Dolly Chugh: Being A Good Enough Person

Dolly Chugh is an award-winning social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, where her research focuses on the psychology of “good people.” She’s also the author of the acclaimed book, The Person You Mean to Be as well as the brand-new, A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change. Both books serve as inspiring, yet practical guides for those of us who seek to be better. A More Just Future builds on Chugh’s first book, which equipped readers with the tools to be “good-ish” people who stand up for their values. In her latest, she offers a guide to reckoning with the whitewashed history of our country in order to build a better future. 

“The seeds of today’s inequalities were sown in the past,” she tells us in today’s conversation, and it will take an extra dose of resilience and grit to grapple with the truth of our history and to make the systemic changes needed to mend the fabric of our country. Moving from willful ignorance to willful awareness isn’t easy, leading to uncomfortable feelings of shame, guilt, disbelief, and resistance when we encounter revelations that run against what we have long been told. “But it is possible to love your country with a broken heart,” she says, imploring us to grapple with contradiction, employing the paradox mindset as we shift from the rigidness of “either/or” to the nuance of “both/and.”

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Wired for consistency…15:00

• Light vs. heat-based change…20:00

• Sitting in paradox…30:00

• Belief grief…40:00

MORE FROM DOLLY CHUGH:

A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change

The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias

“How to let go of being a "good" person—and become a better person,” TED Talk

“The Truth About Rosa Parks And Why It Matters To Your Diversity Initiative,” Forbes

Check out Dolly's Website

Follow her on Twitter and Instagram

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN:

I feel like when we last spoke, I was like, what's the next book? What's happening? And, so congratulations. I feel like your first book did just come out.

DOLLY CHUGH:

I think because of the COVID factor, right? Like those years, do they count? I mean, it came out in 2018, but right. It does feel like yesterday.

ELISE:

If feels fast.

DOLLY:

Yeah. It is, actually thank you. Yes it is. And you're writing a book, you know.

ELISE:

I am writing a book and it's interesting because you have been in my mind and you are in my bibliography because my book is in some ways about the ways, well, in many ways, it's about the ways that women are conditioned to be good and why that you would call it self threat or that threat to our ideas of our own goodness is so terrifying. And I would qualify, as I qualify in the book, you know, I'm a white, upper middle class, straight woman. I recognize this is definitely, I don't know if it's true of, I can't say whether it's true of all women, this is, you know, very much written from my perspective. Definitely I would argue true for the middle class. Have you read Rachel Simmons's book, that classic, Odd Girl Out?

DOLLY:

No, I'll write it down.

ELISE:

I think you would find it interesting. I mean, it's an old book, but it stands. It's about girlhood and aggression and it's a fascinating look at the way that aggression comes out for women, primarily in social forms, that's the acceptable version whispering, back channeling. Whereas physical aggression for boys is lauded. But anyway, she talks at the time even about how so much of the research is about white middle class girls. It's about that experience. That's my experience as well. It's the only perspective I know, but we cling to our goodness. I'm sure we were the target of books.

But this goodness, this sticky goodness, and I wanna talk about it from a gender perspective, a fair amount, because I don't see men grappling with this to the same extent, but I'm very curious for your perspective. I know that obviously is a foundation of your first book, a good enough person is letting go of this perfection of goodness or this idea that we can achieve moral perfection. And then your follow up is the psychology behind it, which I thought was so fascinating. So I wanna talk about all of it. I know that's not a question, but do you think it's gendered?

DOLLY:

You know I just wrote down that question, as you said it. So I don't, from an evidence standpoint, I don't know the answer, but certainly from a intuitive standpoint that really resonates right. Particularly because I think the way we talk about goodness is tied to being communal, right? It's something about being other oriented and so that's the the word association around goodness. And then, when you look at women and men with their condition to do, as you said, there's sort of agency is for men and communalism is for women. And so then that communalism seems to cross right into what we mean when we say “good person.” So that totally connects in a very strong way.

ELISE::

Yeah. I mean, that's just from where I stand watching the world and watching the world, particularly during COVID, and George Floyd, and watching so many men be largely silent, while women seem to engage in either art and debate about their goodness or get into this identity threat, feeling incredibly triggered, misunderstood, etc., or engaging with the work in meaningful ways. And I know that there are lots of people who engage with this work. So I'm not saying that that's gendered, but from what I've observed, it feels like men are like, “uh?” It was all women. It's been all women in my feed, not exclusively. I should be more careful with my language, but that's where I see it. And, we see it and so many assaults on our rights, right? Like men are largely silent about Roe V. Wade, etc. But it's interesting to me that men don't feel the need, nor are they pressured to defend their morality.

