Neeta Bhushan - How to Cultivate Resilience and Grit Through Emotional Agility

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34Welcome back. My guest today is the author of this that sucked. Now what? Dr. Nita Bouchan is an inspirational speaker, an author, a podcast host. I will be on her podcast. We recorded myself and Alice for Unstressable, my book, which is coming out, our next book, which is coming out in end of April. So Nita will release somewhere mid-April on the podcast that's called The Brave Table. It was a very interesting conversation, so I urge you to go there. Nita is a wonderful friend who has constant contributions to the world of well-being. Her passion is really to help people find joy in difficult times.

1:16And I think it shows from the title of the book. The subtitle is How to Embrace the Joy in Chaos and Find Magic in the Mess. So, yeah, I think we are at a time, Nita, where there is a lot of mess in the world. So very timely indeed. The book was out in 2023, February, if I remember correctly. Paperback is out in January this year. Lovely, lovely read. But let's spend some time to talk about it. First of all, thank you for the time. And thank you for doing this when you're jet lagged. So, yeah, so it is. When were you back? No, I got back on Friday, actually, Thursday night. So that's not too bad.

1:59That's the fourth day now, right? Yeah, it's the fourth day. My experience is that the worst day is the first day, actually. Is that? Is it really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the first day I basically, you know, this is when I normally make up my mind that I will never travel again. And then you forget on the fifth day, as you know. This is, yeah. And I kind of feel like the experience of emotional roller coasters, like, oh my gosh, you know, where am I? What, what am I, what am I doing? So it's, I'll keep you posted. Very good. So I know you were in, you were traveling for a reason, but I think maybe if you're open to the idea, the book gives it away.

2:40Like that sucked. Now what? What sucked? Would you mind telling us why you decided to write this? Yeah. So I have had many sucky moments and that would be an understatement. There's a paragraph in the book where if they were giving, you know, an EGOT for, you know, the awards for it, I'd probably win some sort of the trauma Olympics or something like that. And this is by any means a competition. I had gone through a lot of early losses and having born and raised with Filipino Indian parents in the States, they kind of migrated for that air quotes, American dream. They were really hard workers.

3:31I was the oldest of three kids. And of course, being the oldest daughter, there's a lot of these unsaid obligations. They came from the East, et cetera. And also, I think that there was, of course, this pressure. And so by the time I was 10, I became a caretaker to my mom. And my mom had gone through various iterations of what was breast cancer at the time, And then literally from 10 to 16, I would spend my evenings, weekends, she would be in and out of hospital settings. And so that was really kind of the core upbringing for me and my two younger brothers. I was 10 and they were eight and five.

4:20And so at 16, the cancer had spread to her lungs and she transitioned. And so kind of family dynamics at the time, my dad was this Punjabi, stern Indian man. And in that culture, it's not known for a male widow to kind of take on the responsibilities of three kids, let alone three kids under 16. and he went into this severe depression. I think there's a lot of stigma with, you know, how do you function in society, et cetera. And I was kind of, I was always told I'm resilient, I'm strong. And so I had a very good idea of what resiliency was. For me, it meant strong. Nita, you're strong. You're, you have this, you're the eldest.

5:16And so again, a lot of internal pressure. And so a year after my mom died, my brother DJ was, he was 15 years old and he was coming out of his high school and he had an asthma attack and fully collapsed. And they took him, they tried to revive him, but there was no chance he had transitioned that day. And that happened to be on my youngest brother's 12th birthday. And so that, again, it was a year after my mom had transitioned. So a lot of pain, a lot of grief, a lot of loss, so sudden. We couldn't wrap our heads around it, honestly. And the only thing my father knew what to say and kind of how to cope with this extenuating, excruciating pain was, all right, straight A's, work, go to school.

6:14And that became my coping mechanism. And not only that, I learned early on how to, I guess, deal with family dynamics and human connection. I was able to, because I didn't really have a normal childhood. My dad, he really tried his best to make sure that we were having friends. And even at 16, 17, teenagers are already cruel. They don't really know what to say when you're going through loss. And all you want to do is actually fit in. And I remember there were times, especially during this period where I would have my friends just come over and it would just be, you know, they would be singing or, you know, we'd be playing board games.

