December 22, 2025 • 19 mins
Dr. Andrew Erdman, the licensed psychotherapist and historian, about his podcast "Feel Familiar? Emotionally Intelligent History." This podcast examines the 1849 Astor Place Theatre Riot, where 2 people died in a celebrity-fueled culture war. Dr. Erdman uses attachment theory, group psychology, and the trauma frameworks to analyze collective behavior.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI
AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Okay,
my next guest. I'm very excited to have on the
show because he's interested in the two things I'm interested in,
psychology and history, and also the question of why don't
we learn from history? I would like to welcome doctor
(00:22):
Andy Erdman a license to get this psychotherapist and a
historian who's uncovering how societies repeatedly enact the same all
nonsense over and over. Hi, doctor Andy, how are you.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Hi, Doctor Wendy. It's great to be here. Yeah, you've
got those interests too. I think it's a rare overlap,
but I think an essential one.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
So your podcast, we should get this out of the
way and make sure we mention it again later. Is
called feel Familiar emotionally intelligent History. And in your podcast
you look at a riot that took place in a
theater in back in eighteen forty nine. Twenty five people died,
and you called it a celebrity fueled culture war. Can
(01:08):
you just tell me in a bullet point what happened there?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, So in eighteen forty nine, this is in Manhattan.
You had a big rivalry between these two actors. One
is named Edwin Forrest and he's kind of the he's
the first American born action he's American born actor. He's
kind of an action hero, kind of a Tom Cruise
Bruce Willis type. And there are all these guys, these
young sort of bros. They're known as the Bowery Boys,
(01:32):
you might have heard that term. And they're very like
pro American, we're real Americans, even though of course they're
not Indigenous Americans. They're immigrants, and they're very white identified,
and you know, they don't like girls, etcetera, etcetera, very masculinist.
And there's a British actor named William McCready who is
really popular, brilliant actor, and he is beloved by the
(01:54):
more elite, moneyed classes of New York, who are known
as the Upper ten or the Codfish Aristotle. I don't
know why they were called that, but it's pretty funny
and I had a lot.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Of money off codfish. I will tell you I'm from
Newfoundland originally.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Okay, oh yeah, so yeah, the cod Yeah, that's that's
serious cod cod neighborhood. So yes, So MacCready comes to
do a tour of Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House,
which is sort of the krem Dela Creme. It's where
the fancy classes like to go, and the Edwin Forrest followers,
these kind of rough and tumble guys, believe this is
(02:30):
like a conspiracy theory of the day. They believe that
McCready has been undermining ned Forrest's career and making it
hard for him to get gigs in England and in Europe.
It's not true, but they believe it. So there's this again,
this kind of white grievance, and there's something very to
me again as a psychotherapist, something very adolescent about it, Harry,
(02:51):
that hurt adolescent where it's like, you're no good, but
we need you to recognize us the way that kind
of an adolescent does. So. So they decide that they're
going to do a big takedown of McCready when he
plays Macbeth at the Opera House in May of eighteen
forty nine, and they put all their people together and
they're going to smash windows and try to break their
(03:12):
way in and shut down their performance. In Meanwhile, the
people who are backing McCready at the opera house. Are
these very prominent New Yorkers, the mayor and also some
well known writers Washington Irving and Herman Melville, and they're like, no, no, no, no, no,
we cannot have the mob telling the unlettered mob telling
us what we can do and can't do. So Forrest
(03:35):
Edwin Forrest, the American guy, does his own version of
Macbeth down at his favorite theater down on Bowery, just
as McCready's doing his. Anyway, there's a big riot. They
try to bring down McCready. The city authorities call in
the National Guard to put down the mob, and the
National Guard ends up opening fire. This is the huge crowd,
(03:55):
there's fifteen thousand people. They end up opening fire and.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Guy, Wow. So we don't want to give the whole
end away. We want people to listen to the whole podcasts.
