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This week Robin Stern, psychoanalyst, and author of “The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life,” talks about gaslight effect. What to watch for in a relationship or perhaps with a manager, coworker or doctor and how to succesfully navigate the feelings of invalidation that accompany that behavior.
This episode with Robin Stern was originally broadcast July 14th 2024
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Few people offer greater insight, sensitivity, and expertise on human relationships and sexuality than Esther Perel.
Born and raised in Belgium, Perel’s studies took her from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to the United States where she built a career in couples and family therapy. Today, she is internationally acclaimed for her profound insights into eroticism and intimacy. She’s an author and the host of the popular podcast “Where Should We Begin?”
The exploration of human sexual desire is as complex as it sounds. Our ideas of intimacy are varied and sex today can be measurable and perfunctory. “[It’s] often seen as an act, something you do,” says Perel. “How often do you do it? How many? How hard, how long? How frequent?”
But desire and the erotic is a quality of aliveness and vitality, distinct from sexuality. “You don't measure eroticism,” Perel continues. “It's a quality of experience, but you know when you feel it.”
Eroticism is: “Sexuality transformed by the human imagination. It's infinite. It's surrounded by ritual, by celebration, and it's often transgressive. It's often lured by the forbidden. A lot of it is actually in our head and between our ears… not necessarily between our legs.”
Perel tells us that the key ingredients are “curiosity, playfulness, mystery, imagination” … “the forbidden elicits curiosity, and the curiosity activates the imagination.”
Perel argues that we need to do more than just recognize and celebrate this as a wonderful part of who we are. “[Our] core emotional needs are expressed in the coded language of sexuality. Sex is never just something you do. Sex is a place you go.”
Esther Perel’s latest project, which she calls her “Desire Bundle,” features two online courses: Bringing Desire Back and Playing with Desire. They launch later this September.
Esther Perel’s An Evening With Esther Perel: The Future of Relationships, Love & Desire is currently on tour. See her live at the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles on September 10th. More info here.
Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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*This episode originally aired on January 28, 2023.
Jonathan Bastian talks with Harvard Medical School Professor of Psychiatry Robert Waldinger about his latest book, “The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.” Waldinger is also director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the home of the world’s longest-running studies on happiness. The project has followed 724 men — ranging from “Harvard sophomores to inner-city Boston boys” — and their subsequent spouses and families, since 1938, and now encompasses three generations of people.Waldinger says that although there is no blood test for happiness, researchers are able to examine and evaluate happiness from various angles.
“We ask people, ‘Are you happy? How happy are you?’ We also ask other people, their partners, their kids and follow their work lives,” he explains, adding that psychologist Sonya Lubomirski calculated that “about 50% of our happiness is determined by inborn factors, about 10% is determined by what our life circumstances are right now, and the remaining 40% is under our control.”
What was the surprise discovery from the study? While it’s important to look after your health, eat right, and exercise, the most significant impact on happiness, Walindger says, was that “the quality of our relationships predicts who's gonna be happy and healthy as they get older … one of the most important things we need is a person who we know will be there for us in times of stress.”
Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
Later, Jonathan Bastian speaks with Cassie Holmes, author of “Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most,” about maintaining a happy lifestyle. Time, Holmes says, isn’t just the problem — it’s the solution.
“Time is so important, because how we spend the hours of our days sum up to the years of our lives,” she explains. “And as we're looking to feel happier in our days and about our lives, it's crucial to understand how we invest this resource of time and to make the most of the time that we have.”
Holmes offers some tools and tips on being happier and how to harness time towards doing so. She encourages people to “actually track their own time, write down what they are doing and rate coming out of that activity, on a 10 point scale, how they feel,” she says. “That will allow you to pick up on whether those ways of connecting and socializing are truly satisfying and truly fulfilling.”
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*This episode originally aired on October 25, 2023.
