The One You Feed - The Nonlinear Path to Healing: Finding Wholeness After Trauma with Daria Burke

Starting point is 00:00:00 I think I always knew that I could survive things. I had proven that to myself. I was highly confident in my ability to navigate difficult things. But I think rather than chiding myself, I could say, what is this here to teach me? What am I supposed to be getting from this moment? Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great things. thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative. effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Sometimes growth depends less on sheer effort and more on where we're planted. Daria Burke tells a story of hydrangea she thought

Starting point is 00:01:19 were ruined, chewed down, wrapped in burlap, until she replanted them in new soil, where they eventually bloomed even more beautifully. It's a perfect metaphor for her. her own life. In her memoir of my own making, she shares a journey through trauma, resilience, and self-discovery, reminding us that no matter how deep the damage, with time and care, we can still flourish. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. What does it take to grow a small cruise line into one of the world's most valuable vacation companies? Richard Fane knows because he did it. As the longtime chairman and former CEO of Royal Caribbean Group, he's been called a visionary leader and named one of Barron's world's best CEOs. And now for the first

Starting point is 00:02:05 time, he's pulling back the curtain in his new book, Delivering the Wow. In this fascinating read, he shows how a culture of Wow fueled Royal Caribbean's rise, from building the world's most innovative ships to creating a service culture so strong it carried the company through the most challenging crises. This isn't just a story about cruising. It's a blueprint for success. Fane explains how alignment, intentionality, and continuous improvement can unlock extraordinary performance no matter your industry. Whether you're a business leader, an entrepreneur, or just someone who loves a great success story, delivering the wow is a master class in leadership, innovation, and resilience. Get your copy of Richard Faines delivering the wow, available today on Amazon

Starting point is 00:02:49 or wherever you buy your books. We are conducting a survey to find out what you want. Look, you know this, I know this. There's ads on this podcast. It's how the podcast stays alive and feeds those of us who devote ourselves to it. But I'd love to improve that ad experience for you. And in order to do that, though, I need to know a little bit more about you. The survey is quick, it's easy, and it is really important to us right now. It takes two minutes to do and really would be a huge help. go to one you feed.net slash survey again that's one you feed dot net slash survey thank you so much hi daria welcome to the show hi eric thanks for having me i'm happy to talk with you about your book which is called of my own making a memoir and it's wonderful on so many levels and we'll get into it in

Starting point is 00:03:41 just a second but we'll start like we always do with a parable and in the parable there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stopped. They thought about for a second. They looked up at their grandparent.

Starting point is 00:04:05 They said, well, which one wins? And the grandparents said, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. that is such a rich way to start and to think about so much of what I've written about which is nature and nurture and I think we'll get more into that in a moment in that I hear choice that there is a decision that we get to make we may not choose to stay with the parable and the metaphor we may not choose the word

Starting point is 00:04:46 wolves that exist. The way our lives begin is not up to us, but we get to choose who we become. But it makes me think a lot about, and I don't see it as a binary, honestly. I see it as, and so much of my own personal work and to some degree professional work, the ideas that I explore and what the science of healing teaches us is that integration is the goal that we have to find a way, to coexist with the truth of what we've inherited. Maybe it's our psychic inheritance, our emotional inheritance, the ways in which legacies have been left in us or on us in the form of footprints, and sometimes those are traumatic and threaten to debilitate our sense of self

Starting point is 00:05:37 or destabilize the ways in which we might develop, but that if we can pull it in and hold it close, that we can get to know it, befriend it to some degree, at least create conditions for the courage to tolerate it in closer proximity that actually you can feel more integrated and feel more whole. And so that also, I would say, it leads me to think a lot about epigenetics, right? This study that suggests that our environment, our behaviors, the conditions that we create and find ourselves in play a meaningful role in the ways in which our genes get expressed. Our propensity towards something may make manifest. But all of that

Starting point is 00:06:20 is rooted in choice. And so I love the way that it ends, even though I don't see it as a binary. I think of it very much in the integration, but that it's a choice to do so. Yeah, that's wonderful. As I was reading it to you, it occurred to me that it's a story that has grandparents in it. And your grandmother is a big piece of your story and I'd like to get to her in just a second. I'm wondering if you could just, however you do it, give people the basics that they need to kind of understand what this book about and who you are before we go into more, you know, specific pieces. Let's set the general stage. Sure. Well, the context in which I was born was Detroit in the 1980s. I was born in 1980.