DOLLY:

Yeah. That's interesting. So a few thoughts are coming to mind with that. I think it's clear that they're not rewarded for doing it. I'm not as clear that they don't feel the need to do it. I think, you know, they are punished many times for caring about others. And so, I can see how, because it aligns with what women are rewarded for, we express it and because it doesn't align with what men are rewarded for, they may feel it, but not express it or may channel it in different ways.

I started drawing a little like diagram of just connecting a bunch of ideas that I had never really connected until you started connecting the dots, which is, we already connected at the beginning of the conversation communalism of women and this good person idea seems to align.We also know that women are conditioned often around perfectionism and that sets us up for a fixed mindset, a very brittle good person identity, where we do get triggered when it's threatened, because if we're not good, there is only one alternative, that we're bad. because it's so brittle, it's a fixed mindset. It's not dynamic and stretchy and growing and growth-y, or goodish, the way I've talked about it and written about it. And so that perfectionism seems to play into this dynamic that you're describing as well. So it does feel like it's a little bit of a perfect storm, isn't it? Like of expectations around women versus men and then how that plays out in these times of crisis and transition.

ELISE:

No, and that brittleness that you just mentioned, that feels so resonant. That it's also not this permanent state, right? Like we recognize that there's no finish line, there's no moment. And so you always talked about, and this has lodged in my mind, affirmation cookies, right? This desire, this ongoing need to be affirmed in our goodness. We want the cookie. We want that validation, which of course is not the reason to do anything. And we recognize that, but it's the only way that it makes us, I think, feel safe. Is that what it is? Is there a psychological desire to feel like you're on steady ground on the right side of history?

DOLLY:

Interesting. I think we can say that we are psychologically fueled by the need to affirm identities we care about. So those affirmation cookies, it's as just like we crave sugar and we're wired for that, we crave affirmation. And I actually don't even think we should feel bad about it. That's how we're wired. You know, there's a study that showed that for identities we care about, you know, value affirmation more than our favorite sex act or our favorite drink or time with a closed friend. I mean, we really crave it and seek it. And when we don't have it, we try to like find it and heat seek our way towards it. So yes, I do think those affirmation cookies are really central to this story. some of us want to be on the right side of history, if that's the identity we care about, then we will seek to affirm it. But I'm not sure that everybody's worried about being on the right side of history is I guess where I landed.

ELISE:

Yeah. What's the psychological ground that puts this desire to have our identity affirmed above all other pleasures or wants, what is that core thing?

DOLLY:

Yeah. I mean, there's lots of research on self threat, that's when you feel your identity is threatened. If you care about being on the right side of history and you do not think you're being seen that way, or you don't feel like you're behaving that way, you will feel that kind of red zone defensiveness. I would say my second book expands the idea from thinking about the research on self threat, to the research on social identity threat, and that's where groups we belong to. So if I, you know, identify as an American and I care deeply about my identity as American, as a proud patriotic American, that identity, if I feel like it's being, you know, somebody's chipping away at it or doesn't believe it, or, you know, is questioning it, I will feel that same kind of threat that I feel, that self threat, but now it's like part of this group I belong to. Or I think maybe if I'm more precise in describing it, if I feel my group is being criticized, like my ancestors are being criticized, my heritage is being criticized, I feel that same kind of threat.

ELISE:

Right. And then it becomes obviously incredibly discordant when your identity is as a patriotic American. And I loved your conversation about that. I very much relate to that. I'm very grateful to be American, but when it feels defaced or appropriated by like MAGA, right? And then suddenly you're like, “I can't love the flag” or these things become discordant in our minds about what does it even mean to be patriotic or nostalgic or grateful? It's big, right?

DOLLY:

It's really big. And that's where I'm writing from, that place, what you just described, that turmoil around that feeling, like wait is the only way to love my country, to never question it? Or to not look at what it has been and how it's affected the world now? I mean forget what other people think of me, I'm sort of wrestling with how to do that. Like now am I supposed to celebrate the 4th of July and Juneteenth? Am I not supposed to celebrate the 4th of July? Is it wrong to celebrate the 4th of July? Those contradictions and those paradoxes are really bubbling up in a very steamy way for me these days.

ELISE:

No, I mean, I'm a Thanksgiving baby, right. And Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday because there are no gifts and it's meal sharing and I love the food. And, now obviously it's fraud, or it's a more nuanced and complicated holiday than what we were taught as children. And it's hard to sort of both/and these things, particularly because is it a psychological desire to be fixed or that, that brittleness that you talk about, or have we become increasingly less flexible, less mutable in the way we think about things?