This week, economist and author of “Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us,” Russ Roberts offers a different perspective and approach to tackling some of life’s biggest challenges and decisions. -
According to Chaplain Devin Sean Moss, death “informs how we live.” The idea of impermanence —the notion that everything is in a constant state of flux— and a “meditation on finitude,” Moss suggests, is a “cheat code of sorts to making deliberate and intentional decisions and forces the hand of what are my values…to know what my core is about.”
For most people, the subject and contemplation of death and dying is hardly a source of inpiration. We fill our lives with work, travel, and spending time with friends and family. These are life affirming activities to keep our minds from wandering too far down to our inevitable end.
For Devin Moss, confronting death has been both equally a sobering and inspiring journey. As a Humanist Chaplain, Devin Moss forged a year-long bond with Phillip Hancock who was executed by the state of Oklahoma for a double murder. Moss’s experience was chronicled by the New York Times and the subject of an earlier Life Examined.
More: Facing death without God: Spiritual care in the final hours of a death row inmate
Today, Moss writes and hosts the podcast The Adventures of Memento Mori in which he explores the science, mysticism, culture, and mystery of death. Moss regularly grapples with his own mortality and says its a mistake for our culture to shy away from the topic - “the inability to talk about it on a societal level has very harmful byproducts.” Moss suggests that the message society perpetuates is that there is a misunderstanding of what it means to be finite, and that “everything is limitless.”
And when it comes to death itself, Moss urges listeners not to be deterred by fear or not knowing what to do or say. “Just be okay with the unknown and do all that you can do to make it about the other person, to heck with being good at it or knowing what you're doing.” For Moss, it’ss “the ability, not what I can learn from this person as they pass, but more like, how can I ensure that their passing is maintained as a sacred act within a sacred space.”
Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
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This week James Danckert, psychology professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and co-author of “Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom,” provides some tips for parents to deal with kids who say they are bored. As boredom is a natural occurrence, Danckert advises parents not to over schedule their kids or find things to keep them busy. Instead, whenever they can, parents should stand back more and allow their kids to take more agency in how to navigate being bored.
This segment with James Danckert is from an upcoming episode of Life Examined.
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Finding an ideal partner can be an elusive quest. Over the past three decades, attitudes on relationship roles and dynamics have shifted. Thanks to online dating, people of all ages have the opportunity to cast a wider net, expanding their horizons and redefining their expectations.
The journey doesn't stop at finding a partner; maintaining a healthy and fulfilling relationship is the ultimate goal. As challenges arise, seeking support from a therapist before issues become deeply rooted can prove to be one of the most effective ways to foster a lasting connection.
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When it comes to relationships, a friendship can hold a far more nuanced and significant place in our hearts, than perhaps we fully appreciate.
The Platonic relationship, an ideal talked about by the ancient Greek Philosopher Plato, recognizes the existence of a closeness of mind and soul between two people, absent of any physical attraction. This kind of affection and tenderness is captured in letters and stories throughout history — friendships that have been as deep and intimate, meaningful, and powerful as any romantic relationship, and, says author Raina Cohen, “friendships could be the thing that makes life feel full and complete.”
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This week, Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and co-author of “The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness,” talks about the merits of meditation. As a Zen practitioner Waldinger says meditation has helped him stay present, connect with the richness of life and worry less about the things that really don’t matter.
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In today’s job market, “good communication skills” is often listed as a top requirement. This essential ability not only helps you connect and collaborate with others but also effectively express your needs within the workplace. Strong communicators can unite us, foster positivity, and create a sense of shared potential. Moreover, today’s technology has made communication more accessible and rapid than ever before.
Despite all the advances in tech, true connection remains elusive and we often fail to make meaningful connections with the people in our live who matter. The art of conversation is complex but science can offer insights into why these connections are so challenging to achieve.
According to Charles Duhigg, author of Supercommunicators; How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, “our ability to communicate with each other is the thing that has set our species apart and made us so successful compared to other species.”