But what I want to know is one of the
things you talk about is that how unprocessed societal trauma
can can kind of create this cycle of violence in
(04:21):
future generations. In looking into the future from history, how
do you process trauma that's society wide.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, well, it's a good question, and there are different
models for it. And obviously it's not an easy thing.
But if you start with sort of the so I
think like, well, we're working with an individual client, I
would look for the parts of the self that have
been dissociated, that have been repressed, and you can often
see that projected onto the other. So there's a sense
(04:55):
of the self where there's huge amounts of shame, and
shame often gets and grief often gets covered up with
feelings of aggression. So there's there's a way to say
we understand, like nobody wants to feel that they come
from a family, a group, a state, a country, a
race that has done bad things. People don't like to,
(05:18):
you know, admit that sort of thing. But the shame
is survivable and once we integrate that shame. And I
would say this is probably familiar to you, your your
professor of psychology. You know that there's grief, Uh, there's
grief underneath it, there's all and there's existential feelings and
then those are integrated into our adult ego. And so
(05:38):
rather than responding from our kind of limbic system, which
which is, you know, our kind of fight flight. You know,
people familiar with trauma will know that we can begin
to integrate from our pre frontal prefrontal cortex, which is
really our executive function. It's the it's the kind of
thing that goes. Let me think this through first before
I throw a brick through a window, like we all
want to do it when we feel someone cuts us
(06:01):
off in traffic. And I think more than you know
a sense of when people talk about our way of
life is being threatened, I think what they really mean
is they feel at some level is that they're going
to be erased and unseen.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Oh well, that's even been said, right that this erase
of a group of Americans right now are fearing that
they will be erased. And so your answer is exactly.
You know, I often say that, you know, our job,
all of us is to go with a fine tooth
comb through our childhood and process these mini traumas or
(06:36):
experiences through our adult prefrontal cortex. So it's like we
filter it through and there's all kinds of techniques. I'm
sure your clients do it through talk, therapy, sometimes journaling
and writing and sometimes just you know, some of the
most traumatized people produce great art, right, films, poetry, et cetera,
(06:56):
about their pain. So when you think about what's going
on in America today? Well, do you think is the
biggest collective trauma that Americans have not processed?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Well, I think one trauma. I mean, this is not
kind of my original idea, but I think it is
this kind of addiction to kind of Anglo European whiteness,
that we are white somehow and that saves us from
being at the bottom with you know, black and brown people.
(07:31):
And I think underneath that there's a sense of, you know, well,
if I'm not somehow superior, who am I? What am I?
Speaker 1 (07:40):
You know?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
And I think that can account for a lot of
structural you know, and other inequalities that we continue to see.
Now there's also there's also class trauma. There's this society
and you know, we didn't build it on our own
or overnight, but which says that society is a big ladder,
it's a big pyramid. Ultimately you have to sort of
(08:02):
fight your way to the top, and you can't be
sure if someone's been stepping on your head or if
you're going to step on somebody else's head. Rather than
a different conception of a mutual and related you know,
social order, social space kind of like a therapist tries
to create with a client, which is this is an
equal space for you to be here. If that makes sense,
(08:24):
you know exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
We have to go to a break. But when we
come back. Sure, I just watched all of ken Burn's
American Revolution.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
It's a lot of outs. Oh yes, I saw the
first episode.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Oh good, and it really talks about that addiction to
whiteness and also the class piece. I do want to
talk about this, this idea that America is, you know,
broke away from British and the class system, and there
is this illusion that we don't have class, but we
have a lot of very distinct classes. They're just more subtle.
(08:54):
We'll talk about this when we come back. My guests
doctor Andy Erdman. He's a license psychotherapist and his story
in his podcast Feel Familiar Emotionally Intelligent History. You're listening
to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on kf I Am
six forty one Live Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. So,
doctor Andy Erdman, your podcast Feel Familiar Emotionally Intelligent History
(09:16):
looks at a particular event in history, But do you
do some comparisons to what's going on today?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Absolutely, because what we saw in the events that I
cover in Feel Familiar is the Astroplace Theater riot of
eighteen forty nine, in which there's a very race, class,
and gender based divide. It focuses on these two dueling actors,
but really it's about these deeper grievances, and then the
government inter seed. Do you have soldiers on the street
(09:45):
and people are being shot dead, which you know, scarily
is close to what's happening, you know, in places today.
