Florence Williams: Navigating Heartbreak

Florence Williams is the author of The Nature Fix and Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, which is a beautiful exploration of the end of her marriage—and its impact on her health and her soul. Florence met her husband in college and had never lived alone—much less alone as a middle-aged woman. Their divorce and her resulting heartbreak turned her upside-down, and filled her with an incapacitating amount of anxiety and fear. The resulting memoir offers a map as she returns to herself. Ever the science writer, this isn’t just a treatise on her feelings of rejection and loss—this is also a thoroughly researched guide to the implications of heartbreak on our hearts, full of learnings for all of us. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM FLORENCE WILLIAMS:

Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

Florence’s Website

Follow Florence on Instagram

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Well, I loved Heartbreak. I am watching this tendency in myself to only commend, not only commend. But I love memoirs that are structured in a way that support these bigger conversations. And I'm only watching it in myself because I feel like it, there's like this in this feminine instinct to be useful all the time and to make our lives helpful for other people when sometimes living your life is enough. But I will say, thank you for using your own heartbreak as a way to talk about what happens to us. I think anyone listening has been through this cycle and to honor it with a scientific survey of what is happening to us makes it a pretty fascinating read, I have to say. So I'm sorry that your life had to go up on a pire in that way for this book.

FLORENCE WILLIAMS: I'm glad if you found it useful, that's definitely helpful to me. And it's part of the healing process as I learned, right? That if you can, you know make your story more universal and be vulnerable in a way that encourages other people to be vulnerable too, it's helpful, you know, the sense of purpose that it engenders in me is helpful and hopefully it's helpful to others too.

ELISE: Yeah. Well, and we're meaning making creatures, right? And so to actually use our lives to create a different story or to revise our story. For context, obviously this isn't a book that you ever thought you would write. No one sets out to trace the arc of their, I mean, you guys started dating in college, right?

FLORENCE: Well, I met him my first day of college, so it was 18, day one. We started dating about three weeks later.

ELISE: Yeah. And then you find yourself with kids and the end of a marriage, unexpectedly. I mean, you do a beautiful job of describing what I think many of us would witness. And I will say too, like I'm not heartbroken currently and hopefully, my marriage is intact and strong and hopefully durable, but we never know. Right. This is all around us. Sort of like a sea of wreckage. You were writing about that too, like the revelation to people who were shocked.

FLORENCE: Yeah, I mean, I think we were very happy. I think we had a very good marriage for a long time, but you know, it was 32 years long by the time, you know, including the dating, that's three decades of life. Things change, you know, things happen.

ELISE: Yeah. You write about it. I love this at the beginning where you say, “Having never been heartbroken before, I tended to dismiss portrayals of it in popular culture literature, even by my friends, I'm sorry to say as overwrought, but one of the first stages of heartbreak I soon learned is feeling stunned, even if you shouldn't have been. I've been used to feeling in control, but you can't game heartbreak.” And can you talk a little bit about that sort of this, the course that you go through over the book of does it follow any, it's not like Elizabeth Kubler Ross's stages of acceptance, even though she later said, you know, grief is not a stage process and it's not tidy. Is there in your work, and I was looking for it, and I feel like you didn't make it pat, right? Like there is no core journey.

FLORENCE: I did write the book to follow a loose chronology of heartbreak. I wouldn't say everyone's heartbreak is going to fit into that, but it was kind of the order of my heartbreak. So I start with this state of shock, you know, that really has a dramatic effect on one's body, you know, I guess for me, you know, I had like the symptoms of shock and that is partly what inspired me and surprised me and freaked me out, you know, that I could feel the heartbreak so intensely in my body. So, anyway, I started out talking about shock and then I move into grief and loneliness. And then, you know, the things that I tried to do was to feel better, you know, with kind of science weaving its way in through all these threads and then finally, you know, some kind of resolution. Not necessarily a tidy, you know, Hollywood ending, but resolution as it really is in real life, which isn't always a tidy bow.

ELISE: Yeah, we certainly, we love those stories and it's so tempting to wrap it up and I feel like there was a thread of anger. I'm just thinking of the grieving stage. Did you have to burn through your rage in order to access your grief?

FLORENCE: Good question. I think, you know, for me, the predominant emotions were anxiety and grief. The anger came a little bit later. It actually took me a while to kind of really own the anger and feel it, and I felt like that was a necessary stage in order to get to a more healing stage. But I was definitely able to feel a lot of anxiety and grief before the anger came, interestingly.