6:58And there was some sense of normalcy. I remember wanting to escape so many times and now having the pressure of, I'm the only female in the house. And that meant to work one, two, three jobs to put and help my dad put foot on the table. And then two years after that, we had the diagnosis that my father had stage four lung cancer. They found an inoperable tumor. And that was the doctor said that he had 10 months to live and he sure lived up until those 10 months. And so just shy of my 19th birthday, I was 18, I found myself orphaned. And now the person taking care of my youngest brother who was 14 at the time.

7:53And so this time before I kind of spearheaded into my 20s, there was a big, huge sense of what am I meant to do? What is this all about? What is this world? What is this all about? And so I remember early on questioning even faith, of course. And I even write about the first part of my book, I write about the chip on your shoulder. Sometimes when things happen or when you have, it may not be a loss, it may be a setback, a challenge, you didn't get the promotion, et cetera, you worked so hard on something. And now you have this kind of vigor, these wings almost on your back to say, okay, I'm going to prove everybody wrong.

8:42And that was kind of this sense that I felt that I wanted to take my younger brother and I out of this dark cloud. And honestly, I had no idea if this dark cloud would ever let up because that was literally my entire childhood. But what I did know was, okay, I went on to dental school because my coping mechanism was, all right, overwork, overcompensate, overachieve. And of course, it's part of my tiger parent upbringing as well. So I spearheaded into my 20s. I went to dental school and we did do some therapy, some talk therapy. We had an enormous amount of family around us, but that really started to shape my intentions, my goals in life, which were all outward, outward success.

9:33It was outward achievements, accolades. The ego was really driving it in many ways, but it was a survival mechanism. It was how to not feel the enormous amount of pain, especially because early on I was told, okay, you're a warrior, Nita, you got this. And so I was just like bulldozing and charging through. And so in, I would say my mid to late 20s, I would find love. And that's one of the areas that I was probably not the most adept, meaning that I was so afraid of being alone that I would attach myself to these interesting, unhealthy, and even sometimes toxic relationships. And so to the point of in my late 20s, I get married and we have these amazing trappings of success.

10:32I have all the lavish, et cetera, things. And everyone in our family circle, you're the one that's the golden child that everybody kind of compares everyone else to. It's like, you've made it, you've done it. Because I had a booming practice. I wasn't even 30 at the time. you know, graduated all of the things. And I was a cosmetic dentist and I was married. And I remember vividly, you know, December 31st, this is 2011, where I had this overwhelming amount of just anxiety and fear and just rage and all of these feelings that started to bubble up. And it was some of those same feelings that I put away in a back closet when they told me my mom's cancer spread to her lungs and her brain and they couldn't do anything about it.

11:35When they told me my dad had stage four lung cancer and that he only had 10 months to live. When I found out that my brother had taken his last breath and this feeling of, oh my goodness, I know something is going to happen, this change, and I don't really feel safe. That was December 31st, 2011, where I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at all of the trappings of success and And I felt that I was spiritually dead. Physically, I was in a very toxic situation. And that was the first time I admitted to myself. I looked in the mirror in my master bedroom and I said, I need help. Because for the first time ever, I thought, okay, I'm strong.

12:25Everyone's been telling me I'm strong. I'm strong my whole life. But it was the first time I was allowing myself to break and let people in. And that would then open the doors and this cascade of the next seven years of my life where it would be all around full breakdown and full allowing myself to heal and letting people in and the closest people to me who, of course, everyone knew that I was in this kind of situation, but didn't really know because I was keeping things. and shoving things under a rug. And so that was, I guess I would say my first awakening into these sucky moments, but to say, all right, now what?

13:13Now what? That that has happened. And for me, this now what piece really looked like the beginning formations of what I talk about in the book, which is called your bounce factor. And it's really this internal foundation of what happens to us after these sucky moments. And not just for us to be strong, air quotes, so that we can rise up again, but what happens when we actually can bounce back. Because the actual Latin root of the word resiliere is to bounce. And if we are looking at some of the factors that help us bounce, then we can not only bounce, but be able to fly forward through some of the obstacles and also begin to integrate those pieces.

