November 17, 2022 • 32 mins
Martha Beck is Oprah’s favorite life coach and the best selling author of numerous best-selling books including her newest, The Way of Integrity.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Sam Edis and I'm Amy Nelson. Welcome to What's
Her Story? With Sam and Amy. This is a show
about the world's most remarkable women. They're professional and personal journeys. Together,
we'll hear from Gold medalists, best selling authors, and leaders
of the world's most iconic brands. Listen every Thursday or
join the conversation anytime on Instagram at What's Her Story Podcast.
(00:30):
Welcome to Season three of What's Her Story. I am
more excited for this season than any season before, simply
because I feel like we're better at telling women's stories
than we've ever been in the past. And on top
of it, we have the most unbelievable lineup of guests.
This lineup will blow your socks off, no questions about it.
(00:52):
I am so excited to share all of it with you.
I'm super excited for today's guest, Martha Beck. If you
don't know, mark that she is Oprah's favorite life coach
and the best selling author of numerous books, including her newest,
The Way of Integrity. Take us back to that time
when you felt like you had hit rock bottom and
(01:15):
something dramatic needed to change. The year I heard twenty nine,
I decided not to tell a single lie for a
whole calendar year. And by the way, I was also
very physically ill at this time. I had a bunch
of autoimmune diseases. I could barely get out of bed
or use my hands. I was in constant chronic pain.
I mean, things were not ideal. And so I did
(01:39):
go a whole year without telling a single lie of
any kind, not polite, not white, not any kind of lie.
And my entire life exploded because it needed to either
walked away from or was ejected from my religion, my
family of origin because of the religion things very religious family.
(02:00):
Quit my job, which was an assistant professor, quit my industry,
which is academia, because I hated that and I couldn't
lie and say I liked it. I because I was
living in an area. I was raised Mormon in Provo, Utah,
which is a very Mormon area, and once I left
the church, it was not really a good place for
me and my family so left my home realized I
(02:22):
was gay, so they won't my marriage. Pretty much everything
that would define a life went away that year, and
I started to feel happy for the first time in
my life, even though I was grieving all this stuff,
like massively, something started healing inside me because I was
telling the truth about myself all the time, And they're right,
(02:44):
the truth does say free. Did you feel any guilt
for not wanting anymore the things that you had chosen,
the people you had chosen in some instances? Like did
that feel guilty at all? Yeah? I mean, because I
was being so incredibly scrupulous about trying to tell the truth,
I mostly felt just sorrow. But when I would sometimes
(03:05):
get into the mindset of the people who thought that
I should have lived, like if I everybody I knew
growing up was Mormon, right, So when you leave the
Mormon church, that is considered a sin worse than murder.
And in addition, I had left partly because my father
was a sort of very dominant figure in the church,
and he had also abused me sexually as a child.
(03:29):
And also I found out during that year had had
actually published a lot of things that were just lies
in order to support the church. So a lot of
people told me I was trying to destroy the entire religion,
that I was trying to destroy my family, my father
and everything I knew. I wasn't. I knew absolutely in
(03:50):
my heart that I was not, But when I got
into their mindset, I would think, oh, I must be
such a terrible person to them. So it was a
kind of guilt, but it was like I knew it
wasn't true because I've been so careful about doing what
I felt was right the whole time. And that's what
I still ask clients. I say, you know, when they're saying, oh,
I've done the wrong things, I've been a bad mother,
(04:13):
or whatever it is, I always just say, all right,
have you ever in your life gotten up in the
morning trying to do harm to the world or to
any being, to try to cause suffering? And mostly they
say no, I know the ones that don't, and I
don't stick with. And then the other question I always
ask them is is there any time when you weren't
(04:35):
trying your hardest to do the right thing? And almost
everybody says yes. I really believe almost everyone is trying
to do their best, and we leave integrity, that is
our true selves, because we split ourselves away from what
our true nature would have us do in order to
follow the ways that other people think are right or good.
(04:56):
So it's really important not to get into somebody else's
mind st and look at yourself, to stay inside your
own integrity and just do your best from there, and
then you can always be sure you've done all you
can and no one can be expected to do anymore.
One of the really interesting threads throughout your story is
that you've been willing to leave the comfort of communities
(05:19):
so many times. How did you deal with that and
how do you recommend other people overcome that? Yeah, that
is really a hard one. I mean, we are primates, right,
and primates are the only kind of animal that in
a dangerous situation, we don't seek safe places. We seek
safe others. We go to other primates and huddle together,
(05:41):
and that makes us feel safe. Other animals, like horses,
will try to find a safe place. So for us
to leave a community is a survival fear, and for
us to lose a community is almost a life threatening grief.
Like it's such an intense loss, and I experienced it
(06:02):
as very intense. I remember reading a poem by Stanley
Kunitz that part of it goes, Oh, I have made
for myself a tribe out of my true affections, and
my tribe is scattered. How shall my heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses. And I remember going around
thinking how shall my heart be reconciled to its feast
(06:23):
of losses? And then I remember I'm suddenly quoting a
lot of poetry. So I guess that's how you get
through it. You read a lot of poetry. But um,
what happens is that you grieve and it turns into
a need for kindness from others, which can lead you
to kindness to the self, which leads you to healing
(06:44):
stronger at the broken places. You come away from those
losses with a kindness where every loss used to be.
And what that does is it builds you a new tribe.
And it is a tribe of your true affections. And
that's what I've experienced since leaving all those communities. Before
(07:04):
I left them, I was intensely lonely, even though there
were people around me. Now I'm not lonely. You left
the world you'd built when you had small children. How
did you think about your children in that transition and
how did it work out? I was very worried about them,
and um, maybe that was right. You can never go
back and replay it to see what would have happened
(07:25):
if it had been different. I knew I needed to
leave when my daughter, my oldest daughter, turned eight and
Mormon's baptized children at the age of eight, and I
had already left the church, and one day, right after
her eighth birthday, um, there was a knock at the
door and it was a whole group of eight year
(07:46):
olds from around the neighborhood with a couple of Sunday
school teachers and they had cookies and balloons and stuff,
and they said, we're having a party. All you have
to do is come get baptized and we'll have this
big party for you. And if you don't come and
get baptized, you won't be allowed to play with us anymore.