DOLLY:

Well, I mean, I think there's two things, psychologically there's something going on and then societally there's something going on. So psychologically we are wired for consistency, right? Like we want coherence, we want a coherent story about Thanksgiving. We want it to be unambiguous. We want it to you know, have clear good guys and bad guys. There's work on system justification theory or what I've sort of casually named “good guys win mindset.” We want the good guys to win, so we want Thanksgiving to represent, you know, that the side we identify with was sort of virtuous and generous and appropriate, and everything was good in the end. That's the psychological piece of it. And, that's where I think there's great research on paradox that can help us, like that may be what we are wired towards, but there's lots of things that we can do that we're not wired to do. And I think one of them is how to embrace paradox. Societally, we're obviously living in a polarized time and a divided time, and we have all these systems in place that make it tougher to have nuance, like social media. And so I think those two things combined have put us in a bit of an awkward position right now with the polarization and the need that the psychological desire for consistent narratives creates basically distorted narratives.

ELISE:

Yeah. I love your conversation about divisiveness, which you talk about in both books. Both the way that “judgment” is used to shut down conversations or shut down people, you're being divisive. Or that we see it as inherently negative, evil, bad, and yet, absent divisiveness, we would be living with brutal schemes, like divisiveness is what generates change. Divisiveness, as you write, “without the divisive times in our country's history, we would still be “united” in slavery and segregation. Divisiveness is not always bad.” It’s the genesis of change.

DOLLY:

That's right. It is. And you know, there's great work in what's called the hindsight bias. The hindsight bias is how whatever things are now, you know, just seems inevitable. Right, you know, after debating for 20 minutes this morning over what to wear, whatever I ended up wearing, I can't imagine alternative where I’d worn dress instead of my little pink jeans that I'm wearing right now. But more seriously, where the hindsight bias shows up where let's say, Dr. Martin Luther King led the March on Washington and many civil rights activists fought Jim Crow Laws, etc. So we look at the world we live in today in the United States, and we can't imagine segregated water fountains. We just think that's like a preposterous thing, because we assume that in hindsight, of course, that will have changed, that something will have changed that that existed.

But the reality is, it didn't have to change. And there were many attempts to change it that were not successful. So it only looks inevitable after it's happened. And I think how we look at divisive times is seen through that lens of the hindsight bias of like when some somebody's in a meeting at work and somebody's, you know, challenging how we're hiring and questioning whether this is really an inclusive method towards diversifying our workforce and they're sort of getting persistent and frustrated because they're not getting buy in from others and we want to say, you know, I think you're being divisive the way you're approaching this, you know, we're doing our best here, pipeline, etc. And we've now labeled that person as divisive. What we've done is forget that that's exactly how change has always happened. It’s through people being “divisive.” And I have to keep reminding myself that because I'm kind of a smiley, people pleasing person that sometimes gets a little like, “ah, stopping so divisive,” so I have to remind myself that, of the factual base here, which is that divisiveness is critical to change. Sometimes it comes in the form of heat, making people uncomfortable, pushing the envelope. Sometimes it comes in the form of slower change, light, more incremental, but it is essential to us moving in directions that, that many of us care about.

ELISE:

Not to take us on a tangent, can you just elaborate a little bit about what you mean by heat and light because that was such a light bulb moment for me.

DOLLY:

So I actually tried to find the source of the heat and light metaphor, and many who have used it over the past a hundred plus years have not found the original source, but I think it's really powerful. So the idea is that when we're trying to initiate change, there's different ways to go about it. We have different tools of influence and sometimes it's just temperamentally. Some of us are oriented towards ways that are more education driven awareness building, bringing people along at whatever pace they're able to move. That's light based change. Other people maybe temperamentally are more comfortable with pushing people, initiating some conflict, some discord, some divisiveness, challenging systems in a faster moving way. And those are heat based systems. By definition heat makes people uncomfortable. That is exactly what it is meant to do.

I have a theory that heat is needed for changing systems and light is needed for changing minds. I don't have data to prove that, but there is data that shows that movements in the past that have relied heavily on heat and not as much on light or the other way around, have not seen as much progress as movements that have had both heat and light working in parallel. And so that sort of aligns with my theory about systems and minds and, you know, heat and light. I, again, keep reminding myself because I do tend to lean towards light and I, people like me, can sometimes hear people bring in the heat and do a little tone policing, I think, you need to kind of read the room, you know, which is my favorite phrase as the parent of two teenagers, read the room. I can hear that dialogue going on in my head and I really have been practicing pulling it back and reminding myself of how important the heat and light is and how grateful I am that there's people willing to bring the heat when I'm quite frankly too much of a scaredy cat to do it. I should be so grateful that there are people willing to do it. And people who bring the heat, who can sometimes get frustrated or judgemental of people who bring light also need to remember how important that essential work is, and that there are people with the patience to do it.