14:07I want to first just visit some of those emotions, which I think are very important for. I always tell people before you go into thinking about what you can do, there is a lot that is found in the sense of awareness of how hard life can be, right? And for many of us, we don't imagine that our own test is not the most difficult test out there. When in reality, when you look at the stories of life of others, it's just somehow always quite challenging. There is always someone who has a bigger challenge than us. And many of my listeners will know that in the last few weeks, I first lost my sister-in-law, which was truly, truly, truly my sister.

14:56And, you know, so much love that she brought into my life, 40 some years. And she left us, you know, as a result of a heart attack when she was taking care of my sick brother, who was diagnosed with several cancers. And then a few weeks later, as we observed his recovery and, you know, doing better after maybe a year of treatment, something completely out of the blue, you know, just takes him from us. And I get a lot of people that will tell me that, you know, losing Ali, my son, and then losing two of my closest people. And then a week later, my mom falls and breaks a few bones and so on. And you think people look at me and go like, oh, my God, you're so resilient.

15:37Oh, my God, this is, you know, we hope you have strength. And I always say, well, I have to say, I'm sure there are others who are going through rougher than this and much tougher lives than this. And when you tell your story of having to go through three losses in four years at age 16 and to have to really attend to your sick mother since age 10, that is by far like 100 times more challenging than what I have to go through when I'm in my 50s, having seen life and so on. So my question is very straightforward. It seems that for most of us who have gone through those kinds of tragedies or traumas, life tends to look a little easier afterwards.

16:25It's almost as if we sort of like, yeah, we look back at it. And as you tell your story, it feels that you still love your life somehow, that you're still grateful for your life somehow, that you look back at all of this and you're not victimizing yourself somehow. And I found that those who go through more of life's tests tend to find more joy in life in general and more appreciation for the fact that life comes with a lot of tests. Is that something that you would share? Oh, my goodness. I feel like I think that you you cannot take the joy out of me. Exactly right. I think that, well, and to your point, I think that even with my subtitle, How to Embrace the Joy and Chaos and Find Magic in the Mass, I think at the end of the day, it's really about the duality and the paradox of some of these really big, heavy emotions.

17:27And I honestly couldn't quite, obviously, I didn't have the language for it while going through multiple tragedies. But take, for example, any listener that's listening to you right now, maybe they're thinking and they're going through this thinking, wow, I just had a breakup. Or I'm going through a divorce. Or I just had a friend breakup and this was my best friend for several years. Or there was some sort of a betrayal. These are still losses. Of course. They're still losses. And they will have this like soupy mix of, you know, complex emotions. And why are they complex? Well, because we sometimes villainize even feeling these really big emotions where it's so easy for us to numb and distract and avoid and bury ourselves in work and do any of the addictions.

18:24I know I fell into the addiction of just working and that was a coping mechanism. And I know many of us overachievers or high achievers, we tend to do this to avoid pain or for proving ourselves, et cetera. And not that it's a bad thing, it's just a coping mechanism. And so to be okay with grief or to be able to feel the bigness of grief, then we should be able to feel its opposite. the bigness of joy. And I remember, Mo, one of the times when I was in my teenage years, and of course I was still a teenager. Of course I was still going to have little crushes on people. And I remember one day going to visit my mom after school because I grew up in Chicago and it was on the way home.

19:13And I remember there was a boy at the coffee shop and I still remembered going to see my mother who was mostly dying in the ICU, but I was still able to get butterflies in my stomach because I saw this boy at the coffee shop and he smiled at me or something like that as a 15-year-old. And so to be able to feel again the paradox of those emotions, and there were times even throughout some of those phases, the loss of my brother where it's like I did not want to feel, I did not want to go to see a movie with my friends. I did not want to go to a concert. And I remember vividly my dad said, no, you will go.

