Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And you have reached another episode of Bewildered. You know us. We’re the people who do the podcast for the people who are trying to figure it out. How are you doing, Marty?

Martha Beck:
I’m doing okay seeing as how our toddler is on her nanny cam is not napping, but wearing underpants on her head, and I’m just relaxed about that. Going to go ahead and record. How about you? How are you feeling?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. About the same. She’s staring up at the … It’s not a nanny cam, it’s a baby monitor with a video and she’s looking up at it like, I know what this is. I know this is some sort of Orwellian dystopia that you’ve got me in here. Anyway.

Martha Beck:
The eyes looking out from the leg holes of those underpants are chilling.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a very strange little superhero.

Martha Beck:
So what are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
I am trying to figure out … I always feel overwhelmed by this question. There’s always so many things. I have an issue. I have an issue in my body, in a part of my body that I’ve been told is called the adductors.

Martha Beck:
Adductors. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
And when I try to talk about it … It’s a pain and potentially … I don’t know. Something’s NQR in there. Not quite right. And it’s hard to talk about because when I’m in person, I try to talk to someone about it, I have to touch my very uppermost innermost thighs, and that’s just distracting for everyone. But it’s important to be-

Martha Beck:
To explain this you have to touch that?

Rowan Mangan:
I do. I do. To explain it.

Martha Beck:
But you don’t have to make them touch it.

Rowan Mangan:
No. But anyway, I have a thing in that area where I want to click. I want to do a little click. You know what I’m talking about when you do an adjustment?

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
An inner adjustment-

Martha Beck:
Oh, like a little cracking your knuckles or whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
Exactly. It’s something like that. I don’t know what parts are involved, but it’s tendons or bones. I wouldn’t have a clue. I don’t know much about bodies. But I know that there’s this … It’s very hard to achieve the click, but when I get there, the relief is indescribable. I feel instantly so good. Just so good. And I had a weird experience with it a couple of weeks ago. It was really bothering me and I was out. It was early in the morning and I was at the supermarket. And walking around and like, oh God, this thing is really bugging me. You know what I’m talking about? When there’s something where there’s pain until you can suddenly release it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Like your ears getting blocked up and then they pop and it’s like, ugh.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. Kind of like that but more painful, I would say. Equally distracting and annoying. So I’m in the supermarket, it’s early in the morning. I think it was on the weekend. No one was there. And I’m walking along with the trolley. Sorry, the cart. Cart. The cart with the cup holders. The cart with the cup holders. And I was just absently as I shopped trying to create the movement that gives me the click. That I think gives me the click. And what it actually is, Marty, is some form of kicking my leg straight out to the side. Just my thigh. My little rest of my leg isn’t as involved. It can do whatever it wants. But it’s just like this thing of trying to kick my leg directly out to the side, which is quite hard when your focus is your thigh. It’s not your toes going out.

Martha Beck:
True. Especially your inner thigh.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Innermost uppermost.

Martha Beck:
Innermost uppermost. There are different names for that, but adductor will have to do. We all think a lot about our innermost uppermost thighs really.

Rowan Mangan:
And so I’m in this empty aisle and I think I’m just going to make this happen. I’m going to just stand here until it happens because I will feel so good and I’ll be able to shop without distraction. So I start getting really into it. Because there’s something to do with the hips. There’s something to do with the thighs. There’s like a kick it out, kick it out. But you have to wiggle. I get the best results from this incidentally, if anyone else has the similar problem, when I’m on the elliptical machine and if I just start kicking my knees out to the side and really leaning into it.

Martha Beck:
That is not a graceful image, honey.

Rowan Mangan:
The idea that anything I describe trying to do with my body could be described as graceful is hilarious to me. So, anyway, I’m doing a stanky leg wiggle in the empty aisle. I’m leaning into it with my hip. I’m wobbling. I’m wiggling. I’m sticking my leg out to the side. And this old man walks around the corner. And honestly, he looks at me and there’s no category in his head to explain what on earth I am doing.

Martha Beck:
I don’t think there is in anyone’s head, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
It doesn’t look like stretching or exercise or whatever you would call-

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
It was just really strange behavior. And he was suddenly as acutely aware as I was about how relatively empty the supermarket was. Yeah. Anyway, he literally backed away. He thought, “I don’t need oatmeal that badly. I’m just going to leave her to her thing.” Innermost Uppermost thighs.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I’ve seen you trying to release your innermost uppermost thigh, and it reminds me of being in biology when we dissected frogs and you touch the nerve and the leg just kicks out really suddenly and violently. And it does look a little like a martial arts move. I do think he legitimately was probably afraid that you were just going to take out his knees.

Rowan Mangan:
I love that you think that. That is the kindest possible interpretation of what happened between me and that old man. And I really appreciate you for that. Thank you. Tell me what you’re trying to figure out.

Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah. Mine is, we’ve been very busy lately. So busy that even Karen herself, the great Kerry coo who drives everywhere and does all the shopping and whatnot-

Rowan Mangan:
Except for mine on an early Saturday morning with a leg wiggle.

Martha Beck:
She’s the only one they allow in the store anymore. But we were going to go get something. Oh, I needed to drop off something in the mailbox. So she was going to come along because I wasn’t quite sure where the mailbox was and I cannot follow directions. I’m not able to do things that other people do. And yes, I have GPS in my car, but there are problems making that work. The interface with the car doesn’t always work right. Whatever. Anyway, I had Kerry coo as my three-dimensional living hot-blooded GPS that was going to tell me everything I needed to know and she took the task to heart. And I thought, I’ve got to make an app that actually from your car talks to you the way Karen talks to you about where you should go.

“Okay, Marty, take a right. Take a right. There’s a street. There’s a street. Take a right. Okay. Stay in your line. Stay in your line. Stay in your line. Okay. All right. A stop sign. A stop sign.” “Yeah. I see it. It’s way ahead of us.” “Okay. But it’s a stop sign. Okay. Oh my God, that car. There’s a car coming toward us.” “Yes, I see that.” Wouldn’t it be great to have your car just yelling these things at you? And then we go to the post office, I drop off my thing and then I need to buy gift wrapping at this store so I say, “I’m going to the Hallmark store,” or whatever it was to get gift wrapping. And she says, “Yes. There’s a store up there where you can get gift wrapping.” I was like, “Yes, I said that.” So She said, “Okay. Turn right. Turn right. Okay. Now go into the parking. There’s a parking lot. Go into the parking lot. Look. There’s the wrapping paper store.” It was so much better than, your destination is ahead of you on the right. She’s like, “There it is. Go toward it, Marty. Go toward the store.” The parking lot was completely empty. She’s like, “This is a parking lot. Take a space. Take any space.”

And I just thought, talk about feeling like there was someone looking out for me, talk about Jesus, take the wheel. It was an experience in being steered through the mind of Kerry coo that I think everyone needs to experience. So I’m trying to figure out how to turn a Google app or a Google map or whatever into something that has very high anxiety and a random attention field that is both scattered but extremely intense.

Rowan Mangan:
You feel like this is something you’d like more of in your life?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Well, I want other people to have it so they’ll come for life coaching.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. No, that makes sense. I feel like anxiety from your robot servant voice is probably not ideal, but better than what I usually encounter, which is this smug, bored, I’m sick of you in your shit tone that I usually get.

Martha Beck:
Your Siri is really a bitch.

Rowan Mangan:
She is.

Martha Beck:
She really is.

Rowan Mangan:
She is. This is my Siri. Rerouting. I’m just like, the attitude. I know where I’m going.

Martha Beck:
Here’s the problem I have with my Siri. She doesn’t do the bitch voice like yours does. I don’t know why yours does that. But what she will do is she doesn’t … You know how you get something that’s kind of right? Like you remember you were going to Angel’s Harvest Organic Store and it’s really Angel’s Bounty Organic Store, but your friend knows … Kerry coo knows I need to go to the Angel’s Bounty, Angel’s Harvest. 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. My Siri does not make that leap for me. I was driving along trying to go to True North Organic Foods or whatever. And I said, “Siri navigate to True North Organic Foods.” And she’s like, “Turn right, turn left, go far.” And then 10 miles later, I’m like, “Siri, tell me the route.” “We’re going to True North Organic Store in Wilmington, Delaware at a distance of 400 miles.” So I end up doing a lot of long trips towards stores that have names that I have spoken to Siri, and they actually exist, but they are very far away. And you’d think she would get it by now that I’m just roughly going for the label of a store I’ve been to before and she should just … It’s close.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe we should be reassured that AI, or at least to our mainstream AI isn’t yet at the point where they go, “I hear you say this Martha, but I think knowing you, I think you …” This is what mine would say. “I think you mean …” That’s what mine would say. I think you’ll find that what you’re asking me for doesn’t exist. Hey, have we ever talked about our experience with the GPS in San Jose, California?

Martha Beck:
That was a really good one. I think we ought to just tell the story whether or not it takes us 25 minutes of people’s random day. It’s that entertaining. I want to hear it.

Rowan Mangan:
We went to San Jose. I had booked us a hotel. It was a beautiful hotel. We went to San Jose. When we got there, it was raining and stressful and I was trying to find the hotel and I was following the Google and the Google gave up on me. It just went, you’ve arrived. And I’m like, “I haven’t arrived. I’m in the middle of the freaking road in the middle of nowhere. There’s no hotel here. What are you doing to me? Silicon Valley is terrifying. Everyone drives too aggressively and I don’t understand where our beautiful hotel that I saw pictures of that had umbrellas and lovely places to …” Seaside places actually now that I think about it. Lovely seaside villa in San Jose. And that’s when we realized we were in the wrong country.