ELISE: Yeah, that is interesting. It's not surprising. I mean, I feel like anger can be instinctive and, and defensive in a way, and a protection in my experience, sort of like the ice on top of the lake of grief and you have to go into the anger in order to access the sadness. But I can also imagine it the other way, particularly because women are acculturated to be more comfortable with sadness than with our anger that you have to sort of get to the anger.

FLORENCE: Yeah, that could be. You know, I was so still caught up in these complicated feelings that involved love, right, of my departing spouse, and I think I was in some ways projecting the anger onto other parts of my life before I was able to really project it onto him. But that was necessary. It was necessary to be able to do that. I did feel rage and anger about the state of women in general as I was going through this process. I mean, I was very aware of kind of the inequities, you know, of the law, the inequities of divorce as a process. How it so inequitably affects men and women, you know, on everything from, you know, the division of property to how your friends and peers kind of view you. The inequities, you know, they, they permeate everything from, I think how your community views you differently in the breakup to the division of property and who ends up with more resources after divorce and then to even dating. You know, that's the next stage. If you wanna get back into the game as a middle-aged woman, you are so much more handicapped than your middle-aged husband. And I was, you know, just extremely aware of that. Plus, I had come from a legacy of divorce myself, and I had seen it, you know, in my own family. I had seen it in my friends' families. The women are the ones who really get the short end of the stick often after divorce, certainly economically, but also I think just culturally and socially as well.

ELISE: And how did that, how did that show up in your life? I mean, we're all aware of the tropes of, you know, older men, dating younger women, et cetera. Within your friend group, you know, was it that, was there just an aversion towards like wanting to be around anything that felt messy or sticky? Or did you feel like people were actively taking sides or were they not taking sides? And that was sort of the problem.

FLORENCE: You know, I think there were a lot of different responses. You know, my close friends were very supportive and right in there with me and, you know, bless them cause I really needed them and I needed their support. And that was terrific. But I think in kind of my looser ties, you know, my broader social group, there was definitely this sense of, you know, I am maybe contaminating, you know, there may be something contagious about divorce. You don't wanna necessarily be too close to it. And then I think there's this weird dynamic that you know, my divorced women friends and I talk about of your couple friends don't really wanna have you over, you know, at the dinner party because you're sort of the one single person. It kind of messes up their feng shui of their social event in some ways that I haven't really fully plumbed, I haven't really fully figured this out. Is it that as a single woman, you know, you're sort of threatening because now you're kind of available in a way, or is it just that there's this unevenness, you know, of gender? I don't know. I'm not really sure what it's, what it's all about, but the weird thing is that, you know, when I was married and having dinner parties, I also tended to invite couples. I didn't really, it was kind of an unconscious thing. I didn't really think about it until I was the one who wasn't really getting invited to the dinner parties.

ELISE: Yeah, no, it's fascinating and I'm sure incredibly painful. And with all of these things, and what so much of the book is, is like tracing these threads of sort of our natural, innate response to what happens when you lose connection or pushed out of the circle or the need for connection that drives us versus the culture and distinguishing between the two, right? The way that we, our lack of reverence for older women, our fear of women who are aging even that the threat of like, is this divorce contagious? Is my partner gonna suddenly decide, oh, divorce looks good on her, she's available. I'll leave my what, whatever it is that lives in us. And then figuring out from that what is who we are versus like the culture that's driving these narratives.

FLORENCE: And, and by the way, I think it's not just true for divorced women, who are treated that way, but also widows, you know, they also don't get invited, you know, to the dinner parties. There's also something contagious about them I think that just magnifies the isolation and the loneliness and the grief of this experience. And I think it's really unfortunate.

ELISE: Yeah. And this idea, you know, and I think as someone who was single through most of my twenties, the lingering odor or this, like, what's wrong with her? There's must be something wrong with her. Like there is something that's being rejected and the way that we assign that defectiveness to women and not to men, is such a bad cultural hangover. Do you know the roots of that?

FLORENCE: I don't, but I think it extends beyond that to a kind of defensive posture on the part of those who are married who don't necessarily wanna be reminded that marriage is problematic too, you know? I mean, it's like anything, you know, it's like how judgmental we are of each other's parenting, you know, all these kinds of things. We don't, we don't necessarily wanna hang out with people who are doing it differently because there's this assumed critique right then of, of the way we're doing it, and I think that's, that's very much true in this realm of divorce and marriage. And I mean, long-term relationships, look, they're really tough, right?

