Susan Cain: What Makes Us Whole
Susan Cain is the bestselling author of Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. In her first book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which spent eight years on the New York Times bestseller list, Cain urged us to hold space for the introverts among us. In Bittersweet, she implores us to hold space for our sorrow and longing. Through research, storytelling, and memoir, her book explores the value of a melancholic outlook on life and what it stands to teach us about creativity, connection, and love.
Our conversation moves through many facets of what Cain calls “the bittersweet tradition,” exploring all the ways in which allowing ourselves to experience the cosmic sadness simultaneously opens us up to transcendent ecstasy. We are creatures who simultaneously lose and love, who separate and long for home, who experience the bitter along with the sweet, she tells us, and it is in these extremes that our sorrow and joy have the opportunity to meet, unexpectedly bringing us closer to the sublime beauty of life.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
The ecstasy of engaging with sorrow…14:15
The most fundamental part of our emotional DNA…25:00
Writing your experience…43:00
Opening to a different frequency…54:43
MORE FROM SUSAN CAIN:
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Listen to the Bittersweet playlist on Spotify or Apple Music
Watch Susan’s TEDTalk: The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days
Follow Susan on Twitter and Instagram
Check out The Next Big Idea Book Club—a nonfiction subscription book club curated by Susan Cain, Macolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
That's what this book is about. It's that recognition of that deep longing that people feel and haven't been able to ever identify, and then that walk back to love.
SUSAN CAIN:
Yeah, it does really feel like that. The book came from having felt all my life this very distinct and profound emotion, I guess is the best word for it. That was so ineffable. So the challenge of writing this book was that it's a kind of an ode to an inherently ineffable state of being, but one that feels so important. So trying to capture it in words is no small task.
ELISE:
But it's recognizable!
SUSAN:
But it's recognizable, yes. And when I get letters from people, people are like, oh my God, I've been feeling this way my whole life. And I never knew what it was. And one person who also like thinks of himself as an atheist or agnostic, he said, you know, I always describe it to myself as that holy feeling. So just the feeling of articulating a state of being then having other people say, yes, I know that state, too. Yeah. I don't know why that's so deeply gratifying, but I feel like that's why I'm a writer is just for those moments of connection like that.
ELISE:
Well, and I love the narrow gate that you walked through, which was wanting after writing sort of one of the most like a singular book about describing a state of being that so many people recognize and that hadn't in some ways been codified or corralled, right after writing Quiet, that you then were like, I just wanna talk about, and anyone who's listening will understand this impetus, but that the resonance, the chord strike of sad music, you know of that again, ephemeral, fleeting feeling that we all know. Right, like why is this, what is this? Like, why is this pinging my heart in a way that's moving me to tears. And that, then that opens up, like you walk through this gate, into this world, that's kind of not secular.
SUSAN:
Yes, exactly. It's like the tears they're sublime tears. They're not like tears of like, oh my God, my life fell apart. They're tears of like, oh my gosh, I, I just glimpsed, you know, I, I glimpsed the place. I, I long to be. And the place that we all launch be. So then it's like this feeling of love because we're all in that place together. That that's the nice way I can think of to describe it.
ELISE:
And throughout the book, it's so interesting how you look at research that suggests that this is a place, you know, I'm 42 and grew up in a, my dad's Jewish, my mom's a very lapsed Catholic, you know hates religion to the point of intolerance. She’s so scarred and then sort of the snobbery, the secular snobbery that so many people have around anything that's spiritual. And it's been interesting in the last decade, five years, most recently, like the last few years, really of just following maybe a not dissimilar path to you, of, oh wow, like there's something bigger. I wouldn't call myself a religious person, but definitely attached to, I don't even know what I would call it universe, force, nature love, that there's a bigger, something bigger at play here. And this isn't like a mechanical universe.
SUSAN:
Yeah. And I, I think that we're not the only ones who feel this way. I think there's something going on right now. It's very interesting, you know, all at once there are formerly religious people who are leaving formal religion, even as formerly kind of secular materialists are feeling that, that like straight-up materialism is not enough to explain life. And that there's something deeper that they're also a part of. So it's like these two people are coming from these two separate poles and going to a new place. And I don't think we know what the new place is exactly yet.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, that's true. And is that where you feel like you're going, or that like now you actually, and again, path is wrong. There is no path. But do you feel like this book put you right into the river of your consciousness, if that makes sense, or like is in some ways like a birthright?