ELISE:

Yeah, it's interesting, I think culturally people like Martin Luther King Jr., if I'm getting this right, was heat, although he's more remembered as light, we've sort of sanitized that reality of who he was to make it Instagram quotes, but that that's heat. Rosa Parks, heat. I definitely don't have any data that to change systems it's not enough to appeal to people's intellects and minds, but that there's a place for it. I'm with you. I don't think I know how to bring heat, unfortunately.

DOLLY:

Yeah, yeah. But, but thank you for bringing up those specific examples historically, cause they're so useful, right? At the time when Dr. Martin Luther King was a public figure and alive, he was viewed as radical and pushing too hard and too fast by the majority of white Americans. I don't wanna spoil too much, but I talk a bit about Rosa Parks in my most recent book. And there's lots of surprises about her that we don't know about. Let's start with the fact that we often refer to her as elderly and she was 42 at the time when she wouldn’t get off on the bus. So can we all sit with that for a moment? And there's wonderful work by historian, Gene Harris and others, that have documented in a way that's easily documented, it's not even a sort of a hidden history type of situation, that she had been an activist her entire life. This was an intentional, predictable action on her part. She was very active in the NAACP. When she was a teenager her family moved homes because she had to cross paths with white kids on the way to school. And when they taunted her, she wouldn't back down. They were concerned that she was going to get hurt. So they literally moved to a different neighborhood where they didn't have to worry about her being taunted by these kids. And they weren't worried much about them taunting her. They were worried she would get in more trouble if she stood up for herself as a young black girl. So time after time, she was fearless and rebellious. Yet again, we go back to the clean narratives that we like, that doesn't fit the narrative. The narrative that we like to hear is that she kind of, was this this elderly tired seamstress who wouldn't get up and became an accidental activist. And the rest of the world was like, oh my gosh, she's absolutely right. Let's fix this. And there was broad support for it. And you notice what's not in that story is that there were many attempts leading up to that, that failed. The majority of Americans resisted what she and others were fighting for. She was considered divisive. We're hearing all the same words. She was bringing heat. And that she was going to have to push and the massive movement she was part of, were going to have to push hard against people's comfort and the majority where it stood then, historically we look back with hindsight bias and it all looks like it was just going to happen no matter what.

ELISE:

And that somehow the story prevailed on these chivalric ideas too, of this elderly tired seamstress and you would take her seat. It's interesting too, how it plays into that narrative of well, of course I should offer this old woman a place to rest her weary legs. Let's talk about when you write about South Africa and that reckoning and Jonathan Jansen, and these three narratives as he's working through this with people about a apartheid, three prevailing narratives, which I think as you say, apply everywhere: 1) nothing happened, 2) something happened, now get over it, and 3) terrible things happened. And how we split collectively when we're talking about our social identity into those three streams.

DOLLY:

Yeah. This was so interesting. Jonathan Jansen has written a book called Knowledge in the Blood, and he's a black academic in South Africa, an educator who, when a apartheid was finally taken down, served as dean at the University of Pretoria, which was described as such a central force and apartheid. It was the feeder of the white civil servants who would serve the apartheid government. Their scholarship was used to legitimize apartheid, and this was a really central piece of the infrastructure around apartheid when apartheid no longer existed or at least, you know, was no longer legally a force, he became one of the senior deans in the university as a black man in this white university, working with white students who, you know, in their adolescence, late adolescence were seeing this dramatic change in how their country thought about people like him. And he was really interested just in his lived experience as an educator to engage, see how they engaged with him, and to see how they cataloged and remembered what was, how were they gonna take that into the future? Like, why were things the way they were and how are we gonna think about that?

And so his book is kind of like a, not really a memoir, but like an educator's recollection of what he saw in his students. And the framework you described was how, what he came up with is that there were three types of approaches he saw in his students, 1) that nothing happened, 2) bad things happened now get over it, or 3) terrible things happened. And how he articulated that in examples he gave, I was just blown away. I was like change the vocabulary and it sounds like our country, it sounds so similar to how we talk about the past and the different versions and the battles we're having about what to teach in schools, what should be in our textbooks, how to celebrate holidays, all seem to center around these three narratives.

