winehouse or Billy Holliday or Britney Spears. We love the comeback. It looks very different than it does from the Reformation of men.

I don't think that we send them into a timeout in the same way. and then bring them back. I do think, though, there's this tricky element with the pride one. Like, I think a lot of the other sins, it's kind of like if you can recognize that and you can change your behavior, you can have this impact. But pride is an interesting one because you can say, I'm allowed to have pride. You can say, I'm allowed to own my accomplishments. But then the world can still react to you in this really negative way.

Like your boss can say, oh, she like leaves a bad taste in my mouth or your friends can accuse you of being full of yourself. How do we square our own personal actions that we can take with the fact that the world is still going to be responding in this way? I mean, this is my dream for this book, which is not a small dream. And I recognize it's like an insane aspiration. But my hope would be that if we can puncture the bubble or just have a moment of awareness where women in particular start to recognize that this is what is active and that this is what is happening, even if they don't read the book, but that the awareness of this is enough for us to say, oh, I understand when I'm watching with glee as this woman is being destroyed, that this is what's

happening and I can stop it and I can comment on it and I can at least at least, at least, least stop participating because so much of this is like a social sport. It's a social act. And we're so used to it. And I think the minute that we interrupt it, even in sort of conversations with friends where you're engaging in your envy and you're like, oh, I don't like her. She bothers me. Like her Instagram. I mean, we've all been there. And then the minute that someone's like, this makes me uncomfortable, I think she's a really nice person, it's enough for the rest of us to be like, oh, wait, what are we doing? Yeah. What are we doing? Yeah. Gluttony, I want to talk about your MDMA therapy session. This was so interesting to me.

Have you done it? I have not, well, I've done it recreationally. I've never done a therapy session. Unfortunately, I kind of, I went through this like extreme party phase where I did a bunch of drugs and then I had a drug experience that gave me PTSD. And now I feel like I'm so afraid of drugs that I can't use them therapeutically. So I like missed my way. window to use them in good ways. And instead, I just, like, danced at a club in Berlin, you know. Yeah. But I would love to. If I didn't have too much anxiety to use my MDMA to do therapy for my anxiety, I would absolutely do it. So I would love to hear about your experience with it. I'd love to hear what it was like and how it changed your relationship with your body. Yeah. So it's funny.

I, as a kid, smoked a fair amount of pot and then I did mushrooms once in high school and passed out. I don't know why, but it really scared me. And like you, I think I had done MDMA once and had a really bad, scary experience, and that was it. So I was just total novice. And then because of the Netflix show that we were doing, we were going into psychedelics and I did mushrooms on camera, but had a really hard time letting go because I was the one mother in the group. And so my controlling sort of caretaking was strong and a fear was pretty pronounced. It's funny, the guides after were like, we knew that you would be a non-starter.

I think they could sense that there was a reason, too, that I was scared. And so back in LA, I tried MDMA with an underground therapist, which is two doses, pretty close together, medical grade ecstasy. And you put on an eye shade, you put in music, and you go deep into yourself. And I was doing it, I thought, to just see what happened. I didn't have any intention. There was nothing that I was really trying to heal. And the therapist sits with you. They take notes.

They kind of bring you out to talk, send you back in. There's no prompting. At a sort of minimum, they'll encourage you to stay with whatever you're dealing with, but they're not really doing active therapy with you. And then after you do all the processing and all the integration. So I start and immediately, you know, I have a panic sensation and then I relax. And then I have this feeling, which sounds so corny, but it was such an insight for me where I could feel myself in my body in a way that was unmistakable and where I realized that I had not been

in my body. I know that sounds silly, but it's like this deeper, oh, my God, I am in my actual body. And I hadn't realized until the session that, like, I frequently dissociated, particularly during sex. Like, I just thought that that was normal. And I had never heard it described. And so I didn't know that, like, if you're spinning around and leaving your body, that that's a trauma response list.

