Elise Loehnen: Five Things I’ve Learned this Year
Today, it’s just me. I thought I’d round out the year by trying something different, and offering five big things I’ve learned this year.
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Hi, it's Elise, host of Pulling the Thread. Today is a special episode in that it's just me. I thought I would try something new and offer a bit of a roundup of the biggest lessons that I've learned this year. Or maybe lessons I've learned in the past few years. Maybe it's being in my early 40s. Maybe it's, or I guess now mid 40s and this idea of starting to embody the second half of life. But I feel like I've changed so much in the past few years, working for myself, having no one to confer with and brainstorm with and triangulate responsibility onto it's a different landscape.
That's not to say that I don't have a lot of friends who give me advice and who we can bounce ideas off of each other, but it's just different when you're out there on your own being yourself. As many of you know, I've ghost written 12 books and on our best behavior was the first book that I've done under my own name, which was an entirely different process. People often ask me about that and I will say ghostwriting or co writing is pretty joyful and fun and easy because there's no ego. You're shaping and structuring other people's ideas and helping them bring those ideas into the world. It's a very different process than shaping and structuring your own ideas and writing about yourself. So, that was an experience. I could do a whole solo episode, too, about the resistance that I encountered in the publication process. Not from my editor, per se, but, from myself, just how hard it is to keep moving your work forward when you're tired and you want to give up. But invariably, and Steven Pressfield obviously writes about this in his books, The War of Art and Do the Work, which I highly recommend for anyone who is having pings of resonance right now but you will hit a wall and you will want to give up but that's the moment when the work really moves forward and so staying engaged staying in it Is the invitation to up level whatever it is that you're trying to create.
More on resistance, I didn't include it in the list for today, but maybe we'll do this again. I'd also love to do an episode where I answer questions and give book recommendations if anyone has any interest in that. And the impetus for this episode is, you know, I make videos on Instagram, although I've been doing this with less frequency because I probably like all of you feel very over social media and burnt out on all parts of it. But on Instagram I make etymology videos and talk about books and therapy modalities. And then I write a substack at EliseLoehnen.Substack.Com, where I do these pretty short essays about topics or ideas that I'm wrestling with. And I thought I would do this episode as some sort of mashup, the greatest hits, if you will, maybe.
I think, you know, what I'm working toward, and this was the subject of the newsletter that I wrote last night, for those who read it, it was about how self help needs a rebrand to personal responsibility, and this idea that the work we do on ourselves to increase our capacity, our containers for our own hard, dark emotions, for our own fear and anxiety and uncertainty, is work that we're really doing for the collective because the more we can take our own part of the shadow, the more we can process and metabolize and integrate our own exact anxiety, the less likely we are to project it onto other people. And there's so much of that happening right now. We're in a real crisis. So hopefully this episode offers answers to some a bit about this core idea. How can we increase our personal responsibility? How can we do work on ourselves that in turn makes the world a little less burdensome for other people?
So the first thing I'm going to start with is owning our wanting, which I've written about a lot, both in on our best behavior and on my newsletter. But it's this idea, comes from the chapter on envy that So few women in particular really know what we want, and there are issues with this and this isn't about wanting a new car or wanting a handbag. Sure, you could put those on the list. This is about deep existential wanting. This is daemon stuff. This is soul stuff. This is who am I? What am I doing here? And how can I serve? And what do I want that to look like? And Envy is so consequential to the beginning of sort of the genesis of on our best behavior. It's really where I started was examining envy and then understanding it as part of this system of deadly sins. And then locating it in my own life.
And it started with this throwaway comment from Laurie Gottlieb, who's been on the podcast before, and she wrote, a wonderful book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. And there's a small moment in her book where she says that she tells her clients to pay attention to their envy because it shows them what they want. And there was just something about that line, I'm sure this experience has happened to you, where something just hits you. I couldn't shake it. And I asked her about it when I interviewed her but I just kept thinking about it for two reasons. One, because I had a visceral reaction to the word envy. I hate that word. It sounds gross and ew, and I don't envy anyone. I have so much pride, ironically, about not envying anyone. So I had that immediate reaction, which knew that clearly I do have envy. I'm full of envy. And then I also, as a second part of that, couldn't identify what I want. I couldn't do it.
