EP 190: Ron Siegel | Relational Resilience & Healing Trauma

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. And in today's episode, I have the pleasure of Speaking with with Dr. Ron Siegel from Harvard University Medical School, one of the leading innovators in the integration of mindfulness and psychotherapy. And we're going to discuss relational resilience and healing trauma and really look into how relationships can often be a source of our traumas, but also our primary landscape for healing and for deepening our resilience. So give it a listen. I'm here with Dr. Ron Siegel on day two of the summit, which is all about relational resilience and healing trauma. Welcome Dr. Siegel.

Thanks for having me.

Great to see you again. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio with our audience and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

Sounds great.

Okay, so Dr. Ron Siegel is an Assistant professor of psychology part time at Harvard Medical School where he has taught for over 35 years. A longtime student of mindfulness meditation, he serves on the board of directors and faculty of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy and the faculties for the center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health alliance and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches internationally about mind body medicine and the application of mindfulness and compassion practices in psychotherapy and other fields. His clinical careers included working with low income children and families, treating adults with chronic pain and other stress related disorders, and providing mindfulness oriented psychotherapy. He currently maintains a limited private clinical practice in Lincoln, Massachusetts. With colleagues. He has edited and written several books, including the critically acclaimed professional text Mindfulness and Psychotherapy 2nd Edition, a comprehensive guide for general audiences, the Mindfulness Solution, Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems, the professional guide Sitting Essential skills for Mindfulness based Psychotherapy and Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy and a step by step self treatment guide called Backsense, which integrates mindfulness practice, aggressive rehabilitation and mind body approaches to treat chronic back pain and neck pain. Dr. Siegel's latest book is the recently published extraordinary Gift of being Ordinary, Finding happiness right where you are. Great title and we'll hear about that today. He has also created a number of courses for general audiences including the Science of Mindfulness, a research based Path to well Being produced by the great courses and Healing through Effective practices for Chronic Health Conditions produced by Sounds true. He's A regular contributor to various professional publications, and is the co director of the annual Harvard Medical School Conference on Meditation and Psychotherapy.

Wow. Thank you for sharing such a thorough biography.

Yeah, well, you've had a very robust career, and you're a prolific contributor to the fields of mindfulness and psychotherapy. So I think it's important that we set that context.

So, you know, we've had conversations for previous summits, and I always enjoy our interchange and have. Have appreciated our connection. And, you know, for the last several years now, we've been journeying through this COVID 19 pandemic and a lot of other challenging.

Social and cultural upheavals and so forth. And the past year, it's just been an incredibly challenging time for all of us. We've had two more waves of the pandemic with the delta and omicron variants. And, you know, we've all been exposed to significant secondary vicarious trauma in one way or another, and maybe even primary trauma in some cases, especially with all the loss and grief people are experiencing, the incomplete grief of not being able to be there with their loved ones and just so many challenges and so much suffering. And to begin with, I'm just curious how the year has been for you, Dr. Siegel, and your family and your colleagues and so forth.

Sure. And you're welcome to call me Ron if you like, by the way.

Okay, we'll do.

I feel very privileged personally, because all the trauma to the extent to which I've experienced any trauma has been vicarious. I haven't lost anybody close to me due to Covid, and I happen to live near nature, so it's really easy to find rejuvenating activities that are Covid safe. And I have a partner. I have family, friends, colleagues, so really a lot of support. Watching the world, it's been something of another story because there's so much suffering and so much division among people, which I think makes suffering worse and to. Our theme of today, makes it harder to feel a sense of safe social connection, because at least large swaths of the world feel like they're in some other camp and we might feel alienated from them. Among my patients, which is where I've gotten the most intimate look of the different ways that people have been suffering. I think it's the pain of isolation during COVID that's been the worst. I was just talking to someone this morning who is immunocompromised, and she's still having the experience that I remember earlier in the pandemic personally, which is that any Person that I might see on the street or run into in a store was potentially threatening to me because they might be carrying the virus. And for immunocompromised people who haven't been able to be, well, vaccinated is particularly scary. So there's that stress and that impediment to safe, supportive relationships going on. Also, generally people who are living alone without good support networks that I see, they seem to really, really be suffering again, especially if either they're immunocompromised or.