Starting point is 00:07:07 and so at a macro cultural systemic level to some degree that looked like coming into a city that had fallen from favor. It had been the richest, most powerful, arguably American city in just the generation before me when my parents were born. It was the richest, fourth largest from a population standpoint. And by the time I arrived, it was at threat of bankruptcy and had sort of collapsed under industrial conditions that it moved, you know, moved a lot of automotive manufacturing out of Detroit, but also the blast radius of the poverty that existed when those jobs left. And we saw heroin and crack really ravage a lot of the neighborhoods in the city. So that was the greater context in which I was born. And the specific context with my family,

Starting point is 00:08:04 I was born to parents who struggled with addiction. I've since learned, since writing the book actually, particularly with my mother, that her addiction began before I was born and continued to plague our family and really be leading sort of factor for what my early experiences were like as a child. They were young when they got married, 18 and 21,

Starting point is 00:08:29 and I was born three years after that. And I should add, in deep, poverty. I grew up. My parents split up when I was two years old. And so my front row seat to my mother's addiction, I had greater proximity to that, although my father struggled with heroin. It really sets the stage for a lot of early years that were conditioned by loss. And my grandmother, who you alluded to, I think, to an extent that I can't even fully articulate because I was seven when she passed away, was the scaffolding that upheld some semblance of normalcy. She kept a roof over our heads.

Starting point is 00:09:10 We actually lived in a home that she owned. My mother didn't work. And so my grandmother was the financial, the emotional, the spiritual, the structural, the structural support of our family. But it was a really tumultuous upbringing and one that I think caused a lot of trauma. You know, I didn't use the word abuse, really, until I started to write the book. It was very hard for me to use that word for some reason, for many reasons. But it was, it was deeply a lot of neglect and abuse took place, particularly after she passed away. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:47 You talk in the book about something called the ACE test, Adverse Childhood Experience Test. Yes. And it's enough to say for right now, you scored very high on it. Right. You know, you were a nine out of a ten, which means you were dealing with a lot. And coming out of that, you became very successful. And part of what I'd like to explore with you, and I think the book explores a lot, is it seems like you had to do two contradictory things throughout your whole life. One was you had to completely ignore where you came from, the messages that put in you, the messages that put in you, the message. your mom put in you. You had to be like, just, no, this is a different world that I'm going to

Starting point is 00:10:37 create and I'm going to just laser focus on it. And eventually, you also had to integrate, to use the word that you just used a minute ago, these old wounds had to be dealt with. And I just, as the book goes on, I was sort of noticing again and again how you, you, even once it became time to sort of start healing the trauma, there was still that first part of you that was the coping mechanism that was also still really valuable. And I think sometimes we get mired in, we can get mired in trauma work, right, where just everything is about that. Or we can be get mired in just shut it all out and work mode.

Starting point is 00:11:29 And I think you eventually found a place where you did both. Yes. Dissociation is sort of this extreme flight response. And as a child, it absolutely helped create that laser focus. It allowed me to sort of float above those circumstances and detach from them enough to be able to imagine something else, something different that I didn't get so lost and swept up in. that I couldn't function. And it kept me detached from myself as I got older and I could appreciate the ways in which I was so deeply disconnected from feeling all of those things.

Starting point is 00:12:13 And so it is. I'm constantly, even to this day, I think healing is very much a practice and I'm always interrogating the ways in which I'm being able to disconnect from something, have perspective, therefore I can have a different relationship with the emotions that are arising from it and it feels that it can function in a healthy way. However, it was definitely, I think, in the ways that triggers were disruptive,

Starting point is 00:12:45 the ways in which I could get sort of knocked off my star or off balance and be disoriented by things that were resonant with or rhymed with my childhood and I couldn't figure out why those things were happening and it was because oh well you haven't dealt with them you haven't allowed yourself to feel them you haven't you haven't created space and the conditions for that interrogation to happen and to do it knowing that you're safe and so it is this really interesting sort of thing I describe it in the book as as a warm blanket with a glass of wine by the fire because it there's comfort in that but and

Starting point is 00:13:26 And there's strength and power in that, but there's also, I think we all have to know our own limits and boundary, emotional boundaries for when we're hiding from ourselves, when we're so deeply disconnected from ourselves that we can't move forward. You know, one thing I've learned whether it was running a software team or now running the one you feed is that who you hire matters more than almost anything else. As small business owners, we don't ever really clock out. Our work follows us everywhere. That's why I like that when we clock out, LinkedIn jobs clocks in. LinkedIn makes it simple. Post your job for free. Share it with your network. manage qualified candidates all in one place. They'll even help you write the job description. And if you choose to promote your job, you'll get three times more qualified applicants. And the quality really matters. 72% of small and mid-sized businesses say LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. I've used LinkedIn jobs several times and I always find it