SUSAN:
Oh yeah. I mean, very much so. And I didn't expect it. Like when I set out to write this book, you know, which is basically just about kind of like the apprehension that in this world, joy and sorrow always go together and everyone we love best will not be here forever. And yet that, that was connected to this deep state of beauty and love somehow. I was just trying to write about that. I had no idea that I was writing about anything that had to do with religion or spirituality, that literally had not occurred to me for a second. But the more I delved into what I've come to think of as the bittersweet tradition, which has existed for centuries across the globe and you see it in art, and music, and religion, the more I realize that this actually is like a deeply spiritual impulse.
I mean the best way I can describe it for me personally, is I told in the book about that one Hasidic parable, where there's a rabbi who notices that among his congregation, there's a man who seems to be very indifferent to his talk of religion. And, and then the rabbi hums for the man, a melody full of longing and yearning, and the indifferent man at that point says, oh, like now I get it. Now I know what you've been talking about all this time, because I hear this melody and I feel an intense desire to be united with the Lord. And I realize like my gosh, like I am that man. And I'm still technically just as agnostic as I always was when I started, I don't feel like I know any answers. I just know that, or I believe that what I experience when I hear certain kinds of music is what people are talking about when they talk about God. And I can't say what that is, because I'm like too much of, I don't know…too much intellectual or something to say, like, I know what it is. I have no idea what it is. I just know. I just know it matters.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, but I think it, what you're speaking about, I mean, if you go back to sort of the formation of early Christianity and you think about Jesus as a figure, a remarkable figure, regardless of your, or Buddha or any of these people. Jesus didn't write.He spoke and he shared aphorisms and he traveled around. Like this was a spoken, and it was a direct experience, I think is the way that so much of this is described. And certainly when you look at mystics, right, like it's a deep experience. And I think for at least the glancing associations that I had with religion as a child or the way I've experienced it culturally is that it is an intellectual exercise, right. Like it's not felt. And I think, I mean, at least for me, it was never, it never touched some part of my, those words didn't touch some part of my soul, and it's only through life through experiencing and experiencing death loss, getting on my knees through life that then you're like, oh, I, now I feel this, like, this is an experience. It's not a book.
SUSAN:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's not real. I guess for me, the most reliable portal through which I go and experience this is music, but it happens in a thousand different ways. You just mentioned a cathedral and it reminded me of how, I was in the stage of my life when I was in my thirties, where I kind of left the wrong relationship and the wrong career all at once. And I was like, just floating around, not knowing what the future held. And I was living in Manhattan, um, in this non-descript neighborhood in a non-descript apartment. And yet it so happened that across the street from all these non-descript skyscrapers, there was this tiny little church sandwiched between the skyscrapers, a tiny little 19th-century church that had remained with a little garden outside.
And I wasn't working at the time. I had just left my legal career, and I would just spend hours inside that church. And it was just the most transformative place. I was the only one in there, but it was like filled with old wood and candles and certain scents and a certain sense of the world and something more. And there's something about those places when we find them. Like, I guess I've come to realize that these portals are everywhere. And the best thing we can do is be open to them and alive to them and, and step through everywhere we find them.
ELISE:
I love that. And I'm sure people who are listening can relate. I've definitely had that experience, particularly in nature. Just that like awe, wonder, that opening of not even to like our own insignificance, but in some way it's a scaling, right. It's a perspective-making experience as well, of like you're a tiny speck and the most important thing and like trying to reconcile that gap is yeah is life. I loved too, because it seems like as part of this as part of sort of your exploration of longing, and then also a desire to maybe understand yourself. I want to talk about your relationship with your mom. I thought you wrote about that in such a honest and beautiful way. I love the part we were talking about Maslow and the going back to the original concept. Because I think we all know Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like all of these big thinkers, right are always reduced to a meme, but the idea of these transcends, right. Um, people who are less happy than conventionally healthy ones, but who are more ecstatic, it's that like the feeling of joy versus happiness, right?
SUSAN:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's just this weird kind of ecstasy or near ecstasy that comes from being able to also be engaged with sorrow. It's very mystifying, but yeah, but Maslow talks about that as like that these, as he calls them transcenderss are often like more deeply happy than another person would be. Like, they, they feel connected to a kind of cosmic sadness, but also an ecstasy that comes with that. Annd I think that's what we see, you know, in all our religious places, like, you know, you go into a church, it is like an embodiment of suffering up on the cross, right. All our religions are grappling fundamentally with impermanence, and with laws, and with suffering. The longing for Eden, the longing for Mecca, the longing for Zion the longing for the beloved as, as God is often called, especially by the mystics. And yeah, there's something about that longing that I think is the best part of ourselves.
