Martha Beck:
Us?

Rowan Mangan:
I know. Can you believe it?

Martha Beck:
I know. Well, yes, we totally are long-winded and have trouble getting to the point.

Rowan Mangan:
We have a lot of trouble with it. So we thought we’d pop in here and just give you a little heads up about what today’s episode is going to be about. And I have to say, it’s a really good one.

Martha Beck:
It really is because we always talk about nature and culture and how the culture does this, and it takes us from our true nature, and it makes it sound like the culture is the boss of us. But in this episode, we talk about how culture is not the boss of us.

Rowan Mangan:
Spoiler alert, the culture is not the boss of us.

Martha Beck:
No. We have so much power, and it can be so thrilling to look at the power we have when we put ourselves into the cultural equation. So that’s what we’re talking about today.

Rowan Mangan:
And how to do it and why it rocks. So please join us on the other side of us being long-winded.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out just like us.

Martha Beck:
And maybe like you. We’re all trying.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re trying our best, aren’t we?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. What are you trying to figure out right now?

Rowan Mangan:
I have been trying to figure out why, since becoming a parent, I am covered in bruises and bumps, especially on my legs, my hips. And I was thinking about fond memories from being a young person in this life and how my friends and I used to have this phenomenon that we talked about as unidentified party injuries, which is like when you wake up after a big night and you’re like, “Huh, I wonder what I bumped into there?” And they were always very mysterious. And these are similarly mysterious, but for much more pedestrian reasons. And I still feel like I don’t really connect with the moment when the injury occurs because I’m always distracted. And so I’m constantly surprised to see, oh my God, I’ve got this gigantic lump on my calf bone. What’s that called?

Martha Beck:
Your tibia and your fibula? I’m not sure which one is in front.

Rowan Mangan:
My shin that was the word.

Martha Beck:
There you go, shin.

Rowan Mangan:
On my shin. And I don’t remember getting it, but I finally figured out that the reason for this is not our daughter, per se.

Martha Beck:
So you’re not bruising yourself on her.

Rowan Mangan:
No. And that was the tricky part because I couldn’t quite make that work with her height and which bits are her hardest bits that could do the damage. Anyway, then I realized it’s gates.

Martha Beck:
Oh!

Rowan Mangan:
Our house is full of gates.

Martha Beck:
It is.

Rowan Mangan:
These days.

Martha Beck:
It’s a gate festival.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know when we will ever be able to take down these gates, these toddler gates.

Martha Beck:
28 maybe?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, basically it’s going to be as soon as she figures out the mechanism, which could be any day now, but it’s just like our house is full of gates.

Martha Beck:
It’s like running the hurdles every day, all day.

Rowan Mangan:
Well that’s it, isn’t it? Because we’ve actually managed to get for ourselves the world’s most complicated toddler gates, which is great because she’s too smart for our own good and she’ll figure it out. But you and I in particular, we’re not patient. We don’t want to undo this complicated mechanism and so we tend to just be like, I’ll just leap over it.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm.

Rowan Mangan:
And that literally has never worked.

Martha Beck:
I know. You always smack it. You always smack yourself on something.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And that is going to be all the more true if you are carrying something, you mustn’t drop or you’re trying to be quiet. If I come downstairs to get a snack or something at night, I will barrel, I guarantee I’ll barrel straight into one of those through the house. So anyway, I’m just trying to figure out when I won’t be covered in bruises again.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it looks like violence, but really it’s just caution.

Rowan Mangan:
No, violence.

Martha Beck:
An excess of caution. Self-violence, though. Running the hurdles–

Rowan Mangan:
Thoughtless violence.

Martha Beck:
–without really lifting your knees high enough. You can call that violence.

Rowan Mangan:
What are you trying to figure out, Marty?

Martha Beck:
I’ve been awash in shame because we’ve been doing—as I usually am—because we’ve been doing so much mat work in Pilates. Yes, we have gotten to the real beginner Pilates, not the pre-beginner Pilates. And overall we’re on our mats with our wonderful instructor, Ray. And I remembered something that happened to me before I had done much body work. I was maybe 22 or something, 21, and I had lots of chronic pain all over my body. So someone took me to this woman who was supposed to be like a wizard at fixing your body. She was like in wellness before wellness was a thing because she came from some other country, I cannot remember which one, but she had a very heavy accent and all respect because that just means someone is speaking in their second language, and I have enormous respect for that.