When Charles noticed challenges in his own communication, he turned to science for answers. Advances in neuroimaging have allowed neuroscientists and psychologists to uncover that “every discussion is made up of multiple different kinds of conversations,” and they tend to fall into three buckets. “Practical conversations where we're talking about solving problems, emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling,” and “social conversations, about how we interact with each other and interact with society.”
“Super communicators,” Duhigg says, have the ability to “ listen for what kind of conversation is happening” and are able to “match back.” The science behind this, as Duhigg explains it, is called "neural entrainment"— the synchronization of neural activity that is both fundamental to and the goal of communication. The reason super communicators can make a conversation feel effortless, leaving you feeling positive is because “you've achieved that neural synchronization. Your brain has evolved to give you a reward sensation associated with that. Connection is felt deep within the body and “our brains have evolved to encourage this kind of communication, to encourage this kind of bonding…since it's been so helpful to survival.”
Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
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This week, Kemi Nekvapil, leadership coach and author of “Power: A Woman’s Guide to Living and Leaving without Apology” shares a couple of power practices that can help women and especially women of color feel more empowered and reconnect with who they are. When it comes to standing in one's own power, Nekvapil says, practice, role play and experimentation are essential tools in helping to help change existing behavior patterns.
This episode of Life Examined with Kemi Nekvapil was originally broadcast October 15th, 2023 -
There may be no greater pain in life than that of losing a child; the gaping hole felt when a young life is abruptly cut short, leaving parents to deal with a void that can be difficult to comprehend, and a journey to make sense of the heartache that follows.
For poet Rosemerry Wahtula Trommer, the pain is palpable and the grief — the kind of grief only a mother can know — remains unwavering . Tragically, her son Finn took his own life just before reaching his 17th birthday. In the wake of this unimaginable tragedy, Trommer found herself irrevocably changed; it was through the power of words and poetry that she began to find solace amid her sorrow.
Despite the lasting grief in her heart, Trommer is also profoundly grateful to her son. “He my teacher. How much that boy taught me all the things I didn't want to know. I never wanted to learn that things couldn't be fixed. I never wanted to learn that I couldn't be perfect, that I couldn't make the world the way I wanted it. And he taught me again and again and again, how to say yes to the world as it is.”
Reflecting on how she now sees the world, Trommer is struck by “the sweetness and the bitterness, the joy and the grief, the love and the loss and how, as humans, this is what we're asked to meet over and over and over.”
Grief, Trommer says, demonstrates a powerful paradox. It’s central to who we are as humans. It’s “ever mysterious and ever changing and so deeply sorrowful and so profoundly loving,” at the same time.
“Maybe this is the thing that's most exciting for me right now – is this sense of not believing anymore that we're supposed to be happy. That in fact, some of the most profound, wonderful life-affirming, moments have been so difficult.”
“Meeting Your Death”
Rosemerry Wahtola TrommerBecause there are no clear instructions,
I follow what rises up in me to do.
I fall deeper into love with you.
I look at old pictures.
I don’t look at old pictures.
I talk about you. I say nothing.
I walk. I sit. I lie in the grass
and let the earth hold me.
I lie on the sidewalk, dissolve
into sky. I cry. I don’t cry.
I ask the world to help me stay open.
I ask again, please, let me feel it all.
I fall deeper in love with the people
still living. I fall deeper in love
with the world that is left—
this world with its spring
and its war and its mornings,
this world with its fruits
that ripen and rot and reseed,
this world that insists
we keep our eyes wide,
this world that opens
when our eyes are closed.
Because there are no clear instructions,
I learn to turn toward the love that is here,
though sometimes what is here is what’s not.
There are infinite ways to do this right.
That is the only way.Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
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This week, Alain de Botton, philosopher, author and founder of The School of Life talks about why today’s social and cultural environment is contaminating our peace of mind. De Botton suggests that in order to switch off and achieve some kind of balance in our lives, we need to become better editors and curators of what we are exposed to and shut out as much external negativity and noise as we can.
