December 5, 2022 • 45 mins
The rags to riches success story is everywhere - usually with a side of trauma somewhere: the homeless child with mental health issues overcomes all the odds to win an Ivy league scholarship. After graduation, they continue to “rise above” their past by joining the world’s most famous tech company. If they can do it, anyone can.
It’s a story we hear over and over again. But what if those transformation stories actually hide some deeply screwed up practices? Author Emi Nietfeld joins us to explore our beliefs about resilience, and our weird fascination with stories of triumph.
In this episode we cover:
- The main problem with “survival” memoirs
- Who gets to survive? Who gets to thrive? Whose stories are believed?
- The underbelly of scholarship programs (hint: the more tragic your story, the more money you get)
- why one successful person can undermine everyone else’s chances of being seen and believed
- How the practice of motivational interviewing could change the course of mental healthcare
Content note: this episode includes discussion of eating disorders, self harm, and hospitalization
Notable quotes:
“As a culture, we believe in this fantasy that anything bad can be made good, that no matter what we lose, what tragedies happen to us, we can - through our sheer force of will - twist them into something better. And that feels awful if you're the person who's lost something.” - Emi Nietfeld
About our guest:
Emi Nietfeld is the author of Acceptance, a memoir of survival that explores our beliefs about resilience, and our weird fascination with stories of triumph. Her essays have appeared in New York Times, Longreads, Vice, and Boulevard, they’ve been cited in The Best American Essays of 2021 and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Find her at eminietfeld.com
Additional resources
The basics of motivational interviewing
Get in touch:
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Here After with Megan Devine. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, send in your questions, and share the show with everyone you know. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right.
Have a question, comment, or a topic you’d like us to cover? call us at (323) 643-3768 or visit megandevine.co
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Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s Okay That You're Not Okay and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I think we we believe in this as a culture,
in this fantasy that anything bad can be made like
for the good right, no matter what we lose, what
tragedies happened to us, that we can, like, through our
share force of a like, twist them into something better.
And he that feels awful if you're the person who's
(00:20):
lost something, but be it's so dangerous because what incentive
do we have to make systems better? This is here After,
and I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best
selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay. This week
on Hereafter, author Emmy Neatfeldt joins me to talk about trauma,
(00:40):
resilience and that weird transformation storyline thing we force on
survivors of any kind of hardship, Settle and friends. All
of that coming up right after this first break before
we get started, one quick note. While we cover a
(01:03):
lot of emotional relational territory in our time here together,
this show is not a substitute for skilled support with
a license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related
to your work. Hey friends. I first learned about Emmy
meet Felt from a review of her book Acceptance in
the New York Times. That review is called quote the
(01:24):
problem with Survival Memoirs, so of course it had me
hooked from the very start. I am such a big
grouch when it comes to those worn out tropes about
redemption and how people overcome horrible things just so they
can become the amazing person you see before you today
hate them anyway. Emmy's book Acceptance has been described as
(01:47):
a luminous, generation defining memoir of foster care and homelessness,
Harvard and big tech, examining society's fixation with resilience, which
is a pretty awesome review. Amy really dives into the
whole weird thing we do with people who overcome difficult
things in their lives. How we hold up these like
(02:08):
rare rock star examples of success as proof that you
really can transcend anything if you try hard enough, which
also just implies that anybody who hasn't made their way
to Ivy League school, it's jobs at Google and all
of that stuff, they just aren't trying hard enough. If
you haven't risen above your circumstances, that's on you, friends.
(02:32):
This episode is about the underside of that resilience narrative,
and I cannot wait to share this conversation with you.
Quick content note this episode includes discussions of eating disorders,
self harm, and hospitalization. I mean, I am so glad
to have you here with me today. Thank you so much, Migan.
(02:54):
I'm so happy to be here. So I found you
the same way that I find a lot of people
these days is on Twitter. Somebody posted your New York
Times book review for the book, and I read the
essay and I think I think that was in my
message to you that, like I got halfway through the
book review, I was like, I need to talk to her.
I need to talk to her right now. So yes,
as I'm just you know, people should be used to
(03:15):
me fan girling by now. But tell us a little
bit about your book. I talked about your history some
just you know, as we know, we like to give
folks a break from telling that particular story. But tell
us a little bit about the book and then we'll
dive into a conversation. My book is called Acceptance, and
it's a memoir with foster care and homelessness and Harvard Google.
(03:37):
And it's also, I hope, a fast paced read that
reads like a novel. Some people have said like a thriller. Of,
you know, my quest to get into an ivy League school,
but really to get out of these really difficult situations
and be heard. And I hope that that rad need
(03:58):
and drive shines through as I went through it, and
then as I tried to go back and uncover the
truth about what really happened that excavation, right like you
live it. Oh, I'm going to misquote somebody here because
I won't remember who it is, but somebody said, writers
live everything twice the first time, when you live it
in the second time. On the page right, that excavation
(04:20):
is a really huge thing. Yeah, And in the book structurally,
I really wanted to take readers on the same journey
I was on, where I don't share some of the
information that I didn't know then, so kind of living
with me moments moment. But then in the epilogue as
a young adult, I went back and I read tens
(04:41):
of thousands of pages of medical records, interviewed everyone, got
every piece of info that I could, and I share
what I found and how it really radically changed the
way that I thought about my life. One of the
things that I loved in the book review is that
the title of the review is the problem was rival memoirs.
(05:01):
So on that one hand, the book is exactly as
you described, right, like surviving foster care and abuse and
the medical mental health system, and that's striving perfectionist culture.
What I super love about you and your work is
that you you write a survival memoir at the same
(05:23):
time that you're completely skewering the whole idea of survival. Yeah,
thank you. I appreciate that. And I think that the
headline was actually the problem with survivor memoirs, Oh yeah,
which was interesting too, because you know, a lot of
people find comfort in that term, and for me, that's
not something that I really super identify with and I
(05:44):
don't think I ever used it in the book on ironically,
so it's interesting that I wound up as a headline
in it. Yeah. I mean, it's a whole genre of itself, right,
the survivor story, right, that whole trauma porne of resilience,
And that's that's something that you that you really kind
of skewer in all of this, and we don't see
(06:04):
that in a lot of survivor writing, whether it's in
book form or made for TV movies. Right. I saw
another article that said, you know, emmyni Feld's Life is
a made for TV movie, except that it's not. It's
so interesting the stigma that we have against the word
victim or against the idea of being a victim. And
(06:26):
you know, today it's all trauma survivorship, and you know,
certain things happen that make us into victims. And for me,
it's been really important to own that because when I
was going through these these systems and trying to, you know,
prove to people that I was worthy of having a
more secure, stable life, there was this huge expectation that
(06:50):
I had to be a quote unquote survivor with all
of that entailed, and be a good survivor and be
you know, changed only in pretty ways. Right. Yeah, there's
that great scene in your book and I'm not giving
away any spoilers here, but there's that really great scene
in in the book after you've received your college acceptance,
but you have that the scholarship meeting and tell us
(07:14):
a little bit about being that perfect victim. Like a
lot of high school students and I think really anyone
who's looking to powerful institutions to really help them out
in today's world, I felt this tremendous pressure to write
a story in which you know, I had these bad
things happened to me, but I was made stronger by them,
(07:36):
and where I included the ways I was tough and
pretty and completely left out the nightmarors and the PTSD
and the less kind of picturesque details. And so when
I was a high school senior, I won a scholarship
from this organization called the Horatio Alger Society of Distinguishing Perkins,
(08:01):
and Horatio Alger was the famous author of these nineteenth
century novels like that really exemplified pulling yourselves up by
your bootstraps. And when I showed up at the conference
that all the scholarship winners got to, I learned that
that was really their agenda. That they found these kids
who had quote unquote overcome adversity, and that we were
(08:23):
the poster children not just for resilience, but for like
a specific kind of right wing conservative agenda of like,
we don't need social services because these kids have proven
that literally anyone can do it. Yeah, if you if
you come from an abusive home or foster care, or
(08:43):
you have a history of self harm, right, like, we
don't actually need to help you because look at these
children that we have assembled, and look at how perfect
they are and how high achieving and how well spoken
and articulate. We don't need to help them. You just
need to help yourself, exactly. And I used to feel
like this discomfort that I had with that idea was
(09:03):
really personal to me. But then as I started to
talk to more people who had endured really difficult things,
and then they found themselves faced with this these expectations,
like you should be grateful for the good things that
have come out of it. You should be like always
smiling that you know you're still here, you're alive, like
(09:24):
you're doing it. And I found that that was really
a pretty universal sensation that responding to grief and loss
with that type of narrative, it doesn't feel good. No, No,
it's weird because we we call those feel good stories.