I think what's different about eighteen forty nine is in
that particular fracture you don't have the so called billionaire
classes who at the time are called the upper ten,
the elites, and the sort of white working class, the
(10:06):
sort of angry white working class. They're not aligned, so
you don't have all of the structural power in one place.
I think what's so scary about this moment is you
do have that concumis.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Is very interesting alignment, isn't it, from the lowest classes
to the upper class who have joined hands if you will.
I don't know if you remember a book it's a
little dated now from the eighties by Paul Fussel, literally
called Class a Study of American Society, and it's one
of my favorite books, because he is an Englishman who
comes to America where he's told there's no class, and
(10:37):
then he looks around. He's like, wait a sec, there
is a class. It's divided by zip code, by school
you went to, by street you live on, by what
kind of mustard you eat, whether you have your grandmother's
Persian rug on the floor or something for ikia, and
he breaks it all down. He actually he has a
very funny it's humorous as well, it's true, where he
does a living room test to basically tell what class
(10:59):
you are based on what you can find in your
living room, a fun test to take, so interestingly enough,
I also teach health psychology and I teach stressors, right,
various stressors, And when we talk about class and class stress,
I refer to studies that show that in America, some
(11:21):
of the biggest anxiety about class actually isn't with the
lower classes, nor is it with the upper classes. It
is in the upper middle classes. Because their position is
so precarious. They're pretending to be rich their friends and
they get to hang out with rich people and their
friends and family and neighbors, and everybody thinks they're rich.
(11:44):
But you know, one lost job, one bad investment, and
they fall down into god forbid, the middle class.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
And I'll just say, you know, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book,
I believe it was sort who wrote a book called
Fear of Falling, where there's this deep anxiety of the
people who have, you know, sort of come from I
don't know, immigrant or working class, you know, backgrounds, and
they've reached that gated community. And I think you're absolutely right.
There's identity terror.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Identity terror. So so I have I'm this weird person,
very atypical in the sense that and I think it's
due to the fact that my dad was in the
Canadian military Navy, and we moved a lot, and by
the time I graduated high school, I'd gone to ten
different schools, so I was always the new kid in class.
I knew how to make friends quick, but I was
(12:34):
never part of an in group. I would have to
figure out what the in group was doing and sort
of get assimilated as quickly as possible. But I never
internalized a sense of I must be of a certain class.
And so as a result, I have friends in what
you might consider the lowest classes, but I think they're
very happy people who live at the beach and write
(12:56):
great poetry, right, and and then the various upper I
mean I have private jet friends too. I have it
literally everything in between. And people have always referred to
me as a free spirit. But I think it is
that I was never put in a box growing up.
Do you think a lot of this class and class
stress comes from our childhood?
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I mean absolutely, it comes from our various kinds of conditioning,
a lot of which happens in the family culture, in
the I grew up in a very upper middle class.
We moved from a very middle class to a more
upper middle class neighborhood, very aspirational, and so again a
lot of the identity and the kind of sense of
the false sense of self, you know. And Eric Ericson
(13:39):
the psychologist, talks about what happens during adolescence, which is
we're trying to define who we are in relation to
our core self and in relationship to others. So yeah, like,
particularly during adolescence in high school, we're getting all these
messages from our immediate surroundings and also from the larger
cultural surrounding. And I think it's important, you know, just
(14:01):
like somebody who comes into therapy with certain assumptions about,
you know, what a relationship is, to begin to see
that conditioning for what it is.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Can we talk before we go about crowd behavior? I
think I'm thinking very much about January sixth, right, how
a mob attacked the White House? In your podcast, there
was a mob attacking a theater. Right, What are the
psychological mechanisms that make Because you look at some of
the people that were arrested and then later you know,
(14:30):
let out of prison, and they were hairdressers and real
estate agents and plumbers and former military, regular community, law
abiding people became a mob. How does that happen?