ELISE:
When I think about this idea of transcenderss and I think this is what comes with age and why like in the research you've cited, people tend to become more spiritual as they age, even people like Shakespeare, right? Like the content that they're creating starts to, and this is certainly true of me. Um, I grew up working at a magazine about shopping, which is funny.
SUSAN:
Yeah. And I wanted ask you about your, book, I don't wanna interrupt you, but I wanna ask you what the book that you're writing is about. Because I saw that you're writing a nonfiction.
ELISE:
Yes so I am writing a book about women in the patriarchy, and specifically the Seven Deadly Sins and the way that you might think of those and be like, oh, whatever, like they were in a movie, but then when you actually start to check them off, they're all things around which women patrol both ourselves and each other. So lost greed, gluttony, sloth, pride, anger, or wrath. Envy. That when I surveyed myself and looked at my friends and looked at women in the world and sort of cultural, how they've rolled out culturally, it's hard to find the ways for example, that we punish angry men versus the way that we punish angry women, and that it's this the sort of the long tails of patriarchy that continue to keep us bound, and restrict our behavior, and also create this map of morality by which we judge and govern other women.
So it's a big topic. What's interesting too for you, is that originally, so the definitely sons weren't in the Bible, they were, they sort of first, I think they’re old, super old, but they first show up in around the same time that the New Testament was codified and they show up in the Egyptian desert, this monk, Evagrius Ponticus, and originally they were eight thoughts, demonic thoughts, but demon meaning less like the demon that we think of and more about like persecutor thoughts, thinking that would like keep you out of peace as you prayed and the, and one of the thoughts of the sadness.
SUSAN:
Oh, interesting. And then that didn't make it in.
ELISE:
It fell off. Ultimately it was replaced by sloth, which was sort of this apathy. But I think about sadness being something that particularly curtails the lives of men and this unwillingness to feel our feelings in the full spectrum of our experience and how that shows up in ways that harm us all.
SUSAN:
I was just gonna say, so how did, how did you move from a career focused on shopping to these profound life questions? Like what was that trajectory like for you?
ELISE:
I mean, when I think about my, I think this is true for all people, right. When you think about your career, and I'm sure when you think about what you learned as a lawyer, you're like, that was useful.
SUSAN:
Yeah, totally, totally.
ELISE:
Yeah. Like everything makes sense. In retrospect. When I graduated from college, there were no jobs, it was 2002 and the dot-com crash like everyone's job offers were being rescinded, and it was scary. And I was like, in that same, do I go to law school? Like, what am I gonna do? And I didn't think I could get a job in magazines because I wouldn't have been able to afford it. And my brother is a book editor, and I knew I wanted to work with words and I ended up getting a freelance job at Lucky, which had just launched. And because I was freelance, I was paid more per hour, um, you know, benefits. Who needs benefits?
And, and I took the job. And then it's funny. I tried desperately to move within the building. Um, I interviewed at Vanity Fair. I interviewed at the New Yorker. I interviewed at Vogue. Um, and everyone was like, no, no, you should stay where you're at. You're actually doing far more than you would be answering someone's phone at Vanity Fair to stay. And I'm so grateful. I did. I learned so much the editor-in-chief, or was this woman Kim France? Who's an incredible rock musician journalist. She taught me so much. Like I went to Yale, I was an English major. I wrote about John Milton and Andrew Marvell, and I found my thesis and the loss of innocence and the garden of Eden. I mean, as you know, these things chase us throughout our lives, right? Yes. Like I can't escape the things that I'm interested in.
SUSAN:
Goosebumps.
ELISE:
And I did my photography thesis on fairy tales, which also figure and the way and women. So again, I'm just playing out my like long tail interests, but, um, but I, you know, my thesis is I can't read it. It's like so impenetrable with fancy words and I have no idea what I'm talking about and I needed to go to Lucky and learn how to write a bag guide, writing revelatory interesting sentences where you're not replicating any words for 100 handbags is the most intense writing training around and making it smart, like Lucky was a great magazine. It just broke a mold and I learned so much, I'm so grateful. It like it completely retrained and reprogrammed me out of my highfalutin head. Um, and yeah, now here I am just wanting to talk about Sufism and God.