Right here are all of these terrible things that happened,
and here's how this person rose above and started a
(09:47):
foundation and they have a really great life, Like we
call those feel good stories. But what I just heard
you say is like being on the receiving end of
that does not feel good, feel a good story for
whom I'm confused. What in a stew point, and I
think that that being held up in that way. You know,
(10:07):
I know I'm very lucky, Like I went to Harvard,
I worked at Google. Today, I enjoy just a lot
of financial stability and privilege, and I'm very I'm very
aware of that. And I think there's a way in
which our culture says that if you are privileged in
like one or more ways, we don't have the complexity
(10:30):
of acknowledging like that you might also be hurting in
various other ways, right, And that privilege and loss are
not exclusive. Privilege and laws are not exclusive. Yeah, right,
that knee jerk reaction of you know, I am having
even just on like a low level, like I'm having
a really crappy day. Well, you should be thankful that
(10:51):
you have eyes to see the sun. Wait, what right that?
Like we have such low tolerance for any kind of
thing that makes us feel right, anything that makes us
feel We're like, okay, shut that down, shut that down,
shut that down. And in my book, I think I
call it like that backlog of pain. Right, you can't
(11:12):
let somebody else be in pain because you're not getting
any support for yours, So like, buck up and be
grateful a little bratt because you did go to Harvard,
you did get a scholarship, and there's almost this sort
of how dare you still say out? How dare you
still say the things that happened to me were not? Okay? Yeah?
(11:36):
And that was a huge part of why I wrote
this book was that I felt like after I got
into Harvard, people would ask me when they heard about
my life story like was it worth it? Like was
it worth it that your parents had mental illnesses and
that you were abused and in foster care? And one
(11:56):
this felt like a really insensitive question to ask. And too,
I felt like I was supposed to say yes, I
was supposed to say yes, this was worth it. And
I started to see that telling the story in which
literally anything like any amount of suffering is worth it
for the few people who basically get this winning lottery
(12:19):
ticket and this rocket ships upward mobility. That story is
used all throughout our society to justify inequality. We say, okay,
it's okay that millions of children live in poverty because
a few make it out. And if you ask those kids,
you know, and they answer the way they're supposed to answer,
(12:39):
then they'll say it's worth it, and so it was
taking like my lived experience and twisting it against people
who face similar obstacles. I love this idea of like,
that's an interesting question. Tell me why you're asking, right,
because it's the that question is hold up, I'm gonna
(13:01):
I'm gonna make sure we reinforce the cultural narrative that
any hardship can be overcome and that if you fail
to transform, it's your fault. Right. Therefore, we don't have
to be responsible, we don't have to look at broken systems,
we don't have to look at inequality, and we can
also tell ourselves that anything bad happened to me, I
would be able to rise above it and be resilient
(13:21):
because that's what a strong person strong in air quotes does.
So when you get asked that question like is this
worth it? Or was it worth it? Or you know,
would you change anything? Taking that step backwards and interrogating
the question, M huh, I'm going to steal that one.
Do it. It's culture jamming at its finest right, because
(13:42):
you're you're right, like, we're all in a play and
we know our parts. And I really feel like the
work of people who are given a platform and the
opportunity to use their voices to question the play. And
I love yeah, And I love the way that you
know that you are really are really questioning, right, questioning
(14:05):
what it means to be resilient. And I think we
we believe in this as a culture, in this fantasy
that anything bad can be made like for the good, right,
no matter what we lose, what tragedies happen to us,
that we can, like through our share force of like
twist them into something better. And a that feels awful
(14:29):
if you're the person who's lost something, but be it's
so dangerous because what incentive do we have to make
systems better? If you know, any individual can just take
something and just and turn it into a good thing. Yeah,
we make it a you know, we're a country of individualism,
So we take the refusal to be resilient as a
(14:52):
personal failing instead of as a result of the built
environment and the social structures and the lack of social structure.
And you know, we see this, you know, we are
too educated white women having this conversation about our experience
of inequity and forced resilience and and all of those things.
(15:13):
And I think you write about this as well, but
we're super privileged, and like this, I'm always going to
say stuff like this wrong. But like I remember, like
there was something, there was some sign during the political
experience of the last four years. There was something on
Twitter again with a white male holding a protest sign
(15:34):
that said, I am a winery owner in Napa. I'm
a white wealthy man and if I'm out here protesting,
you know it's bad. Wow. Right, that's sort of what
I'm going for here. Like again, with you do this
in the book, and you do this in your in
your your media appearances, and you're writing like I had
(15:56):
it easier as a white person going through Harvard, being
able to have a voice and be recognized as that
quote unquote perfect victim. And we've got to turn around
and say, what about the percent of people who don't
have the opportunity to perform as the perfect victim, who's
by very nature of their bodies and their culture can
(16:20):
never be seen as a perfect victim, no matter how
hard they try. Yeah, that's such a good point, And
I do think it's important for people who are in
our position to share our stories of the backlash that
we faced to talking about what happens when we try
to say like, hey, this this thing sucks for me
(16:40):
because it is so much worse for so many other people.
And in acceptance, I write about how, you know, when
I was a kid and I had some social privileges
right from being white. My parents were college educated, my
mom owned home, but I was not believed right And
when I tried to share like hey, you know, we
(17:01):
don't have hot water at home, Like I can't take
a shower, I can't even get into the bathtub like that,
that just was never going to be listened to. And
so it's something that's both been like infuriating to me
and liberating that today, like from the place I stand socially,
people do listen to me, and people do believe me, right,
(17:24):
and like this is why I wanted to go to
Harvard and why I wanted to get into a position
that I would be trusted, and so many people they
just don't. That's like still not going to happen for them. Yeah.
I was scrolling down and looking at my notes because
this what you just describe there, that you know, your
(17:45):
teenager life at home is really impossible and not okay
and not sustainable, and you keep getting put into the
hospital and all of these things. And here's you, this
young you saying wait a second, wait a second. We
have a mouse infested home, we have no hot water,
it's dirty, my mother has hoarding issues. And the line
(18:06):
from your book is um, she was white and well spoken,
with a house, a college degree, and full custody of me. Right,
Why would anyone listen to a teenager against what a white,
well educated professional person would say. It's like, whose story
do we believe? We believe the story that allows us
(18:27):
to think that the world is a good and just place. Wow.
I hope that when people read the book that they
if they implicitly trust me as a narrator because they
flipped to the back, they see my photo, they see
Harvard and Google, and I'm blonde and white, that it
really makes readers question who they're believing, because it's like,
(18:50):
I'm the same person I was fifteen years ago, but
like to ask yourself, really, like would would you have
believed me? Then? So I primarily write about the mental
health system where I was sent to the psych word.
I was given lots of medication, including antipsychotics, but I
(19:10):
saw a lot of people who were having similar feelings
doing similar things, but because of their race, like the
police were called instead of an ambulance, and many people
were in the same residential treatment center as I was,
but they were there through the court system. And later
on it was when I was applying to college, I
(19:32):
was able to basically leave out the time that I
spent locked up in this institution. But if it had
come through a court, I would not have had that
same freedom. And so basically I was allowed to have
my mental health crisis in peace, which a lot of
people just did not have. That's a really interesting aspect
(19:56):
of this. Even in that position where you're trying to
get a scholarship to cover attending Harvard all of these things,
you know that from the trauma porne resilience end of things, like, wow,
this is so amazing. You got to decide which parts
of your story got shared, right, You do the role
that you needed to play, and you were able to
(20:18):
play it. That's really interesting to think about who doesn't
have access to what parts of my story do I
put into this play that I'm going to perform so
that I can get the services that I actually just
as I can't being deserved. That's a really interesting fact
piece of information in there. Yeah, I think when I
(20:39):
talked to other white people who come from dysfunctional homes,
that's also a pretty common through line, right that, like
my parents struggled with like hoarding and mental health, but
we basically struggled without have being surveilled. And at times
it would have been probably better for me if there
(21:01):
had been someone like watching, but not necessarily the current
system watching. And then lots of like families of color
they have to deal with like you know, maybe substance
abuse or just poverty, and then also the criminal justice system,
and then also like child protective services, and it just
kind of gets piled on in a way that makes
(21:23):
it impossible really to dig yourself out. And so I
really tried to show the hoops that I jumped through
in order to present this narrative that people might be
more familiar with, right one that might look like a
made for TV movie, What is actually behind it? And
what are all the things that go on? Said, including
(21:45):
a lot of mistakes that I made, like I shoplifted
at times, I lied to people. You know, I don't
want to be too hard on myself because I was
a teenager, like trying to get by but those choices
could have turned out very differently for me. And I'm
only worried i'm today because they didn't. The unbelieved teenager
(22:05):
is a is a story very near and dear to me.