So I have this insight that I'm in my body. And then I just start talking about a molestation event from when I was young, probably eight or nine with a friend of a family friend. And I knew I'd had an experience with this man separately that I very much remembered of being on an inner tube with him on a lake and just him being kind of obsessed with me and wanting to ride with me over and over in his much heavier body, you know, tilting the inner tube. So I would fall on him and no adult interceding. But then in this insight, I realized that there had been more. And a lot of it was just this attraction or attention to me that I had very much did not want. And I didn't really get all the

details in that session, but I didn't really need them. And the other thing that's amazing about the MDMA therapy, which is why it works for PTSD, is that it mutes the amygdala. So you're able to access all of this stuff without re-traumatizing yourself. And I was really able to be with myself as a little girl in that moment. And I was a little girl in that moment. And I was able to be And as a mother myself, to a kid who's the same age, I was like, oh, my God, you were just a child. And I think when these things happen to us as kids, we parentify ourselves, we think that we're in control. We don't recognize the power imbalances. We think that these things are our fault, that we wanted it, et cetera.

So for me, it was a huge revelation that made a lot of things in my life make sense, including my relationship to my body and why I, I'm removed from it and I'm scared to find any pleasure in it in any way, including with food and the way that I treat it like a machine or as not me. And so that was a big moment for me of getting out of my mind, which is very much where I like to live or from out there and actually into my body. What do I want? what do I want to eat? Am I hungry? You know, basic things. But I think a lot of women, I'm sure, I know a lot of women are disconnected from this and disconnected from our appetites and disavow our

appetites and don't know how to nourish ourselves, don't know what we really want. It's one of those things where what's most sad to me is this idea of like deadening the appetite. because food is one of the only ways, like, we can contact the world. It's one of the primary ways we experience pleasure. It is how we identify hunger and wanting. And so this idea that it's medically being removed from people makes me very sad. And then on the flip side, I'm like, well, maybe when it becomes accessible to every single person, then thinness will stop being a measure of value.

Oh, that's interesting. Like the only reason we pedestalize it at this moment is because it's only accessible to a small group of people. That's really interesting. Like things we're valuing at this moment in society, but, you know, that's not always been the case. And we always haven't put thinness up on a pedestal when we valued different things on a societal level and lacked different things on a societal level.

Yeah. And it's a body standard when you have. have kids, you'll have this revelation of, one, sort of the predetermination of our bodies and your kids will just land on their own growth curve. And then it's their job to stay on their growth curve. And some kids are 90th percentile, some kids are third, but it doesn't matter. It's just, are they staying any deviance from it suggests that there's like something happening hormonally? but then we lose that. We lose that understanding and move into the space of like, well, we should all look like,

Giselle. I always think about it in the context of my height. I would never be like, oh, if I just work really hard, I'll be five, six. But I definitely feel like I could just like fundamentally change the shape of the rest of my body for some reason. And it's like, well, no, I have my mother's hips. I have my aunt's hips. Like I can see these hips throughout generations of women in my history. And then it's weird that I think I can somehow have a certain amount of willpower and change that. And that too, I wouldn't feel like that's a cool thing. Like look at me being connected through this line of women through this heritage through my family. And that that's the thing that I like would rather look like some random celebrity that I have no connection to whose society is just like decided they look cool right now. It's weird.

Yes. It's actually a wild idea that we think that we should be able to control our bodies and make, them look a certain way, despite the genetic hand that we've been dealt. Okay. Greed. Yes. What is your relationship with money? What are your struggles? And if you could make women internalize a new message about money, what would it be?