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah, well, there's you know, there's lots of different explanations
for it. And at one level, the kind of political
or historical explanation is that there is a kind of
sort of what you're talking about, a kind of class solidarity,
a sense of we're the real Americans, we belong here.
I think at a deeper psychological level, what I see
is there's there's a sense of safety associated with domination, right,
(15:09):
rather than we sort of have to let other people
to the table. It's not a threat to my it's
not an existential threat to my being, My mind still exists.
Even if somebody else with brown skin and a whole
different worldview, et cetera exists, I can let them exist too.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Or has power.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
I think there's right or has and or has power exactly.
And I think I think at some level you know
to know internally, and this does come from childhood to
know internally, I'm precious and valuable. No matter what you know,
life's going to be hard. But I have that, and
therefore I can see that in others. But when there's
that fragility, there's a reactivity. It's the again, it's not
(15:50):
using the prefrontal cortex. It's a reactivity around this feeling
of a rasure. That's how I would explain that when
you know outside of that, sure people can play by
the rules because that sense of eratire isn't felt. But
when it's felt, those deeper psychological mechanisms get activated.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
If something happens when we're in a group, this diffusion
of responsibility, right, the sense that we're just going to far.
We are sheep when we get in a group. We
love to be a tribe at a pack and we
just follow along.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, and things get normalized and it goes the other way,
you know, seeing I'm just you know, thinking of like Zoron,
Momdani or other kind of leaders who have come out
and behaved and said things differently. Well, the things we
think are unthinkable, for better and for worse, when someone
articulates them, they become normalized in kind of the ether,
and people think like, oh, I guess we can say that.
(16:42):
I guess we can do that. Hey, you know what,
it's not so crazy to think X, Y and Z.
I mean, if you want to know why people behave
the way they do, I think the biggest explanation is
because people around them are behaving that way, you know,
which kind of accords with what you were just saying.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
So yeah, with very little time left, I just want
to ask this question. How do we pass down these
maladaptive coping mechanisms? Is it always within families or do
cultures do it as a group?
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, I think it's both. You know, in social work school,
I was trained in systems theory. So we have the
microsystems around us, our family, our school, our immediate community,
and that's very powerful. We also know that genetically traits
and you know, fears that our great grandparents have, we
might actually have. I think the way that we begin
to change it culturally is starting to change some of
(17:31):
the dialogue in the media sphere, the kind of macro discourse.
And one thing I'd like to see is more emotional
intelligence among people who are in the media and reporters
and so that rather than just arguing or debating or persuading.
I mean, I know that's enjoyable at some level to watch,
but it doesn't move the ball. I'd rather hear, you know,
(17:51):
a journalist say it's curious that I find it curious
that you should say that. Can you tell me more
what I'm hearing? To hear the feeling like a therapist
would do it out well, the.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Truth out, yeah, instead of this arguing, well, we won't
get into what's going on the polarization of the media.
We won't get into well. Doctor Andy Erdman. His podcast
is called Feel Familiar Emotionally Intelligent History. I'm about to
get on a couple of long flights to head home
for the holidays, so I will be listening to many
episodes on those planes.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Thanks for being with us, Thanks for having me, Happy travels.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Thank you. And that brings the Doctor Wendy Wall Show
to a close. I hope all of you have a happy,
happy holiday. As I mentioned at the beginning of the
show that going home for Christmas is often good for
your mental health. It reminds you of who you were,
It helps reposition yourself as somebody in the world. It
(18:46):
causes a wonderful break in the year and have a
little travel and downtime. Unless you've had astronomical trauma in
your childhood, remember that there's a big difference between discomfort
and stress. You might be uncomfortable with some of those conversations,
but get to the dinner table with people, keep an
open mind and remember where you came from. It's very important.