And I was like, okay, we're out. We are out.
(08:09):
And that child she's now I could say she they've
now come out as a non binary, so they they
remember that as a traumatic experience. And even my younger daughter,
who now lives in England, she went to a therapist
and the therapist said, did you ever have a cult
around you? Because even that child, who was only four
(08:30):
when I left, it had changed something in her mind
that later later required therapy. And I remember when we
got to our new home, moved to Arizona. She she
was four, and she came and sat on the steps
with me one day and she said, I miss everything.
I missed my friends, and she cried for a while.
(08:50):
I cried for a while, and then she gave it.
He this big sigh and she said, oh, well, I
like the moon they have here. Well, you kind of
glossed over the part where you said and then I,
you know, left my marriage, realized I was gay. Talk
to us about that, because I imagine that that might
have even been just as hard, or in different ways
(09:13):
more difficult than even leaving your religion. It actually wasn't.
It wasn't because I had normalized that. I've been living
outside of Utah. I've known a lot of gay people.
My then husband, I think we both would have come
out of as gay in high school, and we went
to the same high school, so we grew up together.
We both went to Harvard when we were freshman and
(09:34):
stayed there for our pH d s and um he
struggled with a great deal. I never identified as gay.
I was too traumatized. But we had talked a great
deal about it, and I remember always thinking, you know,
he's his best self when he just lets himself be
this way. So thanks to him, I had normalized it really,
(09:57):
really deeply. And then we just decided to unmarry. And
it wasn't a fake marriage. It was I felt deeply
loved and I certainly loved him, but I thought, you know,
you've got to let yourself be you, and I've got
to let myself be me. So because he was my
closest friend at the time, I said to him first,
(10:18):
like once we left the church, I was like, you
need to be you and that's kind of sad because
well I do. And he said, well you should do
the same thing. And I said, you mean dat other
man and he goes, not man, and I thought women.
And then I was like, yeah, totally. And then I
(10:41):
met someone that I thought I would experiment with and
we're still together and it's been like thirty years. And
now a quick break your evolution in terms of you know,
you met Karen and then many many years later you
(11:03):
and Karen introduced another love into your relationship. Can you
share a bit about that. Yeah. At that point, we
were living in California, which is a place I also
went just because I felt a strong inclination to go
out there and sort of live in a forest area,
and I sort of lived away from human interaction for
(11:26):
about six years and it was beautiful. I mean I'd
go out and track animals in the forest every day.
And we were there for so long that you forget
what it's like to be sort of interconnected with human society.
A lot of those pressures of social expectation start to
just drop away when you're living in nature. And somebody
(11:47):
came to visit us at the ranch where I lived,
and I had met her once before, which is an
Australian novelist, and I'd been her in Africa where she
came to go on safari with a group for people
I was with, and I thought she was amazing, like brilliant, funny, sensitive, amazing.
(12:08):
So she came to stay at the ranch for a
while to do work for somebody else who was there,
and we started talking to her more, and Karen actually
got to know her before I did really well. And
one day Karen came to me and she sat down
and said, I really have to talk to you about something.
I said, what is it? And she said, well, Rowan.
(12:29):
I feel things about Rowan and I'm not sure why.
I'm not sure if it's like a sister connection. But
as she talked, she was turning bright red and I
looked at her and I thought, you're in love, and
I I felt this burst of joy, absolute joy. I
was so thrilled for her, and I thought, that's the
(12:51):
way it's supposed to go, but that is what I feel.
I just didn't feel the things you're supposed to feel
in society. I was thrilled. That was like, this is amazing,
invider to come stay with us, I'll stay in the
guest room. You guys can get together, like I was
just I still can't explain this overwhelming joy. I felt
it was ridiculous. So Roke came and stayed in the
(13:15):
house with us, yes, and we all sat around talking
and getting to know each other, and I thought, oh
my goodness, this person is really amazing. And we just
talked and talked and talked and talked and talked for
about three weeks, like almost constantly, and then towards the
end of that time, we were like, we're all in
love with each other, Like I'm in love with both
(13:36):
of you, and you're in love with both of us,
and you're in love with both of us. Like we
just sat there. It's not like we said polyamory we wanted.
We were completely stunned and embarrassed. But we were also
surrounded by nobody but bears and deer, so we were like, okay,
and um, we just thought, all right, this, let's see
(13:57):
how this turns out. And let see, it's been like
six seven years and we have a two year old now,
and it's like having a three legged stool. You wonder
how it ever worked with only two do you all
share a room? Well, since then, since we had our baby. Um,
what we realized is Row sleeps in the room next
(14:21):
to the nursery, and um, Karen gets up early with
the baby. So Rokan who we're not mourning people, So
Karen is she gets up with the baby in the morning.
And I like to stay up late but not be
waking up with the baby. So it turned out that
each of us has our own room. And it's like
a wonderful, wonderful thing. And and it's all as I said,
(14:46):
we have this amazing Our whole family runs according to
sort of almost almost it's like you know, nuns would
get up and do their morning things, and then go
to their chores and everything. When you have three people,
you have to be really organ eyes and really communicative.
And what happens, especially since my son with Down syndrome
lives with us, and people with Down syndrome tend to
(15:07):
love ritual every day, is like we have morning communion
where we all connect and talk. Then we have you know,
we all go to our separate things during the day.
We have a schedule who gets Lilah the baby at
what time? And then at five pm, Adam has decreated,
is absolutely no work, and we all get together and
we commune again, and then we have our dinner, and
(15:30):
then we always have this cuddle time after dinner between
dinner and sleep. And my god, if nobody out there
is doing this, do it. It will change your life.
It is awesome. And then you sleep in your own bed.