So I, like many, have been historically awash with ideas of scarcity. And some of that is very real, right? We have scarcity of opportunity, scarcity of people in the top echelons of government and business. And we have this feeling, I think a lot of women do, of there's not enough, and I'll never have enough. And I need more, but it's bad to want more. And I shouldn't want more than my share. I think part of this is like women's cycle. We understand the ebb and flow of things. Men have this idea of like up into the right and eternal expansion and growth. And I think that those two things are diametrically opposed. And women are like, but this doesn't work. I think we're We look around and we look at our ecological credit card debt and we're like, no, no, no, nobody needs more. Let's like nurture what we have. So I think that there's sort of a philosophical element at play with women, but mostly it's

this idea of like not enough. And all of this is true. The pay gap. The wealth gap, 32 cents to the dollar. Women need more money. It is just a fact. We're better with it. We're better investors.

We are more generous. We're more philanthropic. We're better stewards of it. We need more women to have more money for sure. And then on the personal level, though, part of it is a reframe of that. Like, if I had money, I don't intend to hoard it like Jeff Bezos. I want to shepherd it. I want to take care of my family.

I want to take care of myself. I want to have ease. I want to support people in my community. And then it's defining enough. So there's this like nebulous idea of enough that Hans, us all. And I was talking to this woman I work with this spiritual teacher, Carissa Schumacher, at the beginning of the pandemic. And I was no longer at my full-time job. And I was like, I don't have enough. And she was like, well, what is enough? And I was like, well, I don't know.

What do you mean? And she was like, well, have you ever written it down? And so I got out Excel and started actually writing down. She was like, I want you to do one tab for needs. one tab for once and just go crazy and just see what it is and if you can get your arms around it. And honestly, Liz, it was one of the most therapeutic things that I did in the course of writing this book because by delineating all of my needs, I got really granular. People don't need to get that granular. But I saw a number that I could achieve. And what I also realize is like don't really need that much beyond pain.

a mortgage, paying taxes, taking care of Vicky, our nanny, car, et cetera. Actually, I was like, I don't really need that much. I didn't even want that much. I feel like the want side is the side that kind of messes with people's brain, though. Like, because we are, like, exposed to these Instagram lives and the lives of our friends and this real push that you will be happier if you get this, this, this, this, and this. I could see having my side of the not needing me that much, but I could see having the want side discourage me. Yes.

Well, you should try because you might be surprised. And that's a really important salient point about Instagram and marketing, because it's all marketed to women, this whole like household CEO title that we've been granted over the years. The etymology of economy is household. And this consistent cultural pressure from all sides. that buying things is virtuous. It's our responsibility. We need to support the economy.

It is at least I could see how deeply it was in me, this need to acquire, acquire, acquire, more and more closet full of things I didn't wear. The only thing I hoard now is books. Over time, like, I've broken this spell, having bought things and then never worn them. We all are familiar with that. and to sort of understand, like, where is that even coming from?

Why? I think it comes from marketers know that we don't feel like enough, in large part because of the messages that society has given us from the moment that we're born. So they are able to sell us this false bill of sale that if we buy this purse, this car, this house, that we will feel like enough. And the hard work is figuring out that, like, none of that will make you feel like enough and you have to, like, go in a completely different direction. Yes.

Agree. But this is what's been sold to us as sort of our patriotic duty and our responsibility. So it's all complex. As you start teasing it apart and you start recognizing it, you're like, oh, at least for me, it's really lost its spell where I just don't buy things at all with the same ribidity that I once did. I know what I'm going to wear. I know what I need. I love that. We have lust, anger, sadness left. Sex, lust. I find this one really interesting in terms of the disentangling because I definitely went through this period in my early 20s where I was watching sex in the city a lot. And I was just like, I'm going to go out there and have sex like they do in sex in the city. I'm going to have these one night stands. And I felt so empowered at the time. And it's only really been in my recent history where I'm like, was that empowering? Like, did that make me actually feel good, or was that just men winning in this whole other different way? So I'm curious, if you could give us one piece of advice in the lust realm for figuring out our wants and

our needs and our desires amidst all of this noise, what would that be? So Peggy Ornstein, who's written so many great books about gender, sexuality, identity, she said this incredibly brilliant slight thing to me, which is she was talking about a girl and a boy high school kids, and the boy had said to Peggy about his girlfriend, she's sexy but not sexual. And I think that in a way that encapsulates the way that women and girls perform sexuality, and I think that there's a really big difference. And I certainly have done this in my life where I, I have performed sexy while not even understanding my own sexuality and not understanding my own body or what I like or what I want.