ELISE:

Yeah. And again, I'm, it's hard to understand the psychology of whole groups, but who do you think is most open to the third, terrible things happen and it's time for restoration, restitution, acknowledgement. Like where does that flexibility come from? Is it driven by guilt and shame, which I know you explore at length in the book as well, or is it this, I know I'm bad, this affirmation of a different kind of identity? What is that?

DOLLY:

Well, I mean, what I'm positing is an ability to grapple with contradiction. So that's the paradox mindset that Wendy Smith, Maryanne Lewis, and other scholars have shown, that when we're able to sit with two conflicting things in our minds, for example, that if we stick with the example in South Africa, it may be true that if I'm a student that my parents and my grandparents participated in actively supported apartheid and that they were also wonderful parents and grandparents, those two things can be true. Being able to sit with that contradiction gives me the emotional limberness to kind of, you know, push my way through the, the emotional slog of this is awful. This is awful. And to sit with terrible things happened. And, so that was the first thing I would say is that paradox mindset, which also by the way, has been shown to make us more creative and more resilient. There's lots of benefits to being able to just, and it's not that complicated, it's literally just saying both of these things can be true. Like it's literally just allowing ourselves that.

And then the second thing is when you refer to it, just now, when you talked about shame and guilt, it's the ability to kind of affirm ourself, like shame is an emotion that, as we've heard many times, is sort of where we like put a blanket of shame across our whole being, that there's something wrong with me as a whole. And I certainly felt that, you know, at times where I've used a word that I later learned that has some racist origin or I've, you know, confused two people of the same race for each other. I mean, these are horrible feelings and you feel like, oh my God, I am just the worst. I just want to sink into the ground right now. But that of course makes me just sink into the ground and not actually come up and act and face and confront, and able to say terrible things happen. So what we wanna do is not have that shame that we're soaked in, but be able to sort of affirm, back to affirmation, affirm identities we care about. In the book I share some research about simple ways to do that. What are the values I care most about? I care deeply about fairness. I care deeply about equality. Thinking about that, affirming that as an identity, I care about a value, but it's not something where I am like, “ah, I am the worst. I am the worst”. I can just move into what is the action? What is the behavior that I need as opposed to the whole identity? That's like, I've just shredded right.

ELISE:

Yeah. Shattered.

DOLLY:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

ELISE:

Yeah. I think for many of us in America at least, the fixation on nostalgia is really interesting. I don't necessarily have that, although it sounds quite human, maybe I do. But you write, “research shows that nostalgic memories lead us to feel more loved and protected and even more interpersonally competent. Nostalgia creates a sense of belonging and social connection. Our interest is focused on this intimate past as almost every American deeply engages the past and the past then engages them as most deeply as that of their family.” I thought that was so interesting the way that the self protection that comes from again, we can go to both/and thinking, but most of us don't, but this idea that of course our ancestors were good, noble, well-intentioned people who did what they needed to do to survive. I loved the examples. This had completely gone over my head in the culture but when you write about the difference between Anderson Cooper's reaction to learning about his genealogy versus Ben Affleck, can you tell us a little bit about that? It’s such a good example.

DOLLY:

Yeah. Yeah. This is the TV show on PBS called Finding Your Roots, where they do this incredible job digging into celebrities, celebrities are usually their guests. They're able to use everything from archival records and genetic work and all this stuff, and like really recreate someone's history beyond what they would've ever known about on their own. And then the format of the show is then they present it to the celebrity. There's like a big reveal and they get their reactions and, you know, it's a very moving and emotional, surprising show. I had the opportunity to interview Hazel Gurland-Pooler, who's one of the producers, or former producers on the show. And she didn't work on either of the episodes that I write about in the show, but she was just able to kind of give me a sense about how they put the show together and kind of the ways in which they, you know, really try to balance the surprise that is the core of the show, with also the fact that these are human beings, these celebrities, and, you know, they're gonna have real human reactions to these surprises and have to grapple with that and on camera.

So what I focused on was two little case studies, if you will, from episodes again, that she didn't work on, but one was Ben Affleck and the other was Anderson Cooper. The Ben Affleck one got a lot of attention because it became public through, I think it was one of those big, like email leaks that happened years ago, where a bunch of emails that had nothing to do with the thing, the headline sort of spilled into the public eye. And in this case, some of those emails had to do with when Ben Affleck was on the show, he was apparently told that he had an ancestor who had enslaved human beings. And it wasn't something he was aware of. And it actually ran pretty counter to kind of the narrative that he had learned in his family and the rest of his family. And he, after they were done filming, had reached out to the shows producers and, and asked if they would not include that. And there was all sorts of internal commotion over what to do because generally they don't honor those requests, but in this case they did. So we, as the public, never saw that part of his heritage.