What happened when you left the bears and you had
to the three of you enter back into society that
(15:54):
is less accepting of unusual arrangements because everyone is a
fear the unknown, and so they probably imposed that fear
on you. I would imagine just when we were ready
for people to really put pressure on us, there was
a plague and nobody did anything for two years, so
nobody ever got in our faces about it because no
(16:17):
one was there. So it was like we were separated
by distance, and then we were separated by pandemic. And
then we went on Glennon Doyle's podcast and talked about it,
and now we're talking about it with you, and so
it's sort of out of the out of the box. Now,
let's talk a bit about your career, because it seems
almost impossible to people that Oprah has a life coach,
(16:40):
let alone that you became that. I mean, how does
one become Oprah's life coach. I hate bursting people's bubble
on this, but I am not Oprah's like hired and
paid life coach. I am a life coach who worked
for Oprah through the whole span of the Oprah magazine.
Because I wrote columns for the magazine. She read my
(17:04):
first few columns, and then she wrote to me and
told me that every episode she read, every every episode
she study, she always read my column first. So I
was Oprah's life coach in the sense that I kind
of belonged to But it's not that she needed a
life coach, but I was always sort of giving her
(17:26):
advice through the columns, and sometimes she'd reach back and
thank me, And then she started sending people to me.
When celebrities would go to her and say fix me,
she'd say, I can't do this, and she would call
me on the phone and say, how do you want
to deal with this? And I'd be like, send them along.
So do celebrities have different problems than the rest of us?
I mean, how do you think about that? They have
(17:47):
the very same problems, only so much worse, so much worse.
I have never seen fame or money or power heal
anybody's life, not ever, ever, ever. I have seen people
with tremendous fame and money and power who were just
destroying themselves. I mean, when you have the money and
(18:10):
the influence to get I had one celebrity client who
was taking two d oxycontent a day a day would
have killed an army of elephants. And this was not
a large person. It's only money and influence that can
get you that deeply into the horrors that are available
(18:32):
to people who are trying to kill their own pain,
and it just gets worse. In this last book, I
talked about it as being the false solution. Wealth fame, power.
They look like solutions to us, but they are not.
They make things much much worse unless you you've come
back to integrity yourself and become whole, and then they
(18:55):
can make the whole world better. So replace those three things, money, power, fame.
What are the three things that do heal, that do
make a life better? Great question, stillness, self examination, and honesty.
Those are the three things. That's it, that's all you need.
And I've seen people take those three things and become
(19:19):
incredibly famous and powerful. Nelson Mandela did this during the
twenty seven years he was imprisoned in Robin Island. He
went in as an angry young activist and he spent
those twenty seven years in stillness, self contemplation and getting
really really honest with himself. And he looked at things
like the fact that he was against racism and yet
(19:41):
he was angry at white people, which you know, he
was being really self scrutinizing as an anti racist and saying, no,
I have to He started to learn Afrikaans, he made
friends with the guards. In those twenty seven years of stillness,
self scrutiny and just absolutely relentless honesty, he became so powerful,
(20:03):
and not even his picture was allowed out of Robin Island.
Nothing of him was that. And yet his his fame
has influence. His power circled the whole world. And when
he came out, he was able to quiet the whole
country without bloodshed and become this incredible inspiration to the
whole world. But he didn't want When he went on Oprah,
(20:25):
he sat down on the stage and then he started
the show and he said, so, what are we talking about?
And Oprad laughed for like a full minute, and then
she said you. He was like, well, why would you
do that? Like he was so he was so whole
in himself, he didn't need anything. And that's the point
at which we can access everything. And now a quick break,
(20:49):
how do we become more helpful to each other? And
now there's a lot of layers to this question. One
is just in general, how can we be more helpful
to one another? But also, um, and you and I
have just us as way long ago Marthin you probably
don't remember, but and you help me so much. I
I was sharing with you that I have this blessing
or curse where I see pain. Right, so I'll be
(21:10):
in a supermarket and I can see who is beaten
by their husband or like I just I see pain
everywhere and I absorb that and and it's been a
problem for me. And you shared with me at that
time that the best way to help someone if you
see that is often to stand near them and look
them in the eye and let them know they're not alone,
(21:31):
just by being there. I don't know if your answer
to that has changed since then. I would still say
that's a really good way to do it. But another
thing that may have changed a bit. If you look
at psychological research, you will see that in our brains
we have something called a negativity bias. And it's because
our brains evolved to pick up danger and problems so
(21:53):
we could avoid them. But what happens is we get
stuck in our negativity bias and we don't see things
that aren't negative. I remember getting on a plane one day.
I was talking to a guy who was a white
water river rafter before I got on the plane, and
he said, you know, even in a channel where there's
almost no water, there's just rocks. Never look at the rocks,
(22:16):
because where your eyes go, the boat goes. Then I
get on the plane and I sat next to a
hockey player, professional hockey player, and he said, you know,
when you're shooting the put, the goalie is so huge
and the goal is so small that you only have
these tiny little apertures where the puck can get through.
And he says, but never look at the goalie. Only
look at the spaces, because where your eyes go, the
(22:38):
puck goes. Then I got off the plane. I was
talking to someone about horse riding and they said, well,
you got to make sure you don't look at the
places you don't want the horse to go, because where
your eyes go, the horse goes. And this was in
one day, and I was like, Okay, I get it.
Where your attention goes, everything goes, your life goes. So
you're a negativity biases helping you pick out pain, destruction,
(23:02):
abuse and all of that. What I invite you to
do is start pulling away from from your negativity bias
and seeing the way a dog sees like, find the
joy in people, find what what is working for them.
Stand by someone and don't just say in your mind,
(23:22):
I'm so sorry you're being beaten by your husband. In
your mind say I know you have the strength to
leave that asshole. Excuse my language, you know, but like
I know, you can get out of this. You are
incredibly resourceful. You are a human, for Heaven's sake, in
the twenty one century. You can do this like it's
going to be okay, and when your attention goes there.
(23:43):
This is what I found with my clients, the other
person has an easier time going there too. I love that.
I just read this great article about therapy that so
that therapist should really change how they approach the conversation
from saying, so, what's wrong or you know, what's been
bothering you? Just saying like, what's the best thing that's
been happening this week for you? And then that changes
(24:04):
the whole conversation. Yeah. I think that's why people like
coaches and are starting to hire coaches instead of therapists.