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Starting point is 00:16:45 seen just for you know a decade kind of talking to people about all this is that people can go a long way on that like fuel of getting away from where they were yes and the ambition that that can drive they can go a long way on that and then sometime 30s or 40s it starts to break down it's like that worked and now it no longer does you know and and I think about it like your parents I'm an addict I was a heroin addict it got sober at 24 there was a period of time where my use was sort of adaptive, meaning it solved all sorts of problems in me that I had not had the resources to solve. And then, right, it became extraordinarily maladaptive over time. But I was just struck by reading your book how the balance of that with you has been really

Starting point is 00:17:47 interesting. Thank you. We all find ways to quiet the noise. in our minds. I happened to be fueled for better and for worse by work, by achievement and more than anything by the awe that I received from others, the applause that came when I did something that people thought, damn, that's impressive. And it was enough to keep me going. That hedonic treadmill was driven both by the brains need, the dopamine hit that I would get every time I achieved a goal, but also whatever sort of oxytocin I could sort of generate two from what came from others when I did those things. And it's a dangerous cycle to be in. My mother's was crack, right? She tried to quiet that noise with crack. And she couldn't figure out how to how to quiet it

Starting point is 00:18:47 enough right and so then you tip over to yeah full-blown addiction where everything is is stunted but yes it is it's an adaptive avoidance i love that term it's such a great way to describe it and i think the work of our life is to figure out where the line is a hundred percent and i think that's the other thing that really struck me in your book was the nature of a healing journey because there's a whole lot of you sort of move forward you think you yeah okay i think i've got i think i've covered all this like you move on and then boom something else happens and you're like oh wait a second i clearly maybe have more work to do here and then you do that work and you're like oh things are right and it it kind of comes up and that can seem discouraging so tell me how for you you didn't get discouraged by that

Starting point is 00:19:44 Because what is really easy to do in that situation is to say, I did all this work. It must not have done any good because here I am again. How do you think about that? And how did you encourage yourself when you found those moments? I think I've come to think of them as moments of information, right? Those triggers, those setbacks, the things that challenge your sanity where you say, how do I feel like I'm reliving this all over again? How is it that I've changed the set?

Starting point is 00:20:18 My wardrobe is different. The cast of characters is different. And somehow this feels like the same script. I just read five years ago, 10 years ago. Oh, it's the story that I've told myself about those events. I'm recreating them. And I think choosing to see healing as a conscious intervention to disrupt despair, to disrupt the instinct for the brain to sort of predict where it's

Starting point is 00:20:46 going to go next, what the outcome is going to be, how this is supposed to end. But it's a conscious intervention. And I think trying to be kind first to myself and to say that if a child were learning how to do something, that they were going through the repetition, you know, you get your reps in enough where you can learn to tie your shoe and then you can remember not. to touch the hot stove. And, oh, this other thing is not the hot stove, but it's hot as well. I mean, all those things that seem really obvious when we're dealing with vulnerable beings and creatures are the same practices that we have to give to ourselves. And when you didn't have

Starting point is 00:21:29 that growing up, in particular, I think being so willing to find and create some kind of space for that compassion and to know that it's okay that you can survive those feelings i think i always knew that i could survive things i had proven that to myself i was highly confident in my ability to navigate difficult things but i think rather than shiting myself i could say what is this here to teach me what am i supposed to be getting from this moment why does this rhyme with this other thing, there's clearly something I've not looked at. And typically when that happens and when it's really earth-shattering, it's because you've spent a long time avoiding it and not looking at it and sort of telling yourself, the story that I told myself was, I was healed

Starting point is 00:22:22 and I had spent a decade in talk therapy and everything was great. And then I see this photo of the accident that took my grandmother's life and I lose it. And I'm set back in 30 years. oh there's a lot I haven't been doing and I could only in that in that instance in particular I could I could very clearly just say ooh there's something that needs to be held here I have not made a home for this grief yeah and you've worked closely with therapists I think they can help us center that a couple years ago I had a couple of things happen in my life that re-triggered for me I'm careful with words because I don't necessarily want to say re-triggered because I, you know, I think maybe if I had trauma, it was more of a complex kind of trauma. And anyway, it brought a whole bunch of stuff back that I'd not felt in a long time. And I was a little freaked out and I was a little discouraged because I thought, but I've done all this work. I've done all of this work.

