Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan, and this is another episode of Billwildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out. What are you trying to figure out, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Oh, you know. You know.

Rowan Mangan:
Do I? Well, look, here’s the deal. This is like a conceit of our podcast is that I ask you something that I may already know the answer to, and just so that the listeners can see behind the curtain a minute.
Sometimes I do know.

Martha Beck:
Well, you know. We haven’t really talked about talking about it here, but I think it’s time.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh boy.

Martha Beck:
Paint.

Rowan Mangan:
We haven’t talked about paint here.

Martha Beck:
No. I mean, not enough. I mean about my trying to figure out paint. I mean—

Rowan Mangan:
We talked about painting over mice.

Martha Beck:
We talked about painting over mice. There’s been a lot of painting in our lives, but I have this little space.

Rowan Mangan:
You do.

Martha Beck:
I have a little bedroom that I love, and then there’s a special space, and then I have an art studio. I’m super, super overprivileged. But this little space that we got into was painted, I believe I recall the walls were an almost-black eggplant color, and the floor is kind of a bright neon green. It wasn’t psychologically okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It was rough for you.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And so I just painted the whole thing. I went, “I’m going to paint the whole thing white.” And I did. And it looked like I was living in an anesthetized iceberg. It wasn’t pleasant.

Rowan Mangan:
No, it wasn’t working.

Martha Beck:
Do you know how many times I’ve been—I had to stop going to this hardware store by our house because I had been in so many times for different cans of paint. And it’s only recently I realized: Just buy a court. Don’t buy a gallon. It’s expensive if it’s wrong. Yeah. So I kept, I have the… And you know what happened. I wandered into your part of the house like paint-daubed and sobbing and said, “I can’t. I need help.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And you tried to do life-coachy things to get me to work it out, but I couldn’t. No. I could not.

Rowan Mangan:
I will say that at the best of times, you are resistant to coaching.

Martha Beck:
True. Very true.

Rowan Mangan:
Ironically.

Martha Beck:
But then you just went over and looked at what I had going on in there because okay, let me—wait—let me paint you a word picture. I know. I know. But the furniture is fully in there.

Rowan Mangan:
The furniture’s fully in there.

Martha Beck:
Fully in there.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s an amazing word picture.

Martha Beck:
And I have to paint the ceiling, different colors on the wall because there’s weird shingles-textured stuff, and then there’s regular stuff. Then there are ceiling beams. The floor’s got to be painted all the while, like the whole cube has to be painted just right. It’s full of furniture. It’s a cube of furniture, and I’m trying to paint it with the furniture there.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
Hundreds of times.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Things are going to go wrong.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. No, things already have.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I mean, am I exaggerating when I say things had gotten bad?

Rowan Mangan:
No. I mean, looking back, an intervention might have been the best course of action.

Martha Beck:
You kind of did that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Like you were just, “Marty, sit down. I will deal with this. ” And you started lugging all the paint cans away. And then you, as I had done so often—

Rowan Mangan:
I was helping.

Martha Beck:
Tripped and spilled a can of paint, and it burst open.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that happened.

Martha Beck:
And we spent the rest of that winter day running back and forth with buckets of water trying to get it off the rocks in front of my sitting room. And then you went briefly, briefly, you glimpsed the madness that I had lived with for weeks.

Rowan Mangan:
And once again, reiterated my position, which will never change, that this is why there are professionals who do these things.

Martha Beck:
No, no, no.

Rowan Mangan:
We would have saved so much money in big tins of paint if we had just brought someone who knew what they were doing.

Martha Beck:
We could have probably hired the top designer in New York City to come out and eat caviar with a spoon made of sugar.

Rowan Mangan:
And just go, “Don’t make it white.”

Martha Beck:
Right. But now I have the right colors, and I am slowly, slowly, slowly inching toward completion.

Rowan Mangan:
So now she’s trying to kind of rehabilitate her image in our household by saying things like, “Yeah, I finished quadrant one.”

Martha Beck:
It’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
“It’s looking pretty good in quadrant one.”

Martha Beck:
Divided into—

Rowan Mangan:
“Sometime soon, we’ll be moving onto quadrant three. Now that’s a tricky quadrant.”

Martha Beck:
Time was, you young’un, when I could move all the furniture, including a grand piano, move it around, paint all the walls, made a mistake, painted it aquarium blue, that happened one time without a drop gloss, so I had to shave the carpet. That’s a thing you do.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I’ve done that.

Martha Beck:
And then do it all again the same day. I was a maniac, and now it’s like, “I can’t do the whole room. I’ll do the quadrant where the couch must be.” And then I move a quarter of the furniture. I paint a quarter of the room. I wait a quarter of the appropriate time for it to dry and then I put everything back, and it’s covered with paint and I ruin the paint job. Anyway, I just thought I should come clean in public because it’s a real issue.

Rowan Mangan:
It is an issue.

Martha Beck:
And you’ve intervened.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Well, in my own way.

Martha Beck:
I wonder if they have 12-step rooms for people who just keep painting and painting and painting the walls.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, they have them. They’re sticky on the floor. They’re sticky in the walls.

Martha Beck:
I just thought if anyone notices, but I think most of the paint is off my hands if you’re looking at the video.

Rowan Mangan:
Yesterday we went out for lunch with someone who’s fairly well known in this area, and Marty just turned up, she’s like, “Hi.” And then she puts her hands on the table, and they were covered in black paint. It was terrifying.

Martha Beck:
Dark brown, but it didn’t look right. It did not look right because it was floor paint. Most of that stuff, in the wall paint, I can get off.

Rowan Mangan:
That was not the problem. Oh yeah. I see where your problem is. That was floor paint all over my hands at a restaurant.

Martha Beck:
That’s right.

Rowan Mangan:
Not wall paint, which would’ve looked completely normal.

Martha Beck:
I’m not even going to tell you about the open cuts on my hands and how much it hurt to paint with them without bandaging anything because I don’t like to stop.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
That’s the problem.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it’s one of them.

Martha Beck:
I’ve gone to four different hardware stores in the area. They all know me now. I’m like a person who gets thrown out of bars.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah, Marty, your photo is behind the register.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, they see me coming with the paint chips and they’re like, “Lock everything up.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Martha Beck:
But I like what it’s looking like now.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Thank you for intervening.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s the exact color now of the inside of a red velvet cake.

