Breaking News Has Broken Us

0:00What you are about to hear is a classic session of How's Work with Esther Perel. How's Work is a one-time unscripted counseling session focused on work. For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, names, employers, and other identifiable characteristics have been removed. But their voices and their stories are real.

0:27Esther Perel:For so long, relationships in the workplace were considered soft skills. Highly idealized in principle, but then disregarded in reality. And a major shift is taking place in the workplace now, where relational intelligence is on the forefront. It is not the soft skills, it's the hard skills. So in my work studying relationships in the workplace, I found that there were four pillars that are foundational. Trust, belonging, recognition, and collective resilience. With trust, I mean, do you have my back? Can I rely on you? Can I disagree with you without having to face the consequences? Are you here for me?

1:13Esther Perel:Trust. Belonging. Am I a part of the system? Am I taken into account even when I'm not here? Am I seen? Recognition is am I valued? Am I contributions valued? And collective resilience, which I think is really the significant one, especially for this episode, is when there is a crisis, can we come together and tap into the social resources, the collective resources here to help us deal with this crisis, rather than to fracture and fragment, which often happens in crisis situations. So this is an episode that I did during the pandemic with an entire newsroom. I've never forgotten it. I never forgot it because I remember always the sentence that the editor-in-chief, when he said, I'm running this whole newsroom and I have never met anyone in person.

2:09Esther Perel:And at that time, that was like inconceivable. People were kind of trapped into their little homes. They were parenting at the same time. All their roles had collapsed in one place. They were straddling multiple roles all at the same time. And when I listened to this episode again, I was instantly projected back into COVID era. But so many of the things that we are talking about today when we discuss relationships in the workplace, how they affect culture, how they affect performance. It was right there. So let's listen.

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3:30Support for the show comes from 1Password. A password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team. Why? Because compromised passwords are the number one way bad actors attack companies, and small businesses are their favorite targets. But unlike a lot of security challenges, passwords actually have a pretty simple solution. 1Password lets you manage all your business credentials so you can feel confident that your data stays secure as your company grows. Find out more at 1Password.com slash podcast offer and start securing every login.

4:09It's an understatement to say that this is the hardest year that our newsrooms ever had.

4:16Esther Perel:I'm not meeting co-founders or colleagues for this session. For this session, I chose to meet an entire team. In fact, an entire newsroom of 70 or so people. They've asked me to come and do a session with them because they have felt that dealing with breaking news has broken them. We all just cover, like, terrible, traumatic, sad things all the time, whatever the daily cars are. We are always on, and that's true for any newsroom. People care about their jobs, and they are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Journalists during this COVID year have been essential workers of their own kind. They are frontline workers themselves.

5:05Esther Perel:They're interacting with the visceral experience of people. Like you can't turn away from the thing that is stressful and upsetting because it's your job to be turned toward it. There's like no escape. I wrote an obit for the woman who ran the front desk at my gym who died. and they don't even have the possibility of getting the support from each other that they typically have when they are in the newsroom i mean such a big part of being a journalist i feel like are those moments of walking across the newsroom and striking up conversations that's how ideas spark you hear someone do a phone interview and you go like wait i actually know someone who also does that the collaboration is so much harder to do when we're all so far away.

6:00And then also just the fact that like we've had a big change in leadership, we had layoffs, and so we've just lost a lot of staff and yet we've had more work than ever before because of the nature of our jobs. We are going through a huge racial reckoning. We have lost so many women of color through layoffs and also through them just not wanting to be here anymore. A newsroom that's in a state of grief, that has experienced tremendous losses over the past year.

6:36Esther Perel:A newsroom that has experienced a state of collective trauma and that is exhausted. They are participants of the very stories that they are witnessing.