Even when they're good, they're really tough. We all know it. But I know as someone who was in a marriage for 25 years that you don't really wanna go there. You don't wanna necessarily acknowledge that, you’re putting your head down, you're doing the best you can and you don't really wanna entertain the possibility that. You know, this could end at any moment because that's so destabilizing. It's much easier just to keep going and not think about it too much.

ELISE: And the reality is, and I'm sure this was your experience for 25 years and I've been married for 12 years, something like that. So I'm a bit behind you and as in any relationship, it has its fallow periods and it's really rich remunerative periods. And there are certainly times where you're like, this is kind of a emotional wasteland, like where you're doing too much parallel play and everyone's busy. And then when you come back together, you know, for my husband and I will like go to away for a weekend to a wedding and we're like, oh my God, we love each other. This is so fun. But there is an assumption baked into it that like a marriage is durable and can withstand a fair amount, particularly when you have young children. And so I think it is like incredibly destabilizing to recognize, oh, there's like a bridge too far. There comes a moment that's imperceptible where you're like, how am I on the other side of the door?

FLORENCE: And I think what's also really destabilizing about that is that it's often unevenly felt. Like I kind of knew, yes, we were in this period of disconnection, right? As we had been in before, as all relationships go through. And I kind of thought, yeah, of course we'll come back together and it'll be fine. And he didn’t. He was like, for him it was the bridge two bar. It was like, actually, I'd rather be connected to somebody else. Thanks, bye. And, and so, you know, it's not always right, evenly felt.

ELISE: Yeah, no, there's, I'm looking for this passage, where you write, this actually felt like a moment to me where you really get in touch with your anger and, I wanna say that it was after you get off the river because you have this river trip that's very sort of, wild, where you're on a river by yourself, which I love rafting, but I like rafting with other people.

FLORENCE: Good idea, Elise. That's clever. I don't know why that didn’t occur to me.

ELISE: Do you know this moment? I know it's been a minute since you wrote your own book, but it's such a beautiful moment where you don't delineate what he did, but talk a bit about sort of like the ways where he made you feel inferior essentially. And this drumbeat of, oh, I wrote about you in the context of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. And anyway, I just thought it was when you started remunerating the inequity in your relationship too. I mean, I know he said like very painfully, I’m gonna go find my soulmate. Did you feel like he was your soulmate, or do you feel like you haven't met your soulmate yet? Or do you even believe in that as a concept?

FLORENCE: Wow. I think I used to believe in it as a concept, and I think I thought we were, you know, our souls were joined, right? That there was this shared destiny that we had. I don't know if I would've used the term soulmate necessarily. It's not my kind of term. It's definitely his kind of term. And good question. I don't think I really believe in the concept of soulmates now. I do believe in love, and I think love of lots of different varieties, you know, familial love, community love, landscape, nature love. I believe all of these are, you know, so much a part of being human and being optimistic and living well, but this like long-term relationship, like you're gonna have a soulmate for 60 years. I struggle with that one.

ELISE: Yeah, no, I get it. And I also, but I also struggle with the way that our culture thinks about it because you could say, well, we did 25, 30 years together, we had two amazing children. And I love how you write about sort of the, the family, how do you describe them, the kids that you have and the way that two divorce like makes it so difficult, and particularly the way that we look at it and the pain that it obviously causes, but it makes it impossible to integrate in some ways, like a lot of your life, right? Like what do you do with that black box of too painful to the touch memories? Or after a certain point, are you able to go back there where you're not cutting people out of picture frames?

FLORENCE: Yeah, I think I am more able to go back there now. I think there is this radioactive quality to those memories for a while. And I think that's sad because, you know, a lot of those memories really are happy on their own and it's too bad that they get poisoned, you know, for a while. But I'm happy to say I do think they're less radioactive now and I do feel like I'm better able to integrate them, better able to understand that some of those feelings are going to stay complicated and they're gonna be emotions layered on top of each other. But I can look at a photograph and be like, oh yeah, that was a sweet time and also be like, God damnit. I'm just at the point now where I have, I think, fewer regrets honestly, about the divorce.I do feel like I've kind of integrated the pain of that enough to know maybe it was for the best actually, and I value so much the growth and self-discovery, even though was pretty sucky to go through it.

ELISE: Yeah. Well, I wanna talk about that, but I found the section, I want you to read this section to us because I thought it was so beautiful and this moment, which I think we can all recognize is so painful and difficult when you have to say goodbye. I think anyone can tap into that moment when you are actually shutting the door on a relationship revivifying, or even just like staying emotionally or mentally connected to someone even when it's painful. And so it felt, I think you were on the river or just off the river near the end of the book when you seem to have this like completing moment. So if you could read this to us, I would love it.