If they have somebody in their world who is immunocompromised. And because of that they have to be really careful in their movements. You know, the other thing that I've seen is that people, probably a little less severely traumatic, but people with young kids who are like in and out of school and in and out of either daycare or able to go on play dates or not, as each wave, the pandemic has passed, they've really had a hard time during this. You know, it's very stressful being the parent of young children, period. You know, the various commercials notwithstanding that make it seem like, oh, it's just bliss having a child. No, actually it's quite difficult. And all of our studies of this say it's a very stressful period having young kids. But being isolated and never knowing whether you're going to have to take off from work or not has really been tough. And the other thing is just despair over the divisiveness, particularly the political and cultural divisions, I think has caused a lot of pain. But in all this there are silver linings. My patients have also taught me a lot about resilience. And those that have more relational resources, in other words, are able to connect with other people, or even those who just have a history of supportive relationships are definitely doing better than those who don't have that.

In the psychology field, we talk a lot about attachment, particularly the idea of secure attachment. Secure attachment as a child predicts all sorts of resilience later in life. And, and what that means is it's actually done by doing these studies where you take an 18 month old child, have them with a primary caregiver, let's just say a mother, to make it simple to have the image and the kid's being held by their mother and then a surrogate comes in, a lab worker comes in and the mother hands the child over to the lab worker and the mother leaves and the child typically will become distressed. Securely attached children will become distressed and they'll cry and whatnot. The lab Worker will try to soothe them, Usually with only partial success. And then after a little while, the mother comes back in. And we see what happens in those relationships where inside of a few seconds, once the child's in the mom's arms, they're able to settle and soothe and use the mom's love and care to get an internalized sense of. If we were to put words in their mouth, it would be something like, it's okay, sweetheart. That feeling that it's okay, sweetheart. Kids that are able to get that from their parents and we can study. That is studied extensively in the lab later, go on in life. And whether it's that they've been exposed to combat or they're living alone during COVID they have an easier time of it because they have. I think of it as the internalized Mr. Rogers. You know, that you're okay as you are, and this is enormously helpful. And the people I work with who didn't have that or who worse have real frank abuse or neglect as their early childhood history. Boy, this makes it so, so much harder for them.

Now. Last thing I want to say about this is that people can be alone, but if things are going okay inside, they might get their sense of connection as connection to nature or a pet or animals generally, or plants or the woods, or a connection to God. Anything that's making people feel that they're connected to something alive outside of themselves Seems to do a lot to offer resilience, Even for those folks who are struggling with.

You know, with real difficulty because they're more isolated or they're experiencing trauma during this. During this time.

Wow. Yeah, you covered a lot of territory there.

So.

I want to circle back to this question of having secure attachments and the depths that some of us have to deal with and what we can do about that in creating greater resilience for ourselves, Especially in the sphere of relationships. And, yeah, I have a number of close work colleagues that I interact with a lot who have young children. And it's been a really challenging time for parents. And like you, I feel blessed and privileged to have a good home situation With a loving partner and friends and family and colleagues and a good home situation. But I really remember, in fact, I wouldn't say I've recovered from it completely, of being out in public at the grocery store or where have you. And kind of regarding. Suddenly everybody's the enemy, right? Like, oh, you know, and what a weird feeling, right? And still when I go out walking down the street, you know, still just a little bit, you Know, walk a little over to the side here. And.

That is kind of like a double whammy, because although we have lots of sources of individual resilience and we can cultivate greater individual resilience, but another major source of our resilience is our social networks, our relationship being in that field of trusted social relationships. And so we're under all this pressure, this experience of secondary trauma, sometimes primary trauma, and one of our greatest sources of resilience is. Is cut off. Right. So really a double whammy situation that we've all been going through.

And I think, you know, as you talk about, I'm thinking of some experiences I've had recently. The divisiveness in the culture really makes it worse.

I've traveled a bit lately and, you know, airports have these, you know, pretty firm rules about mask wearing. But then you see the people who are really deliberately wearing the mask, you know, not just below their nose, but virtually on their chin to cover their beard or something.

It's like.

Exactly. And it's a political statement.

For many of them. And because we, you know, we've developed this into this cultural moment where protecting one another is seen as siding with one side of the political spectrum and not wearing a mask is seen as standing up for individual liberties and freedom. It's very easy to feel alienated from one another simply depending on what we're signaling in terms of mask wearing. And of course, there's the double level if you're. I'll tip my hat. I'm a mask wearer. Right. You know, I think we should try to protect one another. And it does line up somewhat with my political beliefs.

But for then the other to not only be one of them and that divisiveness and that I could work with, but to feel like they're threatening me because they're more likely to have been exposed and they're now not protecting me by wearing the mask themselves. It really amplifies this, I think, our political and cultural moment. We're not all rowing in the same direction with this.

Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out, because I think it really does impact all of us, and it certainly has impacted me. I mean, it feels like the political landscape has shifted so much in the last five years and such, this movement to the extremes. I've been a progressive and liberal my whole life, but I kind of feel like that world went so far left, I'm not sure I belong there anymore. And maybe I'm actually more of a centrist, though. I always think of myself as being more liberal and progressive than that. But, you know, it's not like being in the center. You don't have a feeling of having a tribe, having a community. You're just kind of. There's probably a lot of people, but there's no identity. Right. And so it's like, if you want to get that sense of belonging, people are gravitating to the far right or the far left to get that sense of belonging, and it's just getting more and more polarized. So there's. There's some background sense for myself that for the last five years or so, I felt like part of my home has been missing my cultural home feeling. You know, Whereas for many years, I. I kind of felt I knew my tribe. Right. I had that sense of belonging.

Right.

So there's so many things going on.

Yeah. And even if we can get a cultural home by being on this team against that team, I think that's less wholesome and less supportive ultimately than feeling like a part of humanity.

Absolutely. That's why I'm not there. Yeah, exactly. I wish I could. There's been times when I wish I could take the blue pillars and finally feel at home in my tribe again, but it's just. I don't feel like that's in the good direction for all of us. So, yeah, a lot going on.

So our focus today is on.

Relational resilience and healing trauma. And you mentioned secure attachments, and we all get what we get in childhood, and many of us have attachment deficits of one kind or another, or it's a mixed bag. And. And, you know, that really does predict so many later things in life in terms of our psychological flexibility and capacities and so forth, and can be really predictive of lots of disorders and struggles we may have. So, you know, it's wonderful that maybe we have that and then it shows that we'll do well with challenges later in life. But what if we don't? Or what if we have it here and don't have it here? It's a bit of a mixed bag. I'm sure you have worked with many, many patients and clients who've had various levels of attachment deficits. So.

What do we know about wherever we are, how we can actually create greater resilience through relationship? What does it take to create resilient relationships that then can actually be a source of resilience for us individually as well?

Well, I think one really important thing is simply honoring relationships, Simply getting it that relationships are really important for everyone's well being. I have a friend and colleague named Bob Waldinger who is unusual in a number of regards. He's a psychiatrist, he's a psychoanalyst, he's also a Zen priest. And he happens to run the Harvard Study for Adult Development, which is the longest running study on longitudinal development, really asking the question of what are the basic building blocks for well being. And Bob, he has a wonderful TED Talk, by the way, which you can Google to watch this. He says the jury is in. So this study followed some 700 odd men starting in 1938, and it was all men because Harvard was all male back then. And half of the guys in the study were Harvard undergraduates and half of them were, were poor kids living in the tenements in Boston. And they measured everything they knew how to measure in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and then got more sophisticated as time went on and started measuring lipid levels and.

Inflammation in the body. And then they started interviewing spouses and children of the men. And they started looking at every measure they could get for physical and psychological well being. And what Bob would say is, the jury's in. We now know the most important element for sustained well being throughout a lifetime is having good relationships. And interestingly and actually relievingly, good relationships don't mean they have to be harmonious. Right. They can be relationships in which we argue about things, in which we bicker, in which we disagree, but they have to be relationships in which we feel if push came to shove, if one of us were in trouble, the other one would come through, the other one would be there, would have our back in some way. And so just knowing that that is a critical element in well being is going to redirect our attention toward our relationships. And simply valuing our relationships is an important first step. I'll also mention. Go ahead.

I just think they're coming out with a book about that study soon. I had the pleasure of interviewing Bob for one of our previous summits and really important study. There's so much research, that study and many others pointing to really long term, close, healthy, functional relationships that's just so critical to happiness, longevity, physical health, emotional health, the whole thing.

Absolutely, yes. And I forgot to mention that yes, Bob does have, with a colleague, has a new book coming out describing this. The other thing, just having been a psychologist for quite a number of decades, as you can see from the gray hair, you know, early in my training there was such an emphasis on helping children develop a sense of autonomy and independence and individuality. And the field has really matured with as, as the research has grown. And frankly, as more women have entered into the field, there are now more women psychologists than there are men psychologists. And the shift has been, no, it's our capacity for connection that is, that's the jewel in psychological development. And how might we foster that?

So that brings up the question, how might we foster that? Which you're asking. And it's interesting. I've seen two different.

Patterns from the changes that Covid has brought about.