Therapy means something's wrong with you, and coaching means you're
just going to get better. How do you take what
you've learned When you think about your young daughter Lila,
will you be able to teach her things at a
younger age than you could your three older children because
(24:25):
you've had these transformations, like what what are messages you
would want her to learn now? Or when she's three
or four or five. The biggest thing that I wish
I had done with my first three children that I
think I have a chance to do with her is
too absolutely respect and validate every emotion she has all
(24:46):
the time, because little kids don't start out trying to
be bad or anything. And with my older kids, I
tried to make them. You know, I remember taking them
to church in Utah before I left the church, and
there was this whole thing about if you're child is
making a noise in church, you go into an empty
room and you make them face a wall for the
full hour of the church meeting. And I remember hearing
(25:09):
that and going, Okay, I don't think that's what Jesus
would do. So we just stopped going to church and
we spend time in nature playing on Sunday. So I
didn't do that much. But then they went to school,
and some of them loved you know, two of them
love school. One of them didn't. But I tried to
make them fit in with school culture. Not so much
(25:32):
at home, but at school. You gotta do what they say.
No you don't like if Lila just has an oil
and water relationship with school, I'm gonna pull her out
that so fast. And you know, I've now met people
who have been schooled by a tutor who flew to
different places in the world with them on an absolute
shoe string budget. You know you want to learn history,
(25:54):
Let's go to France and live there on five dollars
a day. And my god, these are some of the
most brilliantly educated people I know. So I would shape
I want to shape her experience around her feelings instead
of trying to push her feelings into some sort of
a social category or a box. What do you do
(26:15):
when you feel like you have conflict with your partners,
or your friends or your clients, the same thing every time.
There's actually a script, and I really recommend you do it.
And it works with two year olds, and it works
with I am not kidding psychopathic terrorists, because the FBI
uses the same things to calm down a terrorist a
(26:38):
psychopath that parenting experts advice we do to calm down
our children, and that is to sit down, give them
your absolute full attention, get completely calm in yourself, which
takes a lot of practice on your own before you're
facing it, and say, tell me what you're experiencing, Tell
me everything, Tell me everything, and then as they tell
(27:00):
you, you you say, I really get that. I have felt
that way. Every anybody going through what you're going through
would feel that way. Tell me more, tell me everything,
and then say, yep, I get it. I totally feel
why you. And I've never had an experience with a
person where when I asked them that I didn't empathize
with them. They were always doing what I would have
(27:22):
done in the same situation. So yeah, I do that.
And there's not really any cont not what like, there
isn't conflict when you sit down with somebody who's upset
and say, tell me everything. I'm listening. Oh, I get it.
There's no more arguments like we have in an argument
in our family for a very long time. We have
(27:44):
a lot of discussions. Let me tell you how I feel. Oh,
I get it. That's it. That's all it is. That's
a perfect ending. Um. I think we can all take
that with us. But before we end, we have a
bunch of quick questions for our speed around. What is
your favorite beverage sparkling more, I'm so boring you are
(28:06):
not defined by that, Martha, Okay, favorite trip you've ever
taken life the whole damn thing other than that. Every
time I go to long to Losy, which is a
game preserve in South Africa where I teach people on
change your life Safari's Heaven. What is your favorite guilty pleasure?
(28:30):
Now that I have in my own room, you gotta understand.
I went from sharing a room with siblings, to sharing
a dorm room in college, to sharing a room biasban
to sharing a room with Karen, just sharing room and
like all this room sharing. Well, now I have my
own room. When everybody goes out, I closed the door,
(28:50):
I get in a king size bed and I just
roll and roll and roll from side to side, just like.
I love this. It's a wonderful time. Other than our
podcast or your podcast, what is a podcast that you love? Well, Glenn,
and I mean you can't. Oh, and there's another one
(29:10):
for those of you who are ex Mormon lesbians. There's
one called Latter Day Lesbians that is really good. Well,
thank you, Martha. We love you and we can't wait
to have you back so we could have an entirely
different conversation next time. Thank you guys so much, keep
doing your wonderful work, and hugs to all your loved ones. Well,
(29:34):
that was an amazing interview, But Sam, should we tell
them you have to? This was not our first interview
with Martha. We recorded an entire episode with Martha, and
in a way we couldn't have known until the very end,
Martha's audio just didn't record, so it's lost in the cloud.
But the wild thing about Martha, I think if this
(29:54):
had happened with any other guest, the interviews would have
been very similar. But what's funny about Martha is like
she is so full of wisdom. She's like some I
don't know, she's otherworldly in some ways. And so because
of that, we ended up having an entirely different conversation
this time than we had last time. And I think
(30:14):
that's one of the things that makes her so incredibly fascinating.
I mean, I could talk to Martha forever. Amy, I
told you this story. But years ago, she and I
were asked by the Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Texas Conferences for
Women to do this kind of like fireside chat where
I interviewed her in all three places, and selfishly, I
(30:35):
asked her three different sets of questions just because I'm
always interested in what she's thinking and doing. And she
always surprises me. I really don't doubt that because the
two interviews we had, like you said, just took completely
different paths, and I was really inspired to ask her
at the end of our second interview just about like
(30:56):
how she handles conflict, because she seems like someone who
just a pro coach is life with this really open,
authentic and honest heart in a way that I don't
think I've ever seen anybody do quite like her. And
I have to recommend her books because I've read all
of her books at this point and they are life changing,
(31:17):
so I highly recommend digging into them, especially her newest
The Way of Integrity. She's really a gift in many ways.
I don't know if I've ever shared this with everybody, Sam,
I've shared it with you, but my dream is that
we all go on like a camp retreat somewhere. It
would be a nice camp you don't have to rough it,
but I feel like Martha Back would be like the
best camp leader on earth ever. Thanks for listening to
(31:41):
What's her Story with Sam and Amy. We would appreciate
it if you leave her of you wherever you get
your podcasts, and of course connect with us on social
media at What's Her Story. Podcast What's Her Story with
Sam and Amy is powered by my company, The Riveter
at the Riveter dot Co and Sam's company, park Place
Payments at park place payments dot com. Thanks to our
(32:02):
producer Stacy Parra and our male perspective blue Burns m
HM
I'm Sam Edis and I'm Amy Nelson. Welcome to What's
Her Story? With Sam and Amy. This is a show
about the world's most remarkable women. They're professional and personal journeys. Together,
we'll hear from Gold medalists, best selling authors, and leaders
of the world's most iconic brands. Listen every Thursday or
join the conversation anytime on Instagram at What's Her Story Podcast.