FLORENCE: Okay. Sure. “I found myself resisting saying goodbye to the marriage, to him, to the life I'd enjoyed. I opened a notebook. I made a list of all the things I loved about him, and then I wrote down all the things I didn't love about him, what I admired, his apparent ease, his sunniness, his competence, his enthusiasm for adventure. I loved our family unit that these tall, kind, lanky humans were all my people, and I loved the happy delusion. Such a delusion. That we were surrounded by a special force field of safety and fine weather. What I didn't admire, I won't enumerate his failings here, except to say the biggest one. The one I didn't miss at all was his ability to make me feel that I wasn't quite worthy of him. That was bad enough, but the bigger problem was that I had started believing it, but the bigger problem was that I had started believing it. And as long as I still believed it, the worse my life looked alone.”

ELISE: It's beautiful, Florence. And in that moment, in that revelation, was that a new revelation or something that you knew, had been sort of playing with or eyeing or trying to get your arms around and like, was there a sense of closure where you in that moment chose yourself?

FLORENCE: I think all of the above. I think on, you know, there was this, you know, quiet understanding for a long time that I felt judged by him, you know, and I didn't like that feeling. Hadn't liked it for a long time. But when I really articulated it in that way, that I was also judging myself kind of through his eyes and how just damaging, you know, that is I think understanding that and being like, you know what? It's okay to not be perfect. I don't wanna be judging myself for my imperfections. I actually wanna be accepting myself for my imperfections. And that was really liberating actually. You know, I think so many women, we grow up thinking we are supposed to be perfect. And we internalize, you know, excelling at everything and being good at everything curating our appearance and, you know, being the perfect mom and doing everything right and doing everything right and doing everything right. And just the realization that I was like so over that and feeling like it was actually getting in the way of my, having a more authentic understanding of who I was. That’s when I think a corner really started to be turned.

ELISE: And this idea too. I mean, this is what my whole book about is about. But in this hunt for goodness and this quest to be good and to be ordained as good, it's not enough. We're never gonna get that reassurance from, or validation from an external world that we're safe and secure. It's only something that we can give to ourselves.

FLORENCE: That's right. But I do think it's possible to find a partner who is able to love your flaws and accept you for who you are and kind of support an investigation, you know, into those characteristics, you know, who's willing to kind of take a journey with you and, and, and my ex just so was not interested in that.

ELISE: Right. And do you recognize that as, as just a quality of who he is or something that you guys didn't cultivate together?

FLORENCE: I think he definitely grew up in a very patriarchal, kind of waspy culture where you don't air your flaws, like you just don't acknowledge. So I think it's very much about his culture and frankly the American culture overall. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not, it's not just the waspy male culture, but I think that. I think that, you know, it certainly embraces that. So yeah, I, I don't think he'd go there with anyone, and I think a lot of men wouldn't.

ELISE: Yeah. Do you not to linger on sort of like his emotional state, but I always, and watching other friends, go through divorce, I'm always conscious of like the one that's doing the work and the one that's, um, prolonging the work and or like jumping from lily pad to lily pad where I'm like, that swamp is waiting for you friend. Like you can get in it now and, and, or you can, I guess do it when you're 80, but  it does feel like some. And it's sort of not that consoling, but when I was younger and you know, friends would be going through these hard breakups and the guy would seem to sort of like skidder, scatter away and like into another thing. It was like, just wait. Just wait. He'll be broken on your doorstep in a year or two or whenever it is that he has to resolve the end of this relationship. Like you can't procrastinate and push this stuff. It does get you.

FLORENCE: I think so. I do think there are some members of our society who seem to be a little more sheltered from deep examination, you know, unfortunately, I mean, that's what privilege does, right? It’s kind of famously insulating.

ELISE: It is famously insulating, but I think you can only outrun these things always for so long, and they have a real impact. I mean, that was what was so interesting about the book. The way that you traced, you know, the physical impacts of divorce, the way it showed up in your body in essentially unintentional and prolonged weight loss, weakness, you know, just the way it just destroyed you. I think we can all relate to that. I tend to be someone who stops eating as well in grief. Some people have the opposite experience, but that we have these massive physiological impacts that can be studied. Right. I mean, you were doing your blood work, which I loved throughout. Have you done any more, like, can you talk a little bit about what that showed?

