SCOTT BROCATO:
Hidden Brain is dedicating the entire month of November to the subject “Healing 2.0”. So what will be the theme of “Healing 2.0”, and why did you feel it was important to devote an entire month to it?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
I feel like there's so much going on in the world right now, Scott, that, you know, reminds us of suffering and pain. I'm sure when you listen to the news--I know this is true for me--but you listen to the news, and your heart feels heavy at the end of each news program. It's also, I think, a potentially difficult time of the year for some people. The holidays are obviously a time of celebration and gathering for many people, but there are others who are reminded of those who are not sitting at the dinner table with them anymore. And so the holidays can be a difficult time. And so we at Hidden Brain decided that we were going to take the month of November and perhaps, you know, the first couple of weeks in December, and really explore at length the best ideas in psychology about healing and how we can recover from trauma.
And there's lots of different ideas here. One of the most interesting ideas, and in fact the idea that is part of our kickoff episode that we're calling “Change Your Story, Change Your Life,” is the idea that the way we tell the story of our lives can play a profound role in our mental health and well-being.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Do you think such stories are more helpful or harmful? Or does it depend on the situation?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
Well, let me tell you a little bit about what the episode is about. You know, when most of us think about our lives, we think about our lives the same way that audiences in a theatre watch a play. So we feel like we are experiencing our lives, our lives are happening to us, we're observing our lives. And while that's true, it's also the case that I think we're also, in important ways, the author of our lives, or at least we have an authorial control over the story that we tell about our lives. And the idea of this first episode in the series is that how we tell that story, and especially how we start and stop the different chapters of that story—if you think of your life as being a book, a novel, and it's divided up into different chapters--where you start and where you stop each chapter turns out to play a profound role in your mental health and well-being.
So if you start out each chapter in a very positive note--you tell the story about meeting someone and falling in love and getting married, and you're ecstatically happy--but the chapter ends with disillusionment and divorce and separation and anxiety and pain, that is what psychologists would call a “contamination sequence”: something that started out very positive, got contaminated, and ended very negative. But because all our lives have a number of ups and downs, we can also shift where we start and stop each chapter. And if we start the chapter on a negative note--we started on things that didn't go well, on a door that was closed to us, and we end the chapter by looking at ways in which that door being closed actually opened up a new possibility for us, or opened up something new or a new avenue in our life--that's called a “redemption sequence”: something that starts from the negative and ends in the positive. And of course, because again, our lives have so many ups and downs, it's really up to us to choose where we start and stop each chapter, so it's not so much that we're changing the facts of the story, but we're changing the way we're telling the story. And that turns out to have profound consequences for our well-being.
SCOTT BROCATO:
The second episode is called "What We Gain From Pain”, and it will explore, among other things, whether there's any truth to the idea “what doesn't kill you makes you stronger”. We've all heard that saying. Tell us about that episode.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
This is an idea that I think I've really subscribed to going into our reporting, and as we started to develop the episode, Scott. And but I think in some ways I've come to see that...it's a misguided idea.
You know, the guest whom we spoke with, Eranda Jayawickreme, pointed out to us that in many superhero movies, you have a common theme, a common trope, and the idea is that someone goes through tragedy or goes through a catastrophe, and they come out the other side with superhuman powers. They have superpowers after experiencing that tragedy. And that trope is a very common trope that we have not just in our superhero comics and in our movies, but in our lives: that we expect that people who go through difficult times will come out the other side being wiser and stronger and better. And in some ways, we even, I think, you know, with the best of intentions sometimes, place those expectations on people who are going through difficult times.
So someone goes through cancer, and we almost have the expectation that they're gonna come out and be transformed and be wiser as a result of their experience with cancer. And I think, again, we try and do it, we express this trope as a way to be helpful, as a way to be inspirational But I think it often has a counterproductive effect on people, and I think that's what I eventually took away from the episode, because now the person with cancer is not only trying to battle cancer, they're trying to battle the expectations that are being placed on their shoulders, that they're gonna come out of cancer stronger or better, you know, even a superior version than they were before they got the cancer diagnosis. And of course, when that doesn't happen, or if that doesn't happen, many people beat up on themselves. They say what's wrong with me? How come I'm not a better person when so many other people go through tragedy and come out better on the other side? And so I think in some ways, inadvertently, it has a negative effect on people's well-being and mental health. And it might be an idea that sort of sounds better than it actually is in practice.
SCOTT BROCATO:
And the final episode is called "The Power of Apologies", and you talk with a psychologist about the mental barriers that keep us from admitting when we've done something wrong, as well as the transformative power of apologies. Why is it so hard for us to say “I'm sorry”?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
Well, in some ways, admitting that we're sorry in some ways puts us in a position of supplication to someone else. When we offer an apology--and not just superficially and not like the way politicians offer apologies, where they, you know, they have PR agents who are helping them craft what they're about to say and they sound insincere--if you sincerely offer an apology to someone, and that often involves listening to the person express the hurt they've experienced, processing what that's like, empathically trying to understand what the other person has been through, genuinely expressing remorse, you're putting yourself in a situation of great vulnerability. Because of course you offer an apology, the apology might be accepted, or it might be rejected. You have no control over what the other person does, and in fact this might be someone you have harmed, or someone you have hurt. And so offering the apology involves tremendous risk, I think, for our egos and for our sense of psychological safety, if you will.
At the same time, I think it is also the case that as we go through life, it's inevitable that we are going to hurt other people, and that other people will hurt us. That's just a factor of being human, I think. And apologies have this tremendous capacity to soothe relationships that have been tarnished, or where the where the fabric of the relationship has been torn. And not just at the level of interpersonal conflicts or interpersonal hurts, but even at the level of groups or even nations, there are groups that harm other groups; there are nations that harm other nations. And in some ways an apology that is eloquently expressed and deeply felt, in some ways can allow both the victim and the perpetrator to move forward in a new way that can be really profound. And so both these things are simultaneously true: apologies are very hard to deliver well and to deliver sincerely; but when done right, they can have a really transformative effect in our lives.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Final question: what do you hope listeners will take away from the series “Healing 2.0”?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
I'm hoping they will take away a number of different ideas about ways in which they should think about the setbacks that affect their own life, Scott. I think if there is one overarching idea, it comes from an episode that we did with Lucy Hone, a psychologist who herself suffered an unimaginable loss when her daughter was killed in a car crash. And as she sort of came to terms with the loss of her daughter and her own grief, she also explored a lot of the research, the psychological research, into grief and how grief works. And she came by, in some ways, an idea that is both modern, but also very, very old. It's an ancient idea, and that is the way that we think about the things that happen to us, plays a really profound role in our ultimate well-being and our outcomes.
I was reading a book the other day about Buddhist philosophy. There's a story that's ascribed to the Buddha, who said that as we go through the world, as we walk through the forest, we're going to get struck by arrows. And what he meant was that bad things are going to happen to us. Sickness is going to befall us. We're going to experience loss and suffering. But he says when this happens, the one thing that we should not do is we should not plunge a second arrow into the sight of the first injury. But that, in fact, is what we often do. We often plunge a second arrow into ourselves. And that second arrow are the thoughts and the perceptions and the feelings and our own expressions of regret and self-doubt and recrimination and a lack of self-compassion. These are self-inflicted wounds that we inflict on ourselves. And I think the lesson that Lucy Hone is talking about, using modern psychology and the lesson from many ancient traditions, is you might not be able to do anything about the first arrow striking you. You certainly can do something about the second.