SUSAN:
Yeah, but it sounds like that's where you were headed in the first place. Because you were talking about Milton and the loss of innocence from back when. But it was so interesting because we started off with these saying, you know, about how Shakespeare and all the composers, like that their work gets more profound and more focused on the spiritual when they get to that stage of midlife. There's something about that.
ELISE:
It's really hard to make it to midlife without some big road bumps.. Right. And that only like this is, and I want to talk about, David Yaden, too. What does he call them? Self-transcending experiences.
But like these life transition, death, loss. Loss of relationship, divorce, job loss, whatever it is. Like you get kicked around by middle age and you either learn how to sort of like, what are those dolls called? Like those bobble heads. It's like you learn to experience the range of emotion to allow it to happen and sort of carve you out in some way, or you resist. And those are the people I think, who are, as you write projecting their pain all over the place.Because they haven’t accommodated to life, and in order to thrive, like to be mentally and emotionally sound, you have to let the sadness in.
SUSAN:
The research that you're talking about from David Yaden, who's this amazing, young researcher at Johns Hopkins and he's like a huge up and coming sort of William James type of superstar in the field. Some of his research has focused on self-transcendent experiences, like places where people experience these of transcendence and freedom from the self and like a connection to something bigger. And he's looked at what are the moments where people tend to have those experiences. And what he's found is that they, as you say, that they often come during moments of transition, including moments of great loss, including the moments of approaching death itself. Like the ultimate, you could say the ultimate loss, except I don't think we really know what it is. And then there's other research finding that when people are asked to imagine the emotions that others feel as they approach death, they assume that those emotions are negative ones, you know, fear and anxiety and sorrow and this kind of thing. But actually, when they ask people themselves who are approaching death, what they're feeling, they're usually feeling much more expansive types of emotions. So I think there's some profound misunderstanding that we have between what we think loss and transition is versus what it actually holds for us.
ELISE:
No, absolutely. And I think that research, that research is amazing and I've read that elsewhere as well. Sort of when you ask people to start to describe that process, like the amount of agita that people dump into it, or anticipate, versus everyone who's actually going through the process being like, actually I'm fine. I'm good. I'm relaxed. That there's an anxiety that lifts when you're actually close to the end and theoretically in the construct of your book and what I also would say, you're going home. You're going back. You're going somewhere again. That's ineffable, but that feels maybe like a return.
SUSAN:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's the hope and I think there is sort of at the heart of ourselves, like the most fundamental part of our emotional DNA is the feeling of separation, and the wish for reunion, and the wish to return home. And we express that in a thousand different ways throughout our lives. And we express it very literally in all our religions, you know, the wish to return home. B,ut it's fundamental to who we are. And it doesn't get researched in psychology because I think psychology is such, I know psychology is such a secular discipline and most psychologists themselves are quite secular and tend to the more atheistic side. So to the extent psychologists look at spirituality, it's usually through like through this very limited prism of like, you know, what are the top character strengths and certain people's top character strengths are spirituality, and tthat's associated with certain positive outcomes, but that's kind of the extent of the inquiry. As opposed to like starting from the inside out of like, what is it in humanity that is filled with this longing for home.
And it's true of all of us, whether we're in touch with it or not.
ELISE:
Right. And I think like when you talk about that longing for home and, and it was interesting sort of reading into your bibliography and reading Lewellyn Vaughan-Lee, and he talks about sort of what can happen with young children, right. Who feel this mourning or this longing and this loss like that they, you know, in his, in his worldview, we decide to come. But when we come, we've lost and we'd make choices about where we might go. And then when we come, we've lost all recognition of that. But that, there's something sometimes this feeling of this isn't home or there's something else, or there's someone who I'm separated from plagues young children. And it's interesting to hear him talk about how hard that can be for parents, right. Who feel betrayed by that connection or envious. And then I was, you know, the way that you write about your own mother and her desire for you to be everything to her so in some ways you could be nothing to yourself. Thatat hit that chord for me of like, oh, I think he's talking about you.
SUSAN:
Oh yeah. Wow. And the way you just put it was amazing. You're definitely a writer. I never put it into those exact words the way you just did. Should I tell that story?
ELISE:
Yeah. Will you talk about your mom a little bit?