Rowan Mangan:
For context, I’m going to suggest to the listener that it’s a European accent of some description.

Martha Beck:
It was some kind of eastern European place.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, she had one fatal—slight but powerful—flaw in her pronunciation. She thought the word “grab” was pronounced “grack.” So she had me—

Rowan Mangan:
Easy mistake to make.

Martha Beck:
Yes, she had me lying on my tummy and I was supposed to go into the yoga bridge pose, which is where you reach back and you bend your knees and you grab yourself by the ankles with your hands. So I’m lying there on my face and she says, “Now grack your ankles.” And I was like, what? She said, “Grack them. Grack your ankles.” I was like, okay. I thought she meant crack them like you’d crack your knuckles. So I thought, and I’ve never in my life cracked my ankles in the way you would crack your knuckles, but I thought it must happen, it is a joint. So I thought there must be some way to make them make a popping sound.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s what she wants from you at this moment.

Martha Beck:
That’s what she wants. She wants it so much. So I’m like, how do I make my ankles go pop? So from a facedown position, what I started doing was violently flicking my feet. And she’s like, “Why won’t you grack your ankles?” I’m like, “I’m trying.”

Rowan Mangan:
So she’s picturing in her mind that she’s telling you, “Take hold of your ankles.” And the more she says it, the more your little flippy floppy feet just flop around.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and I’m kicking hard now because I’m determined to please her.

Rowan Mangan:
Because you hate—yeah, you want to please her.

Martha Beck:
I’m such a people pleaser and I’m not pleasing her. And whatever culture she came from was not, did not shrink from displaying anger. So she’s like, “Grack them! Grack them!” And I’m kicking a landed fish as hard as I can around on my stomach, and I start motoring around the room, propelled by the force of my kicking feet. Like I’m a flagellum or something. And she’s raging.

Rowan Mangan:
I love how you both were just so confused by the other person. Like, “Why is this happening?”

Martha Beck:
And in her case, enraged. But I was just appalled by myself and she’s like, “Use your hands!” So I started pulling my feet. I take one foot in both hands and wrench it back and forth. It was horrible and it just would not end. I’m like, take pity and crack them for me even if you have to use a sledgehammer. And finally she just gave up on me. It was a horrible experience for both of us and we’ve never spoken since. And I hope, and I say to myself because she was an older woman and that was a while ago. I always think when this comes back to me, I think, but maybe she’s dead.

Rowan Mangan:
So maybe you don’t have to feel that shame any longer, is that what you mean?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, we were the only two in that room. No one else needs to know.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, but now you’ve shared it.

Martha Beck:
Now I’ve shared.

Rowan Mangan:
With an audience of literally tens of people.

Martha Beck:
Come ’round to the house, I’ll demonstrate it for you. It gets a big laugh out of Ray every time we’re doing Pilates on our three little mats. All Ray has to say is “Now grack your ankles,” and all three of us just laugh hysterically into our mats. We’re limp. We can’t do anything but laugh.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like there’s, when we do Pilates with Ray, we’ve talked about Ray and our Pilates before, but there’s kind of this secondary agenda. Our primary agenda when we do Pilates with Ray is to strengthen our core and become all lithe and strong. But then the secondary, and maybe this is just me, I’ll be honest, but there’s a secondary agenda, which is to put off the next abs-training exercise for as long as possible by making Ray laugh.

Martha Beck:
A hundred percent.

Rowan Mangan:
And so you and I are always trying out our routines.

Martha Beck:
Because if he laughs hard enough, he simply can’t do Pilates. I like to pronounce it that way. Pilates! It sounds zingier that way.

Rowan Mangan:
I have to say I disagree, but that is not a problem. I’m glad that one way or another we figured out how to grack our own ankles.

Martha Beck:
So true.

Rowan Mangan:
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 everyone and exclaim over them and we just love you all. I think it might be time to move on to the topic.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, for God’s sake.

Rowan Mangan:
For today’s podcast, what do you think?

Martha Beck:
What is today’s topic, Ro?