Because we don't have a culture that does that either. It's completely inadequate. And we have so many problems, obviously, culturally, around women and sexuality. So I think that that's primary. Is it sexy or am I sexual? And like really for women being like I trying to be sexual. understanding what that is as a source of creativity, as a source of this primal energy that is our birthright and focusing on that as what feels good. What do I like? And all of that work ideally

should be done before you start expressing it to the world. And it's hard. This might be as someone who's traumatized. But I feel like every woman, if they haven't been traumatized yet, they will be, unfortunately, in our culture. The messed up thing for girls and women is that we are sold a story that whatever happens to us is our own fault because we are the babysitters of male desire and to want it or to invite it in any way means that you deserve whatever comes your way. And until we solve that, it's hard for me to see. see girls and women sort of out there with their bodies, not because I don't want them to be out there with their bodies, but because I worry about safety, unfortunately.

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And so I do think, yeah, the idea of figuring out what does sexual mean to you first before you start almost like losing the ability to get in touch with that for yourself because you're so focused on being it for other people is really good advice. Is there anything that's helped you be more sexual, like get in touch with your sexuality? Well, the MDMA therapy when I had this revelation about what happened as a child allowed me to get closer to a trauma that happened to me in high school. And I had never gone there. And it wasn't really until the last few years that I realized with the dissociation, with what was happening. And having had it happen at a young enough age that I didn't recognize it wasn't

normal to really start to work on it and to get back into my body, I've done a lot of internal family systems work and work with my little child retrieving those parts of myself so that I can get out of this hypervigilant, being observed hyper-consciousness and into my body. And so it's gotten a lot better. I've had to do a lot of therapy. And I have a wonderful partner, but it's worth it. I just didn't even realize that it was as bad as it was until I had that insight. unfortunately, it's embarrassing to admit that because it's so easy to perform it, you know? Yeah. I remember one of my earliest memories about sex was hanging out with this like mixed gender

group and the guys being like, oh, yeah, it's so sexy when you can just like turn a woman on really fast and they can have an orgasm really fast. Like we're taught that our sexuality should be like in response to theirs. That's what it exists for is to be hot, which I, it's, yeah, just like from my early. earliest memories. I was like, oh, my orgasm matters insofar as it sexy to the guy. Yeah. Deborah Tolman has this line that girls are taught to be desirable but never desiring. Yeah. Ew. Anger. Anger. What is one tip for right-sizing our relationship with anger? Yeah. Would be a good way to say it. Anger is an essential animating emotion.

And it is present in all of us and often repressed, always repressed, I would say, almost always repressed. And anger turned inward as violence towards ourselves. I mean, someone like Gabor Mate would say that it's a driver of autoimmune disease, et cetera. But anger is typically righteous. It shows us where our boundaries are. It tells us what we need. And unfortunately, it has been conditioned out of women since the beginning of stories, since the beginning of time. We hate angry women. And we desperately need women's anger to show us how to move forward. And you can think about it for women, why it's so scary for a number of reasons. Aggression is natural in all children. boys are taught to have verbal, physical aggression. Boys will be boys. We don't love this, but it's allowed. No children are really taught healthy conflict or what to do with all of these feelings. Girls, on the other hand, are not allowed to have overt aggression, to push, to yell. And so what we see amongst girls is covert aggression, gossiping, alliance building, whisper networks,

exclusion. We all know these things. I don't think that they're sort of the birthright of any girls, just how we're cultured to deal with these feelings and to deal with violations. And it carries through to adulthood from what I can tell, unfortunately. Many of us still don't know how to have conflict. And then you get into a relationship or a world of relationships where you're swallowing all of your resentment and frustration where you don't know how to assert your needs. You don't know how to ask for what you want. I write a lot about Harriet Lerner and the dance of anger in her work, which suggests that our fear of anger primarily comes from relationship loss.