First, in terms of couples that are relatively isolated, and earlier in the pandemic, many were quite isolated. And those where they're dealing with health issues might still be quite isolated. There were some couples where being together all the time was really hard and it was driving them further apart that they had their relational rhythm involved, mostly getting a lot of needs met outside and then coming together for this or that in the relationship. And those folks suffered a lot. There are other folks for whom being forced together made them come closer together. That was actually my personal experience with my wife. Like if we were not. If one of us hurt the other one's feelings, we were stuck with the other one. They were our only friend that we were going to go for a walk with or hang out with. It couldn't be easily diffused into other relationships. So we were more forced to work it out. And actually we did and we started enjoying each other's company more so under these conditions. So it is interesting to think of how Covid and these shifting external circumstances might work. One or the other might work one way or the other. People who are co parenting young children, boy, a lot more tension seems to be the case. It's hard to come together because they don't have any free time together to be able to talk. They're always on.

Another example is where political beliefs are causing family divisions. The people who can't talk to their relatives because they have differing views about what Covid is and how to deal with it or whether or not to get vaccinated. That has caused all sorts of difficulties. So just interesting to see that the pandemic has brought different sorts of relational challenges that way.

So what to do to foster these relationships? I think the most important thing is noticing that relationships require attention. And that's why emphasizing how important they are is itself such an important first step. When I'm working with couples, I'll often point out that there are three entities we need to take care of here. We need to take care of one partner's thoughts, feelings and reactions. We need to take Care of the other partner's thoughts, feelings and reactions and the needs of both partners. And then we need to take care of the needs of the relationship. And the relationship itself is as though it were a third entity, as though it was a being, if you will, that needed attention, care, nurturing. We needed to notice when it's not getting enough nutrients, notice when it's under threat in some way, and really attend to it in that way. Just having that as our project, I think is really important. There are so many people who. So many times we can go through our day in relationships with people where we're mostly focused on what we might call an executive functioning level, trying to get things done. Well, we've got to get the car repaired, we have to cook dinner, we have to vacuum the living room, that kind of thing. And very often when things go wrong, what's happening is one or the other or both parties are mostly operating on this executive functioning level and they're ignoring the relational level. They're ignoring the way in which they might have just spoken to their friend, their colleague, their partner might have. What would that have felt like to the other? Because they're busy trying to get something accomplished. So if we're going to tend to relationships, we have to notice that the relationship needs love and care and whatever we're doing, whatever we might be doing on an executive level, yeah. We also have to be focusing on the relational level. Personally, it took me a long time to learn this and my wife's been a great teacher about it, but it's been a really important lesson. Not one that I don't forget sometimes, but that I come back to over and over.

Two other things that I'll just mention that I think are essential building blocks. One is we need a lot of self awareness and the capacity to bear our own emotions to be in relationship, because we have to notice what we're actually feeling so that when things go wrong, and they will go wrong, we're able to communicate what actually just happened there and to notice it. Also, if we're in touch with our emotions, we. We're going to notice when things are off kilter relationally because we're not just going to be in our heads, planning, doing, et cetera. We're going to notice something doesn't feel right. And then the last, I think, big element is the willingness to communicate and the willingness to be vulnerable in communication. And I'm sure we'll be exploring that more because I think that's such a central piece of making relationships work.

Yeah, Absolutely. So a couple things stood out there. For one, the Harvard study, the longitudinal study that Bob Waldinger is directing now, that even if a relationship has problems and arguing and the usual tough relationship has, if there's this default level of, you might call it, safety or something, that people know when push comes to shove, they've got each other's back and they trust there's some ground to the relationship that they can trust. And I was involved in, I have. I'm still involved in a practice called the Way of Council. It's a community and a type of work, and it's kind of a dialogue work that's done in circle listening circles and so forth. And there's also a dyadic form where you do it in pairs and couples do. Couples work with it. And sometimes we actually said, you know, you'd have them sitting in chairs or cushioning. You actually have a third chair at their cushion. That is for the relationship.

It's really like a separate entity. And sometimes in the middle of this process, there often is a witnessing circle witnessing it. Someone from the witnessing circle may take that seat. And it's literally like when it's coming through general, it's almost like they're channeling the voice of the relationship, or sometimes one of the two partners will change seats and bring out that voice of the relationship. And it really can become an energetic field that I think can hold a couple of whatever kind of, you know, couple partnership through the hard times. But it takes work to create that. I think my. My experience was that you create that not just on a conceptual level, but almost as an energetic field that can hold a relationship through the work of intimacy of all kinds. And, and, and through that listening and sharing. You know that when you're working on the relationship, you're spending time focused on a relationship. It's an investment that you're putting an investment in the bank, and it stays there and it can really get you through the tough times. I'm curious if that resonates with your experience.

