VFTS 2023 7 | Dr. Mariana Alessandri | When Positivity Becomes Toxic

Read the Transcript below...

Hey there creatives. I am really excited to launch this next round of bonus episodes for

the voices from the Expressive Therapy Summit Special Series, which we've been bringing to you over the past couple of years. It highlights interviews that I have with various

speakers and presenters and workshop facilitators that are affiliated with the Expressive Therapy Summit. The next handful of episodes that we release will be released as we get them done in promotion for the November East Coast event, which will happen virtually completely online so you can join from around the world wherever you might be.

Our first guest, her name is Mariana Alessandri, and she is an  existential philosopher, and she draws on a diverse group of 19th and 20th century philosophers to help us see that our suffering is a sign, not that we are broken, but that we are tender, perceptive and intelligent. So she's really looking to reframe the way we stigmatize people for not feeling good. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and if you're interested in hearing more from her, you'll definitely have to check out her presentation at the Expressive Therapy Summit where she's going to talk about going against toxic positivity and embracing sadness for genuine empathy, which will happen on November 16th from 7 to 8.30 pm Eastern time. And like I said, it will be virtual so you can join from wherever you happen to be on this big planet. And without further ado, here's our conversation.

Welcome. Now here's your host, Reina Lombardi. Thanks so much for listening to the Creative Psychotherapist podcast. I'm your host, Reina Lombardi and I'm very excited to welcome my next guest who is going to be presenting at the November expressive therapy summit. And her name is Mariana Alessandri. And she is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the co-founder of the Rio Grande Valley Parents United for excellent dual education. It's her mission to promote bilingualism, biculturalism at UGTR-GV. And she has a new book, Night Vision, seeing ourselves through dark moods, which has been published by Princeton Press.

And she asks readers to rethink dark moods like anger, sadness, anxiety, grief and depression. And she's worried about the effects that toxic positivity is having on North Americans. And she asks that we stop focusing on the choose happy mindset and instead challenges us to dim the lights until our eyes adjust to the rich darkness that the human existence offers.

So welcome, Mariana. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Thank you for having me. So let's just jump right in. What connected you to this calling to address toxic positivity and highlight the benefits of feeling all of the feelings, the full range of emotions that we feel as humans?

I think at first it was just the basic fact that I can't stay positive. And after years of struggling

with it and saying what's wrong with me and reading like 1000 self-help books on how to be more grateful, how to appreciate your life, more how to change your perspective, how to do it all yourself. I just realized I can't stay positive and there's nothing wrong with me. And so I wanted to carve out a space because I sense that I'm not alone, that I'm not the only person who can't stay positive and who feels broken because of it or who feels like there's something wrong with us.

And so I wanted to go like analyze the different moods that I and others experience like anger and anxiety and grief and sadness and depression and try to understand what it is about those, why they make us feel broken in our world. Like I think it's super contextual because it's such a bright-sided world where the real sped up is that you get to choose happy. You can be happy if you want to be. If you set your mind to it, you can be happy. It doesn't matter what your circumstances are. And so that all sounds great. Like when everything's going well, I can say, I'm being positive. I have a positive mindset. I choose happy. I keep a gratitude journal. But then as students, we just become regular humans again, right? We suffer and we bleed.

And we hurt each other and we're disappointed. Then all of a sudden the world comes crashing down on us. All the self-help authors are going to say, well, then that's your fault. You must not be doing it right. And they make their money off of the whole idea that we must not be doing it right. And so I wanted

to push against that and say, hold on a second.

Maybe it's the case that these moods constitute what it means to be human and that we ought to look at them deeper instead of just by default kind of reject them and avoid them and be scared of them. And so my whole book is about leading into them and thinking about them and staying there for a bit. Yeah. I love the idea of this and it's making me think about how you mentioned it's contextual.

And it really is if we think about the medical model and how it applies to mental health,

we've pathologized a whole host of emotional experiences. They are labeled as a disorder.