6:54So friends, I'm so excited today to introduce psychotherapist Esther Corral, a best-selling author of multiple books on relationships and sexuality. And so therefore you might be thinking, why do we have the world's most famous sex therapist chatting with our newsroom? And that's because her latest podcast, How's Work, is focused on work and work relationships. and with this year of hell we thought we could have her come and talk to the newsroom about the impact of crisis on the workplace and while anyone who has engaged with her work at all knows that Esther will make you rethink your whole life and every relationship you've had she did want to make clear that she won't be so bold as to claim that she can fix anyone or solve anything in one session She makes no promises of quick fixes, unfortunately.

7:46And so with that, since you're all muted, can you please give me a best jazz hand or clapping and welcome Esther Perel. Thank you. Thank you. And hi, everybody. So let me ask you just very, very briefly. You're all in your homes, I imagine. But broadly, you said, OK, there's this conversation. It's a therapist. she's going to talk about what happens to us individually and to the newsroom in this time give me just a few things so I have a pulse check from you

8:22anybody um I'd be the sacrificial victim just to prime the pump the the thing that I was thinking the most of is the sense of isolation that's accompanied all of this it's been many months now And although I normally work out of San Francisco, and so I'm already at a remove from the people in New York, it's been significantly worse. I felt much, much more isolated from my colleagues since this has all began. And I'm really struggling with that. Can you say one more thing about it? Because it's such a theme. It's not just your experience alone. You know, anybody who's going to say something here is going to be talking for many people.

9:07Everyone's individual experience is part of a collective experience. So the isolation, what about it specifically? What aspect of it? Well, in part, it makes it harder to do my job, which involves coordinating work products, how they flow from person to person as they move. so it just makes my job harder but it also has made my life much harder it's just hard for me not to interact with people all day and I have noticed that it asks a lot more of my partner as a consequence of that because she's the only person that I see most days and so where I would have seen a lot more people in my small office on the day-to-day basis I don't anymore and all of a sudden there's just one person who's asked to bear all of the uh weight of my in-person interactions right and i struggle with that and she struggles with that and it's it's hard yep yep can i just ask you all just to raise your hand in case that resonates okay just so you get a sense as well yeah yeah yeah i'm just going to listen for a minute before i say more but yes who else I would love to add to that and just like a slightly different version of that experience which is that I live by myself and I know there are others here as well who live by themselves I think our version of that might be that most of our kind of interaction comes very intensely from work now in a way that it didn't before and that at least for me personally has made me feel very intensely about everything that happens at work and every interaction that I have.

10:56It just is like, there's so much more weight attached to it. Yeah. Let me hear a couple more. I would, I would throw in that it feels like because there's so much happening in the world and my desk is in my bedroom, like next to my bed. And I feel like I am often like scrolling through Twitter until midnight, even though I don't have to. And then like thinking about work so much of the time that it's easy to get burnt out even when you're not actually working. And it feels like a self-control thing. Like I could just decide to save it for work, but it's hard when work and life bleed together so much.

11:38So the context in which this conversation takes place. I think that we are not working from home. We are working with home. and that's very different there has never been such a strong collapse of the boundaries between all our roles where we are the worker the boss the parent the teacher the tutor the partner the cook the cleaner all of it and i probably missed a few you know um at the same time without anything that usually is called contextual living. We are highly localized generally. We work in one place. We go to eat in other places. We exercise in the third one. We go see friends in the fourth one.

12:26There is time and space in between that delineate and demarcates between these various activities. And it is intensely organizing for us to dress differently for different places, to go to different places, to have a beginning and an end in that place to move back to the next one, to have a space called commute or travel or something in between. This collapse of the boundaries is intensely psychologically taxing. And then to turn the home into a gym and a restaurant and an office and a laundromat and everything else as well. So that, you know, what you describe about, you know, I'm already lying there and I'm on Twitter and I'm in bed and the bed is next to the desk.

13:09And, you know, we've never been more physically apart and we've never been more intimately involved in each other's private spaces. I mean, people are literally entering bedrooms when they've never even been in other people's homes, you know. And how do we counter that has everything to do with creating routines and rituals and boundaries. You know, it's like a tiny gesture to make sure that, you know, you clean the table on which you have worked so that it becomes a dining room table, but it actually is intensely important to create these demarcations between activity and between state of being and state of mind.