Martha Beck:
We were navigating to a hotel in the middle of San Jose, Costa Rica, and we were in San Jose, California and we were in the precise address that we had fed in. But it was the middle of a major thoroughfare with business buildings all around us. It was on the median and it said, “You have reached your destination. Sleep here tonight.” And we were looking around going, “Is the hotel incredibly tiny? Is it for leprechauns? Is it under the median?”

Rowan Mangan:
We were not at all dealing with it that calmly. We sounded like Karen trying to give directions. It was not pretty. And then in a later episode sometime we’ll tell you about when we eventually found a hotel in San Jose, California and had to check in with both our homemade cheesecakes.

Martha Beck:
With two homemade cheesecakes. Not pretty ones either.

Rowan Mangan:
Aluminum foil on the top. Anyway. Do you know what? I have a really good idea. Let’s talk about today’s topic.

We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep bewildering new souls and you know how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven and we read every one and exclaim over them and we just love you all.

So Marty, today we’re talking about feeling our big feelings. And most of our topics these days, it is toddler inspired. We have a toddler who’s very in touch with her big feelings and we’re learning a lot. And at the same time, there’s stuff happening around us in the world that is quite hard to bear, I think it’s fair to say, and is giving me some big feelings.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Me too.

Rowan Mangan:
And we’re watching our three-year-old respond to things that are hard for her and her response makes more sense to me a lot of the time than my own. And yet still there’s this urge to suppress in her, in myself. Why do we want to suppress big feelings is what I want to talk about today. Why does the culture seem to want us to suppress our big feelings?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And not just big feelings. When you say toddler, you immediately think tantrum.

Rowan Mangan:
I know I do.

Martha Beck:
Well, yeah. I immediately have a tantrum, but only inside. That’s the key. We learn to keep it inside. So it’s not just though the big tantrumy feelings. Because tantrums are often frustration and anger, but there’s also the big grief that you can feel looking at things that are happening in the world. And there is also something that doesn’t look active at all, is just feeling so slammed in the face by the wrecking ball of whatever’s coming at you that you just go limp. You just give up and lie down. And that’s another level of big feeling.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. Yeah. I guess we’re talking about any expression of a feeling that’s big enough to reroute your day. The expression is big enough to route your day. Whether that’s expressing it through action and noise or expressing it through stillness and silence.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. That’s so interesting that it reroutes your day because yeah, you either have to stop and process a very active thing pushing at you from the inside, but then there’s also what I’ve been experiencing a lot, which is it looks like stillness. It might look like a divine stillness, but it’s not. It’s a complete flat lining that happens when we get so overwhelmed by a feeling that our nervous systems don’t know how to process it at all.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. This is so interesting. You’ve been telling me about the research you’re doing at the moment that if I’m understanding it correctly, there’s an override system in our bodies that once whatever faculty judges that we’ve been in fight or flight for too long, it’s like now you will stop. Now you will just literally lie down.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. There’s a whole school of thought that started actually with a guy who was doing … He was analyzing the nervous system to deal with newborns and preemies. Little babies that have to confront the world before they’re quite ready. And he found these three levels of nervous system stabilization, if you want to call it that. The states of the nervous system. And they evolved over time. And the first to evolve in very, very ancient organisms is in the gut and it’s a connection between the brain and the gut. Then up a little higher in your nervous system around your chest area, there is a different level of arousal of the nervous system and then there’s one higher up. So long story short, if we’re completely regulated … And that’s a big popular word now, especially if you have a toddler. But it’s feeling regulated in your system, is feeling relaxed, open, connected, and that’s when the whole nervous system is awake and accessible.

When you get scared, you go to a level called sympathetic vagal arousal, and that’s where the fight or flight stuff happens. That’s where you’re very active, you’re running. And so a big feeling that could reroute your day is I am suddenly terrified of what’s happening in the world, or I am so grief-stricken that I literally can’t make it to the dentist or whatever it is. But it would be an active avoidance or pushback. Anything fight flight or fawning is another thing. You people please in order to make yourself feel safer and keep yourself safe with other people. And then if you are in a situation that your nervous system sees as inescapable … So either it’s gone on for so long that it thinks I’m never getting out of this state of anxiety, which is where I think most people spend most of their time, by the way, I am literally just going to hit the power switch on the entire machine. I am going to put you into something called dorsal collapse or tonic collapse is another word for it. You have no tone. You just literally fall.