Rowan Mangan:
Today’s topic was inspired by a wonderful actress by the name of Tilda Swinton. You might have heard of her from all the million movies that she’s done because she’s amazing. And we’ll put the clip, we saw this— actually our beloved Karen sent us this clip of her. This is where we get our material for Bewildered. We get it via text message from Karen saying, “This would be amazing for Bewildered.” And here we are. So we’ll put the clip in show notes. But I need to say before we get into what Tilda says in this brilliant interview, if you’re listening, Tilda, and I know you are, please don’t sue us for quoting you at some length. It would be a bummer for us if you did sue us. And I’ve got to be honest, it would kind of hurt your brand as a cool person. So I’m just going to leave that there. It’s your decision, right? But do the right thing, mate. That’s all. That’s all I’m going to say. So Marty’s going to tell us a little bit about what Tilda said about the culture.

Martha Beck:
So it was fascinating. Basically what she said is, the culture belongs to us. We’re making it all the time, and we own it, so we should be working on it. And she talks about her relationship with a man named Derek Jarman who was a famous poet, a filmmaker, an artist, and also who had HIV/AIDS early on and was very public about it. And she said he became central, but not by chasing the center, but by whipping the center around him. She did a whipping motion. It was great. And so what she says is you have to plant your feet—I’m now quoting her—“You just have to plant your feet in your own ground and be your own center. Bend your knees for sure, because there’s going to be some wind coming, but the culture is being built by us. It’s ours. So we make it. So you just do your thing and you will put another flake of skin on that body and it will become you-shaped.” Y-O-U-shaped? Not U-shaped, the letter U.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, we don’t know, in fairness, we heard this as audio, so she might’ve meant. But it’s a great line and I really, really love it. And what it made us think as we pondered the wise words of Ms. Swinton was that sometimes on this podcast maybe we have a tendency to be like, “Oh, the big bad culture man’s trying to bring us down and we have no power over it.” And then Tilda Swinton pops up and says, “No, we are the culture.” And we were like, all right, good point, actually, Tilda.

Martha Beck:
It gives you the responsibility to make the culture better if you don’t like what it’s doing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, well put, Marty, very well put. And so that’s what we’re going to explore today is just this idea that we are the culture. How do we seize that power and make everything better?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah, yeah! How do we?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I don’t know, but we’ll get there. We’ll get there. I’m going to tell an illustrative story to begin our conversation on this topic because all right, I’ll give a little sneak peek for the listener about where we’re going. Where we’re going is, I don’t know. Where we’re going is that we are more powerful than we think and that there are lots of small ways that we shape the culture all the time. So to that end, I will now tell you a story from my own life about a bad thing that I did yesterday. I had an encounter with our daughter who new listeners might not know is quite a feisty little thing. She’s three and a half. I was very excited for her to turn four until friends started dropping in on the DL and just being like, “Four is actually worse than three.” Exactly the same way that other people came in when she was two to go, “Three is actually worse than two.”
So the “four is actually worse than three” has begun, just when I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. But anyway, we love her. She’s adorable. She really is. But yesterday she didn’t want, I can’t remember, she didn’t want to do something she had to do. It was one of those. And she expressed her displeasure with me asking her to do it in quite a physical way. And I don’t want to shame our kid or anything here and describe exactly what happened, but let’s just say the culture would frown upon it, and it was mean and it hurt my feelings and it also hurt my face. Okay? I’ll just say that. And I responded to this behavior, which she knew was pretty out of bounds, but she was also pretty dysregulated at that point in her aversion to doing what she was supposed to fricking be doing, not to put too fine a point on it.

Anyway, I said to her, “All right, we’re done. We’re done with downstairs. We’re going to go straight upstairs now and begin bedtime.” I didn’t say it super calm like that, but I also didn’t scream it, but I picked her up. She’s not full grown, but she’s not a diminutive three-and-a-half-year-old, and attempted with my two arms—actually this is where all the bruises have come from—with my two arms, I attempted to wrangle all four of her limbs and a very powerful core, almost as though she’d been doing Pilates, and wrangle her over the gate. I was like, “Marty, get the gate!” She’s thrashing. She is kicking. She’s like seriously strong. And at one point I nearly drop her and one of her legs comes down and just flails in the air a bit. I didn’t think it was that big a deal from where I was standing. But anyway, I get her upstairs. Fast-forward half an hour, Lila and I have a conversation. And that conversation is I guess where we’re kind of wanting to go with the conversation about culture. But first, to give context to what happened to me yesterday, I want Marty to talk about the Karpman Drama Triangle.

Martha Beck:
Just bounce.