Martha Beck:
Only a small part. I mean, what you’ve just said, I mean, imagine a whole cube colored deep blood red.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I’ve been to that part of Amsterdam. It’s called the red light district. It’s amazing.

Martha Beck:
Not the red paint district.

Rowan Mangan:
Well.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So part of it’s red, but not the whole thing. I used to have a bathroom in a house that I lived in that was all pink: pink tile, pink sinks, pink bathtub, pink toilet, pink carpet. And it was like walking into an open mouth. Yeah. Think of it.

Rowan Mangan:
Congratulations?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it was bad. It was really, really bad.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay.

Martha Beck:
Part of what fuels—I mean, that’s one of the traumas that fuels my addiction to painting rooms over and over.

Rowan Mangan:
There is so much to unpack here. We haven’t even—

Martha Beck:
I know. We’ve got to go on. What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
So I feel a little bad because what I’m trying to figure out is also a deep slur on your character much as your thing was. And if I had known…

Martha Beck:
Fair play. Go for it.

Rowan Mangan:
So people who are regular listeners to this show—God, it’s so pathetic—know that we have very strict routines in our days that we never, ever vary.

Martha Beck:
Never.

Rowan Mangan:
And one of them is called Trinity Time.

Martha Beck:
Oh, got to have Trinity Time.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Which is, we love Trinity Time.

Martha Beck:
I live for it all day long.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We begin it as early as we can possibly get the kids to bed, which is quite early if we’re—

Martha Beck:
The kids being Adam, he still follows this routine that is very kid-like, even though he’s technically an adult.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. He’s a man.

Martha Beck:
He’s a man.

Rowan Mangan:
But he’s your kid. Your offspring.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I have to actually go in, we watch TV together. It’s a whole—because he needs cuddles too.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And we need cuddles. And so once they’re dispatched to their bedrooms, we come down and snuggle and watch a show.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
And there’ve been times in our relationship where you’re interested in physical perfectability. You’re one of those people, those bio hackers or something.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm. I love that stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re always, you make magic potions out of supplements and all these things, you read about things. But this time, I come into our living room where we’re going to do Trinity Time, and you’re there and you turn to me—darkened room, right? Let me paint a word picture. You turn to me and you go—[vocalizes]. And I turn to face you, and your mouth is completely red, but not just red, glowing all the way around.

Martha Beck:
Yep.

Rowan Mangan:
Glowing red. If you are thinking of Pennywise the clown or something, you’re not too far off.

Martha Beck:
It’s worse in some ways.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
At least Pennywise is painted.

Rowan Mangan:
And he’s in the sewer. You’re in my living room on the couch going, “Come here.” And then, so she has this thing in her mouth.

Martha Beck:
Should I say why?

Rowan Mangan:
No, I don’t think, yeah, go on then. Just briefly.

Martha Beck:
Well, it’s because I’m worried about my gums receding.

Rowan Mangan:
That is such a great story. So anyway.

Martha Beck:
It’s supposed to help. Will it work? No. Is it helping me feel better? It is a placebo.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it’s quite a placebo you got on your hands there.

Martha Beck:
I’m hoping it’ll regrow the gums, just a little, just because I believe it will.

Rowan Mangan:
So religiously, every night. But the thing is that it will not prevent her from making snarky comments about what’s happening on the TV, which is funny because you can’t hear a fucking word she says. But you can tell from the tone of voice that she’s being really cutting and that she’s quite pleased with the comments she’s made. So she’ll just be like, “What?” And I’m like, “I can’t hear you? ” And then Karen’s like, “What?” I’m like, “She’s got her thing in.” And Karen’s like, “What?” I’m like, “Wait, let me pause it. ” Got to find the—and then it’s all dark because Marty requires complete darkness. So that her red mouth, red glowing gums will be even more—

Martha Beck:
It’s starting to sound like sort of an Eyes Wide Shut kind of movie thing.

Rowan Mangan:
It is. Yeah. Complete darkness, glowing red gum thing.

Martha Beck:
I love it. I should get some from my ears.

Rowan Mangan:
You used to wear one on your head.

Martha Beck:
Oh, right, right. Yeah, because I don’t know what it is. Every time I go to play—

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a scam.

Martha Beck:
I go to play my little games on my phone and they keep—people are, like this red light thing. People have masks and they’re like these beautiful women showing how you can vacuum in this red light mask that you put on your face.

Rowan Mangan:
This Darth Vader outfit.

Martha Beck:
And it’s just slits for eyes and one for your mouth, and the rest of it is just glowing red. And it’s a white thing, it looks like science fiction horror at its most terrifying. And people are like, “Yes, it does things.”

Rowan Mangan:
And by people, you mean you?

Martha Beck:
Well…

Rowan Mangan:
So I have a question for you: Do you think it’s possible for people to know too much about their self-help guru? Because I’m wondering if I’ve gone too far.

Martha Beck:
Well, I have a very rich trove of eccentricities and frankly insane predilections. So I think you can go a lot further. I don’t think they’ve even really scratched the surface.

Rowan Mangan:
You think this is the tame bits, huh?

Martha Beck:
Well, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. Well, wait ’til next episode. I’ll bring the big guns if you want.

Martha Beck:
Okay. All right, you’re on.

Rowan Mangan:
All right.

Martha Beck:
Because the only thing I have that is equal to my weirdness is my total lack of concern about being public about it.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s fair. I’ll give you that.

Martha Beck:
Once people sort of hate you online, it’s like, “Okay, that happened.” It’s going to happen.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s going to happen. So should we do a podcast?

Martha Beck:
I guess we could.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s do one.

Martha Beck:
Can I paint something that will help the podcast?

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
All right. Let’s just do it then.

Rowan Mangan:
Hi there. I’m Ro and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster? It’s actually pretty easy. You can rate our pod with lots of stars, all your stars. You can review it with your best superlatives. You can even subscribe or follow Bewildered so you’ll never miss an episode. Then of course, if you’re ready to go all in, our paid online community is called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few true sanctuaries online. You can go to wildercommunity.com to check it out. Rate, review, subscribe, join, and y’all have a great day now.