If somebody is feeling grief for a prolonged period of time, it's a disorder. I feel like we need to revisit the way we do that. That there has to be another way that still

allows us to help people that want to say, like, I don't want to feel this way anymore. I'd like to feel different because it's affecting me in this way. Can we do that without we can still have that category to understand it because we know categorizing things helps us to understand and make sense of our world.

But can we do it without the pathology? Yeah. I mean, if you think I've made lists of the words that we use for just general mental illness or things, I mean, mental illness is one of them. Disorder, dysfunction, deficiency, disease, pathology, and firmety, ailment, malady. We don't speak nicely. As a society, we don't speak nicely about human moods. We speak very nicely about joy and pleasure and all these things, but we don't speak nicely. And so there are, you know, that self-help book about like how to talk nicer to yourself or what to say when you're talking to yourself.

There's lots projected onto the individual, right? Like, you're not speaking nice to yourself. You should be kinder to yourself. And I want to take the heat off of the individual. I want to say, hold on, it's not me who's decided that I have a deficiency that I'm broken. It's actually society that has told me in all these words that I'm dysfunctional. And so I want to get society.

Like, I'm a philosopher, so I'm doing a social critique. I'm not just doing sort of psychology on the individual. I'm trying to push it back and say, what in our world is making us talk, not, you know, not nicely to ourselves. It's all the billboards. It's all the things that, you know,

like, sort of attack me when I go into the to the airport. I see a woman whose shirt says,

 "Stay positive." And I see a sign that says, "It will get brighter optimism. Pass it on," right?

There's so much messaging that says, "If you're not doing this, if you're not in this space, then you're broken." And that's what I'm calling, like, there's this economy in the book or a kind of,

like, parallel structure where there's the light metaphor, which is, "Everything will get brighter, bring your own shine your own light, bring your own sun, love and light," the light at the end of the tunnel. It's related to make today ridiculously amazing, as though these things are just solely within our power. Like, bring your own sunshine, right? The world may be breaking around you but you can still, you should still have a great day. So that's like the light metaphor.

Every time we say that something is bright and brilliant and, you know, light, we're saying that anything dark is gross and ignorant and dangerous and ugly and we should ignore it, avoid it, suppress it, get rid of it. And so then I think, well, I'm an existentialist, so I just think we are pretty dark, right? We're just humans, right? We have some light in us and we have some dark in us. And if that's the setup, where only the light parts of us are celebrated and deemed kind of human and good, then all of a sudden, when we're in a dark spot, what do we do? Right? Then all we have, right?

Society's just basically telling us, "Now's the time you feel bad about yourself. Now's the time that you feel like you haven't done what all the self-help authors do, all the YouTubers, all the people who say, I got myself off my feet, I changed my life and you can't do." And so it's a, I don't know, like I've gotten mixed messages about whether it's a particularly American, US-American phenomenon. I've definitely seen it in Mexico. I don't know about Europe. I feel like maybe the English are a little more pessimistic or something, but I don't know, you know?

But certainly in this country, I feel like we are tormented by all the signs that say, "Blessed," and that, like, tell us how to live, how to feel, and how to make our day. And I feel like it's like walking into target is difficult for me because I see all the things that say, whether it's a pillow or a coffee mug or a sign, and people willingly hang this stuff in their house. And I think, "Oh, that's the dangers." Like, I don't, I don't want to hang that in my house because I've already failed. Like, my kids' soccer coach wears a skirt

that says, "#NoBadDays." And I think, "Oh, my God." Like, I already failed. I've, I've failed, like,

when I was born, I already had bad days. Like, none at all zero. Like, our tolerance for dark moods is basically at a zero.

And so I just think, "Okay, can I elevate that with this little book?  Can I get us to be a little more realistic about what it means to be a human being, which is dark and light, happy and sad, often at the same time, a whole bunch of bittersweet. I like what Susan Cane is doing. Right? Like, just like the mix, the, the fullness of a human being is not never going to be just all bright and love and light and bring your own sunshine. We're never going to be that. So we have to figure out a way to talk nicer as a society about these moods that I've considered to be just thoroughly human.