And that’s what happens when somebody is so emotional that they pass out. And I’ve had that happen. And it happens to a lot of people just because of the pressures of everyday life. So the fight or flight stuff and the total collapse stuff, here’s what I want everyone out there to hear. These are involuntary biological reactions. They are not self-serving. They are not lazy. They are not inconsiderate. They are ancient strategies that your nervous system evolved to keep you alive. And so it feels really cruel to me when the world looks at those big reactions and says, you’re not supposed to have those. You mustn’t have those. You mayn’t have those, and there’s no way we can not have them.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right. God, that’s so true of so many things. Actually, it’s funny because we were talking about something being productive, which is always a funny word for us on this podcast because it’s a word that we know the culture loves. Be productive. But you had a great metaphor around it, Marty, about coughing that worked really well for big feelings.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. Coughing is like a big feeling. So when I was young, I used to … And I got sick all the time because I never slept much. And I remember going to debate meets as a teenager and taking tons of cough suppressants because I didn’t want to cough in the middle of a competition or a speech or whatever. And we thought that was just good medicine. You got a cough, you get something that relaxes those muscles and suppresses the motion in them so you don’t cough. And later I learned that’s a way of dying. Because coughing is nature’s way of getting rid of an infection. So then I switched. When I get a cold now you want to get expectorants. It says on the packaging we’ll create a productive cough, which is like … Yeah, it’s the culture just having colonized but cough. Now you, you’ll produce. And it means that you actually get stuff to come up and out of your lungs and that stuff takes the virus away and you’re actually cleaning out your system, your lungs.

So big feelings are the same way. If you just suppress them and don’t feel them, they stay in there as toxicity or infection that has entered the system. And I think that those huge emotions, we can get, those the way our emotional systems cough out the worst of what we’ve encountered so that our systems can get back into a healthy balance. And we’re supposed to suppress that. There are so many things in our culture. There’s medication, therapies, all kinds of things that are meant to make you feel it less. And God knows when it hurts, I want to feel it less, but what if that just keeps the infection inside? What if we need productive big feelings to stay healthy?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Even when expressing those big feelings stops us being productive in the culture’s definition.

Martha Beck:
Absolutely.

Rowan Mangan:
The rerouting your day thing. So as far as what does the culture say about feeling our big feelings, I think it’s probably safe to say that it is not in favor, which is why … To take one example, we’re all so freaked out by our kids having tantrums rather than just being like, yeah, cool. Yeah, man, me too, man. Which is what we’re really feeling on the inside.

Martha Beck:
It’s fascinating to watch. I remember watching Sense and Sensibility, the one that Emma Thompson wrote and starred in. And you look at how, for example, in that part of … So 19th century British society, which still influences our culture a lot. Even the slightest rise in vocal tone, even tearing up is just considered unseemly. So then you have a three-year-old who hasn’t been trained that way, and you see them expressing their feelings the way biologically they’re programmed to do it. And you realize that culturally we’re supposed to take that away and turn this child into a robotic creature.

Rowan Mangan:
And you feel the pressure of that in the moment. You can feel the culture trying to act through your own body. Like stop it. Stop it. Less, less, please, less.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. And it’s so much worse. You were telling me the other day, I can handle it except when I have to get to something on time or we absolutely have to do a certain task. And I was thinking time bound and task bound. That is how the culture wants us. It wants us to do-

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the kind of productive it wants us to be.

Martha Beck:
Correct. Yes. It’s very much the factory again, you do the task you were meant to do at the time you were meant to do it. And frankly, once we’ve got those two things from you, we don’t want anything else.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s so true. So there’s that. It’s not productive, but I think it’s also the displays of big feelings, even when that’s that stillness that could come with grief or dorsal collapse or whatever. They’re uncomfortable and that discomfort I think isn’t easily slotted into the culture’s categories.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me of the little old man in the supermarket. What emotion did he think you were trying to express by kicking violently just with your thigh, not the rest of your leg out to one side? Yeah. It was an expression of some deep feeling that he did not fit into category. Anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
I assume he thought I was dancing or attempting to dance.

Martha Beck:
Well, maybe you were doing something a little different than what you do around the house then. I don’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
It was quite beautiful.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s a great move. I wish I could master it.

Rowan Mangan:
So do I.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, the whole thing is if you get a productive cough, we’re good with not suppressing it, but you cough into a tissue, a Kleenex, your elbow if you’ve got nothing else. And then you put it where no one can see it. We do not want to see the yucky stuff that our emotional systems cough up when we let ourselves feel and when the feeling is productive and it’s moving it out of our bodies.

Yeah. I remember once being in a therapy session, an actual group therapy session, and I expressed anger and the therapy group almost broke up. They were like, “No, no. We know what happened to you, and we know we can see all the things that are making you angry, but showing us the anger itself is just too much. We cannot look at that.” And I was like damn, if you can’t do it in therapy, where can you do it?

Rowan Mangan:
I was reading this article just this past week by a woman called Katherine Roland. It was in The Guardian. We’ll put it in the show notes. And it was so amazing. And it was specifically about the wellness industry. Big wellness.

Martha Beck:
Big wellness.

Rowan Mangan:
And what she says in the headline, I think in the title of the piece is women are being sedated. And she uses this word by the idea of self-care because the message we’re being sold is if you are stressed, it’s because you are not having enough bubble baths or booking enough massages. It’s not because the system, the structures of the culture around you are inherently stressful or putting an untenable burden on you. It’s just I think you need a yoga class, you need to unwind. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Just do a little self-care.