20:03Because we couldn't be in this, there's only so much of this cloud of deep sadness that you can be in for so long so that we can experience this contrast of life because all of us are going to have several iterations of this human experience. And I used to have this kind of, in psychology, it's like this survivor's guilt. Yeah. You know, why my brother and why not me? Yeah. And so you even overcompensate on that level and I shouldn't be feeling good for myself because my dad just went and lost two really big people in his life. And so, and this is where a lot of us people pleasers or givers or martyrs, if we have this archetype, we kind of run ourselves to the ground thinking that we don't deserve love, we're not worthy of it, or that we have to somehow work even harder to prove ourselves worthy.

21:04Yeah. Do you remember, you know, your 20s in comparison to your friends? So you hosted me and Alice the other day and Alice again had several losses in her life. And, you know, she would always tell the story about how she sometimes would, you know, drink, for example, in her 20s, most of her friends would be drinking to have fun and she would be drinking to escape. Right. To sort of almost numb that constant despair of why is life doing this to me? Why is it me and not everyone else? yeah. How, how were your twenties? Were you only working? What was going on? So it's, it's interesting. And I, I talk about this in the, in the book, uh, when I turned, when I turned 20, this was a year after my dad died.

21:55And I remember so vividly, I wanted to, I just, I wanted to escape. I wanted to escape this, this, this dark cloud that literally was with me since, I mean, the most formative years of my life since I was 10. And I didn't know any better, but I just knew my soul was really, it's like I needed to get out of this bubble of Chicago and just where I was. And I ended up going to college in Chicago, Loyola University, Chicago, and they had other campuses globally. And I remember seeing in, And the bathroom stalls, they used to have these flyers with the numbers that you take out. And it says, apply here if you want to go and study abroad this summer and in Roma, Italy.

22:48And I said, oh my gosh, this might be a sign. It was one of those things. And I'm like, I need to get out of here. and I remember having to convince my Filipino grandmother and my Indian bua, which is who I was sharing and mentioning about before my dad's sister, who to actually take care of my youngest brother if I would go away. And they were my matriarchs and they were like, you are not, there is no way we just had, how can you even think about leaving when we've had all of this grief and loss. And I said, no matter what, I'm going in. I just felt the urge. And as soon as I got the admission slip and a scholarship to go, I said, I'm out.

23:40Because there was something just begging in my soul to leave. And so at 20, this is the first time I stepped foot, not only in somewhere where I just do not know a lick of Italian, in a very new place, which is none of my friends were there with me. It was me by myself with hundreds of other students all around the world. And for the first time, I got to be Nita without having this label. Of course. She's the one that had the losses. She's the one. Have you heard her story? Because it was a big thing for young people, obviously. And I got to just be, hi, I'm Nita. I'm from Chicago. Yeah. And it was like this sense of freedom that I never tasted.

24:39I never knew. I had this weight had lifted off of my shoulders. Like I didn't have to worry about these weird calls in the middle of the night. If somebody was not breathing or if they had to do something to one of my family members, or, you know, you just have this visceral central nervous system response constantly. And I felt like for the first time I could actually be a kid, a teenager. And I remember going to the Coldplay concert because they were playing in Rome and it was just, I felt like I was on top of the world because I got to choose what my story was. And it was also, so I was there also, I started to take Italian literature and Italian philosophy.

25:29And it was the very first time I was exposed to the work of the Italian philosophers, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Stoicism. And I remember having to really write my first essay on what that meant and how it has shaped our lives in some way. And that was the first meaning, the amor fati that came up during that semester abroad, which was love of one's fate. And that stuck with me because instead of cursing my fate or just wishing that I hadn't gone through any of this, that I was wishing I could just be a normal teenager to fit in, especially in having these conversations because it would still come up.

26:19Hey, where are you from? What do your parents do? And then I knew, and this is part of the bounce factor that I now teach, which is be able to make peace with your past, forgive your past, be able to understand and appreciate your upbringing, which is the love of one's fate, amor fati. And that was one of the big things that I really got and that fully kind of shifted the trajectory of my life. You asked about certain kind of numbing behaviors that I had. I think the biggest thing for me, having watched all three of my family members pass on through medical diseases that were out of my control, I became a wellness, I want to say addict.

