Telling Harsh Stories to Yourself About Yourself? How To Rewrite the Narrative. | Allison Sweet Grant

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:19Hello, everybody. How we doing? I suspect we all have brutal stories that we tell about ourselves to ourselves. Mine has often been that I'm incredibly selfish, maybe even irredeemably rotten. But for you, the story might be that you're a fraud, an imposter, a failure, unworthy, not smart enough, not outgoing enough, unlovable. Maybe you're haunted by shame or by addiction. I could go on. The menu is vast. Today, I'm going to talk to a living example of the possibility of rewriting your narrative. Alison Sweet Grant is a psychiatric nurse practitioner turned author. Her newish novel is called I Am the Cage.

0:59It's loosely based on her own childhood experiences, which were quite brutal and which she will describe for you. In this conversation, we talk about the impact of your childhood trauma on your adult relationships, the concept of a junk drawer. That's a metaphor for all of the pain and self-doubt and anxiety that you might try to compartmentalize in a junk drawer. We talk about writing as a tool for self-acceptance, how to rewrite your own story and where to start, practical meditation tools to quiet the mind, the role of cathartic visualization, dealing with imposter syndrome, and much more. Just a quick mention before we dive in that our next live meditation and Q &A session will be this Tuesday, October 21st at 4 Eastern.

1:42We do these every Tuesday at the same time. Sign up at danharris.com. And if you want to meditate with me in person, I am co-leading a weekend retreat very soon, October 24th through 26th at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's going to be me, Sabine Selassie, Jeff Warren, and Afosu Jones-Korté. It'll be super fun. We do a session Friday night, two sessions on Saturday, and then a final one on Sunday morning in between. Lots of free time to hike, play tennis, get a massage, do yoga, whatever. The sessions mix meditation, discussion among the teachers, discussion among the audience members.

2:17The idea is really to mix serious meditation practice with socializing, and that's why we call it Meditation Party. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to sign up. Okay, we'll get started with Alison Sweet Grant right after this. Alison Sweet Grant, welcome to the show. Thank you. So nice to be here, Dan. Yeah, it's nice to meet you after having heard tell of you for a while, but not actually having been able to put a face to the name. So it's great to finally be with you. Thank you. Well, I feel the same. I've watched you on television for a long time and read a lot of your work and seen your TED Talk, and it feels great to talk with you in person.

2:56Thank you. Appreciate that. All right. Well, I don't know if you're comfortable starting this way, but I would be curious to hear a little bit of your personal story. I guess this is kind of me diving right into the tough stuff, so feel free to deflect if you want. But I know at the heart of your new novel is a personal history that is not fictionalized. And I've read that you have argued that this personal story was kind of eating its way out of you over time. And this novel is a manifestation of that. So would you be comfortable walking us through what happened to you as a child? Sure. Right from the beginning, I was born with something called a fibular hemimelia and congenital short femur, which essentially translates to having one leg shorter than the other one, one longer than the other one.

3:46And in order to correct the discrepancy, I had to undergo a pretty arduous procedure that involves surgically breaking the bones of the affected limb, attaching a metal external fixator, which is essentially something that looks sort of like a birdcage from hip to toe, and stretching the bones over an extended period of time so that new bone fills in the spaces. Essentially, the aim of the procedure is so that both legs at the end are the same length. It started when I was 11 years old. The entire procedure took approximately two years. And the book that I wrote, it's not a memoir, but it is heavily inspired by this experience in my adolescence.

4:44I don't know if this is me being overly dramatic, but that procedure sounds barbaric. I wouldn't say it's overly dramatic. There were certainly times while I was going through it that it felt barbaric. In actuality, it's kind of amazing that this can be done. And it's a procedure that's still used today for different diagnoses, for different complications. but certainly as a child not fully understanding the extent of what was involved it felt horrific at times and it led to a lot of emotional trauma that I carried with me for decades and that's really was the catalyst for this book as you said it absolutely felt like something was inside of me that was bursting to get out that I hadn't talked about for so long.