FLORENCE: Yeah. I was really lucky early on in this kind of divorce recovery process to make contact with a wonderful scientist at UCLA, Steve Cole, who's an geneticist. And he's made a career by basically studying the effects of loneliness on people's immune systems. And he does this by looking at a suite of genetic markers, transcription factors in our white blood cells. And these are, these are markers that are tied to inflammation, tied to chronic disease. We’ve known for a long time that people who consider themselves lonely have a higher rate of chronic disease. They have a higher rate of early death. They have a higher rate of dementia. You know, all kinds of unfortunate outcomes, given the fact that not only are they lonely, but now they're also sicker than most people who are not lonely. So we decided that we would test my blood cells at different time points after the divorce. And I was trying all these interventions, you know, to feel better to get healthier. I was diagnosed with type one diabetes, you know, not long after the split. I was worried that I was gonna get sicker, you know, so I felt this kind of urgency to figure this out and to try to feel better as soon as possible. So, you know, I was trying all these interventions such as the wilderness trip you mentioned. A number of other things and we tested my blood before and after the wilderness trip. We tested it, you know, at various other time points. And it was really interesting because as someone who had written about the tremendous mental and physical health benefits of nature, you know, I was very invested in that as, you know, a curative. I thought, okay, I'm gonna go on this like month long wilderness trip and I'm gonna, I'm just gonna be so much better at the end of it's really gonna cure me and it and unfortunately, you know, my blood showed uh-uh not so fast. Actually you're the same as you were before the trip. Even though I felt like I had made a lot of progress, you know, kind of cognitively, I had reflected and learned to meditate and done some interesting work. I was also still feeling kind of threatened and anxious because I was alone in the wilderness. Which is not how humans are supposed to feel, we should feel relaxed and safe.

ELISE: You picked something quite extreme.

FLORENCE: I think that the main theme here is that a heartbreak like this, when we feel like we've been abandoned, when we feel like we have lost a major support figure in our lives, our nervous system notices that, and it responds by going into a state of threat. And so that's why people get sick, you know, after someone dies, after a divorce, when they feel lonely, it's because they feel threatened on some, on some deep level. Like you may think, of course, you know, there's no grizzly bear about to jump on me, but your nervous system doesn't really perceive it in a rational way.

ELISE: Yeah. In light of everything that you did, and I loved the way that you described your MDMA and mushrooms. When you look at this experience, what do you think has been, and not to say that you're, you know, healed and over it and beyond whatever, we're so obsessed with that theme too, but what was, what ultimately do you think was the most healing? Was it time? Was it actually studying yourself and creating a story and revising that story?

FLORENCE: I think time was a huge part of it, and I think time for most people is a great curative, not for everybody. And I did not want to take the time. You know, we know from studies that it takes on average four years for people's bodies to return to baseline for their health, to return to baseline after divorce. I felt like I wanted to speed that up as much as I could if it was possible too. And I think all the things I did helped a little bit. I actually think the thing that helped the most, in retrospect, really probably was that session of psychedelics. And I'll tell you why, I think it's because it really addressed my fear, my state of anxiety. I was very afraid of growing old alone, of not having a partner to, you know, look out for me of being financially insecure. I mean, I just had been with someone since I was eighteen. I'd never lived alone and I had witnessed my mother dying alone and broke and other women in my life whose partners had left them as well. And so we know actually from the research looking at psychedelics and people who are diagnosed with a terminal illness, for example, that it’s just these amazing, interesting things happen in their brains where suddenly they, they don't feel so afraid. And I think that's really what happened to me. I was like, you know what, what happens, happens. It's all gonna be okay. It's not really a rational, it's hard to explain, but having such a mystical experience and feeling like I am part of this beautiful universe, we're all part of it together. You know, so many people struggle, struggle comes and goes. Everything is transient. I don't know, it was like this very kind of mystical reassurance in these bigger truths of the universe that were so much bigger than just like, ah, I'm alone.

ELISE: Yeah, and I thought, I feel like it was like the tree in the vine, the way that you started to recognize the way that you were entangled with your husband and sort of how to start disconnecting and letting that, getting that, not off you, but kind of, right. Like particularly you guys had grown up together. I thought that was like very beautifully described, because we can all, you know, you want that sort of co-dependence, that like co-mingled root system and then at a certain point, like you, you saw him as like a strangler vine, right? Essentially.