Yeah, that's great. I haven't seen that particular model, but as you describe it, I find myself smiling like it sounds perfect. Right?

Because that's a way to really honor the relationship and really notice what's happening in the relationship. And I. I've been doing mindfulness practice for a long time. And the particular mindfulness practices that I was first trained in come out of Buddhist traditions where, you know, they. We tend to re. Examine our conventional sense of self and who we think we are. And, you know, There's a lot of different ways of being me. And one kind of me feels separate in a way from, from the rest and feels like it's independent and focused on thoughts and feelings happening in here. But there's another kind of me that feels like a we right when who I am is us. And I've often remarked, particularly in later stages of my life, that.

Yes, my wife and I have different needs, impulses and feelings, but we have so co evolved over time that the me that I think of as Ron, I can't distinguish from the me that is part of this entity, which is Ron and Gina that happens to be her name.

It's as though you've got. Where you see vines growing together. And of course the shape of the vine is so determined by the other vine that it's growing with. And this can exist both in a partnership. We can see this in the level of family, we can can see it at the level of community. But you know, I think it's, it's, you know, a whole shift in the sense of who we are is ultimately where this can lead. Yeah.

And if the idea of a relational self sounds foreign to maybe some of our audience, you know, one way I think we all know the truth of this, that our self structure, our self sense actually is situated in the relational field. It's not the skin encapsulated thing, because when we have major losses, the process of grieving, one of the reasons I think it's so difficult is that we've lost part of ourselves. And it's a real who am I at this point without this person in my life? And then there's a time of having to reweave a new sense of self and a new set of nested relationships. And that takes time. And I think why the grieving process takes so much time. So I think that's one way in which we can go get a window of. Oh yeah, actually I do. My sense of self is bigger than just this.

Absolutely. And you know, it goes way back. There's the father of, often called the father of American sociology, is a fellow by the name of Cooley. And he coined the term the looking glass self. And this goes way back this, around 1900 or so. And this is looking glass in the old meaning of the word, as a mirror. And he was saying that who we feel ourselves to be is constantly being created by the reflections that we have in the eyes of others. So even the sense of independent or separate self is formed in the cauldron and is constantly being reformed in the cauldron of all the reflections that we get in the eyes of others.

Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned mindfulness and you know, without having, at least for me, it feels like, or I imagine with, without having a mindfulness practice, some kind of reflective awareness practice that gives us, you know, that kind of meta awareness or metacognition where we can kind of be witnessing what's going on and more aware of ourselves, our own thoughts, feelings and habitual patterns and those of others. Getting in relationship without that is like walking through a minefield blindfolded. It's like two people walking through a minefield blindfolded. Right. And we all know, even those of us who are longtime mindfulness practitioners, it's still challenging, right? The racial field is still that. That's the real, the mountain towards enlightenment, if there is one is in the relational field. Right. And so part of what we bring to it is all of our own, you know, conditioning and some of that which we continually undermine our own sense of resilience. And you've written about that, I think, in your new book. So I wanted to ask you about that. The extraordinary gift of being ordinary, finding happiness right where you are. You talk about that we have this proclivity to be constantly evaluating ourselves and criticizing ourselves. And that kind of undermines our just that kind of integrity and well being and resilience. And then if you have two people doing that in their own style, with their own nuances in a relationship, then that can start firing on each other. Right. And create more. So you can have this third energy called the relationship, which can be a font of well being and resilience or it could be a big mess, Right?

Absolutely. And.