My parents are lovely now, decent, money educated, very well spoken,
very articulate. Nobody knew what was going on for me
as a teenager and as a kid, and it didn't
matter if I said anything, because I was you know,
I'm sure you know this term the identified patient, right,
(22:28):
the identified problem in the family is not usually the
problem in the family. I've been talking with Emmy Niquefeld,
author of the memoir Acceptance. Let's get back to it,
(22:48):
you know again. We've been talking about like cultural scripts,
like there are ideas we have about young people and
about teenagers, and we dismissed the things that they say
or or you know, if you've got somebody who is
um cutting or self harming or you know, shoplifting, the
sort of cultural way of looking at that is, oh,
(23:09):
they just need to be more resilient. Not always, I
don't I don't want anybody being like that's not true,
but that that we have this sort of default. The
teenager can't be an accurate reporter. We have to look
at the grown ups to find the accurate report, and
it's unusual for us to question that primary reporter. I mean,
(23:30):
I think it's I don't even need to say. I
think I know that it's changed in the thirty years
since I was a teenager. It has changed in large
part because of teachers and nurses and social workers. Shout
out to all of those folks in the education system
doing amazing work and not being paid for it. But
that we I think we still have this idea that
(23:52):
no matter what's happened to you, if you have what
we call maladaptive coping reactions to the terrible things that
are opening to you, it's your fault for not rising
above it. So well said, and in my experience, the
what's considered maladaptive and what's not is really tied with
capitalism and with keeping the status quo running, even more
(24:17):
so than it is about like actual harm to the individual.
Tell me more about that. I was thinking about this
a lot recently when I was reflecting on my relationship
with exercise, and so after I got into college, I
started working out really for the first time in my life,
and I ended up walking onto the rowing team as
(24:39):
a junior, and it was a really incredible experience being
on the team, like I had great coaches, and I
really destroyed myself in workouts because I was running from
these feelings that I didn't know how to cope with,
I couldn't handle, and they were the same feelings that
I had out with in the past by cutting myself
(25:02):
or by eating disorder behaviors. And when I was like
running and doing extra workouts, people praise me because they
were like, you're so healthy, You're a vision of health.
And I ended up getting a back injury that still
really affects me to this day. And I'm lucky that
I didn't get like a horrible infection or have long
(25:23):
lasting physical impacts from eating disorders. But if I look
at what impacts me now, that rowing injury plays a
bigger part of my day to day life than the
superficial scars that I have. And that's not to say, like,
you know, no one should work out, but I think
there's this knee jerk reaction to say like, Okay, these
(25:46):
coping skills are good ones, these are bad ones, without
looking at like why are they happening? Why are we
assigning them this value of positive or negative and without
asking like, how can we reduce the harm of this behavior? Yeah,
and for me, the way that that ties into capitalism is,
you know, we have a real well in the book,
(26:08):
you use meritocracy, right, but like we praise getting back
to work, right, being productive are big problem with grief
or depression or anxiety or disability to be blunt about
that one is that you're not productive. Right. What do
we say to somebody who's just lost a child or
their mom died. We say, keep busy, get back to work.
(26:30):
One of the diagnostic criteria for that new prolonged grief
disorder things that we talked about last season is sort
of an inability to be productive and go back to work. Now,
it's it's worded with more nuance than that, but that
is what it is. Like, you can't go back and
do your job because you're too sad, and that's problem
for us. Yeah. I definitely responded to my childhood with productivity.
(26:55):
For me, work was my oasis and I found peace
and effort and studying for standardized tests, which you know
is great will lasts. But then as I got into adulthood,
I had to question a little bit how healthy that
behavior was as my only coping mechanism. And it obviously
(27:18):
leads to like financial success, like we create more stuff
that way, but what does it do to s as
people watching people around me go through grief? I have
seen people close to me have deaths in the family recently,
and when people have gone straight back to work, I
(27:40):
feel a little disturbed by it, you know, because I'm
worried about them, Like are you going to have the
space to process it right or are you just shoving
it down? And there's no right or wrong there. It's
it's questioning what do we believe is the correct way
to respond to challenges different called emotional moments in a life,
(28:02):
like what is correct? And as you were talking about
with exercise, right, like we praise and prize a very
specific body type and if you aren't exercising, you're failing,
you're being lazy, you're not taking care of your health
without really looking at what what about for folks who
are using physical activity. One of the things that you
(28:25):
said was, you know, exercising in that way was an
extension of self harm write a different expression, not creating
scars on the body, but pushing yourself that hard and
causing lasting damage. I also like that you said, like
exercises good, don't stop exercising? Like exercise, yes, strong bones,
healthy heart, all those things, and really being curious about
(28:48):
how do we use the coping skills that we're using.
Coping skills are awesome. Coping skills help you cope. Hello,
that's what they're for, right, Coping skills help you cope
with the things that you need to survive. You can
use coping skills enjoy too, Like everything is so amazing?
How am I going to cope with it? Right? Like?
This is your little p s a that coping skills
(29:09):
are awesome. They are neither maladaptive or perfect anyway, But
to be curious about what is actually going on and
how am I using the tools in my toolbox to
go all therapist about it? Like? Am I using exercise
or work as a way to avoid feeling okay, not good,
(29:30):
not bad? Useful information? Am I using exercise to channel
my rage at certain situations? Awesome? Right? Again, it's not
that activities are right or wrong, it's what are you
using them for? And this is motivational interviewing, right, you know,
motivational interviewing. I love motivational interviewing. Yeah, it's my favorite.
(29:55):
Looking back, I think my teenagers would have been so
different if the therapist that I had encountered had been
using that technique. Can you I know what it is,
but can you tell everybody? Motivational interviewing is so Motivational interviewing,
as I understand it as a non therapist, is basically
asking someone like, what are your goals? What do you want?
(30:16):
And then structuring the treatment to help someone reach those
goals or always like tying back to what the individual
is looking for. So instead of being like, Okay, this
is the agenda that I have that you have to do,
you have to comply with my agenda, Instead it's like
what is your agenda? And following from there. Yeah, Motivational
(30:39):
interviewing is really really amazing. I'll link to it in
the show notes Everybody so you can get a little
primer on it. But it's it's basically like it's human centered, right.
It comes from the addiction field. There's a whole scale
of like where is the person who's sitting with you,
what stage of their journey or the answer I hate
journey language, but like it starts. It starts with you
(31:00):
can't get somebody to do your agenda if they haven't
joined you in that agenda. And it it really is,
it's about sovereignty and agency, which are my favorites. What
is it that you want? I want to not be
hospitalized anymore because it's really irritating. Okay, what are the
things that you think will help keep you out of
the hospital and how can we help you get there?
(31:20):
That is a very different approach to somebody who is,
you know, self harming or having disordered eating patterns. That
question is very different than you need to hit this
weight goal, you need to show this, this and this,
Because what do we do we learn? I know what
the right answers are. I'm going to give you the
right answers, but it doesn't mean anything is changed. I
(31:41):
feel like often we believe that young people, especially teenagers,
are incapable of knowing what they want, knowing what their
goals are, and communicating that. And I don't under really
understand why we think that, because if you talk to
a teenager, like they know what they want, they know
what they want, they know what they need, and that
(32:02):
is like the energy that young people have is incredible,
and it's something that as I've gotten older, I've been like, Wow,
I wish I still had that amount of drive and
ferocity because if somebody had just sat me down and
asked me those questions, I think that would have made
all the difference, and not even in times of massive distress. Right,
(32:23):
Like we called it motivational interviewing because that's sort of
the the name for this way of approaching specifically clinical work.
But this is like, how do we respect the people
in front of us? How do we respect ourselves? How
do we get curious about what somebody might want or need?