And I contrasted that to Anderson Cooper who was also on the show and he was also shown family history of a great, great, great somebody who enslaved humans and, in that case actually was killed by one of the people he enslaved. And that was aired. And in that case, Anderson Cooper, when you watch him take in the news and react to it, he obviously disgusted by the behavior, that's visible, but he's also able to view it like almost journalistically, like sort of neutrally, as if it was someone else's family and that he can just be like, that's terrible. I'm not going that social identity we talked about earlier. And that feeling of threat, you don't see that threat bubbling up in him. He's able to just condemn it as what it is without sort of feeling the need to defend himself. You see this real contrast. I'm a fan of Ben Affleck, I'm not trying to criticize, I have no idea what was going through his head, but I think most of us would react a little more like Ben Affleck than Anderson Cooper, but we'd all be better off if we could react a little more like Anderson Cooper in that situation. And that was what I was trying to highlight with that contrast.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, the creation of these identities, it's sometimes, I loved this phrase that you came up with, “belief grief,” like so many, you know, when you're talking about Ben Affleck and you're like, he had this revelation ran counter to what he had been told about his family, like great patriots who were, you know, on the right side of history, right? Like more socially, progressive, or liberal, and sort of what happens to us when we have to let go of beliefs that might be personal or could be social, right?

DOLLY:

Yes. Yeah. Belief grief is real. I mean, it is really devastating when, again, it goes back to your identity, right? When a belief that is core to your identity is challenged, we really take it hard and it takes away not just the belief, but that little chunk of the identity as well.

ELISE:

Yeah. I'm so happy that you talked about restoration in Germany and the way that they acknowledge Holocaust all over the place, right. There are monuments all over the city. I had heard that and always assumed that it was like almost an immediate reaction to the Holocaust, like an immediate mea culpa. We need to make this right and acknowledge this. And obviously we have nothing like that. If anything, we are still dismantling Confederate statues and dismantling those belief systems. Not very well, obviously, but I thought this actually gave me hope for us. Can you talk about, Neiman, and the post-war German writing and you write “found little evidence of reckoning” and what happened for that to actually start to happen? Because I think it makes me feel hopeful.

DOLLY:

Me too. And I also did not know about it until I was researching this book, that I always assumed that the Holocaust ended and everyone went, “oh, what were we doing? We must immediately make visible amends.” In fact it wasn't until after 1965, or so. So we're talking a couple of decades later. And what happened was ex Nazis were being tried for, I guess war crimes must have been the official trial and those trials were being televised and their children and grandchildren were seeing these trials. And that is what started to push for public, visible, permanent amends that would, you know, presumably create some sort of societal muscle memory around what happened and what we don't want to happen again.

And so the idea of making things vivid and salient was really part of their own, the way I'm sort of understanding it, is their own unlearning of the past couple of decades where things kind of just kept going as they, I mean, the Holocaust may have ended, but the beliefs didn't really, things just kept going. And then there were these trials and then there was now we reckon, now we unlearn, now we, you know, make public collective commitments. And now of course their country, seems like every country in the world, seems to have their own current struggle going on, but it's not for lack of these public amends. And I also came away hopeful from that, maybe, you know, maybe it's taking us a little bit longer, but, I guess it depends when I say longer, I don't know what exactly point on the timeline I'm measuring from. But, I was thinking the civil war just now, but, yes, I think there's still time. You know, it's too late, but maybe there's still time.

ELISE:

Yeah. But I also think that what we're experiencing in this country at least is these waves of revelation, right? And you talk a lot about the differences in textbooks, right. And the way that things are taught or are not taught or are, you know, new, the things that you've only learned recently that I've only learned recently, like as a well educated person, my posity of awareness is humiliating. And, you know, I didn't know, like you, that native Americans were sent to boarding school until maybe 10 years ago. And I grew up in Montana. And so I think that part of it is, yes, those events seem so far away, but like, even as someone who lived in the north, I clung to that identity as like, I'm not Southern and then you start actually understanding slavery and you're like, oh wow. New York profited from slavery more than any other state.

DOLLY:

Rhode Island was core to the system.

ELISE:

Yeah. I think a lot of people who sort of kept themselves as separate away from this are now recently facing that belief grief and those feelings of, I don't even know who I am and how could I come from this? And it feels like an assault to our brittle identities.