So that passage, that line from Laurie Gottlieb really started me in the process of recognizing that I actually wanted to write a book under my own name. I wanted to have pulling the thread. I wanted much of what I've come to create for myself, but I couldn't see it or recognize it or honor it. And so the wanting work, which I've seen women now do in circles and in community, is so powerful for two reasons. One, because it lets you actually start to listen to that soul's knock on the door to understand where you're being called, where you're wanted to walk. And then I also think that this inability to access our own wanting and the correlation of envy is the source of a lot of women on women hate and maybe this happens for men, too. I can't speak to that experience but what I was observing in myself and then diagnosing in the culture is that what we do because again because we're conditioned to subjugate all of our wants to other people's needs, we can't identify our wants, right?
And so when we see someone who has something that we want or is doing something that we want for ourselves, we feel visceral discomfort in our body. We feel ill at ease, we don't like it, and then we take that feeling and we project it onto the person who's making us feel bad. And so I think that's the source of, I don't like her, who does she think she is, she grates my nerves, why her? Her book really isn't that good. Her podcast sucks. Whatever it is, we can recognize it as it's coming out of our mouths when we deprecate the other person that it's not really about the other person, right? It's about us. This person is pushing on a dream that we have for ourselves if we're just willing to diagnose it.
Again, this isn't conscious. We don't really realize that this is what's happening, but this is the cycle, right? It comes up, we feel bad, we feel bad maybe because this other woman has kids who are really well behaved and read, or we feel bad because this woman has an incredibly successful career and what seems to be a highly functioning relationship, whatever it is, we feel bad, and then we choose to deprecate in order to get that bad feeling out of our bodies rather than letting it happen, letting it emerge. It moves very fast, I promise, once you actually let it come up, and then you say, oh, I want that. And this is where the sins start crashing into each other, because obviously there's this toxic myth of scarcity in our culture as well that suggests for women, and some of this is very grounded in reality, that there's only room for one.
She has that seat at the table, therefore to sit at the table, I need to dethrone her, I need to kick her out. Not, oh, I'll ask someone else to move, one of these men most likely, or I'll pull up another chair, but no, she needs to go. Because she has this, I can't have it too. This is how women have been conditioned and programmed to think. And instead, the move here is to say, Oh, I want that. And because she has it, I can have it too. She is showing me what's possible. This is, again, my soul pushing me forward. So I'm going to study her. I'm going to ask her. I'm going to watch her. You might not want exactly the same things, but she's a proxy. She's a model. She's a map of what's possible. And when I've seen women do this work in group, it's so powerful because you can take a group of women who seem to have a lot in common, right? Your first instinct or my first instinct is, oh, this is going to get interesting because a lot of these women are going to want the same thing.
And you can almost feel the scarcity descend. And then as you ask people to think about something that they want that they maybe haven't ever said aloud or even admitted to themselves, it gets very emotional very fast. I urge you, try it. Do it with your friends. And then what's beautiful is that as people start to express their wants, these deep, deep yearnings, one, they're beautiful, two, they're completely reasonable. Not that they have to be reasonable, but of course it's you're like, I want that for you too. I want that for the world. And then three, in the groups that I've participated in, nobody wants the same thing. Not even people who would seem like they might. They all want variations, often pretty far apart. And that's so beautiful. There's a spaciousness. that comes with that. There's room for everyone. So the wanting conversation is so essential, particularly for women or for anyone who has suppressed their own wanting in service of other people's needs. You're suffocating your soul. You're suffocating your soul.