So today on the podcast, we are going to talk about something that happened to me in my life because that’s what I feel like talking about.

Martha Beck:
As one so often does.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. In a way, this is like my endless coats of paint, you know?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. We all have our thing.

Rowan Mangan:
We all have our thing. Yeah. So this morning, people came to our house, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Yes. This is actually not unrelated to the painting stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ve had a lot of people coming in and out of our house since we moved into it a mere three months ago. Because everything is broken.

Martha Beck:
Everything.

Rowan Mangan:
Nothing works.

Martha Beck:
Except us.

Rowan Mangan:
And everything is broken, and also nothing works. Well, there are people other than us who work, and they are the people that we ask to come in when I can keep the power tools away from you.

Martha Beck:
And you often say in your grandmother’s Australian accent, “We’ll have to get a man in.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. I love that you think she spoke like that. She spoke with this: “Gotta get a man in. We’ll get a man in.” She was a working-class girl.

Martha Beck:
You sound like an American. “Get a man in. Gotta get a man in.”

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know how to speak Australian anymore!

Martha Beck:
I know. It’s crazy. And also I think you are saying that I’m not sure that’s how a lesbian is supposed to say it. “Gotta get a man in.”

Rowan Mangan:
Gotta get a man in.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, we’ve had a lot of men in. Not that way.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. Some people came to our house. Okay. I’ll own the fact that there were a lot of them and I could have foreseen that there was going to be a lot of different people at one time, but we are getting into a time of year where it’s quite hard to get things scheduled and scheduling is not my forte. And the person who usually helps me with scheduling is in the middle of a move across the country. And I can’t bring myself to bother her with my problems right now. So I managed to schedule too many people to come into our house this morning. Okay. That happens. One of the people, God love her, was helping us clean our house. It was foreseeable. She comes weekly. Next thing was people who call themselves— sorry if it’s you listening—”building scientists.” I wanted to see where the ladybugs and the wasps were getting in. But they came with amazing tools and were explaining to me what rim joists are and such things.

Martha Beck:
Oh. Did they figure out where the ladybugs and the wasps are getting in?

Rowan Mangan:
No, but they knew what a rim joist was and they, yeah, no, there’s many places it turns out where they’re getting in. But then there were some guys that came in to help me move furniture because I have very heavy sofa-bed furniture that needed to be in a different part of the house and I could go on and on, but it’s not of interest.

Martha Beck:
People are riveted right now. They’re like, “What part of the house?”

Rowan Mangan:
What part of the house?

Martha Beck:
And how heavy were they really?

Rowan Mangan:
What was a sofa bed doing in the wrong part of the house anyway? Couldn’t we have foreseen this? No, as it turns out, we couldn’t. So I’m like, “Can you help me move things around because of the brawn?” Get a man in. And they did that fine, but when I had booked them, they were like, “Do you have any furniture you want put together?” I think because they were expecting to move people from one house to another, as people most often do, not just, “Can you move a sofa?” And they were like, “Do you want to assemble anything?” And I’m like, “You know I do. ” And that was my first mistake. They were good at the lifting. So I was doing one of those where I’m like, “Sorry, Debbie, that everyone’s in your way. So, rim joist? Oh, wow. That’s so impressive. You really understand a lot of things and I’m so proud of you. And why are you turning my plant upside down on my carpet there?” And it was just bopping around from one to the other, and each one wanted to explain what they were doing with more technical detail than I really required.

Martha Beck:
Are you sure our listeners don’t need to hear the details of the rim joists and whatnot? Like really, it’s so fascinating.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t even know if it was a rim joist now.

Martha Beck:
You’re perilously close to another naughty phrase.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. I know.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I don’t know if they have that in Australia as well, but.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah. We know a thing or two.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. I would expect Australians to know this. Anyway, go on.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but it turns out there are many kinds of joist.

Martha Beck:
Really? Did you have a joist joust? Like different joists fighting each other or something? Sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t sleep well at night. Actually, I do. All right. I’m just not. Okay. Back to it.

Rowan Mangan:
Back to those joists.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
You know what it’s like when you’re bopping between different people who are in your house. It’s stressful.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s very unnerving.

Rowan Mangan:
But when eventually everyone left, I found myself still quite overwrought.

Martha Beck:
You were in a state.

Rowan Mangan:
I was freaked out. I was freaked the fuck out, I think it’s fair to say.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And it was just such a weird thing. And Marty had been going to the doctor and was out and I’m like, “Get home, get home, get home.”

Martha Beck:
You did.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, I need you to get home. She’s like calling me, “Does anyone need anything?” And I’m like, “Get home, Marty, get home now.”

Martha Beck:
And she was like, ” Assembling furniture is not their North Star.” I was like, “Okay, I think this is an emergency.”

Rowan Mangan:
It was. It was. Yeah. It was not their North Star. Okay. I just have to say one thing, which was that the guy, after they tipped my plant over on the beautiful rug, he and I were scooping the potting mix back into the pot of the plant that had been relocated dramatically. And he said to me, “I’ve done a lot of landscaping.” And I was like, “Huh, yeah, well, I guess that’s sort of what we’re doing here.” And he’s like, “No, I mean it. I’ve done a lot of landscaping.” And it was at this…but…that was weird, right? It was weird because that was just—

Martha Beck:
I wasn’t there, but I believe you.

Rowan Mangan:
That was literally scooping dirt off a carpet and putting it in a pot. That’s not strictly landscaping.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know. I haven’t been to horticulture school. Maybe that’s like, Horticulture 101 is just dirt scooping.

Rowan Mangan:
Dirt scooping with two hands. Anyway, they went away eventually because I told them not to do any of the other things, and then the building scientists went away and although they do have a TV show about building science that they’d like us to watch.

Martha Beck:
Oh, wow.

Rowan Mangan:
And I remained freaked out, and finally Marty got home from the doctor. I was pacing about eating chocolate, running an Epsom salt bath. That’s why we were late, Drew.

Martha Beck:
No lie.