This is relationship work, relationship with yourself, with the people
around you, with the culture, with the world. What is
(32:47):
it that you most want? But like that ability to
put your own ideas about the situation, put your own
needs about the situation to the side for just a minute,
to be cary us. What is this person in front
of me? Hold dear? What is important to them? How
can we become allies? How can we become a team
(33:09):
in moving towards what they want? Going back to what
we were talking about with like maladaptive coping skills, right,
and what do we use self harming behavior for what
do we use overwork for? What do we use any
of our sort of addictive behaviors for? We do those
things to help us survive what we are trying to survive.
(33:32):
And until we talk about that as like these are
great things that you're doing, or these are these are
understandable things that you're doing. Can we find other ways
for you to tell your story, get support, manage these feelings? Right?
These are like classic addictions work things. Yeah, when I
decided to stop self harming myself, my foster parents had
(33:56):
been on my case for like, well, I guess they
hadn't known about it, right, But I'm glad you brought
up the motivational interviewing because I write a lot in
Acceptance about the power of having a dream, and I
had these goals like first it was to go to
college early, and then it was to go to a
(34:16):
fancy school and live in New York and speak French.
And people thought like, these are bad goals, These are
not realistic goals for where you are in the world.
Like my social worker had never had someone in thirty
years go to college, like not a single person like
little one Harvard, And so you know, people thought you're
just going to be disappointed, like they tried to dissuade me,
(34:38):
But I think like those were the goals that carried
me through. Those were the dreams that I had. And
I think often we see loss and we think, Okay,
in the wake of loss, that's not at the right
time to be dreaming big. But after you lose something,
whether it's someone who's important to you or the life
that you had, that seems like the perfect time to
(35:02):
think about what's next. The way that you're describing this
and thinking like, we're screwed, right, If you don't have
a dream, you're failing that resilience, gratitude, optimism, think beyond
your circumstances thing. But if you dream too big, you're
too big for your britches. This is unrealistic, right, Like
you can't win because everybody is going to have a
(35:25):
different opinion about what you are supposed to be doing.
And I love this because, like, if you have a dream,
who cares what other people think? Right, whatever you want
for yourself as long as it is not causing harm
to others, Like, let's let you lean into that and
stop worrying about whether the dream is too big or
(35:45):
too unrealistic. I mean, we're just doing that that whole
like not realistic thing, right Like, who that's that's a
whole bunch of internalized disappointment, right that we're trying to
project onto somebody else. But I think it gets so
murky and muddy, and you know, like do these things
and rise above, but don't get that big, don't you know,
(36:07):
don't dream too big because then your dreams, you know,
we think we're protecting you from disappointment. I think that
the way out of all of that murkiness is we
go back to what do you want for yourself? And
can I support you in getting there? Right? And if
you can't support somebody in reaching for the things that
they believe in, then say I can't help you support that,
(36:29):
but maybe I can help you find somebody who will, right, Like,
I mean, we're talking pretty ideal world here. We're sort
of like, Okay, here's this idea we have of the
perfect world where everybody is resilient and pulls them up
by their bootstrairs. But let's maybe reconstruct a different perfect
world where we listen better and we ask people about
what they want for themselves and help them in the
(36:51):
ways that we're able, and if we can't, we say
that instead of just trying to like dismantle somebody else's
dreams because we don't know how to help them reach them.
That's so eys And on one hand it sounds like
an ideal world, idealistic world, And on the other hand,
I totally see it happening. And I think there's so
many educators and health professionals who are out there who
(37:14):
are like really listening to kids and two people going
through stuff and asking them, okay, like what what do
you need? And I know, like I had those people
at various times, and those people really change my life.
And some of the people who helped me the most,
we're really not perfect people and we're only able to
(37:36):
help me in a limited way. And I think that's okay.
Like we have this other narrative of the hero who
comes in and fixes everything and makes it better, and
like my story doesn't have that that one person. It
has a lot of people doing what they can and
some of the most heroic people are not able to
(37:57):
be there all the time, are not able to give
me everything that I needed. But that's okay too. I mean,
it's the anti survivor memoir and also the anti hero story. Right,
there is no one savior, and there's also I mean,
we we touched, we touched on this earlier, so we
don't need to dive into it again. But that idea
of I'm going to be the one to save this
(38:19):
poor disadvantaged use right, so that you know, we can
have that feather in our cap and and when you're in,
when you're feeling that, when you're acting from that, everything's
going to come out wonky. Right, Everything's going to come
out wonky if you're doing it to boost your own
portfolio of saved people. That's so true. That's so true.
(38:40):
You know, the clothes of every episode here is is
talking about hope and what are you hopeful for it?
And it's it's amazing to me that even without me
saying it, I feel like the cadence of conversations always
comes around to hope and hopefulness and dreams, which I
just love because when we get stuck in of this
really like complex systems and webs of things, it can
(39:04):
start to just feel incredibly heavy. And it's not that
hope makes everything better, but it gives us something to
live into. Right, So knowing what you know, and what
you've lived and what you've experienced and sort of turned
on that black light for yourself about the systems that
are involved in everything you've lived, Like, what does hope
(39:27):
look like for you right now? I think that there
are so many good things going on right now, and
I am very hopeful by gen Z about the ways
that they are taking care of themselves and that a
lot of young people are refusing to play the roles
that adults would ask them to play. And I think
(39:50):
a lot of the awareness of mental health and maybe
even quiet quitting and those phenomena are really like radical
acts of resistance to say, like, we are not going
to participate in this system that is making people on
the planet really really sick. And it's like so many
(40:11):
people are doing it, it feels like that it's impossible,
like not to listen. Yeah, there's a lot of hopefulness
in the chaos of kicking over systems that no longer
serve us. Yeah, And it's really amazing to see to
see really young people do it. They should not be
responsible for fixing the problems that older generations created. And
(40:34):
at the same time, it's like, of course it would
be the teenagers who have new solutions. Yeah, I mean
I feel like every every generation kicks something over from
the prior generation. Right. So my generation was, you know,
talking about sexual violence and domestic violence, and those weren't
(40:56):
things that were talked about in my parents generation. And
then the next generation him was talking about nuclear proliferation
and animal rights, and you know, we each successive generation
sort of continues that shedding of systems that don't serve us,
right and turns the light on things, And we kind
of need successive generations to do that, right, Like, there's this,
(41:19):
there's it's not that everything was bad over here, but
like I just I see it all as such emotional
relational growth. The more we learn about being human, the
more we kick over the systems that don't serve humans. Right.
So I'm gonna join I'm gonna join you in that
hope for the young folks and the kicking over of
(41:39):
things that no longer service. I'm so glad you've been
here today. Thank you so much for having me. And
so I'm gonna link to your website and the name
of your book, and I will also link to sort
of basic wiki page on motivational interviewing. So people know
what we're talking about. But where else should people find you?
What do you want them to know? I'm on Instagram
(42:01):
at Emmy Neatfeld my first name, last name, and also
on Twitter at the same handle. All right, everybody, we
will be right back with your questions to carry with
you and my sort of synthesis of my own thoughts
of what I'm carrying with me from today's episode, So
don't don't miss all that. Right back each week I
(42:29):
leave you with some questions to carry with you until
we meet again. You know, one of my favorite things
about today's conversation was the complexity and nuance involved in survival.
I mean, I think about this stuff all the time,
but actually getting into a conversation about whether we believe
the teenager who is trying to get help or we
(42:49):
believe the educated white adult who says that everything is
fine and everything the teenager says is just garbage. I
feel like my interior teen age self got some validation
in this conversation with Emmy. I'm really thankful for that.
What parts of today's episode stuck with you and everybody's
(43:10):
going to take something different from today's show, but I
hope you found something to hold onto. Hope really is
a crowdsourced thing. There are lots of ways to open
conversations like this on everyday grief and resilience and how
we survive, how we really survive, not how drama expects
us to. I definitely want to hear from you on
(43:32):
all of this. What are you holding onto right now?
What kind of conversations do you wish you could have?