FLORENCE: I mean, so you know, we basically grew up together and we became very integrated, I think, in each other's souls and in each other's hearts. And so I had this very clear vision while I was taking the psilocybin that I was a tree and that he was so tightly wrapped around my trunk that I couldn't grow I was too bound to him kind of emotionally that I couldn't grow. And I, and so I had this vision of like literally peeling this vine, this strangler vine away from my trunk, at which point, you know, the canopy of my tree was able to kind of grow into the light. And it was this very beautiful image that I think had a tremendous kind of emotional impact on me, where I was like, okay, goodbye. I need to grow now. It just filled me with, I guess, a kind of sense of optimism, a sense of the, the sense that there was beauty ahead of me and that I could find some, and that I wanted to find it.

ELISE: Yeah, and I love that too because as you, you know, as we've sort of covered in this conversation, the cultural stigma attached to divorced women, in particular middle-aged women who are alone. And you know, I love at the beginning when you encounter it's, I think it's Helen Fisher who's giving you, or another scientist at one of these events who's giving me you these like, Incredibly depressing statistics about loneliness and its impact. And what is it?It’s like widowed, divorced, never married, married in terms of happiness or is it that an unhappy marriage actually trumps divorce.

FLORENCE: It was actually very clearly looking at mortality, so it was a pretty like definitive outcome, like who's more likely to die young and people who are divorced, like come out at the very. At the very end, you know, people who've been singled their whole lives have kind of figured out how to do that and be happy and have a support system. A lot of them, people who are divorced, sometimes there's a subset of people who are divorced who really don't recover about 10 to 15%. They go on to have these health effects and that's what's kind of skewing the stats. So, I did not wanna be one of those 10 to 15%, and I don't think anyone should be. And that's, you know, part of what motivated me to write this book. I mean, I really feel like if there's anything you can do to get out of the funk, you know, and despair of this kind of grief, you've gotta do it.

ELISE: Yeah. No, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s hard. It's also a hard narrative. I mean, it's similar to, I think they call it complicated grief

FLORENCE: Yes, yes.

ELISE: Which people understandably, were really upset at even the suggestion that you could pathologize grief after death, and I a hundred percent understand that. But they're talking about a very specific subset of people typically who were depressed, I think before the event who find who can't even sort of like enter a room in the house that has any memento of the person. They’re so completely unable to function that it has, it does become pathological. And the goal of is getting people sort of reengaged with life so they can actually even grieve. And I can imagine, I know people who get into sort of a divorce rut where it is like running their emotional lives and it's a certain stuckness, right. A total stuckness. And you know, we sometimes tend to internalize these stories that we have been told or the stories from our childhood or, you know, and it may basically has to do with we are not worthy, you know, these stories of we're not worthy, whether it started in childhood, or whether it started through a kind of rejection, a romantic rejection. You, you just don't want that story to keep being the story of your life. It's time for a new story.

:And it's, it's funny too how, you know, we have an aversion for loss, obviously, culturally, but when you think about it, these are the opportunities. This sort of level of suffering is when we do grow and when we do get better. It's hard to do the work when there's no real, there's no emotional work to do, if that makes sense. And it sounds perverse, but we all recognize this, that what drives us deeper into ourselves allows us to emerge as a more expanded version and. You know, I think about my twenties when unlike you, I was sort of getting tossed around in the dryer by getting done, you know, all the things. And there I do have a fair amount of gratitude for that now, whereas I can imagine if I had married my high school boyfriend and had no experience of this too, like how unmooring it would be when it's so high stakes, you know?

FLORENCE: Right? Like you probably got inoculated a little bit earlier on. I never had that inoculation. And I never, I never had thought of myself as, you know, having trauma before. And once I kind of took that on, then I learned about, you know, this other concept of post-traumatic growth. And it was, It was such a lifeline to know that even though I couldn't necessarily predict it or see it, just to know that there was something I could swim toward, that there is a very powerful, wonderful, beautiful kind of growth that can happen, you know, after we have been ripped down to our studs. It's, it's really worth bending your brain to try to get there, you know, and it’s worth the work.

ELISE: I loved the discussion in the book too, about this idea of betrayal and both emotional betrayal, sexual betrayal, you detail an experience with a guy that's wild, but I know that there's like a sense of betrayal in the, in the devastation of your marriage too, right? Where this idea of feeling blindsided or somehow, like how did I not know that? How were we not living the same reality? Right. And betrayal to me is like one of those fascinating words because we all know what it is. And then the second definition is like the revealing of something hidden. And sometimes that hidden thing is something that we're aware of. We just don’t wanna acknowledge, right? We're like, just don't make this something that I actually have to deal with. Like, I would much rather pretend like this isn't happening, but it is in that way it can be a betrayal of self, but how did you, and I thought it was really interesting, the conversation about like emotional betrayal versus sexual betrayal, because those two things are also so present in our culture, right? Like there's the act where it's in some ways like, oh, that's, I can understand there was a moment of physical transgression, but for so many people it's emotional, right? It's an imperceptible nebulous like, Whoa. What, what, what's happening here? Which I think you, there's a gender difference in it, right? In the way that it's experienced?