Martha Beck:
A little self-care. And sometimes they recommend that for males, but what they usually tell males to do is if you’re feeling anything, get more aggressive, get more productive and crush the opposition. And that’s another way of not allowing a full range of feeling. And both of them dismiss all the context that creates huge feelings in all of us.

Rowan Mangan:
I think that’s what Roland’s getting at. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So all of us, whatever our gender … But I do think there’s a particular push to … There’s always been selective pressure on identified females to be subdued. To keep it to themselves. But then you look at the conditions at the events happening around it. The context in which our big feelings are being formed. We’re getting information about things that are so dreadful that if you don’t have a huge feeling about it, I don’t understand how you’re even human.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I think there’s a lot of … It’s hard to say that because then we’re being encouraged to resist those big feelings. I think someone who’s doing their best in the culture, it’s not the humanity that’s shut down, it’s the impossibility of the situation and I think we choose to reject taking that context in sometimes because we can’t afford big feelings right now.

Martha Beck:
Oh, say more.

Rowan Mangan:
I can’t look at the poverty and the genocide and the polar ice caps right now because I’ve got a report that has to get in by three, or my boss is going to be mad, and then I go into existential whatever about feeding my kids or whatever it is. We push so hard against knowing … Like bearing witness to horrors if they get in the way of our productivity.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a little bit like Buddha going out and seeing the life outside the palace and all the horror, and he was supposed to go back and just be the prince again, and he couldn’t keep doing it. He had to deal with that context. And he wasn’t okay till he figured it out many years later. It reminds me a little bit of a set of experiments by Bruce Alexander. I think it was in the 1990s. He had come back from Vietnam where he’d done a lot of drugs and along with fellow soldiers. And there were a few that became lifelong addicts, but by and large all of his friends and he stopped taking drugs like heroin as soon as they came home and they had flu-like symptoms for a week, and they were fine. And then some of them became lifelong addicts. So Bruce Alexander became a psychologist and he was looking at the experiments that showed how addictive these substances are, and they really are.

And he wondered why he was able to quit and as some of his friends were. And he decided maybe it was about context. And he looked at all the experiments done on rats … Which are actually quite surprisingly similar to us biologically, so they can do a lot of addiction experiments with them. There are all these experiments showing that rats were totally addicted to things like heroin and … He was mainly looking at heroin. Yeah. Just heroin. But he noticed something that had never been mentioned in all the other studies, which was that every single rat being tested was in a cage. It occurred to him that rats don’t like cages that much. So he built this enclosure called Rat Park, and it was 200 square feet and it had a beautiful landscape and rolling hills made out of cardboard and a place to mate and a place to eat, and rat toys everywhere. Took all these heroin addicted rats, took them out of their cages, put them in Rat Park. And then he gave them a selection between plain water and water laced with heroin. All these addicted rats switched to plain water when they were in Rat Park. I don’t know. Have I talked about this on the podcast before? It deserves to be talked about. It’s been called the most undeservedly unfamous experiment in psychology.

Rowan Mangan:
But there’s a reason for that. It’s not serving the culture’s agenda, right. Because you go straight from Rat Park to … Hang on a second. So maybe it was the experience of fighting in a totally unjust war that was fucking them up and the heroine. And then you can see all kinds of other agendas. Like there’s a war on drugs, but there’s not a war on war. You know what I’m saying?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
If anything, let’s call a ceasefire on any war on war. This is just war more.

Martha Beck:
Let me make a point because I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I do believe that heroin was messing them up, but they were using the heroin to cope with a situation that was messing them up way more.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s a good distinction to make. But I think the point is exactly the same as Katherine Rowland’s in the sense that it’s being used as a sedative.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re doing it to ourselves for sure, but we’re serving the culture’s agenda by sedating ourselves to make life bearable.

Martha Beck:
Right. Whatever cage you’re in, whatever life you’re in, basically you seek a level of homeostasis. If you’re not allowed to process big feelings and allow them to move your activities and shape your thoughts and philosophy. If you’re forced to live in the same cage all the time, you use whatever you can to suppress the cough. But meanwhile, the infection’s still in you, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So the culture says, in places that are toxic and infectious, act as if you’re healthy and don’t have an immune reaction at all. Just keep going as if nothing’s happened.

Rowan Mangan:
Because what we’re saying is the pain is productive. It has to move like a cough, like a virus moving through us. If we don’t let it move through us, the toxins are just going to fester, which ultimately doesn’t serve the culture either.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. The emotion moves like a cough, It not only moves us, it actually transmutes us. And here the analogy breaks down and I have to reach for another one. It’s more like the forger’s fire. It kills you, but recreates you. And that’s something that is in the hero’s saga of every culture that the hero goes through trials that break him apart or her apart, and then recreate the hero.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And we’ve talked before on the podcast about how all change really is a death and rebirth in our identity and who we are. And so all change follows that death and rebirth.