Speaking of wanting, the other big piece of work that I did here that had to do with Bringing my book into the world is to recognize one that in some way all relationships are transactional. I know we don't like to hear that, but every marriage, even with your children, there's an exchange of love, affection, attention. It's all transactional. Some of it's more overtly transactional than others, but there's this hope, this longing for reciprocation, right? And any relationship that's entirely one way is deadening or not supportable, there's something that you're getting in return. So as I brought the book into the world, obviously I've been a magazine editor for a long time, decades, right? Of writing about other people's work and celebrating other people. And I've never really asked for anything. I haven't had anything that, where I've needed support and I had so much anxiety about it. And what I came to understand was a covert longing. This desire for help from people with platforms or podcasts or, magazine profile writing careers.
I wanted help and hoped that there would be some acknowledgment of some transactional nature of, Oh, I supported your work for a long time and I hope that you'll support mine. So I recognized how much anxiety I was carrying as I came into the publication of my book of just hoping, that longing, covert longing. And, of course, I was talking to a man who had reached out to me about his book, and I've interviewed him in the past, I really enjoyed talking to him, and he'd asked to come on my podcast, and his book published before mine, and I asked, you know, sort of, like, how do you do this? What do you do? And he was like, you ask. You ask people if it feels like your work is resonant for them, you ask them to share your work with their audience. You ask. You can't leave it unsaid. Otherwise, you'll always wonder. And as terrifying as it is to quote unquote know where you stand, There's a lot of clarity that comes from that.
And so I recognized in that moment that this is the time. This is when I ask. And so I did. I took all that covert longing and I made it overt and I asked and I didn't get everything I asked for. That's for sure. But I did get a lot of support from a lot of people. But what's interesting is that a lot of women and men who supported me. I'd never done anything for them. There was no core transactional element. And often some of the women who I've done a fair amount for did nothing. And that was really interesting to me. I don't quite know where I've landed, but it was interesting. And so for all of you, whether you have a project that needs support or you're entering into relationships, I think getting extra clear, I wrote a newsletter about this transactional relationships and shadow vows about this paper by Jungian analysts where he writes about how many of us go into marriage, for example, carrying shadow vows.
There's what's stated, an expectation of what you'll get from your partner: fidelity, support, friendship, et cetera. Most often that's stated or known. And then there's all the shadow vows that we carry in our unconscious, the secret hopes and longings that maybe our partner will, you know, become a billionaire or be a model mother, whatever that may mean, it's endless and we carry these from our family of origin. We carry these from the larger culture, but we then place them on each other in this covert transactional relationship longing way. And I promise you, the more comfortable you can get and thinking about all the relationships in your life and to recognize which ones are sort of covertly transactional, which ones are refreshingly overtly transactional?
I love my relationship with my therapist, for example, because it's overtly transactional. I pay him to listen to me and to help me, to reflect back to me and to help me process my life. And then which, which are the friendships maybe or the partnerships where they're deeply one sided, where there's a lot of asking or requesting or expectation of you and little in return. It's a really helpful exercise for evaluating and as I go into relationship with new people to really check myself. Do I have covert longing in here? Is there covert transactional expectation? Do I need to make that overt? Because that's the other thing is as I made my request, I recognized, I could make an overt request but for so many of these people who I've supported because it was a covert longing, it was never stated. There's no contract. I had never said I'm supporting you because I have an expectation, which I probably didn't even have at the time, that someday you'll support me. That was never stated. But guess what? It can be. It can be. And maybe there's no interest, but maybe there is. And so, I don't know, it's been a very helpful mechanism for me as I move forward.
So third, I have been thinking a lot about the drama triangle, which is Stephen Cartman's idea, which is victim, villain, hero. Although, a friend recently added that there's also the ghost. I don't know enough about that to talk about it, but this idea of the person who disengages or disappears. And the person who's been really teaching me about the drama triangle and this concept of being above and below the line is my friend Courtney Smith, who was on the podcast recently talking about Enneagram, if you missed that, she coaches Enneagram, but also Conscious Leadership Group, the Alexander Technique, Byron Katie, she's brilliant, super brilliant, was a McKinsey consultant, has a JD from Yale, a master's in public health from Columbia, she was a mathematical econ major at Wake Forest. And then, you know, coaches the Enneagram. I love people who play against type in that way and reaffirm that you can be an intellectual and still be interested in things that people think are maybe more out there. Although the way that she coaches that is incredibly grounded.