 I, I agree. I do a lot of work with teens and they already espouse that well, that anger is a bad emotion. I'm not supposed to feel angry or it's, I'm bad if I feel, feel angry. And so if our children are already espousing that mindset, right, they've already integrated all of those messages that you were talking about from various environments, whether it's

like going to target or just the messages that they hear at school at home, it's all around television. Like that is, that's painful.

That's painful because then they are setting themselves up to be in a more pathologized state because now they're questioning like, well, if I'm bad, then it starts taking them to really scary thoughts. And they're not seeing their value in the world.

They're not seeing that they matter because they are exploring and feeling these really painful difficult feelings. But that are essential to our human experience, right? The idea that we're supposed to feel happy or we're supposed to feel joyful all the time doesn't make any sense feelings are cyclical, they come and go. And I think, you know, the deep dark stuff teaches us so much about what it means to be human. Yeah, I mean, I'm really glad you brought up anger because part of what I'm trying to do in the book is show where we got our opinions from.

Where did we get these like sort of real knee-jerk reactions, default assumptions that it's wrong? And so I talk about ancient stoicism, which is super popular today. And it's fascinating because I find it completely dangerous.

It's a dangerous philosophy to play with because their whole idea was that you cannot feel things. You can make yourself stop feeling things that you don't want to feel. And most, like, I don't know a lot of people who actually believe that, but their idea was feelings or judgments and judgments are optional. And that's all through certain kind of, um, psychologists that we learn about today.

 But so, so they're, they were the harshest on anger, they were like, you shouldn't feel it. You can actually stop yourself from feeling it. Even if you're feeling it, you're already in the wrong. If you're feeling it, you're already weak. Then comes Aristotle who's like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. It's okay to feel it because feelings are just feelings. It's okay to feel angry. Just don't act on it." And so he was like a little bit nicer, but I tell a story in the book of like having kids like through that all out the window for me, because I would yell at them, right?

I would behave badly. And I would be like, "Okay, now am I just a monster? I'd look in the mirror and be like, I am the worst mom. I'm a monster because I'm a philosopher. And those are the things I was brought up on. And even if you're not a philosopher, you either believe that you shouldn't get angry. So if you ever say, "I'm sorry, I got angry." That means you're with the Stoics. And you believe you actually have a choice in whether you get angry or not. If you find yourself ever saying, "I'm sorry, I acted out of anger," then you're more Aristotelian.

You believe it's okay to feel angry, but I shouldn't have acted out of anger. And both of those during the pandemic, when everyone was smushed on top of each other, went out the window. And so I thought, "What if we re-educate ourselves on anger coming from contemporary theorists?" Of color. And so in the chapter, I talk about Bell Hooks, her theory of anger, Maria Lugonis, her theory of anger, and Audrey Lord. And if Seneca, the ancient Stoic, is saying, "Angers poison, anger is demonic," Audrey Lord is like, "Hey, what, you know what? Angers information.

Anger is useful to us. Anger is a tool with which we can excavate honesty. But if like you're the kids you work with, what they say is, "I'm angry, therefore I'm bad. They are never going to listen to their anger." But Lord wanted us to listen to it. So if we're knee jerk reacting against it by default, saying, "That's bad, I shouldn't be like that like I did for most of my life, I'm angry person, I'm bad." And it's like, "No, no, hold on. Maybe it's justified." Yeah. I'm angry about something.

And so I started to use them as help for me to retrain my brain to think about anger as information, give it a chance. You might not be right. You might be, you know, in the wrong, like I often am with my kids, but sometimes I'm right. And sometimes I'm trying to make a space for myself to exist in a tradition in which the mother is supposed to not exist, right? The mother is supposed to disappear, be all self-sacrificing, etc. So some of my anger was justified, right? So the whole point is just not to deny it or reject it out of hands, but to actually give it a chance. And that means we have to sit in it.