13:52So that's the first thing that I was going to highlight with you actually is this, It's on the one hand, the request to become more flexible and more open and more understanding of who we are as people. But on the other hand, also a real need to strengthen the structure that usually comes as part of the way we live and that this time we must deliberately do ourselves. You know, that's the first thing. There's a few things for me also that have stood out with this. One is living with a sense of prolonged uncertainty. We have been in this constant, you know, like a total pandemic hum. And this sense of prolonged uncertainty is gnawing at people, you know, in a real constant way.

14:44Even when we allow ourselves the positive aspects of the quarantine, you know, the slowing down, some of us the opportunity to reconnect with certain parts of ourselves or with others or with our families. There is this thing underneath and we tend to call it stress, but it is much more multidimensional. If you break it into parts and you start to give it names, it's called sadness, confusion, irritability, despair, hopelessness, loneliness. That's stress. it needs to be named. Unfortunately, when we just call it stress, we tend to also highly physicalize it and just look at it as a physiological response.

15:27We tend to medicalize it, look at it as symptoms. And most and foremost, we tend to see the answer to stress through a prism of self-care. And self-care, which you have heard plenty of in the newsroom, I'm not going to tell you more about self-care because everyone hears about mindfulness and meditation and all of that all the time, when in fact, much of the self-care that is needed in a time of collective experiences is tapping into the resources of other people. With the prolonged uncertainty comes something, and I've just kind of tried to create a vocabulary for this period, what is often called ambiguous loss.

16:10Ambiguous loss is a term that was created by Pauline Boss way back when to talk about situations of unresolved mourning. So, for example, you have a parent or a family member that has Alzheimer's. They are still physically present, but they are psychologically gone. Or you have people who have disappeared. They are still psychologically present, but they are physically gone. Miscarriages are ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss is what we are experiencing right now for a world that is still somewhat physically present, but doesn't resemble itself. And you can't fully mourn it, but you know that there is a sense of mourning that is taking place.

16:59you know that there is a sense of collective grief over the world of the world that you knew over the plans that you had made over the weddings that got canceled the birthdays that didn't get celebrated the anniversaries that were not even looked at it's all of those tiny losses connected with that sense of collective grief but grief over deadness not just over the actual physical death. That we all know. But the deadness that is creeping up inside of us, the isolation that you're talking about, it's more than just isolation. It's connected to what I call the loss of eros, but not eros in the sexual sense.

17:42Eros as in the life force, the curiosity, the mystery, the playfulness, the imagination, the spontaneity, the exploration, that side of life that is on the other side of security and stability, that is everything that has to do with reaching out, has suddenly become so tinged with danger that we live with the loss of eros. If it's dangerous to be curious because curiosity takes you outside of yourself, the only trips you're allowed to take at this moment are the trips inside of yourself. And yes, everybody who has lived in real confinement for a long time knows that freedom under confinement comes through your imagination.

18:25Anybody in jail has known it. Anybody in a hospital has known it. Any child knows it because a child can turn around 360 and suddenly be the new sheriff. Because they have the capacity through their imagination to switch the borders of reality like that. so we we don't go on a walk we imagine ourselves going on a walk with somebody we're each on our own phone but we're having this walk and slowly we begin to believe that which our imagination is creating for us so that's we have prolonged uncertainty ambiguous loss collective grief And then with that, I think that one of the concepts that has also been very, very useful in dealing with this whole period, and when I think of this period, I think of COVID as an environmental disaster linked to the storms, linked to the fires, linked to the election, linked to the economic upheaval, and linked to the social unrest, and linked to what it means when these devices that we have for decades now set are making us completely disconnected, have remained.

19:37the one and only main way to stay connected. So we are really dealing with stuff that is very hard to process when you're in the middle of dealing with it. But one of the terms that for me has been really useful because it's existed in the test of time is the notion of tragic optimism. You know, tragic optimism is the opposite of what we tend to do here often in the US, especially that kind of believes in mastery, you know, which is we either go back to the old normal, we go back to the old ways. No, we're not going back to anything yet. And we don't know what we will go back to. But tragic optimism is the ability to maintain hope and to find meaning despite the pain, the loss and the suffering.