(00:30):
Welcome to Season three of What's Her Story. I am
more excited for this season than any season before, simply
because I feel like we're better at telling women's stories
than we've ever been in the past. And on top
of it, we have the most unbelievable lineup of guests.
This lineup will blow your socks off, no questions about it.
(00:52):
I am so excited to share all of it with you.
I'm super excited for today's guest, Martha Beck. If you
don't know, mark that she is Oprah's favorite life coach
and the best selling author of numerous books, including her newest,
The Way of Integrity. Take us back to that time
when you felt like you had hit rock bottom and
(01:15):
something dramatic needed to change. The year I heard twenty nine,
I decided not to tell a single lie for a
whole calendar year. And by the way, I was also
very physically ill at this time. I had a bunch
of autoimmune diseases. I could barely get out of bed
or use my hands. I was in constant chronic pain.
I mean, things were not ideal. And so I did
(01:39):
go a whole year without telling a single lie of
any kind, not polite, not white, not any kind of lie.
And my entire life exploded because it needed to either
walked away from or was ejected from my religion, my
family of origin because of the religion things very religious family.
(02:00):
Quit my job, which was an assistant professor, quit my industry,
which is academia, because I hated that and I couldn't
lie and say I liked it. I because I was
living in an area. I was raised Mormon in Provo, Utah,
which is a very Mormon area, and once I left
the church, it was not really a good place for
me and my family so left my home realized I
(02:22):
was gay, so they won't my marriage. Pretty much everything
that would define a life went away that year, and
I started to feel happy for the first time in
my life, even though I was grieving all this stuff,
like massively, something started healing inside me because I was
telling the truth about myself all the time, And they're right,
(02:44):
the truth does say free. Did you feel any guilt
for not wanting anymore the things that you had chosen,
the people you had chosen in some instances? Like did
that feel guilty at all? Yeah? I mean, because I
was being so incredibly scrupulous about trying to tell the truth,
I mostly felt just sorrow. But when I would sometimes
(03:05):
get into the mindset of the people who thought that
I should have lived, like if I everybody I knew
growing up was Mormon, right, So when you leave the
Mormon church, that is considered a sin worse than murder.
And in addition, I had left partly because my father
was a sort of very dominant figure in the church,
and he had also abused me sexually as a child.
(03:29):
And also I found out during that year had had
actually published a lot of things that were just lies
in order to support the church. So a lot of
people told me I was trying to destroy the entire religion,
that I was trying to destroy my family, my father
and everything I knew. I wasn't. I knew absolutely in
(03:50):
my heart that I was not, But when I got
into their mindset, I would think, oh, I must be
such a terrible person to them. So it was a
kind of guilt, but it was like I knew it
wasn't true because I've been so careful about doing what
I felt was right the whole time. And that's what
I still ask clients. I say, you know, when they're saying, oh,
I've done the wrong things, I've been a bad mother,
(04:13):
or whatever it is, I always just say, all right,
have you ever in your life gotten up in the
morning trying to do harm to the world or to
any being, to try to cause suffering? And mostly they
say no, I know the ones that don't, and I
don't stick with. And then the other question I always
ask them is is there any time when you weren't
(04:35):
trying your hardest to do the right thing? And almost
everybody says yes. I really believe almost everyone is trying
to do their best, and we leave integrity, that is
our true selves, because we split ourselves away from what
our true nature would have us do in order to
follow the ways that other people think are right or good.
(04:56):
So it's really important not to get into somebody else's
mind st and look at yourself, to stay inside your
own integrity and just do your best from there, and
then you can always be sure you've done all you
can and no one can be expected to do anymore.
One of the really interesting threads throughout your story is
that you've been willing to leave the comfort of communities
(05:19):
so many times. How did you deal with that and
how do you recommend other people overcome that? Yeah, that
is really a hard one. I mean, we are primates, right,
and primates are the only kind of animal that in
a dangerous situation, we don't seek safe places. We seek
safe others. We go to other primates and huddle together,
(05:41):
and that makes us feel safe. Other animals, like horses,
will try to find a safe place. So for us
to leave a community is a survival fear, and for
us to lose a community is almost a life threatening grief.
Like it's such an intense loss, and I experienced it
(06:02):
as very intense. I remember reading a poem by Stanley
Kunitz that part of it goes, Oh, I have made
for myself a tribe out of my true affections, and
my tribe is scattered. How shall my heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses. And I remember going around
thinking how shall my heart be reconciled to its feast
(06:23):
of losses? And then I remember I'm suddenly quoting a
lot of poetry. So I guess that's how you get
through it. You read a lot of poetry. But um,
what happens is that you grieve and it turns into
a need for kindness from others, which can lead you
to kindness to the self, which leads you to healing
(06:44):
stronger at the broken places. You come away from those
losses with a kindness where every loss used to be.
And what that does is it builds you a new tribe.
And it is a tribe of your true affections. And
that's what I've experienced since leaving all those communities. Before
(07:04):
I left them, I was intensely lonely, even though there
were people around me. Now I'm not lonely. You left
the world you'd built when you had small children. How
did you think about your children in that transition and
how did it work out? I was very worried about them,
and um, maybe that was right. You can never go
back and replay it to see what would have happened
(07:25):
if it had been different. I knew I needed to
leave when my daughter, my oldest daughter, turned eight and
Mormon's baptized children at the age of eight, and I
had already left the church, and one day, right after
her eighth birthday, um, there was a knock at the
door and it was a whole group of eight year
(07:46):
olds from around the neighborhood with a couple of Sunday
school teachers and they had cookies and balloons and stuff,
and they said, we're having a party. All you have
to do is come get baptized and we'll have this
big party for you. And if you don't come and
get baptized, you won't be allowed to play with us anymore.