Starting point is 00:23:27 And my therapist put it in a way that I thought was really helpful. He said, what your work has done is it has allowed you to be. able to deal with that stuff in more and more and more and more situations. That's right. And put under sufficient stress, that will come back. It's there. It's not going away, right? You're not going to just unearth it and throw it out.

Starting point is 00:23:51 It's there. And to your point about how there's an integration, his point was it just doesn't get triggered for you 98% of the time now. And that's a huge accomplishment. and there are going to be times and you know this was one of those times and the way it was it was it was just custom built to do it right it just was the right exact button and but that really helped me think about what the work of healing often is and i think you may have had i might be mixing this up but the idea that i get from your work and i don't know if you said it explicitly

Starting point is 00:24:29 is we become bigger and bigger around the thing that's the problem. It's not that it's gone. It's not that we erase it. You were talking to Elena Brower and talked about like footsteps in cement, right? It's not that that engraving in the cement is going to go away. It's just that there's so much more space around it. That's right. Gosh, you said so much, right?

Starting point is 00:24:51 Judith Herman talks about healing and trauma in that way that it's not an exorcism. you don't get to just exercise it and it's gone you do have those footprints you do carry them with you and and yes i love that you referenced my conversation with elana we were talking about her partner who had very similar childhood experiences to mine a parent who struggled with craft addiction he had grown up in new york city but this idea that a tree that grows next to a fence doesn't stop growing it grows differently. It grows around the fence and it finds its way around it. And that, it's such a beautiful metaphor for how if we can imagine our lives working in that way, we can do that. You know, Eric, I do soul cycle. And I'm sure some of your listeners will be familiar with this

Starting point is 00:25:45 idea, but there's a part in the ride where you're holding weights and, well, you pick up weights and you're doing weights like a song worth of lifting, essentially, right, a couple minutes. And, you know, they'll inevitably have you hold the weights out away from your body. Just hold it. Maybe you pulse, but you just hold. You're like, God, these three pound weights are really, really heavy. I'm now feeling it at my shoulders and my elbows and even maybe in my lower back a little bit. And the moment that you get to pull it closer, the moment that you get to release and come back and bring those weights in, you're like, gosh, I can hold them differently now.

Starting point is 00:26:21 Totally. Yeah. that's a great example. I can move differently with them now, right? That's what it looks like. And so the triggers change. They're not the same as the ones before. And the stimuli will change. And hopefully healing is that your relationship with what comes up starts to change. Not that it goes away. A friend of mine has been talking for months about wanting to start therapy, but kept saying the same thing. It's just too complicated. One night, I sat down with him, pulled up grow therapy, and within minutes we had him matched with an in-person therapist and an appointment on the calendar.

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Starting point is 00:28:38 Copyright McDonald's. Hey friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you've been listening to. What's one thing that really landed, and what's one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection? That's exactly why I started Good Wolf Reminders, short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5,000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one you feed.net slash SMS and sign up. It's free, no spam, and easy to opt out of any time.

Starting point is 00:29:22 Again, that's one you feed. dot net slash SMS. Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. There's one other metaphor that I find helpful with this, which is the idea of a spiral staircase. And if you think of a spiral staircase, imagine there's like pictures hanging on the wall. You keep coming around and seeing that picture again. The picture doesn't go away.

Starting point is 00:29:46 But each time you're seeing it from a slightly higher level. And I often think that's how this process works too. Your mom just keeps reappearing, reappearing, reappearing, reappearing, right? It's not that that's not going to happen. But when she does, you are at a different place than you were before. You know, you're higher up that spiral so you are able to engage with her. and I don't even mean with her personally. I mean the idea of her differently.

Starting point is 00:30:17 Yes. You're rinsing the sponge, as my very first therapist said, right? Sure that analogy. Yeah, I remember just questioning, am I always going to feel like this? Is it always going to be like this? Is it always going to be this hard? Well, I always be doing this work. And she said, think of it like rinsing a sponge.

Starting point is 00:30:37 When you wash the dishes or you clean something, soapy and you put it under water and you rinse some of that soap out and gosh okay you think it's rinsed and then you squeeze it again you wet it again and the soap comes back you sort of think about healing as rinsing the sponge it's a slow release over time and there will be moments where you think you've got it and don't be alarmed something will be there remnants will be there and so yeah I think that whether it's the different elevation the new elevation on the staircase the bringing of the weights back into you to hold them differently. The rinsing of the sponge, right? These are all metaphors for how it feels and looks and to not be surprised, but it really creates a different