And this idea that if we ask for change or if we change, that we might lose our utility and might be abandoned or excluded. And this is a terrifying proposition. So there's like a real reason why women shy away from expressing our anger, but we can't do that anymore. How can we overcome that fear of relationship loss? We see so many boundary books, right? And they're all written by women.

I think helping us baby step our way into, the first step, identifying the need, identifying the source of the anger. How have we been violated and how do we then communicate that instead of blaming the other person, blaming ourselves, finding ways to offload our pain, how can we transmit that? I am frustrated because I am needing support. I am angry because I am needing consideration and it's practice, honestly. And then on the cultural stage and on looking around in society, it is building our resilience for listening to angry women. The shift is learning how to get in touch with their own anger and learning how to try it on and express it and then building a tolerance and

resilience for anger in other women as well. What I love about this conversation and your book is that a lot of it is about redefining your relationship with yourself, but so much more of it is about redefining your relationship with other women. And I think that coming together is this thing that has been missing. So many of us have been with our book. And so many of us have been with our books, with our journals, with our podcasts, doing that work on ourselves. But I think that the real shift and the real change is going to come when we all come together and we say, I'm not going to make fun of her. I'm going to applaud her accomplishments. I like that she spoke up in this way that could be perceived as quote unquote bitchy by somebody. I think that that's really exciting to see

you asking us to tap into. Yeah. I think that it is so needed, women circling, women coming together, whether it's in book clubs or just for drinks. We are communal creatures. This is our history, our prehistory, is affiliate of partnership-style living. Patriarchal living has separated us from each other and turned us all into enemies. And that distance is doing nothing for us, the intergenerational trauma of that being the gender side of the witch craze in Europe. Two hundred years women were hunted. I mean, it's insane when you think about it. And in the U.S., the Salem witch trials, we're talking about 30 women, 25, 25, 30 people. There were a few men in there. But in Europe, it's like 80 to 100,000 women,

mothers, daughters, and much of it was making women turn on other women and turn in their friends, turn in their daughters, turn in their mothers. Which you see repeated in modern society, not in a witch trial way. I still think there's this underlying to get ahead as a woman. Sometimes you feel like you have to kind of get in with the guys. And you get in with the guys by turning on fellow women. Yes, a thousand percent. We are reenacting it, reenacting that instinct.

And I think that that's the source of a lot of our wariness. And we have to heal it because, If we could get on side with each other, watch out. Yeah, I feel that. Sadness, how do you think we should be redefining our relationship with sadness? We are a culture that is awash and grief. So much of it is unresolved and inaccessible to us because we have lost our ability to really process our feelings or even know what feelings are alive in us. Tears are much more accessible to women culturally.

I think a lot of us cry when we're angry, for example. There's something about crying that is inherently non-threatening. But as mentioned, I wanted to include sadness because I think that our disavowal of sadness and grief means that we are denying death and cycles of regeneration and repair. And I think that's the reason we're in this ecological. crisis is because we are unwilling to look at mortality. And by we, I'm really talking about all of the men in power. So I think it's a rebalancing and a washing that's essential for our natures and a requirement for balance, honestly. And this is where I want us to be very careful

to not dissociate from our feelings, because I think that that's what our patriarchal society would require of us to get ahead is a severance from feelings. And there's so much pressure on women right now. It's like raise money, start a fun, do a business, take over the C-suite. I mean, I'm not saying that these aren't all valid and worthwhile things. And we certainly need equity and parity in business. But I do think it makes me anxious that we're just recreating the same patterns with different gendered bodies. And again, it's like this idea of energy. We need a different energy in the world. We need the rise of feminine energy in men as well. It shouldn't really matter what the gender of the body is. And I don't want women to be moving towards

toxic masculinity in order to survive. I want men stopping the toxic masculinity and women too. I do want to ask about the gender dynamics. Do you feel that men don't suffer from these societal notions of these sins and these self-veratements and the things they're told are wrong? Do you think that anybody identifying as a woman is given these messages in really different ways? I think the farther you get from the patriarchal core, the more this becomes relatable material. So my gay friends who have read this book relate to a fair amount of it. I think anyone on the edges of power can perceive, like, no, power is not for you. Goodness is for you.