5:45And it was just sort of like stewing. Writing this book was a part of my healing process. The trauma, was it the result of the physical pain only? Or was it also, I understand from the research I've done coming into this interview, that it was also the fact that there were social costs. This was happening for you at the formative ages of 11, 12, 13, when everybody's in junior high and mean. And also there was some stuff about your parents and the doctors not always giving you full information. So if I understand correctly, this is kind of a multidimensional trauma. Yeah, I would definitely agree with you.

6:32I think there were a lot of layers to it. Yes, the procedure itself was incredibly physically painful. I was not only the actual surgical procedure to put the apparatus on, but then the process of stretching the bone over a period of time and lugging around this very heavy brace that was a permanent fixture on my body. It was something I couldn't take off. It was painful. It was physically painful. but the toll that it took on me psychologically like you said at those formative stages in middle school where everybody is in a fishbowl essentially and there's no escaping it you know this was also 30 years ago I think that the way that children are treated in medical settings you know it was very different back then.

7:27I wasn't given a lot of information. Oftentimes I was sitting in the room and people were talking about me, but they weren't talking to me. There was no trauma-informed care, no patient-centered care. I never spoke with a social worker. I never went to a support group. I was just sort of expected to handle it on my own. And I had trouble handling it on my own. And so, yeah, there was a lot going on. As I listen to the story, and I'm obviously projecting here, but the experience sounds, and you'll tell me if I'm correct, the experience sounds lonely. It was very lonely. It was very isolating. For a long period of time, I was out of school because it was complicated.

8:15And there were resources that I needed during the day that a school at that time couldn't provide. And so I was home. in a hospital bed pretty much by myself. And so, yes, it was both physically and psychologically lonely. It wasn't something that was very well known as a problem and as a procedure. So to be out in the world with this very visible and scary-looking device, you know, attached to my physical body, there were a lot of questions. There were a lot of stares. People didn't understand what was happening to me. And in a way, I didn't really either. And so it was a very lonely experience.

8:59You said it went from 11 to 13. Was it the type of situation where it ended and everybody just expected you to resume your life as if nothing had happened? Yes, pretty much. When I had the fixator removed, there's a very short period after where I wore like a cast, a fiberglass cast, and then had physical therapy to regain my gait and things like that. But after that short period, yeah, there was very little follow-up. I was pretty much just expected to forget it, which was really hard to do. And instead of forgetting it and instead of talking about it, I just held it all inside and it sort of festered.

9:42You have a concept that you talk about in the novel, I'm the Cage. the concept is the junk drawer. Does that seem relevant to our current discussion? I think so. Can you explain it? The junk drawer is really just a metaphor for all of the things that I struggled with and didn't have anywhere to put them. It was just a place inside of me where I kept all of the negative things that I thought about myself, all of the negative things that other people, whether intentionally or unintentionally, gave to me, all of the self-doubt, all of the loneliness, all of the anxiety, all of the pain. It was sort of just like a collection basket for all of those anxieties.

10:35And it's a place that I referred back to. It was sort of like a filing system. You know, is that something that do you have a junk drawer? I would venture to argue that there's nobody without a junk drawer. Another metaphor that gets used, and I'm forgetting the poet's name, maybe Robert Bly. I apologize if I'm mangling that, but he has this idea of a black bag. Everybody carries a black bag full of shit that we're lugging around with us all the time. It's our history. And one way to cultivate empathy and compassion is just to imagine everybody you encounter during the course of your day lugging that black bag or their junk drawer.

11:25They may have worked with it. They may have not. But it is in either case going to inform the way they show up in the world now. Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. I think everybody has a black bag or a junk drawer. I didn't even really know until I started writing that I had it. Right? It becomes like a part of you and you don't even realize that it's like this separate entity. But yeah, once I started opening it up and going through it, looking at all these memories that I had filed away, I was sort of able to process them a lot easier. So before that point, as you'd built a career as a psychiatric nurse practitioner and a robust personal life as a wife and a mom, you kind of had this junk drawer that was acting upon you in ways that were often subconscious?