SUSAN:
Sure. And I will say that I probably won't be able to speak it as well as I can write it. Partly cuz it's such a long story and partly just cuz it's such a sensitive story. But it's all there in the book, but yeah, I guess the basic outlines of the story are that my mother and I had an incredibly deep and close relationship through my whole childhood, and it felt to me like a kind of garden of Eden childhood, you know. She was like incredibly warm and present and sweet and funny and like just great company. I loved her infinitely and she also had troubles that made it really difficult for her when I entered a lessons and started having well started doing and wanting all the things that adolescents want, and had opinions that were different from hers and all of this.
And, and she was also, she was a very traditional and religious person. So she wasn't happy with my like desires for sexual exploration and all of it. My adolescence hit her really, really hard and she reacted with a combination of intense grief and rage. And I loved her more than anything. And so all I wanted to do was take away from her the pain that I perceived that I was the one who was causing, I was the one who was causing it. And so it was a kind of like impossible conundrum of desperately wanting to live out my life, but also feeling that to live out my life was to cause pain to the person I love most. And I couldn't really see a way out of that conundrum, and what ended up happening. I guess we, we ended up doing things unconsciously to solve our problems maybe.
But what ended up happening was I wrote all of this down for years into my diaries, like all through high school. And then when I got to college all through freshman year. I wrote it all down. My love for her and my hate and all the things that I was doing in college that were against the rules. And then at the end of freshman year, for some reason I had to stay on campus for a few extra days when class was over and my parents came to pick up my, my suitcases and to take them home. And just as they were turning to leave, I had the bright idea of like, oh, you know what, here's all my diaries, take those too for safe keeping. And on a conscious level, that is all I thought I was doing was just like giving my mother my diaries to safely take home for me.
And of course she would never read them. I don't know what I was thinking unconsciously, but you know, I got home a week later and she was no longer speaking to me. And even though, even though we did of course start speaking and had a mother daughter relationship for the rest of her life. It was never the same after that. And there was a sense I had after that, of being fundamentally motherless and being unable. I couldn't even talk about my mother for years and years. I mean, for decades and decades. I couldn't mention her without crying because it was like, it was like an unresolved grief, you know, that lasted for decades having like lost the person I loved best, partly through what felt to me like my own actions.
And so that was my own story of the pain of separation and the desire for a reunion. I think we all have these stories, you know, whether they come through bereavements or betrayals or, or whatever, we, we all have these losses. And I thought like the whole time I was writing this book and I knew I had chosen to tell the story in the book. I was so worried about what would happen during the book tour. I feel like, oh my gosh, you know, like I could be on our radio show and someone might ask me about my mother and I'm gonna start weeping. And I mentioned this to a counselor and he said, you know, talk to me when you're done writing the book, because by the time you're done with this process, you may find that that's no longer an issue for you.
And that it's resolved. And at the time that he said that, I thought, yeah, yeah, like that's one of those things that psychologists say, but of course it's never really gonna resolve. But the fact is that it actually did. There's something about having been immersed in this bittersweet tradition, and understanding the pain of separation, and understanding the desire for a union, and understanding that the loves that we lose, that, that we might lose particular loves, but that we never lose love itself. I think that's like the real thing that's really made me come to a place of peace.
ELISE:
It's so meta, I mean, even the unconscious need for separation and sort of what you did in order to do that and, and individuate and, and the fact that you even describe it as your childhood as Edenic. And then you think about sort of the, the way that I guess a lot of people read into the story of Genesis, which, I mean, obviously some people read into it as women's original crime, et cetera, but the more accurate is that this is when we chose to enter duality and to separate and to leave and to have a mortal life and experience loss. And you can't do that in singularity. You can't do that in Eden. You have to go out and live your own life, and then you come back, you come home. So I thought it was, so it was like a masterful telling of this bigger, harder. I think too, we can romanticize loss. Or romanticize a love that burns out, or minimize it. And it is pain. Like there is no escaping from that level of pain, you know, it's not a romantic con. Does that make sense? Like yeah. What you went through was so painful and that's what's required.
SUSAN:
I love the way you just put that. I have goosebumps again. Your interpretation and your understanding is amazing. I do think it's what's required. And, and I do think that, as I say, you know, that it's a kind of a circular process in that you can go through that process and then return at the end to a sense of love again, and to a sense of home again, and so the fact of having these breaks and these losses is not to eternally condemn yourself to that state. It's just, it's something that we experience along the way. It's an experience like all the others. And I, I think it's one, that’s the heart of what it is to be human. And at the same time, it's just an experience.