So Courtney, and this is from Conscious Leadership Group, the way that they coach the drama triangle is this idea that you are either above or below the line. And most of us spend a majority of our lives below the line. And yes, we can aspire to be above the line, but it's usually momentary before we're back down. And when you are below the line, you see the world is happening to you. You feel at its effects that little is in your control. You're looking for that drama triangle. Who's the victim? Who's the villain? Who's the hero? Typically we all have a preference for one role, but we tend to move around the triangle.
And then when you're above the line, the world is happening through you or by you. It's much more empowered. And you don't see the world stage as victim villains and heroes. You can break through the binary to something a little bit more evolved. And those roles continue to be present, but I'll tell you the way in which that happens. And the way to think about the drama triangle is that we're animals, we're constantly experiencing fear and threat, and our immediate reaction to that is to find our place, to find who is the villain in this scenario, who is the victim, is it me, or do I need to get in here and fix this, do I need to jump in and resolve this to make the discomfort and fear and anxiety go away?
So what drives us into the drama triangle is fear, and we're animals after all. We have a visceral response to threat. This is from the Sedona Method, but Courtney talks about how there's three essential sources of fear or threats. There's one that's fear or threat to your security. This is your physical and emotional well being and those of the people you care about, right? This is our livelihood, our safety. Then there's fear or threat to approval. This is our social belonging. We need to belong, otherwise we die or that's the signal to the brain. We know that it matters what people think about us. And then the third one is a fear or threat of loss of control.
And control is our certainty that we can stop anything undesirable or bad from happening. This is our instinct to make the world abide or conform to how we would prefer and like it to be. So those are the primary fear threats that drive us into the drama triangle where we choose a position. And when we're the victim, it's easy to identify the villain or the person who is making us feel bad or who is the bad person. Meanwhile, we're looking for the hero to rescue us. If we're The villain, Courtney talks about how we have a preference, and I want to add with victimhood, that there's a difference between being a victim, of which clearly there are very real victims in this world. And many of us have probably experienced that at some point in our life, and then there's victimhood which is more of a prolonged state, maybe many years after the event where you insist on staying in that disempowered position where you can blame how you feel on other people or factors. So that's the victim.
The second is the villain. And the villain is the one who actually has a very strong belief, per Courtney, about who is to blame, what needs to change, what needs to happen, in order for this feeling of threat to go away. So it's interesting, actually, the way that she distinguishes them, where the victim is more passive, the villain is more assertive. But you can also think of it from the perspective of the victim identifying a villain as well. But if you're taking the active villain state, then you're the one who is Knowing what needs to happen and what needs to change, which is slightly different than the role of the hero. Because in Courtney's view, the hero is the one who's trying to relieve the feeling of fear, both for themselves and for others. And she talks about how the hero does this through distraction or trying to soothe the situation, but they're not actually really resolving anything. They're trying to minimize or make the situation go away. But they're really just fixing the feeling of discomfort.
Now, this is the drama triangle and below the line, but there's a version of it that's above the line. This is, again, when you're above the line, the world is happening through you or by you. You have the power to affect your own reality and your perception of reality. This is where it gets quite cool, because these three roles persist, but they have a more evolved version. Courtney calls this the Empowerment Triangle, and in the Empowerment Triangle, the victim becomes the creator, the one who is taking responsibility for their experience. They are able to talk about what they want, they build their tolerance for fear and being in uncertainty and not knowing. The villain becomes the challenger, which instead of blaming people is Really getting people to face what's happening in reality, what's actually present, and to face their role in the system. And then the hero becomes the coach. And the coach is about helping people stand up for what they want. And I think that that's so beautiful. I would love to, of course, live above the line all the time. But, dare to dream, dare to dream.