12:17Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the weight of the experiences that I had, I think I didn't even realize they were weighing me down. I knew that I was sort of an anxious person. I knew that I was a paranoid person, but I always kind of just attributed it to me, like my oddities, kind of being like a strange kid. And I never really realized, hey, like you went through these really difficult situations that anybody would have residual weirdness from, right? Maybe residual like anxiety or residual trust issues. And And I never really gave myself that grace to say anybody would feel this way. I always just blame myself for being not able to handle it.

13:07Writing this book was a huge part of allowing myself to, I don't know, to cut myself some slack, giving myself permission to be the way that I am and say it's okay. I mean, that makes complete sense. What was the mechanism by which it produced that outcome? How did writing a fictionalized version of your childhood trauma allow you to cut yourself some slack? I think writing for me is one of the only ways that I can be clear about the things that I'm thinking and feeling. And putting it down on paper was really important. And some people are really great at expressing themselves in words, and other people are more physical.

14:05And there's so many different ways of putting the real you out there. And that's something I struggled with for a long time because there was a lot of shame in what I thought was the real me. But putting it down in a book, putting it down in words, I was able to say exactly what I wanted to say and examine things. in ways that I had never been able to before. I don't know. It just gave me permission to be honest and to not feel like I was being judged by anyone else, to not feel like I had to perform for anyone else, to look or act a certain way. It was like the opportunity to be the most honest that I had been in a really long time.

14:52Once I started doing that, it kind of just kept coming, if that makes sense. Once I started, I didn't want to stop. And that's where the book came from. Tell me if you think this is an accurate description of how this works. So you have the junk drawer. I'm going to stay with that analogy. And it's like for most of your life, several decades, it was everything, all the junk in the drawer was locked up in said drawer. You were not thinking about it. You were actively suppressing it or compartmentalizing it, or actually not even actively subconsciously suppressing it even deeper into your subconscious.

15:29And then you make the conscious decision to open the junk drawer and put it all on the table. Okay, here's a like a used paper clip. Here's a coaster that's stained. Here's that horrible shit that happened in seventh grade. Here's that thing that doctor said in front of me as if I wasn't there. Here's some old currency from a foreign country. Well, all the random shit that's in the drawer is on the table and therefore becomes much more workable. You can see it all pretty clearly. And then you can rearrange it in a way that gives you a ton of agency. Would that be a rough description of how the process worked for you?

16:05I think that's a great description of how the process worked. You've talked before about this downward spiral, right? The toilet spiral. Is that the right? Yeah, it comes from Evelyn Triboli, who's a friend of mine and has been on this show at least once. She calls it the toilet vortex, and it's a phrase that she got from the novelist Nabokov. Okay. I felt like I was in the vortex. Like there was all of this stuff spinning around with me. Like I was trying to grab at things and I didn't even know what these things were as they were like spinning around beside me. You know what I mean? Down the vortex.

16:47laying them all out on the table was the first step for me in reversing the vortex and going up the upward spiral right and making a conscious effort to examine what happened and not again not worry about being judged by anyone else but just really examining what happened how i felt it, what my life was like because of it, and then making a conscious choice to not let it define me anymore. Yeah. Just to fill in some of the blanks here about the vortex, the toilet vortex and the upward spiral. I talked about this in a TED talk I gave that your husband was very helpful with. He was one of the first people that I practiced it with.

17:35The toilet vortex is when you're kicking your own ass in any number of ways. and then that shows up in your relationships with other people. And then that makes you unhappy because relationships are so important to human flourishing. And then you're even harder on yourself and then the relationships get worse and then down you go. The opposite is where your inner weather through any number of means, in this case, creative self-expression, turning toward trauma instead of trying to run away from it. Your inner weather improves and then your relationships improve and then you get happier because again, relationships are probably the most important variable in human flourishing, and then your relationships improve even further, and up you go.