27:18I think I was very much so rigid for myself. I even was one of those who would judge other people for drinking or putting harmful things into their body because I firsthand knew some of those effects. So I had very much a very opposite response. But what I did have was this like wonderlust of travel. Now 62 countries in, I still do have that wonderlust for travel and experiences. But what the biggest thing that I would say in my 20s was my pattern in relationships. and this was male relationships and this idea of holding on and then overlapping relationships because of this fear of never wanting to be alone.

28:12And so I would remember always having a group of friends around and it was very easy for me to make friends and connect because at an early age, I had to learn how to make my parents feel really good, especially in these super uncomfortable positions that they were in, in hospital settings. And so that was, I think, to this day, still a gift of mine is to help people feel seen and heard. But of course, at the detriment of myself and putting myself last because I always heard, and this is a very Indian, Filipino, Asian upbringing saying is, your happiness is other people's happiness, right? Your happiness is when you see everybody else happy.

28:55And I never understood really what self-love or this idea of coming back home to your own sovereignty. I never understand what that meant until the next break, which I would probably say, then entering my 30s was this huge radical earthing of all of these concepts of what I thought unconventional career looked like and this linear path to, you know, air quotes, success. Because all I knew growing up was doctor, dentist, lawyer, engineer. And so Asian. I mean, we do the same too in the Middle East. It's like, if you're not a doctor and not an engineer, what are you doing? Yeah. And so I think that when I reached this breaking point of when my life was threatened, I had to haphazardly leave in the middle of the night.

30:07In the introduction of the book, I talk about having so much shame and so much guilt of what will people think if they knew the truth? What will people think that if they knew that I wasn't actually in a happy marriage, if they knew that it was very unhealthy, there was toxicity, there was abuse. And I then had to really radically dive into the second component of this bounce factor that I talk about, which is coming back to your radical self-awareness of, and this is the self-responsibility piece, which is, well, what was your role in this? And I think that that might be triggering for some. That is very triggering, especially when life has not been easy, right?

30:59Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that was a huge turning point for me because, and that's where everything shifted. And I had to ask the question, what did I need and what was I doing to protect myself? No, hold on. I want to stay here for a minute because this is a very, very, I mean, if you decided to take your life circumstances in your early thirties and blame that on life, no one would blame you, right? you can easily say, look, you know, I've tried my best, but look at what life is throwing at me. It's a very easy place to assign the responsibility externally. Right. And yet you talk about, I'm in a wrong marriage, being abused somehow, and I have to leave and I have got that realization that I'm in the wrong marriage because I chose something or I did something and it's part of my responsibility.

31:54That's actually life changing for a lot of people when they realize. And I I find it really difficult to bring this up all the time, but I always try to hint that at least partially, whatever it is that anyone is going through today, at least partially is the result of something they contributed to the world that they're in. Now, how do you do that when you've lost so much at such a young age? You have absolutely every excuse to say, my life was set out for me and I just had to follow. Well, I think that there is this idea of, yes, we can sit in the suck, meaning the soupy mess that we are in.

32:35And there's two schools of thought now that I've been on both sides of the coin. There's the one group where it's easy to say, and I'm sure some of you listening, watching this are probably like, yes, I know that relative who is constantly saying, oh my gosh, my headache is bigger than yours. Or yes, and I had this other massive failure and I can't believe, I can't get anything right. And so they're constantly pinning themselves down and they're literally sitting in the sock and they can't get out of it. And there's so many different, they go in a circle and there's a constant circle and they just can't take the action to shift their life forward.

33:20And then there's the other group. And the other group is, Ooh, it's too painful. I'm not going to sit in the sock. Therefore I am going to do whatever it takes. And you'll see this with these warrior memes and you'll see this people doing these extreme sports or extreme things. You probably even see like military memes that are, you know, I'm so strong, I'm so resilient, and they keep pushing forward. And this is really true in sports as well. You get an injury, all right, let's get back out there on the field. And this is that mentality and the mindset where they don't want to sit in that painful, awful suck because it is too painful.