And I was like, okay, we're out. We are out.
(08:09):
And that child she's now I could say she they've
now come out as a non binary, so they they
remember that as a traumatic experience. And even my younger daughter,
who now lives in England, she went to a therapist
and the therapist said, did you ever have a cult
around you? Because even that child, who was only four
(08:30):
when I left, it had changed something in her mind
that later later required therapy. And I remember when we
got to our new home, moved to Arizona. She she
was four, and she came and sat on the steps
with me one day and she said, I miss everything.
I missed my friends, and she cried for a while.
(08:50):
I cried for a while, and then she gave it.
He this big sigh and she said, oh, well, I
like the moon they have here. Well, you kind of
glossed over the part where you said and then I,
you know, left my marriage, realized I was gay. Talk
to us about that, because I imagine that that might
have even been just as hard, or in different ways
(09:13):
more difficult than even leaving your religion. It actually wasn't.
It wasn't because I had normalized that. I've been living
outside of Utah. I've known a lot of gay people.
My then husband, I think we both would have come
out of as gay in high school, and we went
to the same high school, so we grew up together.
We both went to Harvard when we were freshman and
(09:34):
stayed there for our pH d s and um he
struggled with a great deal. I never identified as gay.
I was too traumatized. But we had talked a great
deal about it, and I remember always thinking, you know,
he's his best self when he just lets himself be
this way. So thanks to him, I had normalized it really,
(09:57):
really deeply. And then we just decided to unmarry. And
it wasn't a fake marriage. It was I felt deeply
loved and I certainly loved him, but I thought, you know,
you've got to let yourself be you, and I've got
to let myself be me. So because he was my
closest friend at the time, I said to him first,
(10:18):
like once we left the church, I was like, you
need to be you and that's kind of sad because
well I do. And he said, well you should do
the same thing. And I said, you mean dat other
man and he goes, not man, and I thought women.
And then I was like, yeah, totally. And then I
(10:41):
met someone that I thought I would experiment with and
we're still together and it's been like thirty years. And
now a quick break your evolution in terms of you know,
you met Karen and then many many years later you
(11:03):
and Karen introduced another love into your relationship. Can you
share a bit about that. Yeah. At that point, we
were living in California, which is a place I also
went just because I felt a strong inclination to go
out there and sort of live in a forest area,
and I sort of lived away from human interaction for
(11:26):
about six years and it was beautiful. I mean I'd
go out and track animals in the forest every day.
And we were there for so long that you forget
what it's like to be sort of interconnected with human society.
A lot of those pressures of social expectation start to
just drop away when you're living in nature. And somebody
(11:47):
came to visit us at the ranch where I lived,
and I had met her once before, which is an
Australian novelist, and I'd been her in Africa where she
came to go on safari with a group for people
I was with, and I thought she was amazing, like brilliant, funny, sensitive, amazing.
(12:08):
So she came to stay at the ranch for a
while to do work for somebody else who was there,
and we started talking to her more, and Karen actually
got to know her before I did really well. And
one day Karen came to me and she sat down
and said, I really have to talk to you about something.
I said, what is it? And she said, well, Rowan.
(12:29):
I feel things about Rowan and I'm not sure why.
I'm not sure if it's like a sister connection. But
as she talked, she was turning bright red and I
looked at her and I thought, you're in love, and
I I felt this burst of joy, absolute joy. I
was so thrilled for her, and I thought, that's the
(12:51):
way it's supposed to go, but that is what I feel.
I just didn't feel the things you're supposed to feel
in society. I was thrilled. That was like, this is amazing,
invider to come stay with us, I'll stay in the
guest room. You guys can get together, like I was
just I still can't explain this overwhelming joy. I felt
it was ridiculous. So Roke came and stayed in the
(13:15):
house with us, yes, and we all sat around talking
and getting to know each other, and I thought, oh
my goodness, this person is really amazing. And we just
talked and talked and talked and talked and talked for
about three weeks, like almost constantly, and then towards the
end of that time, we were like, we're all in
love with each other, Like I'm in love with both
(13:36):
of you, and you're in love with both of us,
and you're in love with both of us. Like we
just sat there. It's not like we said polyamory we wanted.
We were completely stunned and embarrassed. But we were also
surrounded by nobody but bears and deer, so we were like, okay,
and um, we just thought, all right, this, let's see
(13:57):
how this turns out. And let see, it's been like
six seven years and we have a two year old now,
and it's like having a three legged stool. You wonder
how it ever worked with only two do you all
share a room? Well, since then, since we had our baby. Um,
what we realized is Row sleeps in the room next
(14:21):
to the nursery, and um, Karen gets up early with
the baby. So Rokan who we're not mourning people, So
Karen is she gets up with the baby in the morning.
And I like to stay up late but not be
waking up with the baby. So it turned out that
each of us has our own room. And it's like
a wonderful, wonderful thing. And and it's all as I said,
(14:46):
we have this amazing Our whole family runs according to
sort of almost almost it's like you know, nuns would
get up and do their morning things, and then go
to their chores and everything. When you have three people,
you have to be really organ eyes and really communicative.
And what happens, especially since my son with Down syndrome
lives with us, and people with Down syndrome tend to
(15:07):
love ritual every day, is like we have morning communion
where we all connect and talk. Then we have you know,
we all go to our separate things during the day.
We have a schedule who gets Lilah the baby at
what time? And then at five pm, Adam has decreated,
is absolutely no work, and we all get together and
we commune again, and then we have our dinner, and
(15:30):
then we always have this cuddle time after dinner between
dinner and sleep. And my god, if nobody out there
is doing this, do it. It will change your life.
It is awesome. And then you sleep in your own bed.