You know, so often it's our self evaluative judgments that are part of what blows up the relationship. Because in some way. Well, there are many examples, maybe I can mention a few of them, maybe dial back a little bit. You know what got me interested in this theme, you know, and writing this book. There I was, you know, in my 60s and having spent literally decades doing mindfulness practice. I started when I was like a 17 year old kid and decades studying psychology, being a psychologist, having been in my own therapy myself. And you would think that from all those practices I would have established something called a secure identity or coherent sense of self. And yet what I was noticing, to be honest, was my feelings about myself were fluctuating, sometimes hourly, sometimes by the minute, sometimes depending on what email had just come in, depending on whether I just had a good interaction or a bad one with My wife. My appraisal of myself as a psychologist would be pretty much based on the last session if it went well. Hey, I've got a gift for this. And all these years of practice and training are paying off. Look how good this is. Or if it went poorly, you know, I knew this wasn't my calling. I should have been a mechanical engineer. So, you know, noticing this in myself and thinking, you know, what's up here? How come all these practices haven't really worked to come up with something more solid or secure as a sense of self and why still, you know, self consciousness concern. Look, I'm here doing this interview with you, and I'm constantly evaluating. Oh, yeah, that sounded good. When I said, oh, yeah, that didn't sound so great. Oh, yeah, well, Fleet was interesting in this. You know, it's still, still going on. So what's up with this? And, you know, one hypothesis was, well, okay, you know, I was picked last for some sports teams in elementary school, and I guess I've never gotten over it. So I've got these lasting vulnerabilities, or maybe I just am inadequate. But my other hypothesis was that there's something pretty universal about this. And certainly when I looked at my caseload, everybody that I worked with was struggling in some way, either trying to hold on to some kind of positive feeling about themselves, of being special or talented or good or attractive or something like that, or trying desperately to avoid the horrible sinking feeling of not being good enough, of having failed again, of having disappointed others and the like.

When I started thinking about.

Might this be universal? And if so, what's it about, I realized. I started digging into the evolutionary psychology literature and realized that these constant self evaluations are the human equivalent of the pecking orders and the ranking that happens in so many social species. Birds have pecking orders, some crickets have pecking orders. All sorts of mammals have pecking orders where there's a dominant male and, you know, and the females that consort with them. And primates have elaborate, elaborate pecking orders. And instead of just, you know, beating our chest and posturing in that way, although we do do that as humans, the way it manifests is always thinking about how I'm doing and how do I compare. And the reason these pecking orders are so powerful is because those higher up in the pecking orders would have a greater chance of passing on their DNA. They'd have a greater chance of having access to resources and taking care of their kids. So I started thinking about the world through this lens, and how does this shape us. And to come.

To your question and the theme, it's interesting.

Relationships are both the antidote to this kind of self preoccupation and this sort of self esteem rollercoaster of feeling good about ourselves and bad ourselves at ourselves. And they're the fruit of being less self preoccupied. Let me explain that a little bit. You know, when we're talking to a friend, Peck, when I'm talking to you right now, and I, you know, we don't know each other super well, but we've, we've crossed paths a number of times, done these things together and I can't use a friend. And if we're being honest with one another, and I really appreciate your honesty here, I feel like I'm part of a we. I'm less preoccupied with how's Ron doing? And more interested in the experience of connecting with you and hearing your ideas and sharing mine with you and, and being this we together. Because when we feel like a we and you know, check this out for you or the, you know, our, our viewers, when you're with a friend where nobody's posturing and you're just being honest, these words about how I'm doing, they start to relax because we feel like we're part of a we. And then when these feelings about how I'm doing start to relax, we actually find it easier to get into relationships and to have fulfilling relationships. I think one of the reasons why people really gravitate toward relatively evolved meditation teachers and spiritual leaders this way. The ones who have really done this work is when we're with them, we don't feel like they're worried about how they're doing and how we're evaluating them. I've had the privilege of having some encounters with the Dalai Lama and a friend of mine pointed out, yeah, it doesn't feel like he's scanning the room for the best networking opportunity. It feels like he's actually there with us, not judging us, just kind of interested in the moment. And when we're with somebody, they don't have to be at the level of the Dalai Lama, but when we're with somebody who's basically not so caught up in self evaluation, we feel relaxed and we feel connected and that feels so good to us. Conversely, of course, when we're with somebody who is like, posturing and showing us all the important people they know, like the Dalai Lama, sorry, but who's, you know, who's somehow caught up in this, we immediately start feeling inadequate and, you know, oh, gosh, I haven't accomplished this, I'm not as good a person, I don't have as many friends, whatever the dimension is as relevant to us, but we get activated. So one of the things that we learn when we dig into and start looking at this preoccupation with self evaluation is, oh boy, it really gets in the way of relationships and it's really a pathway. Relationships are a pathway out of preoccupation with this. And just to say a few more words about how it gets in the way of relationships and why it's important to work on this, let's take an intimate relationship. I'll take my marriage for example, when I realized that I've been a less than optimal partner, usually because my wife's given me some rather direct feedback about that. And I'm starting to feel ashamed about having blown it again, having not attended to something that's important to her emotionally that I really think I should have attended to. If I can't bear to think of myself as a not so great husband right now and I'm going to get defensive, right, And I'm going to get into blaming her in some way, I'm not going to be able to tolerate the shame of feeling like, you know, I blew it here. And we know where that's going to go in the relationship, right? That, that is not going to help us to, to come back together. But if, if I found pathways to be somewhat less preoccupied with me and somewhat less preoccupied with how am I doing right now and connected to other forms of well being that are more sustainable, then I'm going to be able to admit my mistakes, whether with her or even at work, to be able to say, oh, I blew that or I'm sorry I missed that or so often in the world we're living in a diverse world, it's easy to hurt people's feelings, to commit microaggressions of various sorts that we're not aware we're doing at the time. And if we catch wind that that's, that's occurred, it's so different how it unfolds. If we're able to say, oh gosh, you know, oh, I'm not very good at this, I'm sorry I blew it. Thank you for the feedback versus I didn't really do anything wrong and the like. So there are so beginning to use as one of the objects of our mindful awareness, how am I doing with these self esteem fluctuations? What's catching me? What am I using as my building blocks to try to feel okay about myself, to Try to feel like I'm good enough or I'm high ranking in the primate troop, or at least I'm not terribly low ranking. And learning how to work with the emotions that come up under those situations and even seeing how our whole sense of self is gets constructed this way can really free us to be more involved in relationships, whether intimate ones or less intimate ones, in a way where we get more safe social support and then that supports the whole enterprise.