20:24And that for me means that when you say that you're isolated, when you have a meeting, that you don't just plunge into, you know, what are the stories that you're going to write or what are you going to assign to whom and what, but that you actually take a moment to check in with each other and ask each other a slew of questions that have to do with who you are and how you're living now and what you're facing now, rather than just pretend that this is business as usual and you need to continue work, produce, perform and perfect. And these questions may be basic questions you know are you taking care of anybody at this moment that is more than the usual care you typically do how many of you are sending portions of your salaries to other people than yourself who is taking care of you what are some of the vulnerabilities that you have grappled with you know have you been able to go outside and meet people in 3d for a distant walk whatever Have you lost certain people?

21:32And how have you lost them? What has been the loneliness for those of you who are alone? Do you have a plant that you can grow? Do you have a pet that you can touch? How many of you are suffering from touch hunger at this moment? A total famine. We can live without sex, but we can't live without touch. We become desperate, angry, and irritable. I mean, it's just, So what are we doing with touch when we spend that much time alone? And to have all those things part of your conversations will actually help strengthen the emotional health and the relational health and the sense of trust and the sense of accountability amongst each other.

22:17So this is some of the things that I've been thinking about as I came to the meeting today.

22:27Esther Perel:What's very important for me to convey to this newsroom is to counter the pervasive notion of trauma from an individualistic perspective, i.e. you're having a problem with this. You're having challenges, issues, rather than pandemics, disasters, major upheavals in society, create consequences of grief, of confusion, of loss, of distrust, of fear. And that those are normal. They're part and parcel of large-scale psychosocial disasters. They're not your individual challenge. and that collective traumas need collective healing.

23:27Esther Perel:We have to take a brief break. Stay with us.

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24:33You can think of Vanta as your always-on AI-powered security expert who scales with you. That's why top startups like Cursor, Linear, and Replit use Vanta to get and stay secure. Get started at vanta.com slash vox. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash vox. Vanta dot com slash vox.

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26:18Let me just ask you. Give me a tiny bit of a pulse check, response of what you hear, what strikes you, what irks you all of it yes I was gonna say something about the trying to do routines I found it much harder but in pre-covid I was very routine oriented um and now I find that I like really struggle to keep them for like maybe a week and then something will happen and it completely falls apart and I feel like I think even further than I was before trying to institute these routines in my life. So I don't know if you have any advice for that. Do you have two of your routines? Like just maybe doing something in the middle of the day.

27:08Like when I start working, I kind of go into a work hole and like five hours will pass and I'm still on my computer and I won't move for a long time. So that's something that I've tried to institute, which I just can't seem to keep consistent. Are you, are you solo? Do you have people in your orbit? I'm solo. And do you have people outside in your orbit that are not too far away? Not really. I just moved like six weeks ago. So yeah. I will, I will simply say this. it's very very hard to be completely alone and disciplined about some of these routines in general and maybe you were good in the past but in this moment I think that one of the most important ways to create any routines or any changes is to be accountable to others it's not to do it alone you know if somebody shows up at your door or if you have a call that you need to make because you've made a date with someone that we're taking a 20 minute break and we're going outside you will go outside i i i've done a few of these things from the beginning and what i can say is they become cohesive forces they become not just routines they become ways that are part of a new structure of your life.

28:38So whichever your routines are, if it has to do with exercise, if it has to do with taking a break to eat, if it has to do with going outdoors, if it has to do with taking a moment to close all the devices for 10 minutes, plan them with somebody else who shows up with you on your team, among your friends. It doesn't have to be related to work at all. You find two or three people who have the same need as you and the same complaint as you. And the most important thing is that you do the most you can in motion. We have never, never been that sedentary as we have had to be these last months. It is sedentary and in front of a screen.