What happened when you left the bears and you had
to the three of you enter back into society that
(15:54):
is less accepting of unusual arrangements because everyone is a
fear the unknown, and so they probably imposed that fear
on you. I would imagine just when we were ready
for people to really put pressure on us, there was
a plague and nobody did anything for two years, so
nobody ever got in our faces about it because no
(16:17):
one was there. So it was like we were separated
by distance, and then we were separated by pandemic. And
then we went on Glennon Doyle's podcast and talked about it,
and now we're talking about it with you, and so
it's sort of out of the out of the box. Now,
let's talk a bit about your career, because it seems
almost impossible to people that Oprah has a life coach,
(16:40):
let alone that you became that. I mean, how does
one become Oprah's life coach. I hate bursting people's bubble
on this, but I am not Oprah's like hired and
paid life coach. I am a life coach who worked
for Oprah through the whole span of the Oprah magazine.
Because I wrote columns for the magazine. She read my
(17:04):
first few columns, and then she wrote to me and
told me that every episode she read, every every episode
she study, she always read my column first. So I
was Oprah's life coach in the sense that I kind
of belonged to But it's not that she needed a
life coach, but I was always sort of giving her
(17:26):
advice through the columns, and sometimes she'd reach back and
thank me, And then she started sending people to me.
When celebrities would go to her and say fix me,
she'd say, I can't do this, and she would call
me on the phone and say, how do you want
to deal with this? And I'd be like, send them along.
So do celebrities have different problems than the rest of us?
I mean, how do you think about that? They have
(17:47):
the very same problems, only so much worse, so much worse.
I have never seen fame or money or power heal
anybody's life, not ever, ever, ever. I have seen people
with tremendous fame and money and power who were just
destroying themselves. I mean, when you have the money and
(18:10):
the influence to get I had one celebrity client who
was taking two d oxycontent a day a day would
have killed an army of elephants. And this was not
a large person. It's only money and influence that can
get you that deeply into the horrors that are available
(18:32):
to people who are trying to kill their own pain,
and it just gets worse. In this last book, I
talked about it as being the false solution. Wealth fame, power.
They look like solutions to us, but they are not.
They make things much much worse unless you you've come
back to integrity yourself and become whole, and then they
(18:55):
can make the whole world better. So replace those three things, money, power, fame.
What are the three things that do heal, that do
make a life better? Great question, stillness, self examination, and honesty.
Those are the three things. That's it, that's all you need.
And I've seen people take those three things and become
(19:19):
incredibly famous and powerful. Nelson Mandela did this during the
twenty seven years he was imprisoned in Robin Island. He
went in as an angry young activist and he spent
those twenty seven years in stillness, self contemplation and getting
really really honest with himself. And he looked at things
like the fact that he was against racism and yet
(19:41):
he was angry at white people, which you know, he
was being really self scrutinizing as an anti racist and saying, no,
I have to He started to learn Afrikaans, he made
friends with the guards. In those twenty seven years of stillness,
self scrutiny and just absolutely relentless honesty, he became so powerful,
(20:03):
and not even his picture was allowed out of Robin Island.
Nothing of him was that. And yet his his fame
has influence. His power circled the whole world. And when
he came out, he was able to quiet the whole
country without bloodshed and become this incredible inspiration to the
whole world. But he didn't want When he went on Oprah,
(20:25):
he sat down on the stage and then he started
the show and he said, so, what are we talking about?
And Oprad laughed for like a full minute, and then
she said you. He was like, well, why would you
do that? Like he was so he was so whole
in himself, he didn't need anything. And that's the point
at which we can access everything. And now a quick break,
(20:49):
how do we become more helpful to each other? And
now there's a lot of layers to this question. One
is just in general, how can we be more helpful
to one another? But also, um, and you and I
have just us as way long ago Marthin you probably
don't remember, but and you help me so much. I
I was sharing with you that I have this blessing
or curse where I see pain. Right, so I'll be
(21:10):
in a supermarket and I can see who is beaten
by their husband or like I just I see pain
everywhere and I absorb that and and it's been a
problem for me. And you shared with me at that
time that the best way to help someone if you
see that is often to stand near them and look
them in the eye and let them know they're not alone,
(21:31):
just by being there. I don't know if your answer
to that has changed since then. I would still say
that's a really good way to do it. But another
thing that may have changed a bit. If you look
at psychological research, you will see that in our brains
we have something called a negativity bias. And it's because
our brains evolved to pick up danger and problems so
(21:53):
we could avoid them. But what happens is we get
stuck in our negativity bias and we don't see things
that aren't negative. I remember getting on a plane one day.
I was talking to a guy who was a white
water river rafter before I got on the plane, and
he said, you know, even in a channel where there's
almost no water, there's just rocks. Never look at the rocks,
(22:16):
because where your eyes go, the boat goes. Then I
get on the plane and I sat next to a
hockey player, professional hockey player, and he said, you know,
when you're shooting the put, the goalie is so huge
and the goal is so small that you only have
these tiny little apertures where the puck can get through.
And he says, but never look at the goalie. Only
look at the spaces, because where your eyes go, the
(22:38):
puck goes. Then I got off the plane. I was
talking to someone about horse riding and they said, well,
you got to make sure you don't look at the
places you don't want the horse to go, because where
your eyes go, the horse goes. And this was in
one day, and I was like, Okay, I get it.
Where your attention goes, everything goes, your life goes. So
you're a negativity biases helping you pick out pain, destruction,
(23:02):
abuse and all of that. What I invite you to
do is start pulling away from from your negativity bias
and seeing the way a dog sees like, find the
joy in people, find what what is working for them.
Stand by someone and don't just say in your mind,
(23:22):
I'm so sorry you're being beaten by your husband. In
your mind say I know you have the strength to
leave that asshole. Excuse my language, you know, but like
I know, you can get out of this. You are
incredibly resourceful. You are a human, for Heaven's sake, in
the twenty one century. You can do this like it's
going to be okay, and when your attention goes there.
(23:43):
This is what I found with my clients, the other
person has an easier time going there too. I love that.
I just read this great article about therapy that so
that therapist should really change how they approach the conversation
from saying, so, what's wrong or you know, what's been
bothering you? Just saying like, what's the best thing that's
been happening this week for you? And then that changes
(24:04):
the whole conversation. Yeah. I think that's why people like
coaches and are starting to hire coaches instead of therapists.