Wow. Well, a couple of threads I wanted to follow on there and in the context of your book, which I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I would imagine it's all about really learning how to be with ourselves and appreciate ourselves just as we are. And I'm sure mindfulness plays a role in that. So without that, we get into these cycles of pumping ourselves up and then that collapses. Right. So I'm a winner, I'm a loser. Right. In whatever form of that is. Right. And we're never going to stabilize ourselves in that. I'm a winner, I got it all together. Right. So we're trapped in that fluctuation. And I think one of the ways out is actually to drop into that sense of whatever that other feeling is, I'm a loser, I'm no good, or my insufficiencies or. And be willing to feel that and feel the vulnerability of that. So that's one piece. And in terms of relationships, that ground of relationship, one way of describing might be two people who have the ability to be vulnerable with themselves in that way and then share that vulnerability with others, because that's going to bring on.

Also having the pleasure of having conversations with Stephen Porges for this day on the Summit and. And his polyvagal theory work. The idea of how we help keep our social engagement systems online with each other, that sense of safety and shared vulnerability is one way to do it. And then we know from our mindfulness traditions that to the extent that we're willing to continue doing our work, both individually and relationally within being willing to be vulnerable, we start to touch into some ground, a deeper ground where we can connect with some innate good, unconditional quality of goodness, that I am fundamentally okay. That that's different than these two parts. Right. And it seems like vulnerability and awareness are really the key.

Yeah, no, you bring out several really, really important points here. One of them is this ground of basic goodness that we may drop into is not a goodness which is contrasted with badness.

Right.

It's not about, oh, I'm doing it Right now, it's that.

It's.

It's ordinariness. It's the Extraordinary Gift.

Your book title. That's what I liked about your book title.

It's about. No, just an organism like the other organisms. And organisms are inherently magical and wonderful, but not because they're doing a good job at being an organism. Simply as an organism, this is our birthright. And the other thing you said that is, I think, critically important. Important is so often where the. What's hanging us up and what's getting us all activated in having to prove ourselves or trying to keep up with others or fear of missing out or even. I mean, this gets very funny among meditators. You know, among meditators, it's not so much I'm trying to prove I'm smart, I'm trying to prove that I'm sexy and attractive, or I'm trying to prove that I'm rich there. I'm trying to prove that I'm less concerned with self esteem than other people are. I'm less hooked on ego. I'm less narcissistic. Right. That becomes our goal that we're doing. But humans, we have this remarkable capacity to turn anything into.

A comparative arena. But the key thing is whatever we're getting activated by.

Invariably relates to some past injury because, you know, from so early in our life, we have these injuries where, you know, like I mentioned, you know, you know, not being picked for the sports team in elementary school and at the time, as a, you know, as a little kid, not really having the resources to fully grieve it and kind of pushing it out of my awareness and compensating by, you know, being good at talking and being good at school and other aspects of school than athletics. And this is what we do. And those parts of us or those experiences of hurt, they kind of get buried. As one of my patients put it quite eloquently. He said, when we bury feelings, we bury them alive. They don't just disappear. And I mentioned that to another patient who said to me, yeah, and the hole's never cheap enough, right?

These are going to come back. And they come back when we're in an analogous situation. So, I mean, personally, I could be in a situation where I've had a couple of experiences during COVID where I was supposed to do a workshop and then enrollment.