Let me know? Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram
or here after Pod on TikTok to see video clips
from the show and leave your thoughts in the comments
on those posts, and be sure to tag us in
your own posts on social media. Use the hashtag here
(43:54):
after pod on all the platforms. That's how I will
find you. We all love to see where this show
take x you. Of course, please remember to subscribe and
leave a review and tell your friends about the show
that helps more than you know. If you want to
tell me how today's show felt for you, or you
have a request or a question, give us a call
(44:15):
at three two three six four three three seven six
eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you
can find the number in the show notes, or visit
Megan Divine dot c O. If you'd rather send an email,
you can do that. To write on the website, Megan
Divine dot CEO. We want to hear from you. I
want to hear from you. This show, this world needs
(44:39):
your voice. Together, we can make things better even when
they can't be made right. Want more Hereafter. Grief education
doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Nobody has
to have died for you to be experiencing grief. As
my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief
that we just don't call grief. Learning how to talk
(45:00):
about all that without cliches or platitudes or accidentally rude
statements is an important skill for everybody. Find trainings, professional resources,
and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not
Okay at Megan Divine dot c O. Hereafter with Megan
Divine has written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive
(45:21):
producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by Elizabeth Fossio. Logistical
and social media support from Micah. Edited by Houston Tilly.
Music provided by Wave Crush. Background Noise Today provided by
Luna and l A's City Bird. The Helicopter
I think we we believe in this as a culture,
in this fantasy that anything bad can be made like
for the good right, no matter what we lose, what
tragedies happened to us, that we can, like, through our
share force of a like, twist them into something better.
And he that feels awful if you're the person who's
(00:20):
lost something, but be it's so dangerous because what incentive
do we have to make systems better? This is here After,
and I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best
selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay. This week
on Hereafter, author Emmy Neatfeldt joins me to talk about trauma,
(00:40):
resilience and that weird transformation storyline thing we force on
survivors of any kind of hardship, Settle and friends. All
of that coming up right after this first break before
we get started, one quick note. While we cover a
(01:03):
lot of emotional relational territory in our time here together,
this show is not a substitute for skilled support with
a license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related
to your work. Hey friends. I first learned about Emmy
meet Felt from a review of her book Acceptance in
the New York Times. That review is called quote the
(01:24):
problem with Survival Memoirs, so of course it had me
hooked from the very start. I am such a big
grouch when it comes to those worn out tropes about
redemption and how people overcome horrible things just so they
can become the amazing person you see before you today
hate them anyway. Emmy's book Acceptance has been described as
(01:47):
a luminous, generation defining memoir of foster care and homelessness,
Harvard and big tech, examining society's fixation with resilience, which
is a pretty awesome review. Amy really dives into the
whole weird thing we do with people who overcome difficult
things in their lives. How we hold up these like
(02:08):
rare rock star examples of success as proof that you
really can transcend anything if you try hard enough, which
also just implies that anybody who hasn't made their way
to Ivy League school, it's jobs at Google and all
of that stuff, they just aren't trying hard enough. If
you haven't risen above your circumstances, that's on you, friends.
(02:32):
This episode is about the underside of that resilience narrative,
and I cannot wait to share this conversation with you.
Quick content note this episode includes discussions of eating disorders,
self harm, and hospitalization. I mean, I am so glad
to have you here with me today. Thank you so much, Migan.
(02:54):
I'm so happy to be here. So I found you
the same way that I find a lot of people
these days is on Twitter. Somebody posted your New York
Times book review for the book, and I read the
essay and I think I think that was in my
message to you that, like I got halfway through the
book review, I was like, I need to talk to her.
I need to talk to her right now. So yes,
as I'm just you know, people should be used to
(03:15):
me fan girling by now. But tell us a little
bit about your book. I talked about your history some
just you know, as we know, we like to give
folks a break from telling that particular story. But tell
us a little bit about the book and then we'll
dive into a conversation. My book is called Acceptance, and
it's a memoir with foster care and homelessness and Harvard Google.
(03:37):
And it's also, I hope, a fast paced read that
reads like a novel. Some people have said like a thriller. Of,
you know, my quest to get into an ivy League school,
but really to get out of these really difficult situations
and be heard. And I hope that that rad need
(03:58):
and drive shines through as I went through it, and
then as I tried to go back and uncover the
truth about what really happened that excavation, right like you
live it. Oh, I'm going to misquote somebody here because
I won't remember who it is, but somebody said, writers
live everything twice the first time, when you live it
in the second time. On the page right, that excavation
(04:20):
is a really huge thing. Yeah, And in the book structurally,
I really wanted to take readers on the same journey
I was on, where I don't share some of the
information that I didn't know then, so kind of living
with me moments moment. But then in the epilogue as
a young adult, I went back and I read tens
(04:41):
of thousands of pages of medical records, interviewed everyone, got
every piece of info that I could, and I share
what I found and how it really radically changed the
way that I thought about my life. One of the
things that I loved in the book review is that
the title of the review is the problem was rival memoirs.
(05:01):
So on that one hand, the book is exactly as
you described, right, like surviving foster care and abuse and
the medical mental health system, and that's striving perfectionist culture.
What I super love about you and your work is
that you you write a survival memoir at the same
(05:23):
time that you're completely skewering the whole idea of survival. Yeah,
thank you. I appreciate that. And I think that the
headline was actually the problem with survivor memoirs, Oh yeah,
which was interesting too, because you know, a lot of
people find comfort in that term, and for me, that's
not something that I really super identify with and I
(05:44):
don't think I ever used it in the book on ironically,
so it's interesting that I wound up as a headline
in it. Yeah. I mean, it's a whole genre of itself, right,
the survivor story, right, that whole trauma porne of resilience,
And that's that's something that you that you really kind
of skewer in all of this, and we don't see
(06:04):
that in a lot of survivor writing, whether it's in
book form or made for TV movies. Right. I saw
another article that said, you know, emmyni Feld's Life is
a made for TV movie, except that it's not. It's
so interesting the stigma that we have against the word
victim or against the idea of being a victim. And
(06:26):
you know, today it's all trauma survivorship, and you know,
certain things happen that make us into victims. And for me,
it's been really important to own that because when I
was going through these these systems and trying to, you know,
prove to people that I was worthy of having a
more secure, stable life, there was this huge expectation that
(06:50):
I had to be a quote unquote survivor with all
of that entailed, and be a good survivor and be
you know, changed only in pretty ways. Right. Yeah, there's
that great scene in your book and I'm not giving
away any spoilers here, but there's that really great scene
in in the book after you've received your college acceptance,
but you have that the scholarship meeting and tell us
(07:14):
a little bit about being that perfect victim. Like a
lot of high school students and I think really anyone
who's looking to powerful institutions to really help them out
in today's world, I felt this tremendous pressure to write
a story in which you know, I had these bad
things happened to me, but I was made stronger by them,
(07:36):
and where I included the ways I was tough and
pretty and completely left out the nightmarors and the PTSD
and the less kind of picturesque details. And so when
I was a high school senior, I won a scholarship
from this organization called the Horatio Alger Society of Distinguishing Perkins,
(08:01):
and Horatio Alger was the famous author of these nineteenth
century novels like that really exemplified pulling yourselves up by
your bootstraps. And when I showed up at the conference
that all the scholarship winners got to, I learned that
that was really their agenda. That they found these kids
who had quote unquote overcome adversity, and that we were
(08:23):
the poster children not just for resilience, but for like
a specific kind of right wing conservative agenda of like,
we don't need social services because these kids have proven
that literally anyone can do it. Yeah, if you if
you come from an abusive home or foster care, or
(08:43):
you have a history of self harm, right, like, we
don't actually need to help you because look at these
children that we have assembled, and look at how perfect
they are and how high achieving and how well spoken
and articulate. We don't need to help them. You just
need to help yourself, exactly. And I used to feel
like this discomfort that I had with that idea was
(09:03):
really personal to me. But then as I started to
talk to more people who had endured really difficult things,
and then they found themselves faced with this these expectations,
like you should be grateful for the good things that
have come out of it. You should be like always
smiling that you know you're still here, you're alive, like
(09:24):
you're doing it. And I found that that was really
a pretty universal sensation that responding to grief and loss
with that type of narrative, it doesn't feel good. No, No,
it's weird because we we call those feel good stories.
Right here are all of these terrible things that happened,
and here's how this person rose above and started a
(09:47):
foundation and they have a really great life, Like we
call those feel good stories. But what I just heard
you say is like being on the receiving end of
that does not feel good, feel a good story for
whom I'm confused. What in a stew point, and I
think that that being held up in that way. You know,
(10:07):
I know I'm very lucky, Like I went to Harvard,
I worked at Google. Today, I enjoy just a lot
of financial stability and privilege, and I'm very I'm very
aware of that. And I think there's a way in
which our culture says that if you are privileged in
like one or more ways, we don't have the complexity
(10:30):
of acknowledging like that you might also be hurting in
various other ways, right, And that privilege and loss are
not exclusive. Privilege and laws are not exclusive. Yeah, right,
that knee jerk reaction of you know, I am having
even just on like a low level, like I'm having
a really crappy day. Well, you should be thankful that
(10:51):
you have eyes to see the sun. Wait, what right that?