Rowan Mangan:
And then Marty’s like, “Oh, I know what it is.” And I’m like, “What?” Because I was just so stressed and they’d gone, the source of my stress was gone. But then you had it all figured out. And I love it when you’ve got it all figured out because I, I’m trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Frequently happens as well.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you want to pick up the story at this point, Martha Beck, from your perspective?

Martha Beck:
Well, it was interesting. I knew there was something weird because when I got home, there was a man standing in our driveway in the freezing cold. It was like 28 degrees, and he was very lightly dressed. And I got out of the car and I said, “Oh my gosh, you must be so cold. Can I get you a jacket or something?” And he just stared at me and in a very strange way. And he said, “What?” And I said, “Can I get you a jacket? Are you cold?” And he said, “I’m not even here.” And I was like, “Okayyy.”

Rowan Mangan:
They were ghosts! This makes so much sense.

Martha Beck:
They were dead the whole time.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, that makes it a lot more understandable how much trouble they had putting together furniture.

Martha Beck:
No, it was weird, though. Immediately, the second he sort of went, “Huh?” I went from friendly, happy, give him a jacket to be very quiet, don’t say anything, listen to him without responding, and get out. It was very, very clear. And I have no reason to think anything negative about him, but he kind of went on talking for a little while about, “You know, if it’s cold, I’m just in the desert. If it’s hot, I’m just not there. I don’t feel weather.” I was like, “Okay, I’m going to go inside now.” But that wasn’t even the one that upset you.

Rowan Mangan:
No, the one you spoke to was the one who’d done a lot of landscaping.

Martha Beck:
Oh, okay.

Rowan Mangan:
The other one didn’t talk, and he was the scarier one. But none of this had surfaced into my consciousness while they were there because I was so—I think part of it is that I’m so focused on, “Am I doing this right? Do you need coffee? Is everyone okay? Is it okay if I go down here?” And I’ve gotten worse at this since moving to another country because I never know if there’s hidden cultural rules about these sorts of things.

Martha Beck:
Cultural is the point because you were so fixated on culture. And after many, many years of coaching hundreds, thousands of people, I realized that when I pick up something like that really quickly, then I always say, “No, no, no, there’s nothing wrong with that person.” And then I get to know them like, “Oh yeah, there is actually something really wrong.” So it’s like I’ve been given the opportunity to practice sort of reading someone’s energy very quickly. I don’t want to prejudge anyone and I could be totally wrong, but I pay attention to my instincts. And when I walked in, actually it was when I saw the place where they’d been assembling the furniture, and it was just, it’s kind of like my place, but I’d taken three months to do it and they’d done it in one afternoon. The plastic for the hardware had been ripped open weirdly, and there was hardware and plastic scattered all over your room. And I looked at the scenario and immediately just went, “No, no.” But it’s not an intellectual no, it’s not an emotional no. It’s physical, but it’s also just energetic. It was just like, “That is not okay. Somebody’s not okay. Whoever did that is not okay.” Again, I would never accuse someone in any way, but I trust myself.

Rowan Mangan:
So what we’re talking about, just to kind of contextualize this strange story for a minute, is when you get that bad feeling and that sort of intuitive or instinctive or energetic vibe of “off,” which I was clearly getting, but I was so stuck in my own shit or whatever it was doing.

Martha Beck:
Well, and trying to please, trying to be appropriate and polite and make everyone at ease when you’re not at ease. It reminds me, I may have mentioned on the podcast before, but I think it bears repeating Gavin de Becker who’s a lovely human. I’ve talked to him a couple of times, and he wrote a book decades ago that I think is a classic. It’s called The Gift of Fear because he’s an expert in predicting when people are going to get violent or weird or whatever, and he works for famous people to assess threats and whatnot. And he talks about how we have these very, very highly sharpened instincts, like 300 million years of evolution has given us a lot of ability to perceive potential threat. It’s not that it’s an inevitable threat. We usually don’t notice it until it’s an inevitable threat.But what Gavin talks about is, imagine you’re alone working late in a skyscraper and it’s 11 o’clock at night and nobody else is there, lights are off pretty much, and you go to the elevator and when the elevator opens, there’s a man in the elevator and you get a feeling of fear. What animal that sensed fear from another animal would then voluntarily lock itself in a soundproof steel box with an animal that scares it?

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
And it is only because of social anxiety that we walk into that elevator. You can just get the next one. No harm, no foul.

Rowan Mangan:
That is exactly what I did. That was the exact thing I was doing, was getting in that elevator today.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, absolutely. You were overriding your instincts.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And it wasn’t until you actually verbalized, “I think this is what’s happening,” that I was even able to kind of contemplate. And I was trying to figure out why I felt so freaked out because I hadn’t even necessarily located it with them. I was still trying to make the story work that it was just a stressful morning with different people. But it wasn’t because the building scientists—God love them—left no…

Martha Beck:
I’m sorry, I love building science. I just think it’s funny that people are building scientists.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re building scientists.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Or they’re buildings who are scientists. Yeah, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, like buildings in little lab coats. Aw.

Martha Beck:
So yeah, they were fine. They were fine. You liked those guys.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, they were fine.

Martha Beck:
As Adam says, “I like that little guy.”

Rowan Mangan:
“I like that little guy.”

Martha Beck:
“I like that little guy.” But I was predisposed to know what was happening to you because of that little interaction by the car because I’m highly autistic and I hide behind clumps of moss until lovely people go away. But because I mask it, I will chat with anyone quite competently. In my dotage.

Rowan Mangan:
I love that you will describe a chat as competent.

Martha Beck:
It is.

Rowan Mangan:
Like that is the most autistic thing to say.

Martha Beck:
We talked last time about small talk and how the young kids don’t know how to do it and how you and I want to just run screaming from the room when someone starts it. But I can have a nice chat with someone.

Rowan Mangan:
Competently.

Martha Beck:
Give them cocoa, coffee, whatever they want. And so I said, “Are you cold? Do you want a jacket?” And the moment he started talking, I thought, “Oh, I should respond this,” and something said: Don’t say a word. Do not engage. Just say thank you and walk away. Any engagement is too much.