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Sarah Hill, professor of social psychology at Texas Christian University and author of This is your brain on birth control: The surprising science of sex, women, hormones and the law of unintended consequences, shares her journey into exploring the effects of oral contraception on mental health. “I actually spent my early career studying the way our sex hormones can affect psychological states and motivation…and the desire to attract romantic partners.” It wasn’t until Hill went off oral contraception herself that she began to connect the dots. “I started to feel so differently, that I started to really wonder what we did not know and about the way the pill affects the brain and the way that women experience the world.”
Hill recounts her personal experience and the research she conducted on the Pill’s effects, highlighting a range of impact on physical and mental wellbeing. Everything from “having less energy” to “being at a greater risk for depression and anxiety,” and how “it can reduce sexual desire and sexual functioning.”
Emily Dossett, a clinical associate professor of Psychiatry & the Behavioral Sciences at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, addresses another often-overlooked aspect of women’s health: the prevalence of mental health disorders before, during, and after pregnancy. Dossett underscores that “pregnancy is a time of tremendous and rapid physiological change,” and that “if a woman is susceptible, really to anything; diabetes, hypertension, cardiac disorders,” that pregnancies with those disorders “are more likely to come to the forefront or even emerge for the first time. The same is true for mental illness.”
Dossetts points out that society tends to attach immense joy to pregnancy and the celebration of pregnancy that women feel ashamed, even stigmatized, if they mention or complain about how they feel. “We're just realizing how common some of these challenges are in terms of mental health because we're just now at a point where we're allowing women to actually speak up about it.” Roughly “one out of every four to five women” suffer from some kind of mental disorder, Dossett says, with depression and anxiety being most common.
Because there has been little research on women’s mental health and pregnancy, Dossestt explains that there’s a general “lack of understanding and comprehension and naming of these disorders in the mental health world.” And when it comes to medication; “ the FDA, which approves all drugs, does not permit pregnant or lactating people to be included in drug trials.”
So, what options are available for women who require medication and aspire to conceive? “The question is not really whether or not these medications are safe but it's more of a risk, risk analysis for each individual person,” Dossett says.
“I firmly believe everyone has the right to have a child. Everyone has the right to not have a child and everyone has the right to raise a child in a safe and healthy environment. Those are the tenets of what we call reproductive justice. And I believe they apply to people with mental illness just like anyone else.”
Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
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This week, Terry Real, renowned couples therapist and author “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship” reflects on the keys to building a successful long term relationship. In order to change inherited behaviors and dysfunction, Real cites his own struggle with family trauma and offers hope that with courage, discipline and hardwork change is indeed possible.
This episode of Life Examined with Terry Real was originally broadcast June 23rd, 2024
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If you’ve ever been accused of ‘gaslighting' someone, you might find yourself unsure about what exactly you're being accused of. The term is the latest amongst a growing collection of popular psychological buzzwords used to describe manipulative or calculating behavior, but it's often misused and misunderstood.
The term originated from the 1940s black-and-white film Gaslight where a husband manipulates his wife into thinking she’s crazy by subtly adjusting the intensity of their home's gas lights when she’s alone in the house. The husband denies there’s anything wrong with the lights, leaving his wife distraught, confused, and questioning her own memory and sanity.
In her book The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life “The Gaslight Effect,” psychoanalyst Robin Stern explains why this word has gained so much prominence in both personal and professional relationships, particularly among women. “Seeing many women come into my office who were otherwise in their lives the presidents of their company, professional practice, or very successful –good decision makers who felt comfortable in groups, socialized quite a bit, suddenly, in their romantic relationship were uncertain; felt a kind of dislocated or unmoored, felt unstable and second-guessed themselves all the time, [saying to themselves], am I too sensitive, am I too paranoid?”
Stern says that “gaslighting” is an “insidious and sometimes covert form of emotional abuse.” Being gaslit is “a power dynamic repeated over time where the gaslighters intention is to undermine and destabilize the ‘gaslightee’ and lead that person to second-guess themselves, to question their own identity and ultimately their sanity and their character at different times.”