ELISE:
It was interesting when you went a little bit into organizational leadership and work. And because as we know, so many of us experience the majority of our lives at the office, and yet we don't there's that, that study, I think it was called compassion lab, the management professors who were studying employee transcripts as they were describing their work experience. And you write, “the interviews were full of stories of pain and suffering at work, panic attacks, injured relationships, feelings of devaluation. And yet they rarely use the words, pain or suffering. They talked about being angry, frustrated.” And angry is anger is often a secondary emotion to grief. But that we live in this society. It's like our tolerance for it is up here in that like anger and rage state, instead of letting it in. How do we change culture or company culture even?
SUSAN:
Yeah. It's because anger is seen as an emotion of power. And frustration is also a cousin to that. It's like a milder form of expressing a kind of power, you know?
Yeah. Whereas sorrow or longing is seen, or anxiety, those are seen as emotions of weakness. How do we change it? I mean, I went to a conference once where just like at any conference you've ever attended, people are milling around the hallway and greeting each other, and they're all wearing a smile on their faces. And at one point, the, the host of the conference asked us to just silently write down onto a piece of paper, a struggle that we are going through at that time in our lives. And then someone like came through the audience and collects all the papers into a little box, and they hand them up to the host who, who sits quietly on stage. And he takes this box and he just quietly starts reading out the things people have written down, you know, and because it's anonymous, people are sharing really profound struggles that they're going through, whether it's griefs, or divorces, or whatever, or, you know, crises of the soul or depression.
And, and suddenly you look around and like all these people who had just been smiling at you and glad handing you for the last five hours, this is what they're going through at the same time. So it's, it's like our, our capacity to present exists, right alongside our capacity to endure these struggles. And it was such a potent reminder of who we actually really were in that room. And I thought, wow. You know, like what if every team leader did that? What if every company leader did that in ways that were anonymous like this so that people really could tell the truth, you know, what if we could find ways to do those kinds of exercises periodically, just as a reminder of, of who we actually are to, to normalize these emotions.
ELISE:
Yeah. And then for it to become so culturally acceptable that people would wear it as a badge of the things that they've experienced, and those experiences in which they can impart wisdom. So rather than something shameful or stigmatized as so many of these things are right. Job loss, divorce, they're perceived as failures. But that instead, it could be like, oh I’ve experienced this, like I can share, like I've learned from this. And I think just even understanding, I mean, we talk, this is known, but the fact that like, we judge each other so quickly and so simply, and yet, like the reality of people's lives is so stunning and overwhelming. Like it's hard to meet someone who hasn't been in it.
SUSAN:
I mean, I love the way you framed it as get it to a point where it's socially acceptable, because I think that's kind of in the next stage that we're at. Because like I don't wanna be Pollyanna about what we should do given where we are right now, because for example, there, there was one study I talked about in the book, , that found that when people who are like in the boss position at work confide to their subordinates about things that they're going through, it actually causes the people working for them to feel uncomfortable and to feel a loss of respect. And I wish that weren't so, but it, but it is so, and so I feel like we, we have to really be realistic about that. And that when people feel a sense of trepidation about revealing too much, that's why. They're responding to something real in the air. So this is why I think one of the greatest steps that we can first take is to do these things is to give each other space to do it anonymously. So that people can just become aware of each other as a collective of what everybody's going through as a collective, without the light, having to shine on any one particular person at first. And then once it gets to the point where it's more socially acceptable, then it becomes easier to individuate around it.
ELISE:
No, totally. Can you tell us about the, about Pennebaker too? And that study about writing and even, even the process probably of revelation in this group is healing, but can you take people through his work and, and, and the simple act of writing and how it can transform people's lives?
SUSAN:
So James Pennebaker, he's a psychologist at UT Austin. He has done the most like amazing series of studies, basically just showing that the sheer act of writing down what you might be going through at any given time and like what you're experiencing, what your emotions are. The sheer act of doing that is enough to not only make you feel better, but it improves your health. It makes you more successful at work. It just has all these crazy outcomes that seem too good to be true. But I'll give you one example of a study, of 50-year-old engineers, a group of them who had been all been laid off from their work. And they didn't know if they were gonna be able to get another job and they're all really depressed about it.