18:14And I don't think we're on one of these perpetually. We toggle back and forth, but you can make yourself more prone to one or the other. I'll stop talking and see if any of that resonates with you. It definitely resonates. I mean, like you said, I think my trauma came out in the way I interacted with everybody. And once you start looking at things through a different lens. You can interact with people in a different way and your relationships change. That's something that I absolutely saw happen over the course of writing this book. I think I'm a better person having written it. I think I'm a better wife having written it.

18:53I think I'm a better mother having written it. It only gets better from there, hopefully. What I would want for you is some grace to go into the toilet vortex if you haven't slept enough or Or if a nasty memory surfaces and you don't have full awareness of it, perfection is not on offer. Yeah. Don't you think that it's hard to know? Like when you're in the toilet vortex, like for a long time, I didn't even really know. You're suffering, but it's so like normalized, you don't realize it's suffering. A hundred percent. That's why it's so important to name that. That's why when I heard from Evelyn, this idea of the toilet vortex, I was like, that's great.

19:33I'm going to use that because part of my job, and I think actually now part of your job as a, I think this is your third book, as an author, you know, one of the services you can provide is to name things that people are kind of ambiently, vaguely aware of, but have never crystallized or fully articulated so that they have like, what's the fancy word for this? Like a heuristic, a way to understand it when it happens to them. Yeah. I'm still working on it for sure. My experience is only my experience. And I hope that there are people out there who read it and can connect to it and say, oh yeah, I know exactly what she was feeling when she said this.

20:10I mean, that's amazing and all that I can hope for, but I'm still working on it too. There are still those thoughts and feelings that I haven't figured out how to turn them into a heuristic yet, how to turn them into words. It takes time. Yes. Yes. No, it absolutely takes time. The words that I find myself uttering a lot, because people will say to me, yeah, you're pretty anxious for a meditation evangelist or whatever. Well, first of all, I say, well, you have the causality wrong. I'm a meditation evangelist because I'm anxious. But I also say something that my friend Sam Harris, I'm not related to, but who's a good friend of mine and who has also interviewed your husband on his podcast, on Sam's podcast.

20:54I was asking him many years ago, hey, you've been meditating for decades. what do you like? And he said, well, I retain the capacity to be a schmuck. And I really like that. If we create perfection as a goal, especially in this realm of whatever you want to call it, self-improvement, self-understanding. Yeah, well, nobody's going to get there. So it's not constructive. Yeah. You know, I have an interesting relationship with meditation, which is that like I try it repeatedly. And the hardest part for me is like clearing everything else out and focusing on the nothing, right? And I know for a lot of people, it's not nothing that they try to focus on.

21:36It's something very specific and poignant. I have a hard time with that. I just wonder how do you yourself work through that when you're meditating? One of the most helpful insights for me and the thing that I try to say as loudly and frequently as possible. So thank you for giving me another opportunity to say it, is that the whole notion of clearing, clearing the mind or like there's a healthy version of clearing and then there's an unhealthy version of clearing. And the unhealthy version is unhealthy because it's just impossible. Like if you tell yourself that you're going to stop thinking, well, even that is a thought.

22:16So that's not going to happen. There is a healthy version of clearing where over time, if you do this practice where you focus your mind for just a few nanoseconds on your breath, on the feeling of your full body sitting in the chair, on loving kindness phrases, on sounds in the environment, you just pick something to focus on. And then every time you get distracted, start again and again and again. Over time, the mind does cough up less nonsense. And when it does, you're more aware of it. And that's a kind of gentle clearing away of old habit patterns and neuroses. But first of all, you can't do it with a hostile attitude.