FLORENCE: Yeah. I mean there, there are psychologists who are looking at this kind of from an evolutionary perspective and I kind of take everything they find with a grain of salt, because I've just learned that a lot of people who are looking at evolutionary biology, you know, have so much bias attached to it. But some studies have supported the idea that men take sexual betrayal more seriously, you know, and that's because their genes and the passing along of their genes really depends on sexual fidelity, right? They don't know if a kid is theirs, whereas women, there's some indication that women take an emotional betrayal more seriously. And that's because they really need to know that they're gonna have kind of the loyalty and support, you know, of a male figure.

ELISE: I like that you take that with a grain of salt though, because I also feel like you can't separate nature and culture.

FLORENCE: Right.

ELISE: There are these tropes, right, that we're all supposed to follow.

FLORENCE: And I also feel like rejection is rejection. And as human animals, you know, if you wanna talk about the evolution of it, you know, what is true is that we are a hyper social species. We live in a very hierarchical society. We live in groups typically and if you get cast out, if you get sort of demoted in the hierarchy of your group, that has life and death consequences for individuals. And so we are hypersensitive to social slights, including maybe especially romantic rejection, but, but other kinds of rejection as well. So I think, you know, it's almost irrelevant whether it's sexual or emotional. And I think, you know, you hear people, I think sometimes excusing their behavior. It's like, oh, well I didn't sleep with her, so it's fine. but it doesn't work that way in our brains, you know, it's just very deeply felt.

ELISE: Yeah, no, and I think for a lot of women, and again, I think this, there's a question here, whether this is a natural instinct or just a cultural bias, but the idea of like your partner having an emotional relationship with someone rather than just like a fling in Vegas, it hits very differently.

FLORENCE: Yeah. I mean, what hurts, hurts, you know, regardless of what the studies show and rejection is, it's one of the most painful and complicating emotions that we have.

ELISE: Yeah. What are you working on now?

FLORENCE: I have become really interested still in the science of awe, which I talk a lot about in the book. I think it's a really surprising antidote to heartbreak, which we haven't really talked about. I mean, we talked about how the river trip didn't really work, but for me, experiencing beauty and sort of being more open to beauty and to awe also been incredibly helpful. Again, it reminds us, I think, that we're part of this larger, beautiful universe and, and maybe what happens to our egos on a particular day is not the most important thing in the world. I would love for more people to get that message. You know, that, that by accessing beauty, however it is you do it, you know, whether it's through nature or whether it's through music or through art or, you know, through witnessing, you know, amazing people in your life who inspire you. I think these are the things that really make us feel like we belong, make us feel connected to each other, make us feel connected to a larger world. And I just, I, I hadn't heard that message. I hadn't heard, Hey, looking for awe is the secret to recovering from loneliness. But it turns out it, is. And so I hope we can spread that word a little more.

ELISE: Why do you think, you know, I know Dacker Kelner, his book just came out and I feel like I'm probably more like tuned to those radio stations, so I'm aware of it, but why do you think that those concepts take so long to puncture people's awareness? Is it cause it’s so quiet in inherently and so personal?

FLORENCE: In terms of the psychologic in, in and in terms of the sort of field of psychology, awe was not taken seriously as an emotion until very recently, really until Dacker Keltner and his colleagues started looking at it in the early two thousands. It just hadn't really been studied much before. I mean there was in general, there was a bias towards studying negative emotions. Right. And then when positive psychology started studying the positive ones, all was kind of left behind for a while. I do think it's a complicated emotion. It's not always easy to study. I think that's one of the reasons. And then I actually think all this work that we're seeing now on psychedelics has really pushed the field because there's a theory that awe is in fact the mechanism by which so many people are transforming. You know, it's the sort of mystical experience they're having within the psychedelic treatment that is driving this incredibly profound change. You know, one, one of the things of about awe that I think is really interesting is that when we experience awe, you know, for example, imagine that you're looking at the Milky Way for the first time. Which a lot of kids are because they grow up in cities and they don't see the Milky Way. And then, you know, suddenly they go to summer camp or on a Girl Scout trip or something. And I've actually been with Girl Scouts who are 12 years old and looking at the Milky Way for the first time. And, you know, it's incredible, right? The expression on their face changes. They suddenly feel like a grain of sand in the universe. They are trying to, they are so full of wonder and amazement that they're trying to sort of understand what it is. Oh, that's a galaxy. It's on its side. There’s his cognitive accommodation that we do when we are experiencing awe. In which our brain kind of stops. Its normal categorization of things, you know, oh, that's a tree. Oh, that's a rock. It's more like, oh my God, what is that? And in that moment, there's this incredible window of learning that can happen. So when you're experiencing awe, it's an opportunity for you to also reexamine who you are and what your place is in the universe. And I think that's why it's working in psychedelics. And it's also maybe why it worked for me. It's like this rare window to sort of reassess everything that you thought about the world and I think that's really cool.