And he has half of them write down what they're going through. We're talking about two or three minutes a morning. It's not like they spent their days writing. They just would write for a short period of time. And then the other half for the control group were just writing like what they ate for breakfast that day. And he found that the ones who wrote down the truth of what they were feeling were, I think it was three times more likely to have found work. A few months later, their blood pressure was lower. Their sense of wellbeing was higher. Everything about their lives had improved on all these different measures. And again, it seems too good to be true. And yet he's done study after study validating these findings. And I guess it's something that we know intuitively for those of us who have been diary keepers in our lives.
There's a reason that we do it. There's a kind of sense-making that goes on, and a kind of giving yourself permission to live with what you might be feeling. And, and I think there's also, when you write things down, a sense that our emotions are real and that they don't live forever. And you know, sometimes we have the feeling of, you're going through something difficult, you write it down and the emotion has now transferred onto the page and it's no longer as much in you. So you're being honest with yourself about what you're feeling, but also there's a kind of letting go of it that can happen. When you put in on paper.
ELISE:
Well, and I'd like to offer that your book in some ways, like in terms of your, mom's your fear of your grief around your mother, that incapacitating feeling, and then you granted you wrote more than 20 minutes a day about it, but like the processing of it, like you’re a testament to the power of metabolizing, the hard things in our lives. And I think even writing it down, it like honors it as something real, and impactful, even if you can only admit it to yourself. Because you know, it's hard, it's hard to admit like when we're sad or when we've been hurt. And I think particularly for women, it gets buried deep in our subconscious around these ideas of like, I'm fine, I'm fine. I just don't think we have as many, we have as many ways to socially acceptable ways to acknowledge. It's so much more acceptable for us to be sad. That's true. But anger, frustration, resentment. Like these are not socially acceptable mechanisms for women to, um, react to the world in the way that our needs aren't met. And so at least be able to admit your needs to yourself, or the way that those needs haven't been accepted or acknowledged. It's like emotional hygiene.
SUSAN:
Yeah. It’s emotional hygiene. That's exactly what it's like. That's exactly how it is. Yeah. And as I say, I didn't believe it when the therapist said to me that I would get to a point of complete resolution, but it's been amazing how much that's happened. And I don't think it's only from like, I don't think you have to go out and write a whole book in order to do that. Because I don't think it was that so much as, as it was being just immersed in what I call the bittersweet tradition of all these thinkers, artists, writers, who for thousands of years, the theologians have been talking about this essence of humanity that like, we are just creatures who simultaneously lose and love and that that's what we do.
And we separate and we long for home and that's who we are. And, and so we're like deeply connected to each other in that core emotional DNA, there was something about really being immersed in that understanding that was incredibly freeing and liberating.
ELISE:
What's interesting too, is I think, and you write about that the famous early study of 573 creative leaders, this is Marvin Eisenstadt and like the incredibly high percentage of creative people who were orphaned in childhood: 25% had lost at least one parent by the age of 10, by age 15, it was 34%. And by age 20, 45%. But that there's this long relationship between creativity and sorrow or depression. Like I certainly grew up in that with that. Let's call it a myth, but this idea that you have to be depressed. You have to be Van Gogh in order to create great art. But it feels like that's an oversimplification. It seems like you just need to be able to go there to visit, but you don't have to stay. Do you feel as a creative writer, who's now maybe moved one of a primary sadness in your life or you transmuted it, do you feel like it's made you any less creative, or willing to go deep into pain?
SUSAN:
Oh God, no, no, no. I feel like that particular thing has been resolved, but yeah. You know, in terms of whatever that state of being is that gets released when, you know, when I hear the right music or whatever, I feel just as much connected to that as I always have. Because you know, that was just my particular or one particular story of loss that I happen to tell. But I mean, this is like, this is a world simultaneously always, the world is broken and the world is beautiful. It's it's those two things forever.
So to resolve one particular loss is not to change that state of being in any way, if you know what I mean. But I also wanna make sure to say that, um, there's also data showing that when people are actually depressed, it's actually difficult, if not impossible to be creative in that state. And I think it's really important to make a distinction between this bittersweet melancholia that I'm talking about, versus actual depression. You know, because depression is like, from what I understand, a kind of numbness and a despair and an ability like your feet are stuck in the clay. You know, like as if your feet are weighted and you can't move. Whereas this bittersweet state is much more of a feeling of aliveness to all that is. So to the joy and beauty, as well as to the sorrow and longing, you're, you're alive to all of it and you're creating from that place. So I think that bitter sweetness and depression, they're probably cousins of each other, but they're different. They're quite different. And with bittersweetness, what you're doing is taking your pain and turning it into something else, you know, making a creative offering out of it. So it's a very alive state.