(19:10):
Thanks for being with me. I'm here every Sunday from
seven to nine pm. You can also follow in my
social media at doctor Wendy Walsh. We'll see you next week.
You've been listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on
KFI A M six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI
AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Okay,
my next guest. I'm very excited to have on the
show because he's interested in the two things I'm interested in,
psychology and history, and also the question of why don't
we learn from history? I would like to welcome doctor
(00:22):
Andy Erdman a license to get this psychotherapist and a
historian who's uncovering how societies repeatedly enact the same all
nonsense over and over. Hi, doctor Andy, how are you.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Hi, Doctor Wendy. It's great to be here. Yeah, you've
got those interests too. I think it's a rare overlap,
but I think an essential one.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
So your podcast, we should get this out of the
way and make sure we mention it again later. Is
called feel Familiar emotionally intelligent History. And in your podcast
you look at a riot that took place in a
theater in back in eighteen forty nine. Twenty five people died,
and you called it a celebrity fueled culture war. Can
(01:08):
you just tell me in a bullet point what happened there?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, So in eighteen forty nine, this is in Manhattan.
You had a big rivalry between these two actors. One
is named Edwin Forrest and he's kind of the he's
the first American born action he's American born actor. He's
kind of an action hero, kind of a Tom Cruise
Bruce Willis type. And there are all these guys, these
young sort of bros. They're known as the Bowery Boys,
(01:32):
you might have heard that term. And they're very like
pro American, we're real Americans, even though of course they're
not Indigenous Americans. They're immigrants, and they're very white identified,
and you know, they don't like girls, etcetera, etcetera, very masculinist.
And there's a British actor named William McCready who is
really popular, brilliant actor, and he is beloved by the
(01:54):
more elite, moneyed classes of New York, who are known
as the Upper ten or the Codfish Aristotle. I don't
know why they were called that, but it's pretty funny
and I had a lot.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Of money off codfish. I will tell you I'm from
Newfoundland originally.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Okay, oh yeah, so yeah, the cod Yeah, that's that's
serious cod cod neighborhood. So yes, So MacCready comes to
do a tour of Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House,
which is sort of the krem Dela Creme. It's where
the fancy classes like to go, and the Edwin Forrest followers,
these kind of rough and tumble guys, believe this is
(02:30):
like a conspiracy theory of the day. They believe that
McCready has been undermining ned Forrest's career and making it
hard for him to get gigs in England and in Europe.
It's not true, but they believe it. So there's this again,
this kind of white grievance, and there's something very to
me again as a psychotherapist, something very adolescent about it, Harry,
(02:51):
that hurt adolescent where it's like, you're no good, but
we need you to recognize us the way that kind
of an adolescent does. So. So they decide that they're
going to do a big takedown of McCready when he
plays Macbeth at the Opera House in May of eighteen
forty nine, and they put all their people together and
they're going to smash windows and try to break their
(03:12):
way in and shut down their performance. In Meanwhile, the
people who are backing McCready at the opera house. Are
these very prominent New Yorkers, the mayor and also some
well known writers Washington Irving and Herman Melville, and they're like, no, no, no, no, no,
we cannot have the mob telling the unlettered mob telling
us what we can do and can't do. So Forrest
(03:35):
Edwin Forrest, the American guy, does his own version of
Macbeth down at his favorite theater down on Bowery, just
as McCready's doing his. Anyway, there's a big riot. They
try to bring down McCready. The city authorities call in
the National Guard to put down the mob, and the
National Guard ends up opening fire. This is the huge crowd,
(03:55):
there's fifteen thousand people. They end up opening fire and.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Guy, Wow. So we don't want to give the whole
end away. We want people to listen to the whole podcasts.
But what I want to know is one of the
things you talk about is that how unprocessed societal trauma
can can kind of create this cycle of violence in
(04:21):
future generations. In looking into the future from history, how
do you process trauma that's society wide.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, well, it's a good question, and there are different
models for it. And obviously it's not an easy thing.