Rowan Mangan:
Which is a thing.

Martha Beck:
It’s a thing, You can bounce right off a thrashing 3-year-old and you can bounce off them and go right into psychological theories. All right, so the Karpman Drama Triangle was a psychological relationship dynamic described in the 1960s by one Steven Karpman. No, it was not made by fish people. This man was just named Karpman.

Rowan Mangan:
You teach this, don’t you? This stuff you’re talking about, you actually teach it in your Wayfinder Life Coach Training.

Martha Beck:
I teach it to coaches, and I tell it to clients and it’s very handy. It’s really useful. And I’ve probably mentioned it on the podcast before, but here it is.

Rowan Mangan:
You might’ve, but it’s freaking fascinating. And as Marty talks, I want listeners to think about how this plays out for you because I can guarantee that in certain parts of your life it does.

Martha Beck:
Okay. So in the Karpman Drama Triangle from this perspective, people who are in this perspective see everyone as being in one of three possible roles. One is Persecutor, one is Rescuer, and one is Victim. So it’s very common, for example, for someone to feel like a victim of, say, their boss. They go home, they say, “Oh, my boss is terrible and horrible,” and they feel like a victim and they express themselves like a victim. And they say this to their spouse, and the spouse then becomes a rescuer: “Oh, that bad boss, I’m going to go give him a peace of mind.” And very often the victim will actually say, “No, don’t rescue me that way because the persecutor will be even worse.” In fact, it can get to the point where the victim thinks that the person trying to rescue them is trying to make their life worse, so they move the rescuer person into the persecutor category. But nobody ever gets out of these three categories. So then the victim might attack the spouse: “Why are you trying to mess with me? Why won’t you just listen to what I say instead of trying to fix everything?” Now that person has become the persecutor, the spouse has become the victim. It gets very complicated. One of the scenarios—

Rowan Mangan:
Can I just interrupt and just say, this isn’t saying that everyone’s in this all time? It’s just describing a dynamic that can arise.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And very often if people come from abusive backgrounds, there are families in which everyone is either being attacked in some way, being rescued in some way, or attacking someone else. So it’s very common, for example, say a mother yells at a child and then another child comes in and yells at the mother, becoming the aggressor, so the mother now feels like a victim because the child is trying to rescue another child. Meanwhile, the child who’s been rescued says, “Now you’ve just made her worse,” makes the rescuer into the persecutor. It just goes round and round and round with people seeing themselves almost always as victims and other people as alternating between potential rescuers and persecutors who are making their life even harder. And here’s the thing, everyone on this triangle, everybody who gets a role in this drama ends up feeling like a victim.
So if you try to save someone from their own life situation or their own stupidity or whatever, and you constantly have to save them, you end up feeling victimized because you have to take care of them. “I’m so sick of this.” Then you might get angry. “Would you just stop it? Would you just wise up?” Then you become a persecutor. But the reason you’re being a persecutor is you feel like you are a victim. So people who do violent things never identify as “I’m going to persecute other people.” They always see themselves as being stuck in a situation where they’re the victim and they have to fight back. So they look like persecutor, but they always feel like victims.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s fascinating. It’s so, so interesting. So with me last night with Lila, I felt victimized by her behavior towards me, and I reacted poorly with some anger, let’s say, certainly some adrenaline. And she certainly felt like a victim as I carried her up the stairs. I’ve only just realized that in this dynamic, Karen stepped in and became the rescuer very clearly, and Lila started sort of, “I don’t want Mummy, I only want you,” that stuff, which is familiar in the Karpman.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, Mommy is now the–

Rowan Mangan:
—in the context.

Martha Beck:
Mommy’s the persecutor. Cuckoo, or Karen, is now the rescuer. And so yeah, she switches over.

Rowan Mangan:
But then I’m trying to talk to Lila and saying, “Listen, I had to bring you up here, la, la la.” And Karen is hugging Lila while I’m saying that. So I’m starting to get a little bit angry with Karen, who is giving Lila snuggles while I’m trying to tell her something instructive. So now Karen, rescuer to Lila, is persecutor to me.