Martha Beck:
And I really got a big dose of how we’re supposed to move through your life without letting the big feelings transmute you. I was at Harvard and my son had his down syndrome diagnosis, prenatally. And late in the pregnancy, but still prenatal. And I had to go through all the formal tax things and inheritance things. I had to change a lot of paperwork having to do with Adam’s future because he was never going to be a normal person. So here I am, I’m 25 years old, I’m six months pregnant, and I’m trying to deal with this. And the idea was I had to move through it with the same speed and efficiency and good humor that I would’ve done any other piece of paperwork or homework or whatever.

And everyone that I was dealing with, if I showed any emotion about it, would say, “Well, clearly you’re making the wrong decision. You need to terminate the pregnancy.” It wasn’t really legal by that point anyway, but they were still urging me to. And what I kept thinking was, even if I do terminate the pregnancy … Which I think is just fine, if that’s what you feel you is right for you. Absolutely. I will still have to go through a lot of grief. This is an intensely emotional experience for me. It is not just different paperwork. I’m human here. And it really was like dealing with a series of robots who were telling me, oh, you have a feeling, well then go deal with it. Come back here. Go take care of it. You shouldn’t do anything that’s making you have a big feeling.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. You must be doing the wrong thing.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
Do a different thing. And the problem has to be solved by doing as well. By taking action in the world.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Taking action, getting knowledge. No. I remember thinking knowledge is power and I got all this information and it just hurt and hurt and hurt. And I finally realized that knowledge was not power necessarily. It was a kind of power to take a kind of action. But it was not the power that was going to enable me to absorb this experience into my life story, into my identity. I was being broken. My identity was being broken apart. My thoughts about my child were broken apart and taken down to the bare boards so that something else could come in its place so that there would be a complete transmutation. And I wasn’t old enough to know then that grief’s so strong, it shakes your teeth. It was a productive sensation and was leading me towards something powerful, natural, and good, because I was just told don’t have those feelings.

Rowan Mangan:
And the culture doesn’t want us to become something different in that way and something that it can’t contain as easily. It reminds me of … There’s a really beautiful little snatch of song that I saw recently online that we’ll link to. It’s the Bengsons. I think it’s called, Don’t Numb To This. And I really encourage people to listen to it. It’s very beautiful gospel feeling, simple acapella song. And she says, don’t numb to this, let yourself breathe in and out. You’re strong enough to feel it all. It’ll keep your heart alive. And I love that because at a certain point, if you numb yourself, whether you’re numbing with sedatives that are substances or activities or whatever, your heart won’t be able to survive it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. But if you keep breathing in and out … She keeps saying you’re strong enough to feel it. If you can do that, what happens is you go past that fight, flight state, you stop trying to do anything, you go to the place of total collapse. And at that moment there is a living death and a surrender to the new situation which is necessary for your heart to keep beating through the experience. What should we do about all this, Roey? What are you planning to do with this?

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s figure it out in a minute.

Martha Beck:
Something productive. So you’re with Bewildered with Marty and Ro. We’re talking about big feelings as being productive, like a cough. And I was just thinking that another word for productive is powerful. And I was thinking that the natural role of big feelings is to help us gain a inner power. Not a cultural power, but something very different.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I think where we talk about coming back to our senses, it’s really helpful to frame this whole idea of big feelings up through a lens of different kinds of power. I think we know that displays of emotion generally, especially tears or that sort of thing in public, that is framed by the culture as the opposite of power. As a form of weakness.

Martha Beck:
Oh, you’re right.

Rowan Mangan:
And so there’s power as culture defines it, which is quite a macho concept, I would say. But what I want to think about is a more feminine notion of power. A power that moves, that breathes, that feels it all like the Bengsons say and keeps its heart alive. That kind of power.

Martha Beck:
And it’s so interesting because the power … This is one of my soapboxes. I have so many. But the power of history is how many guys were able to kill how many people on a given day? How many people did we manage to kill that day?

Rowan Mangan:
Congratulations.

Martha Beck:
Congratulations. There’s nothing in the history books about the amount of power it took, the amount of dedication, ingenuity, tenacity, grit it takes to create a life and keep it going. To not just have life come from you, but to continuously work to keep life going. That’s power.

Rowan Mangan:
God yeah.