Starting point is 00:31:23 strength, really, that we're talking about that you can have for how to hold it, how to live with it, and to not let it completely disorient you. Yeah. And I think the other piece that's important in that is not to focus on like that you've got to get to the end of some process before it starts to yield benefit right like even though for me I continue to as a I think all humans are doing this right we're always trying to sort life out right because as soon as we get one thing sorted something else happens right you know it's just life but there's this idea that we're going to get somewhere and then suddenly it's all going to be fine and and I think that that is an illusion. But I also think if we look at it healing that way, we're not cognizant of the

Starting point is 00:32:12 very real benefits that are occurring as we go. Now, sometimes in those moments, as you're working on it, it doesn't feel like a benefit. But you don't have to get to the end of some long journey before life starts to improve. I don't think there is an end. Yeah. I really don't. No. And I think that's why I've always tried to use the word integration. I know Elise Loonen, who's been a guest on your show, I'm a huge fan of hers, and she talks about wholeness. It's the same idea. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:41 It's all the same idea. It's like, can I be whole with all of the holes that have been left in me? Can I find a way to feel complete? So much of this book I've described as a reassembly of all of these selves that I had sort of shed along this journey of survival. of survival, feeling like this part of me was too innocent to move forward in the journey. This part of me doesn't belong here because her narrative doesn't fit the environment that I'm in, right? All of these selves that I had to let go of. And to see this as a knitting together,

Starting point is 00:33:17 a reassembly, a re-dash membrane, right, of all of these parts of myself and saying, they all have a room somewhere in the house that is me. They don't have the same amount of space, but they all live here. And that's okay. That's okay. They all belong here. Yep. You share in the book about how you did 10 years of talk therapy and then still had a place where you realized that you needed to go sort of deeper into the experience, the felt sense, the emotion. And I think that mirrors a lot of people's journeys. For me, I don't feel like all that cognitive work was like misplaced and that I you know what I really need to do is to get to this other work it feels to me like that had to happen yes for me to get to that place say say a little

Starting point is 00:34:11 bit more about what I'm describing how it showed up in your life and how you think about it well I integrate by speaking so it gave me a place to do that I think to some degree I integrate when I say that I mean ideas I can start to piece things together in a way that I say oh that makes sense to me now. I've heard myself articulate in a way that once it was out of my mind and sort of it got some air, it could land in a way that I could make sense of it in a different way, right? And to your point, we are seekers and we are meaning makers and there will always be things that will push us to do that kind of work. And talk therapy allowed me to do that. I think, first of all, it allowed me to just surface everything that I'd swallowed and pretend it didn't

Starting point is 00:34:54 exist. And so I went into therapy at 26 thinking that I was troubleshooting a very specific acute problem of how do I tell my classmates when I graduate from business school that no one in my family will be there. That was my impetus for going to therapy. It wasn't, oh, hi, I'm 26 years old. I've spent my entire life traumatized by my drug-addicted, abusive, of neglectful parents and I need help parsing that because, you know, I'm an MBA student at NYU and I'm about to go launch this beauty career. Not at all. So when I went into therapy, it was with that one intention and what that experience allowed me to do for the very first time in my life was say it out loud and then start to say, oh gosh, that did happen. And, you know, for better

Starting point is 00:35:48 and for worse, the more you remember, the more you remember. And so I'd sort of flip the cap off of all of these things that came flooding. Now, what was great about that was that I started to try to create containers for it. What was not great about it was that I did not have modalities that allowed me to deal with the feelings when they emerged. So I could name things and I could label things and I could go, ah, that was this. Oh, this thing happened. And then it sort of just that was where it ended. That's where the work sort of ended. And I was doing that week over week for basically 10 years. Not with the same therapist and a little bit off and on, but largely for that period of time. It was important. And it was, I think, step one. And I think

Starting point is 00:36:37 it laid the foundation for a kind of resilience that would allow me to, when I see, saw that image of grandma's car accident in the article that wrote about, it was tragic and it was brutal. And so it made the news. And so in finding that and reading it and remembering that and being carried back to that time when I was seven years old, I did have some support in the work that I had done in top therapy. Even though I felt ill-equipped in other ways, I wasn't, my psyche could only allow me to go there because of the work that I had done. Yep. And so then what did the work moving from a more intellectual understanding of what happened

Starting point is 00:37:28 to you, being able to put it into different cognitive frames, all these things that were really helpful, what then prompted you to try different approaches and what did you do then? First, it was learning about neuroplasticity. It was just the term that kind of was this light bulb moment, this idea that our brains are not fixed, that we are not just who we are, that you sort of get baked and you arrive, and that's it, that we will continue to grow and change and form new neural connections with experience and information and that our brains could adapt to accommodate a new paradigm. And I thought, ah, that explains a lot, but also what does that mean for what healing might actually then look like in my life? I learned about it in the context of Norman Deidre's work amongst others, but he was really kind of the person who, through a podcast interview, introduced me to that term in 2017 and was sharing it in talking about people who had experienced Parkinson's and debilitating neurodegenerative. diseases. And I thought, well, if they can do that, what does that look like for other kinds of emotional trauma? And then it was during that time that somatic healing in many forms began to