Fielty to the system is for you. Compliance is for you. I hope men read it in part so that they can understand the psychology of women. But I do think that I think it would help them identify the way that culture is alive in them as well as either a contrast or in the ways that they will relate. But you won't be surprised. It's hard to get men. So far, I've been interviewed by John Boucher, who's at the Joseph Campbell Foundation, because there's a lot about myths and whatnot in the book. He's wonderful.

But other than him, I haven't been interviewed by a single man. And this is another cultural problem that I have a lot of passion for, which is that men are really only interested in men and women are interested in everyone. There's some big podcast that I will not name. And it's so interesting because you can literally go to the reviews. and the reviews are like, why don't you have women guess over and over and over? And these huge podcasters, people that I really respect that I think are really smart because of their own conscious or unconscious biases are just not putting women on their podcast.

And it's fascinating to me. It's like they don't know a single female doctor or PhD. And if they interview someone, then they will most likely only be interviewing them for like the paramedopausal episode that they do once a year. I mean, yeah, I've done audits on this. It is stunning. And I don't think that I'm glad to see that you're seeing it in reviews because I've often wondered if people are even conscious of who's being platformed and who's not. But a lot of these podcasts, when you audit them, it's like 10 to 13 to 15 percent of guests are women.

And then you have a male host. So it's not like you're talking about at least 50 percent representation by virtue of a woman at the mic. And then if you look at that too, like I look at as my podcast has kind of raised it on the charts, I've looked at the people above me. And so many of them, almost all of them, are men. And I talked about this with my husband so much because it's like men and women will listen to a male hosted podcast. And it is so much harder to get men to listen to a female hosted podcast. Yes. It's a big problem. And we see this all over culture. We're so used to hearing the story. of men and making those central to our understanding of the world and anything else is deviant. It's wild. But to see it continue. And I think a lot of it, again, is people aren't totally conscious. I'm sure some of these men, no shade on their own qualifications, smart, pedigreed men.

But then when you say, oh, do you know that this popular podcast has had, the last time I checked, he had had six women on since he launched his podcast. Six. No, and eyes go up. I mean, I don't think people realize the extent of it. And what's also really interesting about it is I'm sure this was your experience as well. But as the world has finally started waking up to systemic racism and all of these people who have not been platformed, it's women. It's women in media who are primarily.

moving their butts to make sure that they are being equitable in coverage and in book deals and in all of this. Oh, that's so interesting. I don't know a lot of men who are thinking about it or who care. And what's wild is that we do not seem to hold them to any sort of standard, whereas we do hold women to the standard. but the men have completely avoided accountability for this. It's actually wild.

Yeah, that's so interesting. Can you leave us with one homework assignment for claiming our power in reference to all of these different, quote-unquote, sins that we're redefining our relationship? I'd really like every single person listening to come away with one actionable thing they can do today to get some of their power back. Yeah, I wrote a quiz with my editor on my site, leisleunin.com. You can see which sins are most alive in you,

which I think is always a good place to start. And in that processing to be like, what programming have I imbibed about what it is to be a good woman about sloth or pride or whatever it is? I think that the primary thing for women is where we started, which is to identify what you want. And you can do this in an Excel spreadsheet. You can do this in your journal.