Therapy means something's wrong with you, and coaching means you're
just going to get better. How do you take what
you've learned When you think about your young daughter Lila,
will you be able to teach her things at a
younger age than you could your three older children because
(24:25):
you've had these transformations, like what what are messages you
would want her to learn now? Or when she's three
or four or five. The biggest thing that I wish
I had done with my first three children that I
think I have a chance to do with her is
too absolutely respect and validate every emotion she has all
(24:46):
the time, because little kids don't start out trying to
be bad or anything. And with my older kids, I
tried to make them. You know, I remember taking them
to church in Utah before I left the church, and
there was this whole thing about if you're child is
making a noise in church, you go into an empty
room and you make them face a wall for the
full hour of the church meeting. And I remember hearing
(25:09):
that and going, Okay, I don't think that's what Jesus
would do. So we just stopped going to church and
we spend time in nature playing on Sunday. So I
didn't do that much. But then they went to school,
and some of them loved you know, two of them
love school. One of them didn't. But I tried to
make them fit in with school culture. Not so much
(25:32):
at home, but at school. You gotta do what they say.
No you don't like if Lila just has an oil
and water relationship with school, I'm gonna pull her out
that so fast. And you know, I've now met people
who have been schooled by a tutor who flew to
different places in the world with them on an absolute
shoe string budget. You know you want to learn history,
(25:54):
Let's go to France and live there on five dollars
a day. And my god, these are some of the
most brilliantly educated people I know. So I would shape
I want to shape her experience around her feelings instead
of trying to push her feelings into some sort of
a social category or a box. What do you do
(26:15):
when you feel like you have conflict with your partners,
or your friends or your clients, the same thing every time.
There's actually a script, and I really recommend you do it.
And it works with two year olds, and it works
with I am not kidding psychopathic terrorists, because the FBI
uses the same things to calm down a terrorist a
(26:38):
psychopath that parenting experts advice we do to calm down
our children, and that is to sit down, give them
your absolute full attention, get completely calm in yourself, which
takes a lot of practice on your own before you're
facing it, and say, tell me what you're experiencing, Tell
me everything, Tell me everything, and then as they tell
(27:00):
you, you you say, I really get that. I have felt
that way. Every anybody going through what you're going through
would feel that way. Tell me more, tell me everything,
and then say, yep, I get it. I totally feel
why you. And I've never had an experience with a
person where when I asked them that I didn't empathize
with them. They were always doing what I would have
(27:22):
done in the same situation. So yeah, I do that.
And there's not really any cont not what like, there
isn't conflict when you sit down with somebody who's upset
and say, tell me everything. I'm listening. Oh, I get it.
There's no more arguments like we have in an argument
in our family for a very long time. We have
(27:44):
a lot of discussions. Let me tell you how I feel. Oh,
I get it. That's it. That's all it is. That's
a perfect ending. Um. I think we can all take
that with us. But before we end, we have a
bunch of quick questions for our speed around. What is
your favorite beverage sparkling more, I'm so boring you are
(28:06):
not defined by that, Martha, Okay, favorite trip you've ever
taken life the whole damn thing other than that. Every
time I go to long to Losy, which is a
game preserve in South Africa where I teach people on
change your life Safari's Heaven. What is your favorite guilty pleasure?
(28:30):
Now that I have in my own room, you gotta understand.
I went from sharing a room with siblings, to sharing
a dorm room in college, to sharing a room biasban
to sharing a room with Karen, just sharing room and
like all this room sharing. Well, now I have my
own room. When everybody goes out, I closed the door,
(28:50):
I get in a king size bed and I just
roll and roll and roll from side to side, just like.
I love this. It's a wonderful time. Other than our
podcast or your podcast, what is a podcast that you love? Well, Glenn,
and I mean you can't. Oh, and there's another one
(29:10):
for those of you who are ex Mormon lesbians. There's
one called Latter Day Lesbians that is really good. Well,
thank you, Martha. We love you and we can't wait
to have you back so we could have an entirely
different conversation next time. Thank you guys so much, keep
doing your wonderful work, and hugs to all your loved ones. Well,
(29:34):
that was an amazing interview, But Sam, should we tell
them you have to? This was not our first interview
with Martha. We recorded an entire episode with Martha, and
in a way we couldn't have known until the very end,
Martha's audio just didn't record, so it's lost in the cloud.
But the wild thing about Martha, I think if this
(29:54):
had happened with any other guest, the interviews would have
been very similar. But what's funny about Martha is like
she is so full of wisdom. She's like some I
don't know, she's otherworldly in some ways. And so because
of that, we ended up having an entirely different conversation
this time than we had last time. And I think
(30:14):
that's one of the things that makes her so incredibly fascinating.
I mean, I could talk to Martha forever. Amy, I
told you this story. But years ago, she and I
were asked by the Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Texas Conferences for
Women to do this kind of like fireside chat where
I interviewed her in all three places, and selfishly, I
(30:35):
asked her three different sets of questions just because I'm
always interested in what she's thinking and doing. And she
always surprises me. I really don't doubt that because the
two interviews we had, like you said, just took completely
different paths, and I was really inspired to ask her
at the end of our second interview just about like
(30:56):
how she handles conflict, because she seems like someone who
just a pro coach is life with this really open,
authentic and honest heart in a way that I don't
think I've ever seen anybody do quite like her. And
I have to recommend her books because I've read all
of her books at this point and they are life changing,
(31:17):
so I highly recommend digging into them, especially her newest
The Way of Integrity. She's really a gift in many ways.
I don't know if I've ever shared this with everybody, Sam,
I've shared it with you, but my dream is that
we all go on like a camp retreat somewhere. It
would be a nice camp you don't have to rough it,
but I feel like Martha Back would be like the
best camp leader on earth ever. Thanks for listening to
(31:41):
What's her Story with Sam and Amy. We would appreciate
it if you leave her of you wherever you get
your podcasts, and of course connect with us on social
media at What's Her Story. Podcast What's Her Story with
Sam and Amy is powered by my company, The Riveter
at the Riveter dot Co and Sam's company, park Place
Payments at park place payments dot com. Thanks to our
(32:02):
producer Stacy Parra and our male perspective blue Burns m
HM
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.