Stern argues that being able to spot this type of behavior is important. When “gaslighting” happens professionally, it can be tough to tackle. For example, Stern cites doctor/patient relationships and warns that “if your doctor minimizes your symptoms, if he or she continually interrupts you or accuses you of being too preoccupied with your symptoms, or refuses to order follow-up tests or if you constantly feel like your doctor is rude, condescending, belittling, or passing it off, as ‘that's your age, or you're a woman, or you're a new mom’ or whatever it is, you're being gaslighted.”
After recognizing the behavior, Stern suggests taking action. “Opt out of those power struggles and sort out the truth from the distortion…Nobody needs to put up or should put up with abuse. It is not acceptable for anyone to be intentionally hurting someone else.”
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*This episode originally aired on July 2, 2022.
British writer Robert Macfarlane grew up loving mountains. A keen hiker, he says mountains are in his DNA – Macfarlane's father was a mountaineer and his grandfather oversaw some of the early expeditions and the first summit of Mount Everest in the 1950s.
Macfarlane’s own passion for the extremes of the mountains and the wilds of the outdoors fostered yet another interest: writing. In his first book “Mountains of the Mind,” Macfarlane explored why he fell in love with mountains and sought answers as to why so many climbers are willing to die for love of rock and ice.
Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
Macfarlane is a fellow at Emmanuel College at Cambridge University in the UK. He has written numerous books focused on nature and landscape, including “Landmarks” and “The Old Ways,” which led to an exploration of the subterranean world, the topic of his latest book “Underland: A Deep Time Journey.”
“The trodden paths are the beginning of the underworld if you like because they are land hollowed by feet, by time and by wheels, so there were lots of things pointing me down,” Macfarlane says.
While the upper world is the place of the gods and awe, he says, the subterranean world is an unseen place — one for burial and hiding. Macfarlane also shares his passion for language and metaphor, explaining that the “underworld” is where “matter meets metaphor” — and that negative words like “down,” “dark,” or “depressed” are deeply ingrained into our language.
Jonathan Bastian talks with Robert Macfarlane about his connection to the landscape and about his exploration and interest in what lies beneath our feet. As a writer, Macfarlane shares his love for language and metaphor and is particularly interested in “gathering words which seemed much more vibrant, reciprocal, and dynamic.” For Macfarlane, the rediscovery of language furthers a connection to the natural world, and Macfarlane says there’s even a map highlighting the regional terms for “creek” across North America.
So how has language and the Tale of Gilgamesh impacted his latest project? Can music and song breathe life into ancient stories - in a way that writing can’t?
Macfarlane speaks about his interest in music and how it connects to his love of nature and storytelling. He explains how he connected during the pandemic with actor and singer/songwriter Johnny Flynn, and how Epic of Gilgamesh, became the “nourishment that drove the writing of 11 songs” that now appear on the album “Lost in The Cedar Wood.”
Music, Macfarlane muses, is “the purest form of magic to me. Writing is labor and trial work and concentration, perspiration and locked rooms. No one would ever want to watch a writer write, right? It's paint drying, it's grass growing, but musicians. ...are magicians weaving a golden thread that they pluck from the air.”
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This week, Rabbi Steve Leder, author of “For You When I Am Gone: Twelve Essential Questions to Tell a Life Story” reflects on the legacy we leave after we’re gone and suggests that rather than a long list of accomplishments, it’s the quality of our relationships, throughout our lives that have the biggest impact on our own happiness and how we are cherished and remembered by others.
This episode of Life Examined with Rabbi Steve Leder was originally broadcast May 28th, 2022
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*This episode originally aired on January 14, 2023.