Martha Beck:
May I also say that Karen was rescuing you in that situation because what she saw was that Lila was fully enraged as only a three-and-a-half-year-old can be. And if you’re trying very hard not to do anything harmful or aggressive to your child and they are fully violent, you kind of need some help. So Karen ran in to rescue you, it was just a drama triangle going round and round and round.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But the coolest thing, and I remember the first time you told me about this, you had read about the Karpman Drama Triangle and Karpman got that far in his description, and it was just meant to be a descriptive thing. This is something that happens. What can you do about it? I don’t know, nothing. But then some other bloke came along, right, and switched it up, and now I want you to talk about that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So Karpman did recommend therapy to anybody who was on the drama triangle. There was a way out. But then someone came along, a man named David Emerald Womeldorff came along and did something really brilliant, I think. He took the Drama Triangle and he created a sort of photonegative of it because these triangular relationship patterns do form over and over. In every culture all over the world, you’ll find the Drama Triangle happily at work. So he thought, well, if this is a pattern in the human psyche, in the human brain, how can we use it for something positive? Use the same structure, but put positive attributes inside it. So what he did was he recast everyone in the Drama Triangle. The Persecutor, the big bad who’s making everybody suffer, becomes the Challenger. So they’re to make you rise to a new height.

So if somebody is persecuting you and you think that you’re a victim, he would say shift and start to think of them as a challenger rather than just a persecutor. The Rescuer, in his view, and he calls this the Empowerment Dynamic, it becomes a Coach. So a Rescuer says, “Oh, poor you, poor you. Let me help you. I’ll fix this for you.” And a Coach says, “Wow, this is a really hard situation. What are you going to do about it? I’m standing right here cheering.” But you don’t take on the power of the victim and say, “I will be your power.” But my favorite part of David Emerald Womeldorff’s system is the role of the Victim. The other two, I might have guessed, but I would not have gone where he went with the Victim. In his system, the Victim becomes Creator. So instead of being overwhelmed by a persecutor and desperately needing someone to come in and rescue you while you lie there passively, when you find yourself feeling victimized, you recognize it as an opportunity to create something with your power that will respond to the challenge. And then your coaches around you can help you and cheer for you, but they won’t do it for you, so you never get disempowered.

Rowan Mangan:
So interesting how creativity is always such a surprising photonegative of its opposites, right? Because what you’ve been writing about in your new book, but I love that basically if you’re feeling like a victim, the invitation is to your imagination, not to your feelings. It’s lifting it, not even into a mental place, it’s always into a kind of spiritual imagination where you’re like, “How can I utterly transform the situation?” And so with Lila, I’ll say, once a bit of time had gone by last night, we were able to have actually a very productive conversation. And I feel like, I don’t know if we’ve talked about it on the podcast before, but we were very impressed from a parenting stance with Dr. Becky Kennedy who talks about, I don’t know if she’s the first one to talk about it, but she talks a lot about the power of the rupture and repair process in parenting and how that having had the rupture, a good engagement with the repair processes ends up with a stronger relationship than if there had been no rupture in the first place.

Martha Beck:
Absolutely. And that’s really true at all levels. But before we move on, I really want to say, this in no way minimizes the impact of what bad people, maybe not bad people, but people do terrible things to other people, and horrible things happen to us. And if you’re a victim of one of those horrible things, we are in no way minimizing the horror and the damage of that. It is real and you deserve to be witnessed and held and allowed to heal. And then once that’s happened, you get to make something out of your experience using whatever power you have in your imagination, as Ro said, to either carry that as a wound and nothing else, or to make it a source of rupture and repair that will in the end bring you more resilience. So it’s not about minimizing your pain, but it is saying maybe there’s light at the end of every tunnel.

Rowan Mangan:
And if it helps, you don’t have to think about this as a true victimization, something that applies commonly to true victimization but is more a lighter description of a dynamic that can play out in much more everyday situations as well, at least to start with before the medicine gets too strong. So I didn’t have a particularly revolutionary way of turning Victim into Creator last night, except that I think both Lila and I managed to do it together. And we did it through play. We did it, she was in the bathtub by then and we did play our way through the conversation of “I wish you hadn’t done that. And I did that because I had this feeling, but I shouldn’t have done that.” All those sorts of things. But I think we both did come out of it feeling much more creators than victims.