DOLLY:

Absolutely. You're really pointing out how much of this learning about the past, thinking about the past, honoring the past, how much of it is an emotional process. We often think of it as an intellectual process. We think of it history as dry intellectual exercise. I mean, that's sort of the cliche of history class, right. As opposed to what it really is or should be, which is a deeply emotional roller coaster.

ELISE:

Yeah. And nuance, right. I mean, going back to the beginning of our conversation and the way that women are programmed to be good or to care community to also to also think of yourself as like I'm a helper, I do well. And then to be like, oh, and I've caused a lot of harm and I have been unconscious in my actions and nobody has asking for my help, like all of these things. Again, it goes to that core of who we perceive ourselves to be and how we want to be affirmed. It's really difficult. It's a, there's a lot of grieving that's required.

DOLLY:

Yeah. Well said.

ELISE:

I loved this tool because I feel like it applies to all of life, and you were talking about it in the context of your kids, your maternal desperation when you were young and you were flying and your plane was struck by lightening, but it is changing our reference point from being everything goes right to some things go wrong. And it goes again to this, like just try to be a goodish person so that you can be a better person don't claim good person. I know it also requires holding paradox, but can you talk a little bit about that?

DOLLY:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean the adventure points is the idea of, you know, when we set out these wonderful plans and of course you missed your connection and you leave your bag somewhere and somebody wets their pants and all the things that happen, that how do you still push on with an attitude of this is going great and you don't wanna be Pollyanna about it and be like, well, it does kind of stink that we don't have a change of clothes for you right now. But there's no doubt, that's not good. But is there a way to frame it in a way that's both reality based and positive and hopeful. And so, you know the desperation move in every parent has their own stories of these desperation moments was something around adventure points of like, how many points can we get today? Every time something goes wrong or doesn't get us goes planned or violates our expectations of what was gonna happen, we're gonna get a point for it. And if it's really bad, we get bonus points. And you know, I still try to use it with my 17 and 16 year olds right now and now I just get eye rolls as opposed to any sort of momentum with it.

But what I love about it, actually, can I tell you a cute story, when I submitted that chapter to my wonderful editor, Stephanie Hitchcock at Atria at Simon and Schuster, the comment she put in the margins next to the adventure points explanation was, “Tell me your mom's a psychologist without telling me your mom's a psychologist.” I thought that was funny. But I like the idea. I mean, I've been thinking a lot about looking at history as a form of time travel, right. And thinking about sort of the travel guide, you know, I feel like I essentially have tried to write a travel guide for time travel that sets you up for the adventure points. And the idea that if you go into this trip thinking it's all going to be nostalgic and sweet and all our ancestors are going to, you know, make us proud. And, we're always gonna be on the right side of history and etc., it’s like getting struck by lightning on the plane, and wetting your pants. And all the things are gonna really floor you. It's going to make it the worst trip ever. You're going to want to go home. You're never going to go again. Like, it's really going to shut down that sense of exploration and adventure and all the wonderful things that come with looking at the past and the things that are to be proud of and excited about and just like delighted by that you discover on a trip. So adventure points in time travel, I think, are really useful too. What paradox did you find today? You know, what identity threat did you stumble on? What belief grief did you have to handle a little bit? Point, point, point for all of them.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I like it because it's not negative and like prepare for the worst whatever, whatever that is, but it's not this foreboding joy, like the shits going to hit the fan. So, it brings with it the sense of adaptability learning, adventure, resilience. It feels engaged and active, rather than life's going to happen to you and it's gonna suck, but more of a, how do we get a little bit more flexible and gooey about how we respond to curve balls?

DOLLY:

Yes, exactly. You used the word resilient, I offer the reader the idea of being a gritty patriot, where I lean on the research from Angela Duckworth and colleagues on grit. Grit, they define as passion plus perseverance in pursuit of a meaningful, long term goal. And if we think of love of country or patriotism as a meaningful, long term goal, as something we actively work towards, as opposed to we're just entitled to it and we have passion and perseverance and pursuit of it, then we can embody this gritty patriot identity. I think with excitement, like Americans can do hard things. I can do hard things. I can love my country with a broken heart. I can push through the paradox. I can push through the identity threats and I can still love my country and I can still work towards making it better.