ELISE:
Yeah. And I know music is the way in, and I love that statistic. I don't remember it, but it's like people listen to sad songs, like 800 times and happy songs, 150 times, like it's a staggering difference, right. But it feels like there's tools you can cultivate, one could cultivate tools of like those deep resonance, like that bittersweet door. Do you go when you need to feel, do you use certain songs?
SUSAN:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's for everybody, we have these different portals to that state of being. So for me, music and certain times of day are so reliably one of those portals. So I actually created a whole bittersweet playlist that's up on Spotify and Apple Music. So anyone, anyone can listen to it, if you just like, look for my name and bittersweet, you'll find it there.
So for me it's music, but for other people, it might be something different. You know, I think you talked about nature and it could be walking into a cathedral. It could be anything. And I would say in general also just to engage proactively with beauty as often and as regularly as possible, that's a way of entering this bittersweet domain. There's like a thing of like that phenomenon when you see something that's so beautiful that it moves you to tears. And it's like, why would beauty make us cry? There’s a theological explanation that's given for it, that when we see something like truly transcendent or you see, you know, like Simone Biles, you know, turning herself over five times in the air and how is that even possible? And you see that. And you're like that that's a moment where you're glimpsing Eden. Like you're glimpsing the world that we feel we actually belong to. And that's where the tears come from. So the sheer act of engaging with beauty is transformative.
ELISE:
I just want to go back to something you've said at the very beginning, which was about how in your work you're seeing sort of these, the people coalescing around this, both like from all parts of life, like materialist scientist, to people who would've previously, or maybe continued to identify as religious. I see a lot of people who were in a very structured religion becoming separate from that and maybe bringing Jesus with them, but abandoning the rest. What do you think that, do you have any theories? I mean, obviously we're living in weird times that seem meta in significant ways. Feels like we're all playing weird roles here, or at least that's how I feel, um, in a bigger context. But do you have any theories about what you think is going on? No pressure.
SUSAN:
I mean, I don't really know more than anybody does, but I think that we are going through such through moments of such profound transition right now. And just the way, you know, we were talking at the beginning about David Yaden’s research that found that the people are more likely to have these kinds of transcendent experiences at moments of great transition. So I think we're all feeling this transition around us and that kind of opens us up at a different type of heart level, or opens us up to a different frequency. And it makes us maybe less trapped in our own ego because there's so much happening around us. You can't, you can't possibly be only looking through your own prism all the time. So I think, I think it's something about this, what out this, whatever these transitions are, whether they take us to a good place or a bad place, we all feel it happening. And, and I think that's an opening.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, you think about, most people are going through transitions on their own asynchronously, apart from other people, whether it's divorce, loss of job, death of a loved one. And with COVID alone, we all we went through something globally together. And I'm sure we'll be studying its impacts spiritually for a long time.
What an honor. I love Susan Cain and I’m so grateful for her work exploring the quieter parts of life, the things that we don’t normally gravitate to. As we know, extroverts get a lot of attention, but introverts have a lot of power. And similarly, as a culture we’re very, very focused on happiness, while denying the value of the opposite end of spectrum and that oscillation of emotion, which is what makes life so full. And I loved this deeper, and the ways the book explores this idea of longing, desire really, but slightly different. And I think that that’s something that women in particular both embody and struggle with. What do we want? What is it we desire? What are we longing for? I’m going to read for you, where she’s talking about Lewellyn Vaughan-Lee, who she writes about in the book, and I’ve since gone on a deep-dive on him. She writes: “His answer confirms what I’d gleaned from his lectures and writings. In one of my favorite written passages, he describes longing not as an unhealthy craving, but as the feminine expression of love: ‘Like everything that is created, love has a dual nature, positive and negative, masculine and feminine. The masculine side of love is “I love you.” Love’s feminine quality is “I am waiting for you; I am longing for you.” For the mystic, it is the feminine side of love, the longing, the cup waiting to be filled, that takes us back to God…Because our culture has for so long rejected the feminine, we have lost touch with the potency of longing. Many people feel this pain of the heart and do not know its value; they do not know that it is their innermost connection to love.’” May we all connect with our inner divine feminine, which is different than being male or female. Because longing is a significant part of who we are and what drives us forward.