Martha Beck:
And the point of that is you shifted the culture of Lila and Ro, you shifted our family culture when you took it in that direction. And that’s as we’re talking about how do you deal with the culture, very often in this podcast we say things like, the culture does this to you, teaches you to do this. Okay, so what we want to point out is we’re not saying we’re all victims of culture. We’re saying there are real pressures on us that are cultural and that are negative. But what we want to bring into this is to say, let’s take the power of the creator so that when culture does something to you that is bad, you can say, “All right, that’s a challenge, but this culture is mine and I am a creator of it. So I’m going to add my flake of skin.” As Tilda said. And we’ll tell you all about how to do that in just a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So how do we figure this whole thing out, Marty Moo?

Martha Beck:
How do you become the creative aspect of your own culture?

Rowan Mangan:
How do you solve a problem like Maria, as it were? Sorry, I think I just went on a different path. Completely different path. That’s all right, we’ll get back.

Martha Beck:
Maria, we love you. As we talked about this whole idea, the thing that kept coming up was the word “fractal” and the concept of a fractal. Now, we’ve talked about it before, I’m sure, because it’s part of our general conversation a lot of the time, but maybe you could explain what fractals are for the folks who haven’t heard about them yet.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and this will be a super fun exercise because I’ll try to explain it and then Marty will step in and actually explain it. And I always love it when we do that. It’s like this fun, cute little thing that we do.
All right, so a fractal is a pattern or a form or a shape that appears in nature, and as it replicates, it maintains its shape, I want to say. So it starts sort of simple and small and then it branches and branches—and branches is actually a really good example, how a root system of a tree and the branches coming out, they look the same, but as they branch out, they get more complex, but they’re still doing that same shape. And people point to that’s also the system of veins and capillaries that we have in our bodies—it also follows that same branching shape. But there are lots of them, right?

Martha Beck:
You can look down from an airplane at a river delta and see the same type of branching and it’s just like your veins, it’s just like a tree. There are these patterns that replicate consistently at different sizes.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s really a juicy concept to apply to ideas what we talk about on Bewildered because in the same way that that in nature can happen and that it gets out, it gets more complex, it maintains its essential shape. That’s what we have the power to do between people in movements, in cultures.

Martha Beck:
So there are all these cultures we’re embedded in. We’ve got a global culture, and then you’ve got your national culture, and then you’ve got maybe your ethnic culture and your family culture and then your couple culture. And then there are all these different cultures until there’s actually a model of the culture that surrounds you built into your psychology.

Rowan Mangan:
Which is going to be built out of all the different cultures you’re exposed to, right?

Martha Beck:
Right. So that’s one of the other things about fractals, they’re like snowflakes. A snowflake is a fractal form. And so every snowflake will always have a hexagonal shape. It will always have six arms, but no two snowflakes are alike. You can recognize it as a snowflake, but you can’t ever find two that are exactly alike. So there’s a pattern of culture inside you that is very, very similar and recognizable as a version of the cultures that have formed you. But no two of us have exactly the same internalized culture. Does that make sense?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and so you said the cultures that have formed us. And so that’s like imagining the outer bits of the capillaries or the outer branches of the trees coming into the trunk, which is us in this, actually don’t let me extend a metaphor, but I’m just trying to say that if we at the center have our own culture, which is distinct when we start making a change there, that the flow that has maybe formed us coming in can come back out and affect the people around us in the same way that we were affected by the people around us. Is that fair?

Martha Beck:
Yeah! And so a lot of the time when we’re talking about the culture and the things that it does that do violence to our essential nature, there’s an implied argument that there’s this big outside culture that is just acting on us and we have no role in forming it and we want it to change or we have to get away from it so that we can be true to our nature. What we don’t often say is that when we do get away from it and become different and get connected to something deeper in ourselves as Tilda Swinton is saying we should do, the culture of which we are a part cannot go unaffected. So there’s a feedback mechanism going into the culture from us as well as from out of the culture into us. So yeah, when you change to be more like your true nature, you’re not just becoming countercultural and a rebel. You are becoming an aspect of the culture that is now truer to your nature. And I believe if you’re really true to your nature, then the things that you will feed back into the culture will allow others to be true to their own nature as well.