Rowan Mangan:
So do you think that most people who would be listening to this podcast, because I don’t care about the rest of them, would be closer to your response, which was very quickly clocking what your reaction needed to be to keep yourself feeling safe. And mine, which was to completely quash any awareness of what was going on intuitively. Where do you think most people lie? Because I have no idea.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know either, really, because I don’t know what the sample of our listeners is like, demographically speaking.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
I’m sorry. You ask me things about sociology, I’m going to get sociological. But I would say they’re probably in the middle. I’d say that probably most people are sort of listening to their instincts, but rapidly overriding them. Like you didn’t even articulate to yourself, “I feel dangerous with that man and especially that man. That’s danger.” You didn’t think that.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
You pushed over it before you let yourself know.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, 100%.

Martha Beck:
And I heard him say three things in the driveway and I’m like, “That’s trouble. Walk away.” But I’m very uninterested in pleasing people generally now. I didn’t used to be, but I’ve been displeasing for so long now that I’m getting used to it. So I think people are somewhere in the middle, but I think almost everyone overrides their instincts in certain ways. And especially, for example, with someone you know. If you get an itch somewhere that goes, “This is not okay, this is not safe.” And it’s someone you know, even someone you love, that’s when we really start to play the denial tapes really loudly.

Rowan Mangan:
So what I was thinking about was what do you think, like, could you walk us through like slow motion, what happened in your body when you spoke to him outside the door or in the driveway or whatever?

Martha Beck:
And it has to do, there’s something called neuroception, which is like your entire nervous system perceiving things, rather than just like even the five senses, because it sort of slides over into metaphysics. It slides over, I think it definitely goes all the way to just being able to sense energy.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And I mean, I think most people have had the feeling of just eeriness, something’s wrong, something’s off. And then they find out something is. There’s tons. Read Rupert Sheldrake. Read the tons of evidence that say we can sense energy. So I’m very alert to that. So I got out of the car and I met the guy’s eyes, and there was just this blankness there. And it didn’t look like someone daydreaming or anything. There was something unsettling. And I immediately felt my stomach tighten just a little bit, and my legs tightened a little bit, like run. I mean, and I’m probably grossly exaggerating this, but I would rather err on the side of caution without insulting anybody. If I got to know him and he was wonderful, that’d be great. I was wrong. But yeah, as I said, so much practice that I don’t really doubt myself anymore. So there’s that.

And then when I almost spoke back to him, it was literally like somebody had put a hand on my mouth gently and pushed my head back, and my throat closed and it was like: “Not a word.” And that was almost out loud in my head: “Not a word, not a word.”

Rowan Mangan:
And of course, for the purposes of this conversation, it’s not about who these guys were or what they’re—it’s not even about that. It’s just about learning to track our own interior reactions. And it’s fascinating to me to see that this is like this huge blind spot for me when it comes to, like, I find it very stressful having people—anyone who doesn’t live in my house—in my house. That’s always stressful for me. And so it’s like usually I’m very sensitive to energy, as you know, and can pick up lots of little things, but there’s clearly this one situation, which is that sense of here is my home, here are people coming in and in this scenario—

Martha Beck:
You have to be hostess.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, exactly. And I’m just running around offering them coffee like there’s no tomorrow.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that was the other weird thing. So there are two coffee cups in your room and one was empty, but one was really full. And you told me, “Yeah, I asked him if they wanted coffee,” and you asked him if they wanted coffee and you said, “How many sugars?” And he said six.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Now that’s neither here nor there, but he hadn’t touched it either.

Rowan Mangan:
He hadn’t touched it. He hadn’t even had a sip.

Martha Beck:
I have to say, and here’s something I want to say to our listeners, don’t go accusing people with no evidence, but if you feel disturbed, go and sit down. And like Ro was sitting there trying to figure out why she was so disoriented and like she couldn’t get—

Rowan Mangan:
I was stressed.

Martha Beck:
She wasn’t relaxed. She couldn’t relax. And if you’re feeling that way, it may be because you know something that your social self feels you’re not supposed to know, or you think something your social self thinks you’re not supposed to think.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s so good. Could you just do a really quick like social self definition? This is your term for people who don’t know it already.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. My very first self-help book, even before that when I was a professor, I would talk to people about their “essential self,” which is the essence. That’s one meaning of the word essential, but there’s also, it’s your essence and it is “that what you need.” So it’s essential for your happiness. And that’s like a genotype. That’s born into you. It would be the same, no matter where in the world you were born, you’d have the same essential self. And then there’s the “social self,” which is constructed of an interplay between your ability to be social, which is so high in humans and whatever the socializing forces around you may be. And that will be completely different if you’re raised in like Buenos Aires versus Iceland or even in a different family. So the social self is very malleable, and the essential self is not, but we push the essential self away in order to follow the rules of our socialization because that is survival to a child, to a human. We need the acceptance of our group. And so we override the essential self with the social self a lot, a lot.

Rowan Mangan:
Which is completely fine if you have like fluid access between them.

Martha Beck:
Right. If you know you’re doing it.

Rowan Mangan:
You still need your social self. It’s when the social self is not allowing the messages of the essential self to reach the conscious mind, which was my thing this morning, that that’s when it can be a problem.

Martha Beck:
And I would say it is technically a lack of integrity because integrity means that two things are working in alignment and duplicity means they’re at odds with each other. It’s not a moral statement, but when I go on my integrity cleanses, which I do for years at a time, where I am always examining, “Am I telling myself two stories or one? What’s the truth? What’s the truth?” So, if anybody’s feeling that way, it may be something you felt for a long time: there’s something just off about a work situation, a relationship, whatever. Or it may just be this bolt like you had today, but go sit down and think, “If I were to know, what am I afraid to know? What do I know that I’m afraid to know? What do I feel that I’m afraid to feel? What is it that I understand that I’m not letting myself admit?”

And another thing I ask people is, “What do I almost know? What do I almost feel?”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s a good one.

Martha Beck:
And then let yourself be profoundly antisocial, like say the things you’re not supposed to say because it’s always behind those things that the essential self is like jumping up and down going, “Danger, danger. I’m trying to tell you something.”

Rowan Mangan:
And it may not be danger, danger, code blue, get out of there kind of thing.

Martha Beck:
It could be.