But if you start with sort of the so I
think like, well, we're working with an individual client, I
would look for the parts of the self that have
been dissociated, that have been repressed, and you can often
see that projected onto the other. So there's a sense
(04:55):
of the self where there's huge amounts of shame, and
shame often gets and grief often gets covered up with
feelings of aggression. So there's there's a way to say
we understand, like nobody wants to feel that they come
from a family, a group, a state, a country, a
race that has done bad things. People don't like to,
(05:18):
you know, admit that sort of thing. But the shame
is survivable and once we integrate that shame. And I
would say this is probably familiar to you, your your
professor of psychology. You know that there's grief, Uh, there's
grief underneath it, there's all and there's existential feelings and
then those are integrated into our adult ego. And so
(05:38):
rather than responding from our kind of limbic system, which
which is, you know, our kind of fight flight. You know,
people familiar with trauma will know that we can begin
to integrate from our pre frontal prefrontal cortex, which is
really our executive function. It's the it's the kind of
thing that goes. Let me think this through first before
I throw a brick through a window, like we all
want to do it when we feel someone cuts us
(06:01):
off in traffic. And I think more than you know
a sense of when people talk about our way of
life is being threatened, I think what they really mean
is they feel at some level is that they're going
to be erased and unseen.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Oh well, that's even been said, right that this erase
of a group of Americans right now are fearing that
they will be erased. And so your answer is exactly.
You know, I often say that, you know, our job,
all of us is to go with a fine tooth
comb through our childhood and process these mini traumas or
(06:36):
experiences through our adult prefrontal cortex. So it's like we
filter it through and there's all kinds of techniques. I'm
sure your clients do it through talk, therapy, sometimes journaling
and writing and sometimes just you know, some of the
most traumatized people produce great art, right, films, poetry, et cetera,
(06:56):
about their pain. So when you think about what's going
on in America today? Well, do you think is the
biggest collective trauma that Americans have not processed?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Well, I think one trauma. I mean, this is not
kind of my original idea, but I think it is
this kind of addiction to kind of Anglo European whiteness,
that we are white somehow and that saves us from
being at the bottom with you know, black and brown people.
(07:31):
And I think underneath that there's a sense of, you know, well,
if I'm not somehow superior, who am I? What am I?
Speaker 1 (07:40):
You know?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
And I think that can account for a lot of
structural you know, and other inequalities that we continue to see.
Now there's also there's also class trauma. There's this society
and you know, we didn't build it on our own
or overnight, but which says that society is a big ladder,
it's a big pyramid. Ultimately you have to sort of
(08:02):
fight your way to the top, and you can't be
sure if someone's been stepping on your head or if
you're going to step on somebody else's head. Rather than
a different conception of a mutual and related you know,
social order, social space kind of like a therapist tries
to create with a client, which is this is an
equal space for you to be here. If that makes sense,
(08:24):
you know exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
We have to go to a break. But when we
come back. Sure, I just watched all of ken Burn's
American Revolution.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
It's a lot of outs. Oh yes, I saw the
first episode.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Oh good, and it really talks about that addiction to
whiteness and also the class piece. I do want to
talk about this, this idea that America is, you know,
broke away from British and the class system, and there
is this illusion that we don't have class, but we
have a lot of very distinct classes. They're just more subtle.
(08:54):
We'll talk about this when we come back. My guests
doctor Andy Erdman. He's a license psychotherapist and his story
in his podcast Feel Familiar Emotionally Intelligent History. You're listening
to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on kf I Am
six forty one Live Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. So,
doctor Andy Erdman, your podcast Feel Familiar Emotionally Intelligent History
(09:16):
looks at a particular event in history, But do you
do some comparisons to what's going on today?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Absolutely, because what we saw in the events that I
cover in Feel Familiar is the Astroplace Theater riot of
eighteen forty nine, in which there's a very race, class,
and gender based divide. It focuses on these two dueling actors,
but really it's about these deeper grievances, and then the
government inter seed. Do you have soldiers on the street
(09:45):
and people are being shot dead, which you know, scarily
is close to what's happening, you know, in places today.