23:00And second, it's not going to be a thorough cleaning. Like even the Buddha, after he got enlightened, you can see in the ancient texts, in his mind, he's still seeing old, unhelpful stuff coming up. He's just no longer fooled by it. Yeah. So for me, just to take it back down to earth for a second, I'm not surprised or dismayed when I noticed that I'm planning a homicide or whatever it is during my meditation session. It's just, it's what the mind does. And my goal is just to notice when I've gotten carried away and start again. One little phrase that I sometimes use, I literally use this when I'm meditating, when I wake up from distraction, whether it's been a second or 10 minutes is great job.

23:43Welcome back. And that's something you say to yourself, to myself. Yes. Yeah, I did it. I was doing some walking meditation last night where you kind of walk slowly or this helps me fall asleep, walk slowly around the house a little bit and feel my body moving. And then you get distracted and you start again. I was on some big jag of some dunking I was going to do on an enemy or something like that. And I was just like, yeah, great job. Welcome back. Here's the world again. As my friend Jeff Warren says, it was like I'd been swallowed by a whale. You know, everything was gone. Reality was gone.

24:16I was in my revenge fantasy. And it's just like, oh, well, I'm back. Here's the world again. You know, great job. It seems like you have a lot of revenge fantasies. This is. Well, I would say. I don't feel judged. Partly I use those for comedic effect. And it does speak to, I think there are two modes that I fall back into as a default, greed or self-centeredness or hatred, anger, which can be directed outwardly or inwardly. Right. You know, again, to be Buddhist about this, the Buddha talked about these three poisons of the mind, greed, hatred, and delusion, which is just being confused, often confused that you're in the grips of greed or hatred.

25:06I don't really take it personally too much. It's just, this is the nature of the mind. And so over time, learning to get a little bit friendly with these aspects of the mind so they don't have their hands on the steering wheel so frequently. Anyway, does it answer your question at all about how to meditate? Right? I'll have to get back to you on that. I think it's something that I try to do often. I find it hard to carve out time during the day to sit down and meditate, but I do find it easy when I have a few spare minutes in the middle of an activity that I'm consciously doing to pause and take a few minutes to meditate.

25:47But that's also when it's hardest to focus. I do that in the car when I'm waiting to pick up my kids from school where I'm parked and there's nothing to do other than look out the window or listen to the radio. That's a time when I feel like, oh, I can take two minutes to try to center myself, to meditate, to repeat a mantra. And almost always I find myself looking out the window at the birds or whatever. I don't know. I haven't yet found a way to always call myself back. Well, I got to say what I'm hearing is actually pretty good. Oh. Part of why I wanted to, before I went off into Buddhist esoterica, part of what I was really trying to say to you is, and this is something I hear from people all the time, I think you may have a story that you're a bad meditator, but actually what you're describing is good meditation, which is you try to focus on one thing, you get distracted, you start again.

26:45That's it. That's it. There are rarefied states at the deep end of the pool, but it's not relevant for most of us. And my practice, after having done this for 16 years, which, by the way, is nothing compared to the many, many masters I know, really is like trying to focus on one thing, get distracted, start again. I may be a little bit better at staying undistracted, but not that much better. That's not the point. The point is not to get better at meditation, although that can happen and it can be beautiful. But the point really is to get better at life, to be less owned by all of your thoughts.

27:22And so if you're finding a couple of minutes most days to try to focus on your breath or something like that, and then you get distracted, you're staring out the window or whatever it is, and then you wake up from that and you start again, like, great. Yeah. Well, I'll take it. Thank you. If you say I'm good at it, I appreciate that. Good. I'm going to go with that. I was interested when I was reading up on you that you had mentioned meditation as something that was helpful for you, given your husband's very public and longstanding history of hostility toward meditation. How does it go down when you guys are talking about this?

28:00Well, we actually don't really talk about it that often because he is, like you said, pretty averse to meditation. But really, personally, I think it just comes down to time. I mean, you have to set aside time to do this, and he doesn't have a lot of time. It's pretty simple, right? We're lucky he sets aside time to brush his teeth, and meditation takes a backseat to that, I guess. Fair enough. Yeah.

28:32Much more with Alison's Week, Brent, after this.