Starting point is 00:38:55 kind of fill in my understanding of what that might mean, that it wasn't just talking about it, that you had to actually do something with it. And for some people, that was in how they could physically get it out of their bodies through movement. And that could be dancing. And that could be dance. It could be exercise. It could be jumping and shaking and tapping. And, you know, there are lots of ways that we do that. But that was really kind of what cracked it open for me and starting to more actively research ways in which I might do that for myself. And so that has looked like, you name it in the ways that I've tried to test that. It's looked like EMDR therapy and actually trying to resurrect those.

Starting point is 00:39:40 memories and emotions tied to those memories, the stories that I created, related to certain events in my life. But it has also been extremely physical in nature. Breath work is a really, really big one for me. I meditate. I find all the ways to feel it in my body to recognize. And a lot of it, honestly, Eric, was the pattern spotting of, oh, when I was really nauseous, this was happening when I was feeling like this so a lot of it too was really kind of going back and figuring out when my body was telling me something I just wasn't paying attention to it and thinking about how it was moving through me physically and what I might do to respond to that and so for me it always starts in my in my gut in my tummy and so I tend to get very nauseous and then sometimes

Starting point is 00:40:33 very sick and so just that awareness that it was not just my mind that needed to do some work, that I need to figure out how it was showing up physically in my self. We were talking about how we cope. And one of the things that you used as a real tool early on is you said something to the effect of a relentless pursuit of control. to what extent have you been able to lessen control and how do you tell useful control from not useful right you've been very successful in a lot of different ways and that's not a bad thing right and and control is part of a control of yourself and i don't want to say control of others because that sounds bad but like guidance like there is a place where thinking about what's going to happen

Starting point is 00:41:28 and trying to shape the way it happens is a back to our maladaptive and adaptive strategies. This seems to have been one of your big ones. So I'm curious, how have you lessened and how do you tell when you are sort of in, all right, I'm in a maladaptive control mode versus I'm just doing what kind of what needs to get done here and move this thing forward? Sure. It looks like hypervigilance for me. when I feel like I have to be hypervigilant around the environment or what I say or how something is presented or that I am over architecting and solving for circumstances that, first of all, aren't my business, that I don't need to be managing or that I actually have no real influence over, that's when I know that it is not serving me well. And when my thoughts are consumed with trying to manufacture something that is just either, I don't want to say not there, but that doesn't need that level of attention from me.

Starting point is 00:42:36 That is not my work to do. And I find myself often actually one of the questions that I sort of ask of myself and I suppose to the universe to God is, is this mine to do? And that shows up for me that question a lot, whether it's an idea that I'm noodling out, or in real time, some problem that needs to get solved. And I'm like, it's mine to do. And it allows me to just take a minute and say, okay, who's showing up in this moment? Because it could be this protective part of yourself that feels like if you have all the knowledge that you can gather, that information is control, right?

Starting point is 00:43:15 That if you know everything, then you can forward off whatever threat you're trying to anticipate or if it's just am I trying to create a set of conditions that I will never fully be able to. I'm not singularly responsible for these conditions. I think that's typically how it shows up for me. And so that awareness is step one for sure. I think that's the step one for any kind of change, any kind of evolution. I think the second thing typically is that question a business mind to do. And what do I do with what comes up for me in that moment, right? Sometimes it's the reframe. You're safe. You're fine. There's nothing for you to do. Be there. Be present. Lots of things can inspire what I call a psychic surrender, right? Which is just the like,

Starting point is 00:44:07 take your hands off the steering wheel because this is not mine. And I say that without any sort of religious context, but this deep faith and knowing that I'm held and that I have the tools that I need to actually handle something if it comes up, but this isn't something to manage right now and knowing the difference. But I think that interrogation is slowing down and not operating from this place that feels, you know, we like to call it instinct. And I think, I think even about success in the same way, but we want to call it, oh gosh, well, I'm just driven. I'm ambitious. You're like, is that ambition or anxiety? Yeah, that's my instinct. Well, sure, is that your instinct and is that coming from an intuitive place or is that coming from fear? And I think