From our earliest ancestors, we’ve been travelers — first as nomadic tribes, and later as raiders, traders, explorers, and colonizers. Whether by ship or by foot, it’s human nature to move and explore.Jonathan Bastian talks with travel writer, podcaster, and vagabond Rolf Potts about the merits of travel. Potts is the author of several travel books, including Vagabonding and Marco Polo Didn't Go There. In his latest book, The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel, Potts explains why travel is good for us and how the unexpected part in a journey can change us for the better.
“The best gift to travel is just allowing yourself to be surprised,” says Potts. “Stumbling into serendipity, having a bad time, and realizing that it's not as bad as you thought it would be. We forget how easy it is to adapt, how helpful people are, and how we can figure it out and have a great time doing it.”
“One of the gifts of travel is to sort of blow those habits open and be vulnerable and almost childlike in your relationship to the world again,” says world traveler Rolf Potts. Photo by Fritz Liedtke. In “The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel,” author Rolf Potts encourages you to sustain the mindset of a journey, even when you aren't able to travel, and affirms that travel is as much a way of being as it is an act of movement.Today, technology, cheap flights, and bucket-list trips have made travel easier, more affordable, and somewhat predictable. Potts says that’s also limited our options and possibilities as travelers.
“We're all in lockstep, following our phone, looking at a screen as a window into a place that we've traveled so far to come to, instead of just sort of following our nose or following our eyes or following our ears,” he says.
When it comes to modes of transportation, Potts shares his tips on exotic ways to travel without becoming overly dependent on flights.
“Train culture around the world is really fun to experience and it doesn't have as many emissions,” he suggests. “Stay on the sea over land and go those hardships, don't fast-forward your way through the world with a bunch of flights — slow down a little bit.”
Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
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After 30 years of experience counseling couples, therapist Terry Real reflects on what makes building a long-term relationship difficult and the skills needed to keep a partnership intact. Reals says that even with changing dynamics and non-traditional partnerships, the age-old problems still exist.
“Despite all of the gender fluidity and all of the experimentation, a two-person paired-for-life, monogamous core, is still alive and well and extremely difficult.”
The pressure is on to find that “perfect” someone, yet, despite the romantic “idealization” of coupledom, promoted by a booming dating and marriage industry, the reality is that most couples won’t last a decade together, much less a lifetime. The US Census Bureau reports that most marriages last on average 8 years. Real says the odds in the U.S. are that roughly 50% of all marriages will end in divorce - “the failure rate on marriage has hovered at about 40-50% for half a century.”
The reason, Real explains, is that “we want to be lifelong lovers; we want long walks on the beach, we want heart-to-heart talks, great sex in our 60s and 70s but we don't have the skills to match this new ambition. We are trying to be lifelong lovers in a culture that does not cherish relationships.” We live in a society, Real argues, that asserts individualism. “We don't teach our sons and daughters and non-binary kids how to fight fair, how to stand up for yourself in a loving way. We don't teach the basic skills of relationships in this culture because we don't value it.”
So what are the chances a couple has to beat the odds? What’s the key to staying together? According to Real, it’s “hard work” and “it’s very rare that people have the discipline.” Relationship skills need to be learned and practiced. Real suggests that “basic relationship skills [be] taught in elementary and junior high.”
Real, who’s also the founder of the Relationship Life Institute and author of numerous books including most recently Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, talks specifically about the impact of inherited family pathologies. He advises the reopening of childhood trauma to heal old wounds;
“Family pathology rolls from generation to generation, like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children.”
In his book, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, author Terrance Real says “we don't teach the basic skills of relationship in this culture because we don't value it. We're supposed to just know how to do it and most long-term relationships crash and burn. The failure rate on marriage has hovered at about 40-50% for half a century.”
Terry Real, pictured here, says “ you can have a superlative relationship if you're with a partner you love who is also in on the game and willing to do the work themselves. If both of you are willing to do that and you have the basic chemistry that drew you to each other to begin with,you can do it. But it's very rare that people have the discipline and the know-how to build it all.” Photo courtesy of Terrance Real at The Relational Life InstituteDelve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
- Visa fler