Like we have such low tolerance for any kind of
thing that makes us feel right, anything that makes us
feel We're like, okay, shut that down, shut that down,
shut that down. And in my book, I think I
call it like that backlog of pain. Right, you can't
(11:12):
let somebody else be in pain because you're not getting
any support for yours, So like, buck up and be
grateful a little bratt because you did go to Harvard,
you did get a scholarship, and there's almost this sort
of how dare you still say out? How dare you
still say the things that happened to me were not? Okay? Yeah?
(11:36):
And that was a huge part of why I wrote
this book was that I felt like after I got
into Harvard, people would ask me when they heard about
my life story like was it worth it? Like was
it worth it that your parents had mental illnesses and
that you were abused and in foster care? And one
(11:56):
this felt like a really insensitive question to ask. And too,
I felt like I was supposed to say yes, I
was supposed to say yes, this was worth it. And
I started to see that telling the story in which
literally anything like any amount of suffering is worth it
for the few people who basically get this winning lottery
(12:19):
ticket and this rocket ships upward mobility. That story is
used all throughout our society to justify inequality. We say, okay,
it's okay that millions of children live in poverty because
a few make it out. And if you ask those kids,
you know, and they answer the way they're supposed to answer,
(12:39):
then they'll say it's worth it, and so it was
taking like my lived experience and twisting it against people
who face similar obstacles. I love this idea of like,
that's an interesting question. Tell me why you're asking, right,
because it's the that question is hold up, I'm gonna
(13:01):
I'm gonna make sure we reinforce the cultural narrative that
any hardship can be overcome and that if you fail
to transform, it's your fault. Right. Therefore, we don't have
to be responsible, we don't have to look at broken systems,
we don't have to look at inequality, and we can
also tell ourselves that anything bad happened to me, I
would be able to rise above it and be resilient
(13:21):
because that's what a strong person strong in air quotes does.
So when you get asked that question like is this
worth it? Or was it worth it? Or you know,
would you change anything? Taking that step backwards and interrogating
the question, M huh, I'm going to steal that one.
Do it. It's culture jamming at its finest right, because
(13:42):
you're you're right, like, we're all in a play and
we know our parts. And I really feel like the
work of people who are given a platform and the
opportunity to use their voices to question the play. And
I love yeah, And I love the way that you
know that you are really are really questioning, right, questioning
(14:05):
what it means to be resilient. And I think we
we believe in this as a culture, in this fantasy
that anything bad can be made like for the good, right,
no matter what we lose, what tragedies happen to us,
that we can, like through our share force of like
twist them into something better. And a that feels awful
(14:29):
if you're the person who's lost something, but be it's
so dangerous because what incentive do we have to make
systems better? If you know, any individual can just take
something and just and turn it into a good thing. Yeah,
we make it a you know, we're a country of individualism,
So we take the refusal to be resilient as a
(14:52):
personal failing instead of as a result of the built
environment and the social structures and the lack of social structure.
And you know, we see this, you know, we are
too educated white women having this conversation about our experience
of inequity and forced resilience and and all of those things.
(15:13):
And I think you write about this as well, but
we're super privileged, and like this, I'm always going to
say stuff like this wrong. But like I remember, like
there was something, there was some sign during the political
experience of the last four years. There was something on
Twitter again with a white male holding a protest sign
(15:34):
that said, I am a winery owner in Napa. I'm
a white wealthy man and if I'm out here protesting,
you know it's bad. Wow. Right, that's sort of what
I'm going for here. Like again, with you do this
in the book, and you do this in your in
your your media appearances, and you're writing like I had
(15:56):
it easier as a white person going through Harvard, being
able to have a voice and be recognized as that
quote unquote perfect victim. And we've got to turn around
and say, what about the percent of people who don't
have the opportunity to perform as the perfect victim, who's
by very nature of their bodies and their culture can
(16:20):
never be seen as a perfect victim, no matter how
hard they try. Yeah, that's such a good point, And
I do think it's important for people who are in
our position to share our stories of the backlash that
we faced to talking about what happens when we try
to say like, hey, this this thing sucks for me
(16:40):
because it is so much worse for so many other people.
And in acceptance, I write about how, you know, when
I was a kid and I had some social privileges
right from being white. My parents were college educated, my
mom owned home, but I was not believed right And
when I tried to share like hey, you know, we
(17:01):
don't have hot water at home, Like I can't take
a shower, I can't even get into the bathtub like that,
that just was never going to be listened to. And
so it's something that's both been like infuriating to me
and liberating that today, like from the place I stand socially,
people do listen to me, and people do believe me, right,
(17:24):
and like this is why I wanted to go to
Harvard and why I wanted to get into a position
that I would be trusted, and so many people they
just don't. That's like still not going to happen for them. Yeah.
I was scrolling down and looking at my notes because
this what you just describe there, that you know, your
(17:45):
teenager life at home is really impossible and not okay
and not sustainable, and you keep getting put into the
hospital and all of these things. And here's you, this
young you saying wait a second, wait a second. We
have a mouse infested home, we have no hot water,
it's dirty, my mother has hoarding issues. And the line
(18:06):
from your book is um, she was white and well spoken,
with a house, a college degree, and full custody of me. Right,
Why would anyone listen to a teenager against what a white,
well educated professional person would say. It's like, whose story
do we believe? We believe the story that allows us
(18:27):
to think that the world is a good and just place. Wow.
I hope that when people read the book that they
if they implicitly trust me as a narrator because they
flipped to the back, they see my photo, they see
Harvard and Google, and I'm blonde and white, that it
really makes readers question who they're believing, because it's like,
(18:50):
I'm the same person I was fifteen years ago, but
like to ask yourself, really, like would would you have
believed me? Then? So I primarily write about the mental
health system where I was sent to the psych word.
I was given lots of medication, including antipsychotics, but I
(19:10):
saw a lot of people who were having similar feelings
doing similar things, but because of their race, like the
police were called instead of an ambulance, and many people
were in the same residential treatment center as I was,
but they were there through the court system. And later
on it was when I was applying to college, I
(19:32):
was able to basically leave out the time that I
spent locked up in this institution. But if it had
come through a court, I would not have had that
same freedom. And so basically I was allowed to have
my mental health crisis in peace, which a lot of
people just did not have. That's a really interesting aspect
(19:56):
of this. Even in that position where you're trying to
get a scholarship to cover attending Harvard all of these things,
you know that from the trauma porne resilience end of things, like, wow,
this is so amazing. You got to decide which parts
of your story got shared, right, You do the role
that you needed to play, and you were able to
(20:18):
play it. That's really interesting to think about who doesn't
have access to what parts of my story do I
put into this play that I'm going to perform so
that I can get the services that I actually just
as I can't being deserved. That's a really interesting fact
piece of information in there. Yeah, I think when I
(20:39):
talked to other white people who come from dysfunctional homes,
that's also a pretty common through line, right that, like
my parents struggled with like hoarding and mental health, but
we basically struggled without have being surveilled. And at times
it would have been probably better for me if there
(21:01):
had been someone like watching, but not necessarily the current
system watching. And then lots of like families of color
they have to deal with like you know, maybe substance
abuse or just poverty, and then also the criminal justice system,
and then also like child protective services, and it just
kind of gets piled on in a way that makes
(21:23):
it impossible really to dig yourself out. And so I
really tried to show the hoops that I jumped through
in order to present this narrative that people might be
more familiar with, right one that might look like a
made for TV movie, What is actually behind it? And
what are all the things that go on? Said, including
(21:45):
a lot of mistakes that I made, like I shoplifted
at times, I lied to people. You know, I don't
want to be too hard on myself because I was
a teenager, like trying to get by but those choices
could have turned out very differently for me. And I'm
only worried i'm today because they didn't. The unbelieved teenager
(22:05):
is a is a story very near and dear to me.