Martha Beck:
So yeah, you do have big feelings when you’re trying to gain the power to be a creator and sustainer of life. And I think what the big feelings do, the way they detour our day is they pull our attention off all the pressures around us about getting to the bank or whatever, and they turn our gaze inward. And instead of brushing it aside, suppressing it and saying, okay, I wish this weren’t happening, I’m going to act as if it isn’t happening, we accept what is happening and then we grow large enough, psychologically, spiritually to hold the reality of what is happening, which is not small. Which is huge.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Wow. God, that’s so true. And talk about growing large enough. I was just thinking about … Valerie Kaur is my personal hero at the moment, and everyone should check out her book, See No Stranger. It is amazing. She has a really beautiful reframe in terms of the … I guess the collective sense of darkness that many of us feel about the time we’re living in. And she says, “What if this isn’t the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” And talks about are we in the beginnings of a transition? And she means that in the sense of labor, physical labor. She has this whole giving birth as the analogy for a … What you call it, the transformation of consciousness that we’re all hoping that we’ll see in our lifetimes. But it’s just breathe and push. That’s what we’ve got to do. Breathe and push.

Martha Beck:
And she says that’s what the midwife says because if we don’t push, we will die. And whatever wants to be born will be still born. It’s like shutting off your big feelings. It keeps you from the desire to push. It’s like being anesthetized to the point where your body can’t do what it needs to do. Suppressed emotion is like a pneumonia of the soul. Everything stays inside us and destroys us from within when instead we could be letting it go out. And everybody goes, “Ew, how gross. All the stuff you’re putting on into the world. The phlegm, the babies, the afterbirth.” Okay, it’s gory. It’s not pretty, it’s shocking and it’s life. It’s the only way to sustain life.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah. It’s so interesting how that mess is so … It’s such an inherent, deep, deep part of the feminine. I’ve never really thought about it like that. In that messiness, whether it’s phlegm or baby placenta or whatever. Menstruation. The poet laureate of the show, Ani DiFranco … Might’ve mentioned her once or twice. She has a line about … She actually has a whole song really that’s all about feeling our share of pain, feeling pain as a right, that we come into the world with and through the pain, it’s the pain that teaches us that we’re connected to everything. That we’re not separate from everything. And it strikes me that the ego, which is … We have our own whole language in here. But you can say the concept of ego could be analogous to how we talk about culture or the system. The ego is the individual expression of what the culture’s doing at the collective level. And what the ego wants to say is, we aren’t connected. We are separate. I’m this one unitary, separate being and there’s nothing. There’s no blood. There’s no cuts. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Martha Beck:
I’m completely okay and I am me, and I am perfect. And you will never get me. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Exactly. And feeling our pain is a way to stop identifying as ego in a way maybe.

Martha Beck:
But not just pain. I really want to reiterate, it’s not … One of the things that culture robs us of is the knowledge of what it feels like to go through the ego death and into the birth of something else. Because we don’t follow it far enough. Because if you do allow it-

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Because We stop at the pain so we never find out what’s on the other side. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. It’s scary down there. Don’t go there. Instead of it’s scary down there and it is rebirth. It’s scary down there, and it is life. And you will come out with a bigger soul and more capacity to love and all these positive things that are on the other side of the ugly feelings that society doesn’t want us to feel. When we do that, we stop polarizing and we stop saying … Not just, I am separate from you, but we are separate from you. We don’t serve the us them mentality of the culture. And I think that allowing people, especially women or the more feminine aspects of all people, what if allowing us to feel really big feelings in a productive way turns us into something that is threatening and frightening to the system?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, Martha Beck. Yes. That thing you just said, that is what I think we’re really getting towards now. I agree with that. What’s it scared of?

Martha Beck:
It’s scared of being dismantled. In the immortal words of Audre Lorde, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. I think the tools that we get from experiencing our biggest emotions, we find them in ourselves. We are forged as a tool ourselves. And then that tool doesn’t build up the master’s house. It starts to break things down. It’s interesting. You can see it in radical love, Valarie Kaur, you could see it in Nelson Mandela, you could see it in Gandhi. The classic examples. But the master’s house does not want to be dismantled either in our own egos or in the outside world.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. I think that part of what the culture wants us to think is that the way to dismantle it is to reproduce it. And so this is where you talk about revolution as just being the replacing of one system with another very similar system in all-

Martha Beck:
Identical system, different players.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And that’s the model that we have in that masculine power frame, right. There was something that John Lennon said once, and he was talking about non-violence. But he says, when it gets down to having to use violence, then you’re playing the systems game. The establishment will irritate you, pull your beard, flick your face to make you fight, because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you because you’re the same as them.

Martha Beck:
That’s the system.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And so be identical to me, and the house always wins. But if you can embody a completely different power, then anything can happen.

Martha Beck:
Which is why after Valarie Kaur gave that speech, the darkness of the womb rather than the darkness of the tomb, a recording of it went out and got 40 million hits and she got very, very frightening death threats talking about a woman giving birth. “We can’t have that. We will kill you for saying that.” Because she does it in a big way and she lets big emotion flow through that and it pulls you in and it pulls you right out of your left brain hemisphere where everything is polarized and everything is us against them. And it brings you into what she calls radical love. Where there is-

Rowan Mangan:
Revolutionary love.