Rowan Mangan:
And so actually living a good life, a true life, a life that feels ethical is in itself a type of activism. It has to be, right, because the ripples have to flow out. And I feel like there’s, yeah, I mean I think it’s what you were saying that we think it’s handed down because we do kind of always do that sort of parental “We’re the children and then the government are the parents or the teachers are the parents” or whatever it is, so that we are always feeling like the victim in the triangle. And so therefore we can only receive culture and rebel against it, rather than transforming it into becoming the creators of the culture that we do want to see. And so it’s sort of like a trickle-up can happen, and we don’t pay attention to that as often as we do feeling put upon by trickle down. And I was thinking about these tiny little things that do trickle up and Rosa Parks popped into my head as someone who made a small move within the context of the civil rights movement. And then her small act of resistance became this symbolic and then fractalled out into other moments of resistance that then created huge change and continue to grasp our imagination.

Martha Beck:
Well, the very fact that you can say Rosa Parks and almost everyone who listens to this will instantly know who that was, the woman who refused to give up her seat to a white man. The fact that it’s in our minds, the name Rosa Parks, it is part of the culture in our heads as well as part of the culture around us. So that is an example of somebody who did a small thing that just resonated out into the culture. But what many people don’t know—well, I didn’t know about Rosa Parks until I read up on her once—was that this was the result of a history of self-education and activism where she had been breaking down the white supremacy culture in her head and getting rid of it. So she had transformed herself and she had become not just the victim but the creator of something different.

And people who make these big changes in society with seemingly small actions are almost always people who have gone through revolutionary change inside their own minds and hearts. And it may not look, you may not see that. They may not be teachers who come out and give lectures on how the culture should be different or politicians or whatever. They’re ordinary people, but they have cleared out the cultural clutter. They have met the challenge of the culture’s wrongdoing by becoming creators of something new inside their own hearts and minds. And then their actions seem to be magnified in some interesting way back into the culture.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, there’s a kind of phenomenon that happens there that you can’t quite put your finger on what’s happening alchemically between the person who’s done that internal work and the effect that they have outwardly. But it does remind me of some words that a wise woman once said, Martha Beck, I think her name is, she likes to say, “We fix what’s broken in the world, one life at a time.” And I love that so much because it really speaks to, I feel like sometimes one trick that the culture plays on us because we’re the victims on that, is that we think we’re only changing the world for the better if we’re martyring ourselves to others. And I think it’s really important to remember that those internal transformations are the transformations. It has to be because it’s the same, it’s all connected as part of a fractal form.

Martha Beck:
Right, a system of fractals. And I love what Byron Katie, one of my favorite spiritual teachers says, she says, “The Buddha only ever tried to save one person.” He was just on an internal quest, but when someone is that intent on eradicating suffering within them, eradicating what is not true for them, finding out what is true, what does set them free, it tends to spread from them like wildfire. This self-liberation from cultural—of feeling victimized by the culture, the owning of the cultural creation. And the phrase “charismatic leader” actually comes from a sociologist named Max Weber bringing it out of, this obscure word charisma out of Greek, and it meant connection to the gods because he said every culture begins with someone who breaks away from the other people and finds a connection with something so powerful in themselves that they will live by it, culture be damned. And then suddenly, people are attracted to that, and it forms a culture and it happens—there’s another pattern that happens over and over and over and over. But every time you own the power to change and refuse to be victimized, you get a little of that charisma, and it is a very real, potent force and it’s almost magical.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so interesting. I feel like there’s a negative idea that you sometimes have with that idea of charismatic leaders because I immediately think of dodgy charismatic cult leaders, but I think that there’s, that’s like a fake charisma, a cultural version of charisma that’s packaged that way, rather than what you are saying, which is someone who has that kind, that kind of authentic power that only comes through having done an inner transformation that’s neither with the culture, in resistance to the culture, neither of them. It’s something that is completely independent, and there is something very bewitching about someone who’s done that, which grabs our attention and just holds it.

Martha Beck:
There’s a simple test. If you feel drawn to someone and they’re very magnetic this way, they often have done a lot of personal work, but if they have turned it into, “I know what you should do,” don’t go with it. If they’ve turned it into, “I know what I should do. I know you should do what you know to do,” that’s the real deal.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the real deal.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And actually that’s an example of rescuer becomes coach, right? I know that you know how to do this.