I think what's different about eighteen forty nine is in
that particular fracture you don't have the so called billionaire
classes who at the time are called the upper ten,
the elites, and the sort of white working class, the
(10:06):
sort of angry white working class. They're not aligned, so
you don't have all of the structural power in one place.
I think what's so scary about this moment is you
do have that concumis.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Is very interesting alignment, isn't it, from the lowest classes
to the upper class who have joined hands if you will.
I don't know if you remember a book it's a
little dated now from the eighties by Paul Fussel, literally
called Class a Study of American Society, and it's one
of my favorite books, because he is an Englishman who
comes to America where he's told there's no class, and
(10:37):
then he looks around. He's like, wait a sec, there
is a class. It's divided by zip code, by school
you went to, by street you live on, by what
kind of mustard you eat, whether you have your grandmother's
Persian rug on the floor or something for ikia, and
he breaks it all down. He actually he has a
very funny it's humorous as well, it's true, where he
does a living room test to basically tell what class
(10:59):
you are based on what you can find in your
living room, a fun test to take, so interestingly enough,
I also teach health psychology and I teach stressors, right,
various stressors, And when we talk about class and class stress,
I refer to studies that show that in America, some
(11:21):
of the biggest anxiety about class actually isn't with the
lower classes, nor is it with the upper classes. It
is in the upper middle classes. Because their position is
so precarious. They're pretending to be rich their friends and
they get to hang out with rich people and their
friends and family and neighbors, and everybody thinks they're rich.
(11:44):
But you know, one lost job, one bad investment, and
they fall down into god forbid, the middle class.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
And I'll just say, you know, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book,
I believe it was sort who wrote a book called
Fear of Falling, where there's this deep anxiety of the
people who have, you know, sort of come from I
don't know, immigrant or working class, you know, backgrounds, and
they've reached that gated community. And I think you're absolutely right.
There's identity terror.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Identity terror. So so I have I'm this weird person,
very atypical in the sense that and I think it's
due to the fact that my dad was in the
Canadian military Navy, and we moved a lot, and by
the time I graduated high school, I'd gone to ten
different schools, so I was always the new kid in class.
I knew how to make friends quick, but I was
(12:34):
never part of an in group. I would have to
figure out what the in group was doing and sort
of get assimilated as quickly as possible. But I never
internalized a sense of I must be of a certain class.
And so as a result, I have friends in what
you might consider the lowest classes, but I think they're
very happy people who live at the beach and write
(12:56):
great poetry, right, and and then the various upper I
mean I have private jet friends too. I have it
literally everything in between. And people have always referred to
me as a free spirit. But I think it is
that I was never put in a box growing up.
Do you think a lot of this class and class
stress comes from our childhood?
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I mean absolutely, it comes from our various kinds of conditioning,
a lot of which happens in the family culture, in
the I grew up in a very upper middle class.
We moved from a very middle class to a more
upper middle class neighborhood, very aspirational, and so again a
lot of the identity and the kind of sense of
the false sense of self, you know. And Eric Ericson
(13:39):
the psychologist, talks about what happens during adolescence, which is
we're trying to define who we are in relation to
our core self and in relationship to others. So yeah, like,
particularly during adolescence in high school, we're getting all these
messages from our immediate surroundings and also from the larger
cultural surrounding. And I think it's important, you know, just
(14:01):
like somebody who comes into therapy with certain assumptions about,
you know, what a relationship is, to begin to see
that conditioning for what it is.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Can we talk before we go about crowd behavior? I
think I'm thinking very much about January sixth, right, how
a mob attacked the White House? In your podcast, there
was a mob attacking a theater. Right, What are the
psychological mechanisms that make Because you look at some of
the people that were arrested and then later you know,
(14:30):
let out of prison, and they were hairdressers and real
estate agents and plumbers and former military, regular community, law
abiding people became a mob. How does that happen?