Martha Beck:
Oh, revolutionary love, okay. There is not a black and white world. There is a world of full color. There is not us and them. Every person is different. Every person is connected. There is no rigid formula for anything. There is only this, there is only all. And feeling pain, feeling anger, feeling grief, feeling joy, feeling love, feeling all those things is a skill that many ancient cultures taught people to invite. To get still in your body, to sit with your emotions and not run from them and let the feelings come and be productive. Sitting in a heat ceremony, a Navajo sweat lodge, the idea is for the pain to become intolerable, the emotional pain to become intolerable because the body is so uncomfortable and you will not move away from the heat source. And people are vomiting and people are screaming. And it’s considered part of using big emotion to become huge enough to handle the incredible emotional highs and lows of this existence and come out as a more compassionate human.

Rowan Mangan:
Fully expressing and allowing our big feelings is like the path to the transformation right.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. In Dante’s terms, you’re in the forest of confusion and the only way out is through hell. But that’s fine because that’s only a third of the journey. And everybody reads Dante’s Inferno and they don’t read the second and third books where it’s about coming into wholeness because you’ve let yourself be completely broken by the inferno. And then going to a level that is actually beyond anything you’ve imagined. Going into the Paradiso, which is where you realize what you actually are, which is a set of feelings so big, it transcends the physical completely.

Rowan Mangan:
So if we don’t completely fall apart … And you mean it quite literally as well. You break down, you shatter into pieces, you allow yourself to shatter into all those pieces. That’s the only way to become whole, because before you’ve done that, you’re not whole, you’re confused. Right?

Martha Beck:
Right. And you’re wandering around-

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And when you’ve completely, completely broken and then you still exist, which is a theme in all shamanic traditions, what’s left of you is a healing space in which you are safe and the whole world is safe.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. That hits so true.

Martha Beck:
A heart as wide as the world they call it in Hinduism.

Rowan Mangan:
God, it’s interesting. It’s just that idea of I’m a healing space because I have completely fallen apart and become whole. What they say, just to come full circle on the toddler thing is that they say that when you have a big reaction to a tantrum, you are saying to your toddler, this experience that you are having that is so scary and overwhelming for you, that’s why we see it come out that way because it’s too big for your body to contain. This experience that you are having isn’t scary to me, your parent as it is to you. You’re right to be that freaked out and you reinforce the sense of insecurity. Whereas if you’re just like, mood. I get it. Let me sit down here nearby. Not too nearby. Just to avoid the missiles, and just like, yeah, this doesn’t scare me.

Martha Beck:
It’s only by letting the big feelings really pass through us that we become a space so calm that someone can completely collapse within the circle of our compassion and not frighten us.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Because then we’re not recreating the culture and suppress, suppress, suppress.

Martha Beck:
I have to say something that I’ve just written into this book about anxiety, and I really want to say it as we say goodbye. Because I always think, all right, readers, sit down and let’s talk about what you’re feeling. And then I always have to put in there, after coaching a zillion people, you are going to feel things. Do not be afraid of the feeling. Even you are going to feel afraid. Don’t be afraid of feeling afraid. It’s okay. It’s a transmutation force. You’ll get through it. It’s okay to be afraid of being afraid, but you don’t have to be. There are levels and levels of resistance to our feeling and culture wants us to put all that resistance on. And as we drop resistance, we’re going to territory culture doesn’t train us to navigate, and that is the place with strong feelings and it scares us because people couldn’t stand our tantrums.

Rowan Mangan:
And yet without letting ourselves go there, we’re never fully alive. Right. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Ani DiFranco poet laureate of the show.

Martha Beck:
I think you should just change your name to Ani DiFranco and go around saying things she has said.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. So I will only speak in verse.

Martha Beck:
Okay, good.

Rowan Mangan:
She has a song where she says … What we’ve got to do is we’ve got to get permission to play the song so I don’t always feel like an idiot reading the lyrics that are meant to be sung. Just show me a moment that is mine. It’s beauty, blinding and unsurpassed and … I’m going to get in trouble with my accent. Okay. Can you read it, Marty because there’s a problem with a rhyme and I can’t pronounce something.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Just show me a moment that is mine. It’s beauty, blinding and unsurpassed and make me forget every moment that went by and left me so halfhearted because I felt it so half-assed.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, man. And we’re just going to … Who wants to be half-hearted and who wants to express things half assed?

Martha Beck:
And all you were doing in the grocery store is you really wanted to feel your whole ass. And I too want to feel my whole ass, my whole heart. It isn’t always fun, but it’s what we’re here for I think. It forges us into something extraordinary, something that can tolerate this world and even turn it into something beautiful and meaningful and I want that.

Rowan Mangan:
I want that too. All right. So here’s to feeling our big feelings and falling apart and becoming a healing space in the world because all these things are a beautiful way to feel our whole ass. And to stay wild.

Martha Beck:
To stay wild.

Rowan Mangan:
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.