Starting point is 00:44:53 having the courage to actually ask yourself that question, determine what the answer is and then say, okay, I need to stop here. This is a moment to pause. Yeah, I want to come back to intuition and fear for a second. But I want to stay with this a little bit longer. You and I, before we started, were talking about book covers. And I was sharing, you know, I've had quite a journey with my publisher on getting to the book cover that we want and I was talking about how wonderful your book cover was and it sounds like we had a very similar sort of journey like you you exercised a certain amount of control or will to get the book cover right and what I always think is interesting is in something like that how do we know when like we've done what's the right thing

Starting point is 00:45:45 to do for the situation or when have I tipped over. And for me, that's kind of how I think about it. Like, book covers are important, right? I put all this time into writing a book covers one of the most important parts of it. I want it to be right. Yes. And there's a place at which point I need to set it down and put it back into a bigger global context. And I'm curious how, you know, for those things where you kind of have to do it to a certain

Starting point is 00:46:11 degree, I think it's easier when we're like, that's just not mine at all. Yes. It's harder when it is ours. We are responsible, but we don't want to become obsessed. Yes. That's such a great example. And thank you for saying that. I'll thank you on air as well because I do love the cover and how it turned out.

Starting point is 00:46:33 And I don't feel like I needed to control that situation so much as I was demonstrating my own agency in that part of the process. And having the vision that I had for the book, this is a very deeply personal story that I'm sharing and having the clarity to bring forward how my story would exist in the title, in the cover, and in the text. Those things that were all mine to do, and they were things that to some degree were co-creative. Yeah. I think where I try to hold the line is when I felt fully out of alignment in trying to get to a good place. So as long as I was in a good place, even if I meant another round, another round, another round, right? But when I found myself like losing my shit where I was like, oh my God, I'm going to lose it, it's like, okay, Daria, what is happening right now?

Starting point is 00:47:39 is it that you're not feeling cared for in this moment? Is that you're not feeling understood? Is it that you're feeling somehow neglect? What wound is being scratched here? And I could be very clear. And usually quickly, I could say, this is scratching something. And I know what's coming up in this moment.

Starting point is 00:47:59 And also, I think I could rely on my professional experience as a career marketer. I have great taste. I have a great eye. I know the vision. And I knew that we had a shared vision, too. So I could also come back to the good intentions that we all had and to say, I know I'm pushing for something that right now we're not all aligned with.

Starting point is 00:48:22 We've got to keep going, though. We can do better. I know that we can. And then knowing, again, when to take your foot off the gas and when you're not going to fight, you know, fight the fight. But I think I did have that try to hold the space for those two things. to be true to coexist and also to realize when I was being completely sort of taken out of my own kind of alignment where I felt so upset by how difficult it was. And I was like, okay, this is good

Starting point is 00:48:51 information. What is this telling me? And then in some cases, I was like, okay, got it. I've captured what it's telling me. I'm still going to push because it means that much. And I'm not going to be told that it doesn't matter as much to me as it does. Right. And I think to me, I just, I see that as agency more than anything. And sometimes it's okay to really, really fucking care. Excuse my language, but like sometimes things really matter. And I think we have to allow ourselves to feel and know and recognize and name those moments to let that desire be a teacher.

Starting point is 00:49:28 Now, how I handled it all the time, I think that's a different, yeah, that's a different conversation. I think I handled it largely pretty well. But, you know, I had moments where I was like screaming into the void when I was alone. One of the things that we're not capturing as we go through this very well is how beautifully written the book is. And I want to give listeners just a small flavor of like a paragraph that jumped out to me, although there are so many of them. I mean, it is so beautifully rendered. But if you would read the bottom of page 176 for us, because I think it kind of sums up a lot of what we've been talking about up to this point. Thank you, yes. Integration then means knitting together these detailed observations and broad

Starting point is 00:50:15 understandings into a coherent sense of self. It is about acknowledging the contradictions, holding the complexities, and finding clarity in the confusion. It is a series of ongoing negotiations between the past and the present, the self and the other, the details and the bigger picture. It is delicate work, one that requires patience and the the courage to face the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, and the courage to do the same with ourselves. That's a beautiful section. Is there anything you would like to add to that, or is it just stand alone?