Wasn'T going to be so good because of COVID in part, but maybe because other people want another workshop instead of mine. And the sort of a little bit the crestfallen feeling, oh, well, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not such a great teacher or this is, you know, there goes my career. I can spiral sometimes with this, but then if I inquire about it, just as you're suggesting, I start noticing. Oh, yeah, wow. What's that feeling? Oh, yeah. Connects to that experience that I've had with quite a long list of girlfriends earlier in my life, you know, moments when they weren't so interested in me. That's what's getting activated and realizing that we do need our mindfulness, this practice or other therapeutic techniques that we use to be able to work on healing all of those past hurts so that we're not so reactive now. So every little symbol of being wonderful or terrible isn't so intense for us because it's not resonating with such a backlog of buried feeling.

Wow.

Yeah.

And you know, the difficulty. And I want to say that this all applies to bureau being with ourselves. It applies. I don't want people who are single to feel like they're left out of the conversation because this applies to all of our relationships. And with that Harvard study, even though long term, safe, workable relationships are important, they don't have to be primary relationships, they can be other relationships. And so everything we're talking about here applies to the health and the quality and the life satisfaction we get from how we relate with ourselves, work colleagues, friends, family members, as well as primary relationships. Yeah. Thank you. And we know in all these relationships that it when we're involved in all this self criticism and self evaluation of blame and the triggering from our past stuff, our childhood stuff and so forth, we often tend to project that then onto our partner or onto whoever we're in relationship with. And we so easily move from to blame. Right. And because obviously we're trying to protect our own tender heart and we don't want to. We've been blamed enough in life. So we just almost instinctually deflect, reflect everything, and then project it onto others. And it's so hard to kind of untangle that I think it really takes. The one great thing I love about that Harvard study is hopefully that message really gets out and so people realize, whoa, it really makes sense to invest in my relationship here. Maybe I've kind of let it slide or maybe it's gotten to a level of tolerating each other. No, just like it's important to keep investing in my own health. It's important to invest in this relationship. And that takes some work. My wife and I are going through A series of books that we study together. Right, Dan, Catherine Hendricks. We're doing one. David Rico's book, How to be an Adult in Relationships. I think we'll look at your book together. And doing that work together, having that shared commitment to kind of figure out working for ourselves together, it just makes everything different because otherwise, again, it's like being in this minefield blindfolded. Is it my stuff, is it their stuff, his stuff, her stuff? Who's blaming who? What? You know, it can be so confusing.

And it takes so much humility to do this. Well.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I really appreciate your work. I'm really looking forward to reading your new book, Ron and I wonder if you'd be willing to.

Offer any kind of simple practice here that we could, that you could introduce to for three to five minutes, something about maybe creating a ground and moving out of that self evaluative, self critical space, either just for ourselves or in the sphere of relationship.

If you're in a place where you're not driving a car or something so that you're able to and comfortable, perhaps closing your eyes or if not having a soft gaze, we can just start with a minute or two of the breath.

Just settling into the present moment and feeling what it feels like to be here breathing.

This is an exercise for working with the fact that we're still in a moment of a lot of uncertainty in the world. That's always been the case, but I think the pandemic has made it particularly so.

You know, we don't know when the next wave is going to come. All of our plans are always in pencil rather than in pen now, which has always been the case, but we're more acutely aware of it now.

And a very simple kind of practice, a little bit of a mantra to go along with just being present and just being with the breath is even though the future is uncertain, here and now I'm safe.

Even though I don't know what's going to come next.

Here and now I'm safe.

Even though everything keeps changing.

Here and now I'm safe.

And even though everything is uncertain, I'm not actually alone. We're going through this together.

Even though I may experience good fortune or bad fortune.

We'Re going through this together.

Even though I may encounter difficulty.

There will be other people I can connect with.

I'm not alone in this.

So even though we don't know what's coming next, here and now we're safe.

Even though the world is constantly changing, here and now we're safe.

Even though all things have always been impermanent and that can be frightening here and now we're safe.

And just to bring this brief practice.

To a close, I'll ring a bell. And let's listen to the bell here and now until it trails off and can no longer be heard.

Ah, beautiful. I could feel the well being all the way down to my toes. Thank you so much. Dr. Ron Siegel. Your latest book, the Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary. Finding happiness right where you are. So wonderful to be with you today. Really a joy. And I feel more resilient just having had this conversation.

Wonderful to be with you and I really appreciate both your questions and your reflections and perspectives on these themes. It's been a delight. Thank you.

Thank you. Be well.

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