Rowan Mangan:
It might be, but it might not be. It might just be like that you need to navigate a certain way. So what I love about this, and it’s so perfect because the social self is, in many ways, like the avatar that we use to interact with the culture. And so again, nothing wrong with culture, it’s inevitable, it happens, but we just need to know when we’re doing it and when we’re not.

Martha Beck:
Right. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And so what I think is so interesting here is that where my social self had no freaking idea because it was so focused on doing things right by the cultural rules in this particular circumstance. And so if I followed the culture’s rules, I think in this situation, and it might be changing a bit, but my vibe is that the culture would say, “You’re crazy. You do not have the evidence to say anything about this. You’re an emotional female person who is a little bit cuckoo.” And I think that’s the only space the culture holds. Although I do think gradually mainstream culture is starting to open a bit with this stuff, but that’s the kind of conventional cultural wisdom, don’t you think?

Martha Beck:
Yes. And I mean, it stands to reason in a way because there were times when somebody could say, “She’s a witch. I can feel it.” And they burn someone, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And that’s why, sorry, I just need to put in that none of this is about taking action interpersonally. This is we’re only talking about how you’re interacting with yourself, and you can never know anyone else’s truth at all, and don’t presume to. And don’t say we said you could because we didn’t. We said you couldn’t.

Martha Beck:
But it’s almost equally dangerous—in fact, I’d say it is more dangerous—to not know what you know and not feel what you feel. Because on most days it’s going to be fine, but when it’s not fine, you’re going to just walk into that elevator.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s about making decisions about your actions and not trying to make decisions about other people’s.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. And certainly not about accusing anyone. Sorry, I’ll stop belaboring that, but it’s a tricky path to walk because on one hand, we want to be rational and evidence-based. Because what Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “It’s better for a hundred guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be wrongly imprisoned.” So we don’t want to accuse anyone. On the other hand, if you pay no attention to your instincts because there’s no rational proof that your fear is valid, you’re going to put yourself in harm’s way when your whole body and your instinctive and your energetic self has been designed to get you free from that. And that’s where there’s another side to it, which is it’s better if you’re the one who might be in danger, it’s better that a hundred little kids be kept away from a window, even if they wouldn’t fall out of it, than for one little kid to fall out. It’s better to keep, to err on the side of safety a hundred times than it is to just blunder into outright danger even once.

Rowan Mangan:
Be cautious. Be careful. That’s the message.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the thing is, if you let yourself, this is like a muscle that you can build.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s what I’m interested in. Although it’s so interesting because to me, it almost feels like the metaphor is opposite. I don’t want to bulk up. I want to loosen. I want to get more—

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You become more fluid and more, I mean, that’s the wild side, right? Like you watch an animal going through the woods, it’s always present, it’s always aware. And I’ve had a chance to test it so many times. There are people I’ve had as clients who are so shut down that they can’t even talk and they’ll sit there and they’ll say like three things to me and I’ve learned that I can sort of drop into my body, relax, and sort of let myself feel what I’m really feeling. And I remember saying to one woman, second time we’d ever talked, and she just chit-chatted the first time. The second time she just went silent and I said, “Okay, here’s what I’m getting: There’s a shell of fear around you that doesn’t want to talk to me. Beneath that is a little layer of anger that is mostly directed at people who’ve hurt you in the past. And underneath that is an ocean of sorrow. Tell me where I’m wrong.”

And it’s not often that I lay it out that bluntly, but no one’s ever told me I’m wrong. We can do this stuff. We can interpersonally sense things at a far more sensitive level than the culture gives us room for because it’s looking for material evidence. You’re just not going to get that in time.

Rowan Mangan:
I know someone who is like a deeply intuitive reader of energy and is also deeply in love with science and the scientific method and has quite a limited, like not the most open mind in that way.

Martha Beck:
Is it a building scientist?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, it is. And it’s so funny because he always talks about body language, because that’s like the way that he can interface between what he knows and what he finds culturally acceptable to say. And he’ll be talking about body language. I’m like, “That person isn’t moving. That’s not body language, that’s energy.” But it’s just really fascinating. He can’t know about that. He can’t let himself know that he knows how to do that because he doesn’t understand it from a—

Martha Beck:
We all do it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So talk to me more about how you see where the culture is and the culture’s view of the capacity to read energy.

Martha Beck:
Well, I think there’s still, and again, it’s so difficult to say because there’s so many subcultures in our culture right now, and you’re right, there’s a huge part of the culture that has accepted that, and it’s just like snore, old news. But I would say certainly the academy and science and the people who purport to give us rules for conduct, it’s still about what you know, intellectually. It’s about facts. Do you have evidence for this? And I mean evidence you can show me with your, I need to see it with my eyes and touch it with my hands. If you just had a funny feeling, no, that’s not enough. So I think that’s where the mainstream culture goes. And then I think frankly, there is kind of a divide between people who feel more vulnerable and people who feel less vulnerable, women feeling more vulnerable than men in general. There’s that whole women’s intuition thing because if you walk around nervous—

Rowan Mangan:
If you’re a prey animal, you’re going to have big ears.

Martha Beck:
If you’re being preyed upon, you’re going to have big ears and a lot of good peripheral vision. And who knows? Maybe it’s even hormonally different. I don’t even know.

Rowan Mangan:
But I’m sure that follows all the usual things, like you could say gender or you could say the more power you have, the less sensitive you have to be. So then anyone in society who comes down as less powerful will be closer to more in touch with those faculties, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the scary thing is, though, that the lower you are in the power structure, the less you will be believed. If you are legit afraid because you’re in a very vulnerable position because you’re low on the pecking order, people won’t listen to you. And it’s one of the most terrifying things about the way our culture is structured. People at the lower echelons are in genuine trouble, and no one believes them.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so interesting because it’s also, you were saying, “Read Rupert Sheldrake,” and it’s so interesting that of all the people who have kind of been pushing science—sorry, but it’s the Boomer white man who’s like at the pinnacle of demographically powerful humans right now, who is the only voice that’s given legitimacy. He’s the one that everyone cites. He’s brilliant, but it’s that—

Martha Beck:
There are others. There’s Dean Radin. And Lisa Miller at Columbia is like marching out for the future.