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah, well, there's you know, there's lots of different explanations
for it. And at one level, the kind of political
or historical explanation is that there is a kind of
sort of what you're talking about, a kind of class solidarity,
a sense of we're the real Americans, we belong here.
I think at a deeper psychological level, what I see
is there's there's a sense of safety associated with domination, right,
(15:09):
rather than we sort of have to let other people
to the table. It's not a threat to my it's
not an existential threat to my being, My mind still exists.
Even if somebody else with brown skin and a whole
different worldview, et cetera exists, I can let them exist too.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Or has power.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
I think there's right or has and or has power exactly.
And I think I think at some level you know
to know internally, and this does come from childhood to
know internally, I'm precious and valuable. No matter what you know,
life's going to be hard. But I have that, and
therefore I can see that in others. But when there's
that fragility, there's a reactivity. It's the again, it's not
(15:50):
using the prefrontal cortex. It's a reactivity around this feeling
of a rasure. That's how I would explain that when
you know outside of that, sure people can play by
the rules because that sense of eratire isn't felt. But
when it's felt, those deeper psychological mechanisms get activated.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
If something happens when we're in a group, this diffusion
of responsibility, right, the sense that we're just going to far.
We are sheep when we get in a group. We
love to be a tribe at a pack and we
just follow along.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, and things get normalized and it goes the other way,
you know, seeing I'm just you know, thinking of like Zoron,
Momdani or other kind of leaders who have come out
and behaved and said things differently. Well, the things we
think are unthinkable, for better and for worse, when someone
articulates them, they become normalized in kind of the ether,
and people think like, oh, I guess we can say that.
(16:42):
I guess we can do that. Hey, you know what,
it's not so crazy to think X, Y and Z.
I mean, if you want to know why people behave
the way they do, I think the biggest explanation is
because people around them are behaving that way, you know,
which kind of accords with what you were just saying.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
So yeah, with very little time left, I just want
to ask this question. How do we pass down these
maladaptive coping mechanisms? Is it always within families or do
cultures do it as a group?
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, I think it's both. You know, in social work school,
I was trained in systems theory. So we have the
microsystems around us, our family, our school, our immediate community,
and that's very powerful. We also know that genetically traits
and you know, fears that our great grandparents have, we
might actually have. I think the way that we begin
to change it culturally is starting to change some of
(17:31):
the dialogue in the media sphere, the kind of macro discourse.
And one thing I'd like to see is more emotional
intelligence among people who are in the media and reporters
and so that rather than just arguing or debating or persuading.
I mean, I know that's enjoyable at some level to watch,
but it doesn't move the ball. I'd rather hear, you know,
(17:51):
a journalist say it's curious that I find it curious
that you should say that. Can you tell me more
what I'm hearing? To hear the feeling like a therapist
would do it out well, the.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Truth out, yeah, instead of this arguing, well, we won't
get into what's going on the polarization of the media.
We won't get into well. Doctor Andy Erdman. His podcast
is called Feel Familiar Emotionally Intelligent History. I'm about to
get on a couple of long flights to head home
for the holidays, so I will be listening to many
episodes on those planes.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Thanks for being with us, Thanks for having me, Happy travels.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Thank you. And that brings the Doctor Wendy Wall Show
to a close. I hope all of you have a happy,
happy holiday. As I mentioned at the beginning of the
show that going home for Christmas is often good for
your mental health. It reminds you of who you were,
It helps reposition yourself as somebody in the world. It
(18:46):
causes a wonderful break in the year and have a
little travel and downtime. Unless you've had astronomical trauma in
your childhood, remember that there's a big difference between discomfort
and stress. You might be uncomfortable with some of those conversations,
but get to the dinner table with people, keep an
open mind and remember where you came from. It's very important.
(19:10):
Thanks for being with me. I'm here every Sunday from
seven to nine pm. You can also follow in my
social media at doctor Wendy Walsh. We'll see you next week.
You've been listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on
KFI A M six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
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