ELISE:

Yeah. One of the things that I love about your books is that even though you're an academic and professor and a psychologist, you embody this idea of like showing your work. I love being able to read through your own processing as you're grappling with these things, rather than like this statement that somehow you've arrived and you've achieved this exalted state, but that you're showing us, you know, work and progress, or I am learning and I'm trying to unpack this and evolve the way I understand it. And hopefully you understand it as well. So thank you for that because we need, I think particularly in this sticky, treacherous, scary land, a model for what that looks like.

DOLLY:

Thank you for saying that. It's funny while we've been talking, you've been such a amazing supporter of this work. And so you're one of the first podcasts I'm doing as we launch this book. And my internal dialogue as we've been talking is, feeling my own struggle and resistance with doing what I feel I do well on paper, making my own learning visible, I'm struggling to do verbally. Because it takes practice. It's hard right, to do that, and you know, I'm early in the launch process. So I've been having this internal dialogue. So it's very interesting you name that. And it encourages me to keep trying,

ELISE:

Well, it encourages all of us because we are lost if people think that life isn't about, again, that in some ways pursuit of evolving our own awareness, understanding, compassion, and being better, you know, these are all hard words, right?

DOLLY:

Absolutely.

ELISE:

But these things are processes and not perfection.

DOLLY:

I like your, think it was on your, one of your social media bios that said your mantra was, I don't know.

ELISE:

Yes.

DOLLY:

I like that.

ELISE:

Yeah. I mean, I don't, right? But I think culturally, we want to project we know that we're certain, that we've arrived. I was reading this book by Roshi Joan Halifax, and she was like, we're all in free fall. AnD the best that anyone can offer is to sort of be a support to someone else who's like falling next to you. But this idea that like some people have done it and they can shepherd you through and they've arrived, I think a great cultural fallacy.

DOLLY:

Yeah. Yeah. That's powerful.

ELISE:

Alright, well, thank you. Sorry again, that I was two minutes late. I really hate being late.

DOLLY:

You gave us the minutes we needed to get up. So thank you for that. You did us a favor. By the way, some core pieces of this book were written in Montana.

ELISE:

No way, where?

DOLLY:

Yeah. In Bozeman, I spent about a little over a week, maybe nine days out there in a, you know, head down writer's retreat, just solo. And so I have a lot of mental associations, I would right in the morning and then go hike in the afternoon. And it was my first time out there. It was so beautiful.

ELISE:

It's the best. I'm glad you got outside, too. I would feel bad if you were just locked inside.

DOLLY:

Yeah, yeah, no, while I was getting ready to go, I was kind of like, I'm going to just write for 16 hours a day. And then people were like, okay, first of all, you're going to write really badly if you do that. Second of all, why would you go to Montana to do that?

ELISE:

No, totally, moving meditation.

DOLLY:

Yes. Yes. For real, for real. Please let me know if I can support you in any way, and anything, if you ever need someone to read pages or anything at all.

ELISE:

Oh, thank you. I really, I really appreciate that. And I very much might take you upon it.

DOLLY:

I'd be honored.

ELISE:

Thank you, Dolly. Yeah, always here for all of your work. So I can't wait to see not what's next, but I'm happy to see your work in the world.

DOLLY:

Thank you. I appreciate you. You've done so much and you continue to do so much. I’m sometimes not, I'm not very good with Instagram. So I sometimes find out later that I've missed things that I should have reacted to.

ELISE:

That's not you that's also like the Instagram algorithm, where you're like, did that, what happened to that person? I haven't seen them in like nine months and then you're like, oh, because Instagram doesn't show me.

DOLLY:

Yeah, yeah.

ELISE:

Alright. This comes out the week of your book.

DOLLY:

That's amazing. That's a huge help. Thank you.

ELISE:

Of course. Alright. Bye, Dolly.

ELISE:

I love Dolly. And I really do mean that she shows her work and reveals of herself in a way that I think makes space for again this paradox that she illuminate this being essential for our thinking, this both/and, the rose and it’s thorns, and other examples of how things can be multiple things at once. She asks the question, and I think many of us can feel this way, particularly when there are regressive policies happening across the country, rights that we maybe took for granted being rescinded, etc., she asks the question, “Are we making progress?” She writes: “Sometimes the answer is ‘all of the above.’ When we release the need to solve an unsolvable problem, we shed the heavy, clumsy load of anxiety and discomfort. The tension of trying to resolve a paradox can be emotionally depleting and that energy can be released for other cognitive and emotional tasks. We also see new possibilities. The world is complicated and nuanced, it takes effort to see beneath the surface. When we do, however, new possibilities emerge. People are both, good and bad. And situations will shape their behavior more than we realize. The world is making progress, but it is not always linear.” Thanks again for listening.