Number four. This is a newer teaching. This is also in Conscious Leadership Group, and this is work I've done with Courtney as well. But it's being able to distinguish between facts and stories. And I think this is so essential, particularly in this deconstructionist period where truth has become contextualized. We are very focused on your truth might be different than my truth. Who's the person that's saying the truth? Whose version of history are we talking about? It's all based on context, which is why I think it's become quite slippery and given way to people in the culture who talk about things like alternative facts, right? This is why truth of really inviolable, absolute truth is slipping away from us and why we're really on shaky ground. And so I love this reframe because it's understanding that there are facts and a fact is something recorded on a video camera. This is not an AI video camera either. This is something that indisputably happened.
You walked into a room, you had dinner with someone, someone said this recorded phrase to you, or this was what was in the email. And then the story is how you make meaning from that factual event. And so much of our culture, 99. 9 percent of our culture is story, right? We're meaning making creatures. We agree on stories. We agree on creation myths. We agree on events that are largely, almost completely story. And story is beautiful. Story is essential. Your story matters. My story matters. But we get ourselves into trouble when we get into conflict and we're comparing stories. Because getting someone to abide by your story when they have a very different interpretation of events is hard. It's rare to find someone, a partner, a parent, someone in the culture who says, Oh, your story sounds better than mine. I'm going to abandon my story. Because stories are also so indelibly tied to our identity. They are defining. And when you drop your story, you lose your identity in some way, you have to change or move from that story.
This is also why people carry their defining stories around and can't let them go because they don't know who they are without the story they tell about themselves. So when I workshop facts versus stories with Courtney she had us do an exercise that's very powerful, which is you sit with someone and that person asks you, tell me a fact about yourself. You state a fact. I'm from Montana. Then they say, tell me a story you tell yourself about that fact. And then you launch into stories. They can be short phrases. The person thanks you, they ask you again. You can repeat the fact and tell another story. You could say, oh, I went on a date with a guy on Friday. What's the story you tell yourself about that fact? He hasn't called me or asked me out again because he thought I was unattractive. Rinse and repeat.
So you can understand the reason that this experience is so powerful is not only because you can immediately build intimacy with someone as they start to reveal the inner contents of their minds to you, but they start to see the inner content of their own mind, they start to see the way they've taken a fact and created a myth, potentially, the way that they've constructed a whole narrative about a father who worked late nights, or a partner who refuses to do the dishes, whatever it may be, you start to understand how much of your life is constructed on story. And again, story's beautiful, but you it's not a firm ground on which to compare factual evidence.
And, this distinguishing factor between the two has been so helpful for me. It's created a whole new level of literacy for me as I think about my own life and see what's happening in the world. And here's another great example, with people you love or people you're in relationship with, you can use the fact, this is similar to brené Brown's work where she talks about in the absence of information, we make up stories where you can say to your partner, you state a fact and then you tell the person the story you're telling yourself. So you can say, I've noticed that you've worked late every night this week. The story I'm telling myself is that you're trying to avoid me. And that's a much easier startup than confronting your partner by saying, are you having an affair? Or criticizing or going after them or rushing at them head on, but giving them an opportunity or space to say, Oh, sorry, babe, I've been trying to finish a chapter or I haven't been paying attention. I'll do better. It just creates a lot more room for your partner to come in with what might actually be present rather than having to confront. Your story first.
The fifth and final idea is a complex one. Well, in some ways, it's incredibly simple. And this is Ken Wilbur, who I'm minorly obsessed with. And in the new year, I'll be bringing you an episode about spiral dynamics, which Ken Wilbur has pushed forward. He didn't create that, but he's an incredible, he's a philosopher and an incredible synthesizer. In fact, he locked himself away , this is how the story goes, for three years, looking at every single system of personal human development, cultural development, social development, spiritual development, wrote down every system on a piece of paper and a yellow legal pad and then organize them and organize them until he came up with the coherent idea about a personal development and what's so profound about Ken Wilbur's work is this idea of transcend and include Although Father Richard Rohr likes it better as include and transcend, which I like too because it gets at that idea that the inclusion of all of these ideas is what drives us to the next level, not so much that there's that sort of the drive shaft that's behind, that's the energy that pushes us to a higher, wider perspective.