ELISE: It's amazing and it's like also so fun to think about people like you with your sciencey brain sort of opening a new line of inquiry or insight, you know, it's because you, you think about sort of where we are at this moment in time, and I'm think I like went on a big, I don't know if you've ever read Ken Wilber, but a big Ken Wilber deep dive and he's brilliant and his whole thing is like taking paradigms and organizing paradigms and this just like capacious massive brain, like literally writing them down on yellow legal pad sheets and like putting them in his house for four years and like putting them all in systems and his point is that in our like system of evolution, we have sort of the me, we, it. And ‘its' has been so dominant as we've developed our scientific language and understanding of the world and that. We're lagging a little bit or like bringing all of these things together are everyone's speaking a slightly different language and his point is like, you can think about the brain and you can study the brain and look at all the synapses firing and all of the sort of neurochemistry that's there, but you will never know someone's mind until you talk to them, and you'll never have a sense of someone or their personality from studying the the brain. And, but we've been so focused on sort of the, it, it's part of the quadrant that he delineates. And so the mystical obviously is the me we, and so thinking about it as a really necessary part of our lives that has to be nourished and it's like an extra part of context that we can forget about, but it's exciting to me to watch people like you people, people like Dacker Keltner and, and the psychedelic movement and the people sort of ancillary to that as they're bringing the mystical and the scientific together. I mean, I'm convinced it's all the same, it's different languages for the same thing and that we'll get there. We're like building those bridges.

FLORENCE: And I think we're really hungry for it. You know, we have an understanding that we're living this kind of odd deprived life in general right now. You know, we're not having enough daily exposure to the moon and the sunset and wild animals, you know? I mean, our species used to have this daily drip of awe. You know, life was not easy, but we're able to sort of recover from those stresses in lots of ways, and awe was one of them.

ELISE: Yeah. And just the magic, like just the ineffable magic of our lives and the strangeness of our existence. And then to also constantly be like in our tendency to like define that, describe it, like attribute it to various factors and just like drain the magic out instead of being like these things can be concurrent in us. And, yes, I'm a human biological being, having this very physical material experience, but then there's all this unseen, whether it's the Milky Way being hidden by light pollution or something else like that something else is so weirdly reassuring.

FLORENCE: Yes, yes. And I think a lot of people just feel the absence of meaning. I mean, we're just living in an epidemic, right? Of loneliness and connection, and grief and anxiety. I mean, all of these things.

ELISE: Yeah.

FLORENCE: I think people are sort of looking, they're looking for things that are gonna bring that meaning back. And so, I mean, you know, and in some ways like heart heartbreak and grief and talking about it and owning it and feeling it, it's opening a lot of doors. So that gives me hope.

ELISE: Beautiful. Thank you.

One of the things that Florence explores really beautifully and deftly in Heartbreak is this period of life, she is a little bit older than I am, but the 40’s and 50’s and the way that so many women experience a massive transformation and shift—where really, I think women become more themselves and come to be more to themselves as society chooses to sideline or make older women invisible. Although I do feel there is growing resistance to this, we desperately need our wise women to be reinstated and re-throwned. And she writes, “Ethnographer, Howard Norman, once told me about interviewing an Inuit women who laid out her life story. He said to her, ‘I see everything but the years from when you were 50 to 54.’ ‘Oh, I have no words for those years,’ she replied. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘In those years, I was a polar bear,’ she told him. These are our polar bear years. Everything about us is changing physically, hormonally, emotionally, our shifting roles in culture, work, and family upend our identities, even without divorce. I told Barnes about my own reluctant transition and my desire to market, recover from it, figure out what the hell comes next. She convinced me of the importance of setting clear intentions for my solo self and I found myself reviewing them during the quiet stretches in Deza.” Thanks for listening, I’ll see you next week.