Martha Beck:
I know that you know what to do. I don’t know what you should do. I can figure out what I should do, though.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like there’s a kind of old consciousness model of how culture is formed, which puts us in the victim or the child or the underling kind of role, which is this idea that culture is handed down and that we receive it passively. And what excites me about this conversation is that we’re creating in our vision of a new consciousness, a model of culture being generated from below. I mean above and below become meaningless as terms but generated from within coming out. Let’s say that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Well, in a way, technology has made this possible because it used to be that communication really did go down a hierarchy. And now we’ve got people all over the world able to put their charisma into the machine of communication that is the internet. And everyone can hear what Tilda Swinton says about being a creator of culture. So instead of coming from on high, it’s coming from people who have no particular status. Instead of coming from the outside things we’ve learned, it comes from inside our cores after we’ve gone through horrible things and come out the other side. And when we put it out there and it’s inspiring, it travels. It’s not just that it sets people free, but that it travels very quickly. Speaking of Maria, nobody solves a problem like Maria– is that, how it? How do you solve a problem like Maria? See, I switched it to nobody solves a problem like Maria, she does it great.

Rowan Mangan:
Victim became creator, just like that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s every Maria we know. But speaking of Maria’s, Maria Ressa is a Nobel Prize winning journalist from the Philippines, and she did an expose, basically, an investigative journalism approach to the corrupt government there. And the president turned against her, and he really organized this massive smear campaign. And there was a time when she was getting a hundred death threats per hour, like crazy amounts of hate. And what she did, she had this little team of people and they decided they would do research on the hate mail, which is so brilliant. It’s a way of being Creator. What can we do with this that’s creative? And they found that on the internet lies spread six times faster than facts, true fact, which is discouraging. And there’s only one thing that travels as fast as a juicy lie online. And that thing is inspiration.

Rowan Mangan:
So that’s how we create culture. That’s how we plant the seed that sends culture outward, even in the face of lies and hate and forces that seek to victimize us. We turn around and inspire like Maria Ressa and her team.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and notice that wasn’t something she said, it was something she did. It was something she lived. For me, when I get, my thing is to feel backed into corners when people are putting social pressure on me to save them from their lives because I’m a self-help writer or whatever, I start to feel like their victim because they’re using cultural pressure to manipulate me. What I need to do, and I know I always get polemical and, well, pedantic really is the better word, but so don’t take this as me giving instructions from my pedestal. But what I need to do if I want to be a source of inspiration is in that very situation, instead of running away or lashing back or whatever, I have to find my integrity, acknowledge that I’m feeling cultural pressure to do something that feels wrong to me, and then figure out what feels right to me and do it, whether or not I explain it or convince the people around me. It’s about just living your integrity. Sometimes you’ll explain it to people and that message will get through. Sometimes you won’t explain anything to anyone, but the way you continue to live may turn out to inspire other people. Inspiration is something we do by living, not by talking.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s a quote, I’ll have to look up who said it. I feel like it was like St. Francis or someone like that who said, “Everywhere you go, preach the gospel. Only if absolutely necessary, use words.” And that’s kind of what you’re talking about, isn’t it? If you believe in that a certain, I don’t know, way of treating each other is right, don’t talk about it. Do it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And if you’ve been in a fracas where you felt victimized and you lashed back, and now the other person feels like a victim and you’re their persecutor and you’re, oh, here I am in the Karpman Drama Triangle. Oh, that’s a cultural form that’s fractalled all over the world and in nations and in all kinds of situations, and go, okay, how do I solve it in myself? I go in to my child who’s in the bathtub and sit down and say, “Here’s what just happened. I felt like you were being mean to me, and you felt like I was being mean to you, and we were both being mean to each other. And that’s understandable. And we can forgive each other and we can forgive ourselves and try to do better later.” And that conversation with a 3-year-old in the bathtub, I think is the cultural—I’m not going to say the cultural revolution, 30 million people died in China. I was just getting to something really moving, and then I had to say that. No, that conversation with your 3-year-old, that conversation with your significant other, that simple–

Rowan Mangan:
The moment where you behave differently from how you want to behave rather than speaking it.

Martha Beck:
Where you behave like a creator of culture instead of a victim of other people in whatever numbers, that is the moment we change the world.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I think it’s a great reminder for us in the conversations that we have on this podcast. I’m really stoked to have found this and had this conversation for ourselves. And it’s also something that I’m definitely going to be bringing forward in day-to-day life because it’s genuinely something that we can be working towards and acting towards in every minute of every day.

Martha Beck:
Every single minute of every single day. It’s kind of exciting when you think of it that way.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s one of the best ways I can think of to—

Martha Beck:
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 an 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. Bewildered is produced by Scott Foster, with support from the brilliant team at MBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review—and stay wild.