Rowan Mangan:
And what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of people studying it, and Rupert Sheldrake is the one that the culture’s listening to primarily like that. He’s the big name.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. He took a lot of thumps. He’s somebody who refused to give up his intuition. I saw him and Iain McGilchrist is another neurologist philosopher that the culture is also starting to listen to. And I saw them interviewed together, and they were talking about how you have to be very biased to believe that we don’t have these energetic facilities to like know when someone’s looking at us or sense things far away. And to buy the scientific story right now, you have to pretend that all these tests, all these pieces of research did not happen. And then Iain McGilchrist said—and they’re both like Oxford types—he said, “Oh, and one would also have to ignore one’s own experiences.” And I was like, “Boy, howdy! An old white man is finally saying he’s had these experiences, not just he’s done the research.” It’s so obsessively “objective science,” but it’s a subjective experience. And I think a lot of old white guys are having it, a lot of everybody’s having it, but you’re right, someone had to break the mold and sort of stand there from inside the system and say, “No, I refuse to stop believing this” for it to even start to crack open.

Rowan Mangan:
And I think, and the point I was making was also that, yeah, that’s what’s going to get the ear of the culture, but also that if you’re in a fairly comfy position, you’ve got some capital you can afford to burn in order to—

Martha Beck:
It’s kind of an interesting thing. It’s kind of like being an ally, which we try to be. Allied for anybody who’s less privileged. It’s just, I feel it’s just a moral obligation. And I’ve never thought about being an ally to people whose energy reading is being belittled. If somebody comes and says, “Look, I have this feeling.” And by the way, it’s not all bad because when you start getting sensitive to it, you’re more apathetic. You can be there for people who are sad. It’s not just running away from danger.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
You can also, you can love much more deeply and love people you don’t know much more deeply because you can—

Rowan Mangan:
Well, you can know them much more deeply.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. Exactly. And it’s the same thing. I’m sitting across from this woman at the doctor’s office. We’re both waiting for the doctor. There’s the receptionist. I can feel the receptionist being…something wasn’t going right. And she was very, very worried, but she was trying to be very calm about it. And so I calmed myself down a lot and made a point of like when her computer wasn’t working, it took forever and she was so like [vocalizes]. And I looked away, I relaxed, I hummed a little tune. I was giving her signals that she could relax. That, to me, is a way of loving. And as we’re talking, I mean, we’re just talking about this. It just happened. I don’t always do that, but I think I want to do it more, not just to avoid danger, but also to love and to champion the oppressed and everything.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s a form of integrity as well, like you were saying earlier, because if we see ourselves as part of a greater whole and not as these little individual entities, then it’s sort of like—I’ve never thought about your definition of integrity and this kind of spiritual lens of oneness, like the separate self, the whole ego and the idea of the separate self is actually a form of multiplicity. So it’s only when we’re just like, “The receptionist and I, together, are going to bring down our net stress level by me getting super calm,” that’s a way of becoming more in integrity with consciousness.

Martha Beck:
That’s really true. I’ve never articulated that, but it’s really, really true. And I do think that if we start to acknowledge when something is wrong, like today, and it’s so interesting as well, because people come and go from our house, as you said, all the time. They know where the key is, but I’ve never been afraid of one of them coming back.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
Only today, I looked at the stuff thrown all over your room, and I looked at those coffee cups and I just said, “No.” With my mind, but with something else as well, that whatever it is that can tell people are sad, it was just like, “No, you will not come here again, full stop.” And that, so it keeps you safer, but you’re also empathizing with the other person. I have no hatred toward those guys.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
It’s just you’re not coming to my house again. And I think if we went around that way, we would start to get better and better and better at it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. But it’s the thing about “authorize your knowing” that we did before is that’s what you did. You said you went in there and you saw the coffee cup and you saw the way the crap was left and everything and you went, “No,” that was the bit that I couldn’t do—is that I had the knowing, but I couldn’t authorize it, and that’s that channel that you have really open from experience and from trusting it and from having it validated.

Martha Beck:
And from like not trusting it a lot and getting in harm’s way and experiencing the consequences. It’s like crashing your car. You kind of go, “Okay, that indicator? I’m going to pay attention to that.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And you will be countercultural. You will sound like a nut half the time.

Rowan Mangan:
So I want to talk a little bit more about how we come to our senses.

Martha Beck:
Absolutely.

Rowan Mangan:
On the energy stuff right after this. So Marty, I just don’t feel like we’ve talked about me enough in this episode.

Martha Beck:
No, we haven’t, but we have years ahead of us.

Rowan Mangan:
So I was just thinking for myself and for any of the listeners who might relate to where I was today with the—I was getting the warnings, but I wasn’t letting them through.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
So my question to you is when it comes to “How do I come to my senses?” and what I mean is, how do I know what I don’t know?

Martha Beck:
Right. But you know at some level, but you’re not letting yourself know that you know.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I’m in this situation where my body’s giving me these signals, but I genuinely, even sitting there with it and asking myself, “What is this?” I couldn’t get there until you came in. So what can I work on so that that will be like a clearer path for me to tread?

Martha Beck:
Well, recognize that’s a form of denial. It ain’t just a river in Egypt. People talk about denial being, “I’m ignoring my partner’s drug addiction” or whatever, but it’s also “I feel something. No, I don’t.” “I feel agitated and I don’t know why.” But actually if you sit down and explore the feeling, you end up knowing why. If somebody says to you, “That man made me nervous too,” there’s a sense of coming back into integrity, which is relaxation.

Rowan Mangan:
So would you suggest that if I’d been, if you hadn’t been there—”Get home, Marty, get home now. Get home. I’m having a feeling. I’m having a feeling and I need you.”

Martha Beck:
It was quite urgent.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It was. I had a feeling, and you weren’t there.

Martha Beck:
I was not.

Rowan Mangan:
So if you had continued to rudely not be there to tend to my feeling, like I was sitting there trying to know. It had not popped into my head—

Martha Beck:
Interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
—Until you said it. So I will say the minute you said it, I was like, “Oh! That’s it. ” And my whole body settled and the calm and all of that, it still took a while to get the icky energy out.