Ken Wilbur has written so many amazing books, many of which are very long. He synthesizes across so many different systems, and it's so fascinating and accurate and then provides an incredible bibliography. Also, if you want to go deeper into any of the thinkers, but some of his essential ideas along this idea of include and transcend are that there are these four quadrants of development that he calls wholarchies..
One is I. Then there's it, this is the difference between mind and brain, subjective and objective. And then there's we, and there's it. So there's the collective, and then there's sort of the objective version of the collective. And so as I mentioned, you know, one example for I is the mind, it's our sense of self. And then it's the way that we study ourselves, which sounds incredibly heady. So I'm hoping Ken will join me on the podcast in the new year. He has a new book coming out. But in the interim, I'm going to try and tell you one of his foundational ideas without confusing you. So, the impetus for transcend and include or include and transcend is this idea, this is Ken Wilbur writing in A Brief History of Everything, " all scientific descriptions can generally be summarized as the basic drive of evolution is to increase depth. This is the self transcending drive of the cosmos, to go beyond what went before and yet include what went before. And thus increase its own depth."
So an easy example of this, he talks about, you know, how we live in this moment in time where we hate hierarchy. This gets back to spiral dynamics, but we want to live in a world with no hierarchy, but our whole system would collapse without hierarchy, and he talks about this as wholarchy, which is these nested wholons. This is, I think, Kessler who came up with this idea, but that within these four quadrants that I told you about, I, It, we, it's that there are these nested wholarchies, which increase depth. And as you think about our progress, you can see the addition of depth and complexity as we evolve and age on this planet.
And his point is you don't just erase or eradicate what came before, but you transcend and include it. And to destroy any previous level, destroys the whole thing. It all starts to cave in. So this is an easy example of this. There are letters. Those letters form words. Those words form sentences. Those sentences form paragraphs. Those paragraphs form chapters. Those chapters form books. So you could destroy books and still have chapters. Right? You'd still have words and letters. But if you destroy letters, the whole thing implodes. And you can think about this existentially as our life on this planet. You can think about the earliest forms of life and then the development over time until you get to humans go away, all those earlier forms of life still exist, right? But if you destroy an earlier form of life, then humans don't exist.
So, you can wipe humanity, I know we like to put ourselves in the center, but you can wipe us off the planet and the biosphere still exists, but if you destroy the planet, If you destroy the most fundamental parts of life, then humans don't exist. So transcend include, and I use this not in such a heady way in my daily life, but to just understand that everything is present and everything belongs. And it's not our job to deny the existence or eradicate or push people out. It's to expand so that we can make sense of our more chaotic world, that we can create systems that are more inclusive of everything that we see around us, and that we can continue to increase depth by transcending and including.
And this is hard work. This requires us to break the way that we see things, to expand our own understanding, but it's really vital. This is Ken Wilbur on this idea of transcending and including, he writes, " The idea is that every stage of evolution eventually runs into its own inherent limitations, and these may act as triggers for the self transcending drive. The inherent limitations create a type of turmoil, even chaos, and the system either breaks down, self dissolution, or escapes this chaos by evolving to a higher degree of order, self transcendence, so called order out of chaos. This new and higher order escapes the limitations of its predecessor, but then introduces its own limitations and problems that can't be solved on its own level. In other words, there is a price to be paid for every evolutionary step forward. Old problems are solved or diffused only to introduce new and sometimes more complex difficulties."
Sounds like our current world and When I think about this moment in time where we're in disorder, we are responding to the order and conformity of previous generations, I hope that we find a way to include and transcend and reorder ourselves on a different plane that can hold all this complexity. Okay, thanks for listening. I'll see you in the new year.