Starting point is 00:50:49 Thank you. I think it stands alone because of what we've been talking about. Yeah. And it's that simply stated and that hard to do at the same time. So where I would like for us to wrap up here is to have you tell us the story. story that ends the book about the hydrangees. And I may ask you to read something else from that also, but set us up. Yes. Well, I bought a house from here now, a little house in East Hampton, out in the woods, and I'd have this fantasy of planting hydrangeer bushes in the front of my

Starting point is 00:51:25 house. I found all these pictures, and I have a little cedar shingle, gray cedar shingle house, and so I could imagine these big, blooming white hydrangeers in the front of the house under the windows under the two front windows. And so I finally got into a place where I was ready to do that kind of work. And I bring in my landscaper and we make the plan. And even in talking about the kind of hydrangeas I wanted, I said, well, I want, yeah, I want light hydrangeous. And he says, well, you know, he calls me misdaria. He says, misdaria, the soil is really what determines the color, right? You have to actually have the right conditions for it to turn out that way. There are some that are I read that way. Yes, the pH in the soil helps dictate the color. So funny story, which I'll get to, but mine have actually changed color as the season has gone on. But so I say, okay, interesting. Well, this is my aspiration. And so maybe it's this breed and this variety, this variety. So we plant them. And at the time I was in Los Angeles. And so he had done the work and I come back maybe a month later. And they had been ravaged.

Starting point is 00:52:35 like the leaves were chewed. It looked like lace and the deer had gotten to them. They had started to bloom and they were apparently quite lovely. I didn't get to see them because they had been ravaged by deer and I'm like, what is happening? So I call him, he comes over and we try to figure out what to do next and I was so beside myself. Forget the expense. It was like the emotional investment that I had made in them. And so I said, well, can we just cover them with burlap for now? I don't know what to do with them. I don't know what else we can do to save them. them and leaving them like this, they'll only continue to be eaten. So we covered them in burlap and a whole year goes by before I decide to relocate them, to repot them, to change their

Starting point is 00:53:17 environment. So one by one, and I had a dozen of them, six on either side. I dig them up myself, really gently and try to protect the roots. And I repotted each of them in planters on my deck, which is fenced in. And as you can imagine, when I first replant, then they looked kind of quite sad, actually. But as the season goes on and months go by, and then eventually, especially the next summer, they began to bloom.

Starting point is 00:53:47 And they were stunning and beautiful. And they were just sprigs when I'd replanted them. So I was terrified that nothing would happen. And they began to bloom, these big green leafy leaves and flowers. And it was such a beautiful, articulation of the pain that we go through sometimes in certain environments and the ways in which if we can just reframe and reimagine, get creative. And sometimes it takes time to figure out

Starting point is 00:54:15 what that looks like, but we can move to a new space and find flourishing again. And that's exactly what happened. And I can actually see them right now. And what's really funny, I'll add is that they started this season white and now they're bright pink. Really? That's so interesting. Yes, and I'm deeply invested in what happened over the course of the summer because I've never seen them like this. And so the soil clearly has something has found its way in there and has changed the color. But it's such a sometimes obvious but beautiful, I think, metaphor for how this all works. We're not unlike them in many ways. As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself,

Starting point is 00:55:02 how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join Goodwolf Reminders' text list. It's a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5,000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at one you feed.net slash SMS. No noise, no spam. Just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf.

Starting point is 00:55:29 I'm going to say something. I'm going to ask you to read something to wrap up. And I just can't go without saying it. There's a book I've been reading called The Light Eaters. And it's all about plant intelligence, for lack of a better word. Although a lot of people in the plant world tread carefully around that term. It will blow your mind. All these things that plants can do.

Starting point is 00:55:51 It really is like, what? It shows just how embodied into nature is this incredible intelligence, resilience, change, evolution, all of these things. Yes. So I would love you to read the last two paragraphs of the book, thinking of that idea and of those hydrangees in mind. They stood there, lush and quiet, their fullness of far cry from the brittle beginnings of the year. before and there amid the green the first white blooms unfurled delicate and resilient proof that life could return even after what felt like a devastating ending we carry that same power in us to rise again to transform to flourish against all odds to stretch toward the light even after being

Starting point is 00:56:46 buried we can still grow still we become and in those quiet moments when new life finally breaks through, we remember that we were always meant to be. That's so lovely. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. This has been wonderful. The pleasure has been mine. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. and that's you.

Starting point is 00:57:25 Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community.

Starting point is 00:57:41 The course of true love never did run smooth. Shakespeare wrote those words hundreds of years ago and they still ring true today. Finding love and keeping it is hard. I'm Shankar Vedantam. host of Hidden Brain. Join me for Love 2.0, a new series featuring ideas designed to make your relationship the stuff of great literature. Or just help it run a little more smoothly. That's Love 2.0 on Hidden Brain, wherever you get your podcasts.

The One You Feed - The Nonlinear Path to Healing: Finding Wholeness After Trauma with Daria Burke

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