My parents are lovely now, decent, money educated, very well spoken,
very articulate. Nobody knew what was going on for me
as a teenager and as a kid, and it didn't
matter if I said anything, because I was you know,
I'm sure you know this term the identified patient, right,
(22:28):
the identified problem in the family is not usually the
problem in the family. I've been talking with Emmy Niquefeld,
author of the memoir Acceptance. Let's get back to it,
(22:48):
you know again. We've been talking about like cultural scripts,
like there are ideas we have about young people and
about teenagers, and we dismissed the things that they say
or or you know, if you've got somebody who is
um cutting or self harming or you know, shoplifting, the
sort of cultural way of looking at that is, oh,
(23:09):
they just need to be more resilient. Not always, I
don't I don't want anybody being like that's not true,
but that that we have this sort of default. The
teenager can't be an accurate reporter. We have to look
at the grown ups to find the accurate report, and
it's unusual for us to question that primary reporter. I mean,
(23:30):
I think it's I don't even need to say. I
think I know that it's changed in the thirty years
since I was a teenager. It has changed in large
part because of teachers and nurses and social workers. Shout
out to all of those folks in the education system
doing amazing work and not being paid for it. But
that we I think we still have this idea that
(23:52):
no matter what's happened to you, if you have what
we call maladaptive coping reactions to the terrible things that
are opening to you, it's your fault for not rising
above it. So well said, and in my experience, the
what's considered maladaptive and what's not is really tied with
capitalism and with keeping the status quo running, even more
(24:17):
so than it is about like actual harm to the individual.
Tell me more about that. I was thinking about this
a lot recently when I was reflecting on my relationship
with exercise, and so after I got into college, I
started working out really for the first time in my life,
and I ended up walking onto the rowing team as
(24:39):
a junior, and it was a really incredible experience being
on the team, like I had great coaches, and I
really destroyed myself in workouts because I was running from
these feelings that I didn't know how to cope with,
I couldn't handle, and they were the same feelings that
I had out with in the past by cutting myself
(25:02):
or by eating disorder behaviors. And when I was like
running and doing extra workouts, people praise me because they
were like, you're so healthy, You're a vision of health.
And I ended up getting a back injury that still
really affects me to this day. And I'm lucky that
I didn't get like a horrible infection or have long
(25:23):
lasting physical impacts from eating disorders. But if I look
at what impacts me now, that rowing injury plays a
bigger part of my day to day life than the
superficial scars that I have. And that's not to say, like,
you know, no one should work out, but I think
there's this knee jerk reaction to say like, Okay, these
(25:46):
coping skills are good ones, these are bad ones, without
looking at like why are they happening? Why are we
assigning them this value of positive or negative and without
asking like, how can we reduce the harm of this behavior? Yeah,
and for me, the way that that ties into capitalism is,
you know, we have a real well in the book,
(26:08):
you use meritocracy, right, but like we praise getting back
to work, right, being productive are big problem with grief
or depression or anxiety or disability to be blunt about
that one is that you're not productive. Right. What do
we say to somebody who's just lost a child or
their mom died. We say, keep busy, get back to work.
(26:30):
One of the diagnostic criteria for that new prolonged grief
disorder things that we talked about last season is sort
of an inability to be productive and go back to work. Now,
it's it's worded with more nuance than that, but that
is what it is. Like, you can't go back and
do your job because you're too sad, and that's problem
for us. Yeah. I definitely responded to my childhood with productivity.
(26:55):
For me, work was my oasis and I found peace
and effort and studying for standardized tests, which you know
is great will lasts. But then as I got into adulthood,
I had to question a little bit how healthy that
behavior was as my only coping mechanism. And it obviously
(27:18):
leads to like financial success, like we create more stuff
that way, but what does it do to s as
people watching people around me go through grief? I have
seen people close to me have deaths in the family recently,
and when people have gone straight back to work, I
(27:40):
feel a little disturbed by it, you know, because I'm
worried about them, Like are you going to have the
space to process it right or are you just shoving
it down? And there's no right or wrong there. It's
it's questioning what do we believe is the correct way
to respond to challenges different called emotional moments in a life,
(28:02):
like what is correct? And as you were talking about
with exercise, right, like we praise and prize a very
specific body type and if you aren't exercising, you're failing,
you're being lazy, you're not taking care of your health
without really looking at what what about for folks who
are using physical activity. One of the things that you
(28:25):
said was, you know, exercising in that way was an
extension of self harm write a different expression, not creating
scars on the body, but pushing yourself that hard and
causing lasting damage. I also like that you said, like
exercises good, don't stop exercising? Like exercise, yes, strong bones,
healthy heart, all those things, and really being curious about
(28:48):
how do we use the coping skills that we're using.
Coping skills are awesome. Coping skills help you cope. Hello,
that's what they're for, right, Coping skills help you cope
with the things that you need to survive. You can
use coping skills enjoy too, Like everything is so amazing?
How am I going to cope with it? Right? Like?
This is your little p s a that coping skills
(29:09):
are awesome. They are neither maladaptive or perfect anyway, But
to be curious about what is actually going on and
how am I using the tools in my toolbox to
go all therapist about it? Like? Am I using exercise
or work as a way to avoid feeling okay, not good,
(29:30):
not bad? Useful information? Am I using exercise to channel
my rage at certain situations? Awesome? Right? Again, it's not
that activities are right or wrong, it's what are you
using them for? And this is motivational interviewing, right, you know,
motivational interviewing. I love motivational interviewing. Yeah, it's my favorite.
(29:55):
Looking back, I think my teenagers would have been so
different if the therapist that I had encountered had been
using that technique. Can you I know what it is,
but can you tell everybody? Motivational interviewing is so Motivational interviewing,
as I understand it as a non therapist, is basically
asking someone like, what are your goals? What do you want?
(30:16):
And then structuring the treatment to help someone reach those
goals or always like tying back to what the individual
is looking for. So instead of being like, Okay, this
is the agenda that I have that you have to do,
you have to comply with my agenda, Instead it's like
what is your agenda? And following from there. Yeah, Motivational
(30:39):
interviewing is really really amazing. I'll link to it in
the show notes Everybody so you can get a little
primer on it. But it's it's basically like it's human centered, right.
It comes from the addiction field. There's a whole scale
of like where is the person who's sitting with you,
what stage of their journey or the answer I hate
journey language, but like it starts. It starts with you
(31:00):
can't get somebody to do your agenda if they haven't
joined you in that agenda. And it it really is,
it's about sovereignty and agency, which are my favorites. What
is it that you want? I want to not be
hospitalized anymore because it's really irritating. Okay, what are the
things that you think will help keep you out of
the hospital and how can we help you get there?
(31:20):
That is a very different approach to somebody who is,
you know, self harming or having disordered eating patterns. That
question is very different than you need to hit this
weight goal, you need to show this, this and this,
Because what do we do we learn? I know what
the right answers are. I'm going to give you the
right answers, but it doesn't mean anything is changed. I
(31:41):
feel like often we believe that young people, especially teenagers,
are incapable of knowing what they want, knowing what their
goals are, and communicating that. And I don't under really
understand why we think that, because if you talk to
a teenager, like they know what they want, they know
what they want, they know what they need, and that
(32:02):
is like the energy that young people have is incredible,
and it's something that as I've gotten older, I've been like, Wow,
I wish I still had that amount of drive and
ferocity because if somebody had just sat me down and
asked me those questions, I think that would have made
all the difference, and not even in times of massive distress. Right,
(32:23):
Like we called it motivational interviewing because that's sort of
the the name for this way of approaching specifically clinical work.
But this is like, how do we respect the people
in front of us? How do we respect ourselves? How
do we get curious about what somebody might want or need?
This is relationship work, relationship with yourself, with the people
around you, with the culture, with the world. What is
(32:47):
it that you most want? But like that ability to
put your own ideas about the situation, put your own
needs about the situation to the side for just a minute,
to be cary us. What is this person in front
of me? Hold dear? What is important to them? How
can we become allies? How can we become a team
(33:09):
in moving towards what they want? Going back to what
we were talking about with like maladaptive coping skills, right,
and what do we use self harming behavior for what
do we use overwork for? What do we use any
of our sort of addictive behaviors for? We do those
things to help us survive what we are trying to survive.
(33:32):
And until we talk about that as like these are
great things that you're doing, or these are these are
understandable things that you're doing. Can we find other ways
for you to tell your story, get support, manage these feelings? Right?
These are like classic addictions work things. Yeah, when I
decided to stop self harming myself, my foster parents had
(33:56):
been on my case for like, well, I guess they
hadn't known about it, right, But I'm glad you brought
up the motivational interviewing because I write a lot in
Acceptance about the power of having a dream, and I
had these goals like first it was to go to
college early, and then it was to go to a
(34:16):
fancy school and live in New York and speak French.