But to really give your permission. And this can be excruciating. This was excruciating for me to admit my wanting to myself, which is embarrassing. But to say, what do I want? And I think using other people as expanders or as material for your vision board is great, particularly if you are shy about that. Like now we know Liz wants to headline stadium tour. But honestly, like what would feed you?

And if you can get there, I think most people, at least my experience was like, oh, I'm already kind of doing this. And now I can just say that this is what I want. I want to write books and host a podcast and do a little bit of board. work. I want to be able to do this in perpetuity. That is my goal, not getting another full-time job, etc. But to actually arrive there took me a minute. Part of it is like running things through your body. Does this feel good? Would that feel good to be on stage at the Hollywood Bowl? For me, no. For you, yes. Like in reality, I would have a panic attack. But I'm like, Taylor seems comfortable. It's a good gut check that I know I would run away in a second.

You could do it. I can't wait. I'm very excited. And then the second part of that all of the things you've been saying for this whole conversation is to not shame yourself for what you want, to give yourself permission to fully want the things that you want and to go after them. And then I would say to applaud the other women in your life for doing the same. Exactly.

It can be like a tea cuddle that's like on that verge of boiling. I think so quickly we just shut ourselves. down where it's like, oh, no, but just like figure out how to talk into your voice recorder, whatever it is. Just try to get yourself into a place where you actually express without editing and without shaming yourself and see what comes up. I love that. Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your book?

Yeah. On Our Best Behavior is about the systemic cultural messaging around goodness. for women, which is heralded as our primary pursuit and where this came from, how it evolved over time or didn't, and then ultimately what we can do to set ourselves and ideally each other free. And to me, it's about, yes, we can identify the systemic issues. We can see inequity around us, but where is it in us? How are we policing ourselves? How are we internalizing all of this messaging? And then how are we projecting that on each other? Love it. And should we be going to your site first to take the quiz

to find that? And also we can pick it up wherever books are sold. Yeah. I have a substack, Elise Loonen at substack.com. Or you can find the quiz on my website, Eliselunin.com or my podcast pulling the thread available wherever you get your podcast, Liz. A hundred percent. And if you're a fan of this podcast, you will be a fan of pulling the thread. Yes, very complimentary. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. I absolutely love this conversation. I'm such a fan of your book. I'm such a fan of your podcast. And it was so fun to finally get the opportunity to chat. I know. I can't wait to hike with you and to read your next book. I'm obsessed with this episode and it's completely changed,

not only how I relate to myself, but how I relate to other women in my life. It's actually started to give me such an ick when I scroll through my TikTok, FYP, and I see you, women basically taking other women down as sport. It's like that glass-shattering thing where once you become aware of it, you'll notice it everywhere. That happened to me after the aging episode with Dr. Becca Levy, where she talked about how we lose seven and a half literal years of our lives because of negative aging beliefs. And after we spoke, I started to see negative aging messages everywhere. They're on greeting cards. They're in TV shows. They're in every freaking conversation. And I have become so adamant about pointing them out to people and noticing them myself. And I can already tell I'm

going to be doing that about all of the ways that we bring each other and ourselves down after this episode. I truly hope that you loved it. And I hope that you share it with everyone that you know. If you're new here, welcome to the pod. Make sure that you're following the podcast on whatever platform you like to listen on. Just go to the main podcast page, the one that lists all of the healthier together episodes. You'll see the word follow under the logo on Spotify. And then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple Podcasts. That way, all of the new episodes will show up right in your feed so you will never miss out on one.

And you are definitely going to want to be following along because we have some amazing episodes coming up, including our latest edition of our advice episodes, which features lots of juicy relationship questions with Zach. That's my husband. If you're new here, he gives amazing advice. I fell in love with him a little bit, recording this episode a little bit more. I was already very in love with him. and then an episode about how to show up as your most authentic self in all aspects of life.

So make sure that you are following so you do not miss out. Okay, I love you. I will see you next Monday for our advice episode and then next Wednesday for our next normal episode of the Healthier Together podcast. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. but there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely

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