Martha Beck:
The adrenaline and the cortisol. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But I mean, I know that there was only a finite number of things it could have been, and it wasn’t the building scientists, and it wasn’t Debbie with the vacuum cleaner, but I just didn’t think.

Martha Beck:
That’s what denial is, and that’s why it’s so baffling. You don’t—

Rowan Mangan:
No, it’s not.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. No, it isn’t. My denial wasn’t.

Rowan Mangan:
Absolutely not.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. There’s nothing behind my denial. Yeah. You do not see it. You do not see it. So if you’re baffled, especially by a negative feeling, I had, the other day, I had a whole day when I was baffled, and my emotions were all over the place and I just wasn’t acknowledging something really deep inside me that was essentially a spiritual sensation. I’ll talk more about that later. But this is like, let’s talk about instincts and energy. If you don’t know why you’re so upset, there’s denial at work somewhere.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So I often talk about, think about the body as an animal, how would you treat an animal? Would you work it to death? Would you give it no sleep? Think about that. In this case, the animal self is up, but you have to be able to listen to it at a sophisticated level. So to me, it’s like the part of you that’s upset is a child, a young child. And it helps me to actually project an image of myself forward, and it’s a little child and she’s very frightened or she’s very angry or whatever, and I don’t know why. And so I ask her, “Why are you so upset?” And then the first thing you have to say is, “I believe you.” That is the huge block that keeps us in denial. It’s not that we will be attacked or anything, it’s that we won’t be believed and that our reality will be completely eliminated by other people’s way of thinking.

I remember once talking to somebody whose father was very sociopathic, and she went to a doctor once, a lot of doctor visits, and then she came home and he said, “Where were you?” And she said, “I was at the doctor.” And he said, “No, you weren’t. You’ve been here all day. You’ve been sitting right here.” She said, “No, I went to the doctor.” He said, “No, you didn’t. You’ve been here all day.” And she was so baffled that she went back to the doctor and got a note saying she’d been there and she came home and she showed it to her father and he took it, he tore it up, he said, “No, you were here.” That is so freaky-deeky, right? That’s so extreme. And yet, because it was her father and because it was so convincing, she actually left her own reality because she wasn’t sure. So when people—

Rowan Mangan:
Well that’s what, then that’s the purpose of gaslighting is to make people doubt that what they know.

Martha Beck:
And those who would do evil, not out of despair but out of premeditation, count on other people to be terrified that they will not be believed. If you can be the person who says to your nervous system, “Tell me what you’re afraid of, and I will believe you.” Will I go to the police about somebody who will never come into my life again? No. But I will not doubt you.

And you have to build that for yourself, and then that child becomes incredibly psychic. I’ll just say it out loud.

Rowan Mangan:
I realized something really that to me is interesting about myself.

Martha Beck:
We haven’t talked enough about that.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s what I was going to say. Is that when you said the one who is afraid is a little child, what I realized is that for me, the youngest part was the one that was freaked out about having people in my house. And there was a lot of childhood stuff around shame and fear about having people at home and what will they—

Martha Beck:
And make those people happy. We have to make those, any guest, anybody who comes in.

Rowan Mangan:
And that is what caused me to completely leave my integrity was actually, it’s less about the fearful part. It was actually the part that was stepping in.

Martha Beck:
Social belonging. Social manipulation is a very dark word for it, but you really are trying to make people feel okay about you. And that, by its nature, is a manipulation of their emotional state. And we’re there almost all the time. Even if you’re a little kid and you think, “I have to make these people like me.” Trying to make someone like you is a form of trying to control the situation so you don’t feel out of control. And so you were trying desperately to make these guys like you.

Rowan Mangan:
It wasn’t that.

Martha Beck:
It wasn’t that?

Rowan Mangan:
No, it was about behaving properly and not being—I mean, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter about the ins and outs of it, but it wasn’t about how they were going to feel. It was about: Are people going to see my house, my private space as being okay and normal? Is this going to be normal? Is this going to be above board? Is this going to pass muster? Does this pass muster as normal?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And we all have our own old trauma profile. Some of us with profound trauma, some of us with just like, we were hushed a lot and it hurt our feelings. Those are all like microtraumas, the whole thing. And it conditions each of us in a specific pattern where we will go into denial and allow things to happen that our instincts are saying, “No!”

Rowan Mangan:
But it’s so interesting to note that where those exist, they can push you into the culture and they’re actually quite likely to because of what you started out by saying, which is that where these social primates, who ultimately, we rely on acceptance by the group for it feels existential even when in our daily life it may not be.

Martha Beck:
Or it may be. I mean, there’s really good data to show that when people are too isolated, they just die of failure to thrive. And here’s the thing, if you can believe that child inside you and then start picking up what everyone picks up, even though we don’t acknowledge it, as I said, when you believe the child, you become psychic. And it’s not even like, “I have a special gift.” You’re just human and you start to pick things up, and you can start to guide your life toward things that feel deeply good. I mean, we were talking about this right before we started recording and I said it was very much that sensitivity that made me think after I met you, “I must never lose track of this person.” The fear was: “She cannot be allowed to just go back to Australia and never speak to me again.”

Rowan Mangan:
I will lock her in my basement.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
And I will force her to do a podcast.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And I will dress her in pinafores and feed her porridge and call her George. That’s what we do at home. No, I just made that up.

Rowan Mangan:
That was what I was trying to not let people see, was the pinafore and the George.

Martha Beck:
Sorry. And by the way, people coming to our house and thinking it’s normal, if they came into my house before you intervened with your intervention in the intervention room, they would have not thought I was very functional.

Rowan Mangan:
Fair.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, the whole point is when you come to your senses, you’re not going to be going along with the consensus anymore. And that’s just what we have to make peace with if we’re going to be bewildered.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And there’s something that happens when you sit with the child inside you and say, “I will believe everything you tell me and I will not laugh at you and I will not slap you down.” There’s a joy of finally belonging because you belong to yourself.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
And if you refuse to belong to yourself in order to belong in the group, you don’t belong.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. That’s very cool, Marty. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
It works. Believe yourself.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We have to believe ourselves. That’s the way I think that we’re all going to be able to….

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

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.