And people thought like, these are bad goals, These are
not realistic goals for where you are in the world.
Like my social worker had never had someone in thirty
years go to college, like not a single person like
little one Harvard, And so you know, people thought you're
just going to be disappointed, like they tried to dissuade me,
(34:38):
But I think like those were the goals that carried
me through. Those were the dreams that I had. And
I think often we see loss and we think, Okay,
in the wake of loss, that's not at the right
time to be dreaming big. But after you lose something,
whether it's someone who's important to you or the life
that you had, that seems like the perfect time to
(35:02):
think about what's next. The way that you're describing this
and thinking like, we're screwed, right, If you don't have
a dream, you're failing that resilience, gratitude, optimism, think beyond
your circumstances thing. But if you dream too big, you're
too big for your britches. This is unrealistic, right, Like
you can't win because everybody is going to have a
(35:25):
different opinion about what you are supposed to be doing.
And I love this because, like, if you have a dream,
who cares what other people think? Right, whatever you want
for yourself as long as it is not causing harm
to others, Like, let's let you lean into that and
stop worrying about whether the dream is too big or
(35:45):
too unrealistic. I mean, we're just doing that that whole
like not realistic thing, right Like, who that's that's a
whole bunch of internalized disappointment, right that we're trying to
project onto somebody else. But I think it gets so
murky and muddy, and you know, like do these things
and rise above, but don't get that big, don't you know,
(36:07):
don't dream too big because then your dreams, you know,
we think we're protecting you from disappointment. I think that
the way out of all of that murkiness is we
go back to what do you want for yourself? And
can I support you in getting there? Right? And if
you can't support somebody in reaching for the things that
they believe in, then say I can't help you support that,
(36:29):
but maybe I can help you find somebody who will, right, Like,
I mean, we're talking pretty ideal world here. We're sort
of like, Okay, here's this idea we have of the
perfect world where everybody is resilient and pulls them up
by their bootstrairs. But let's maybe reconstruct a different perfect
world where we listen better and we ask people about
what they want for themselves and help them in the
(36:51):
ways that we're able, and if we can't, we say
that instead of just trying to like dismantle somebody else's
dreams because we don't know how to help them reach them.
That's so eys And on one hand it sounds like
an ideal world, idealistic world, And on the other hand,
I totally see it happening. And I think there's so
many educators and health professionals who are out there who
(37:14):
are like really listening to kids and two people going
through stuff and asking them, okay, like what what do
you need? And I know, like I had those people
at various times, and those people really change my life.
And some of the people who helped me the most,
we're really not perfect people and we're only able to
(37:36):
help me in a limited way. And I think that's okay.
Like we have this other narrative of the hero who
comes in and fixes everything and makes it better, and
like my story doesn't have that that one person. It
has a lot of people doing what they can and
some of the most heroic people are not able to
(37:57):
be there all the time, are not able to give
me everything that I needed. But that's okay too. I mean,
it's the anti survivor memoir and also the anti hero story. Right,
there is no one savior, and there's also I mean,
we we touched, we touched on this earlier, so we
don't need to dive into it again. But that idea
of I'm going to be the one to save this
(38:19):
poor disadvantaged use right, so that you know, we can
have that feather in our cap and and when you're in,
when you're feeling that, when you're acting from that, everything's
going to come out wonky. Right, Everything's going to come
out wonky if you're doing it to boost your own
portfolio of saved people. That's so true. That's so true.
(38:40):
You know, the clothes of every episode here is is
talking about hope and what are you hopeful for it?
And it's it's amazing to me that even without me
saying it, I feel like the cadence of conversations always
comes around to hope and hopefulness and dreams, which I
just love because when we get stuck in of this
really like complex systems and webs of things, it can
(39:04):
start to just feel incredibly heavy. And it's not that
hope makes everything better, but it gives us something to
live into. Right, So knowing what you know, and what
you've lived and what you've experienced and sort of turned
on that black light for yourself about the systems that
are involved in everything you've lived, Like, what does hope
(39:27):
look like for you right now? I think that there
are so many good things going on right now, and
I am very hopeful by gen Z about the ways
that they are taking care of themselves and that a
lot of young people are refusing to play the roles
that adults would ask them to play. And I think
(39:50):
a lot of the awareness of mental health and maybe
even quiet quitting and those phenomena are really like radical
acts of resistance to say, like, we are not going
to participate in this system that is making people on
the planet really really sick. And it's like so many
(40:11):
people are doing it, it feels like that it's impossible,
like not to listen. Yeah, there's a lot of hopefulness
in the chaos of kicking over systems that no longer
serve us. Yeah, And it's really amazing to see to
see really young people do it. They should not be
responsible for fixing the problems that older generations created. And
(40:34):
at the same time, it's like, of course it would
be the teenagers who have new solutions. Yeah, I mean
I feel like every every generation kicks something over from
the prior generation. Right. So my generation was, you know,
talking about sexual violence and domestic violence, and those weren't
(40:56):
things that were talked about in my parents generation. And
then the next generation him was talking about nuclear proliferation
and animal rights, and you know, we each successive generation
sort of continues that shedding of systems that don't serve us,
right and turns the light on things, And we kind
of need successive generations to do that, right, Like, there's this,
(41:19):
there's it's not that everything was bad over here, but
like I just I see it all as such emotional
relational growth. The more we learn about being human, the
more we kick over the systems that don't serve humans. Right.
So I'm gonna join I'm gonna join you in that
hope for the young folks and the kicking over of
(41:39):
things that no longer service. I'm so glad you've been
here today. Thank you so much for having me. And
so I'm gonna link to your website and the name
of your book, and I will also link to sort
of basic wiki page on motivational interviewing. So people know
what we're talking about. But where else should people find you?
What do you want them to know? I'm on Instagram
(42:01):
at Emmy Neatfeld my first name, last name, and also
on Twitter at the same handle. All right, everybody, we
will be right back with your questions to carry with
you and my sort of synthesis of my own thoughts
of what I'm carrying with me from today's episode, So
don't don't miss all that. Right back each week I
(42:29):
leave you with some questions to carry with you until
we meet again. You know, one of my favorite things
about today's conversation was the complexity and nuance involved in survival.
I mean, I think about this stuff all the time,
but actually getting into a conversation about whether we believe
the teenager who is trying to get help or we
(42:49):
believe the educated white adult who says that everything is
fine and everything the teenager says is just garbage. I
feel like my interior teen age self got some validation
in this conversation with Emmy. I'm really thankful for that.
What parts of today's episode stuck with you and everybody's
(43:10):
going to take something different from today's show, but I
hope you found something to hold onto. Hope really is
a crowdsourced thing. There are lots of ways to open
conversations like this on everyday grief and resilience and how
we survive, how we really survive, not how drama expects
us to. I definitely want to hear from you on
(43:32):
all of this. What are you holding onto right now?
What kind of conversations do you wish you could have?
Let me know? Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram
or here after Pod on TikTok to see video clips
from the show and leave your thoughts in the comments
on those posts, and be sure to tag us in
your own posts on social media. Use the hashtag here
(43:54):
after pod on all the platforms. That's how I will
find you. We all love to see where this show
take x you. Of course, please remember to subscribe and
leave a review and tell your friends about the show
that helps more than you know. If you want to
tell me how today's show felt for you, or you
have a request or a question, give us a call
(44:15):
at three two three six four three three seven six
eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you
can find the number in the show notes, or visit
Megan Divine dot c O. If you'd rather send an email,
you can do that. To write on the website, Megan
Divine dot CEO. We want to hear from you. I
want to hear from you. This show, this world needs
(44:39):
your voice. Together, we can make things better even when
they can't be made right. Want more Hereafter. Grief education
doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Nobody has
to have died for you to be experiencing grief. As
my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief
that we just don't call grief. Learning how to talk
(45:00):
about all that without cliches or platitudes or accidentally rude
statements is an important skill for everybody. Find trainings, professional resources,
and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not
Okay at Megan Divine dot c O. Hereafter with Megan
Divine has written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive
(45:21):
producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by Elizabeth Fossio. Logistical
and social media support from Micah. Edited by Houston Tilly.
Music provided by Wave Crush. Background Noise Today provided by
Luna and l A's City Bird. The Helicopter
Host
Megan Devine
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