We can't will it away. We put, I don't think we should be counting to 10 and getting over in and forget about it because as soon as I calm down, all the advice, calm down, calm down. As soon as I calm down, I'm like, "Oh, no big deal. Oh, it was a, I don't know what I was so upset about. No big deal." And I just think, "Oh, you've lost your fury. You've lost the fire, the heat. You've lost the thing that actually could help you make change or at least articulate

the thing." And, you know, into philosophers and a lot of us today believe, "Well, when you're angry, you're not articulate. You're not, you're never speaking rationally. You're not saying what you actually believe." Audrey Lorde and Maria Malone specifically says, "I have seen women with an outrageously clear head when they're angry because what happens when you're so angry is you stop caring what people think of how you look. You stop self-monitoring and you actually say the truth." And so sometimes, like, I've changed my opinion on that.

It's, you know, sometimes I'm inarticulate when I'm angry. And sometimes I'm very articulate. Sometimes I might be getting at the exact thing that has been bothering me. And so it's important to stay with it. It's important not to just be scared of it or get rid of it out of hand. I would say especially for women like who have been trained to kind of swallow it and internalize it and, you know, all this kind of thing. And so anyone who's been socialized that way is the point to kind of realize that this can be a tool. This can be helpful. This doesn't have to be scary.

This can be something that you sit with and really try to learn from rather than just call it unladylike and try to get rid of it. Yeah. I try my best with the kids to teach them that every emotion has a function and a purpose and a reason. There's a reason why we're feeling it. We might not understand the reason like, "Why am I feeling this way? You don't need to know why, but how can you use it? How can how can you listen and see what it has to tell you?

What is it telling you in this moment?" Usually, anchors, it's about we've been threatened in some way, whether that is psychologically, socially, physically, or somebody we love and care about or something that we love and care about, something that's important to us has been threatened by somebody else.

And we're responding with anger because it is a motivating emotion. It gives us a lot of energy. I always tell people, "If you're feeling depressed and now you're feeling angry, they that's good." You have more energy to do something now because if we're feeling depressed, we're in that like apathetic state and we don't have a lot of energy to do much. So when it shifts, let's take advantage of it. It can be quite energizing.

Yeah. So the other one that I think has... So the bookends are anger and then anxieties at the other end of the book and the advice for both from these philosophers who are existentialists who I sort of...I turn to now instead of the ancient philosophers who sort of I feel like led me to feeling like I was bad, right? Shame. I'm feeling bad about feeling bad. And so with anxiety, Soren Kierkeger says, "Also listen to it. Listen to it."

And I think that if we have a major reaction against anxiety to say, "Anxiety is clinical. Anxiety is a bad thing. Anxiety is a deviation from what's human." Then we have Kierkeger in my ear at least, right? Saying, "Anxiety makes us higher than the animals and the angels." He says, "The more anxious a society, the more profound that society." I just think, "Oh my goodness, this is crazy, right? This is like nothing we hear. Everything we hear is about how anxiety is irrational or it's a brain disease or it's a chemical imbalance or it's a set of limiting beliefs, etc." And Kierkeger comes in and he says, "Well, maybe it's a sign of emotional intelligence." Maybe what if we try on for a while for 20, 50 years? The idea that anxiety is emotional intelligence, that the anxious person's right.

And we don't think so much about what, right? Because they might be wrong about the exact thing. It might not be, you know, the person going for a car ride and they're anxious that they're going to die or something, right? It might not be that acute thing that they're right about. But anxious people are super attuned to the world in a way that I wouldn't necessarily want to dull out the world. I don't want, I think of it like, so I'm following like Rolomey and

Irving Yalome in thinking that it's like a fire alarm, right?

It's telling us something. And so it's worth our while to listen to it rather than have this kind of, it's just like a cloud. Imagine it

floating away. Like, there's so much advice about how to get out of it or in the book, I talk about this book for kids about your anxious spot and you have to calm your anxious spot and make the circle on your hand until the anxiety goes away and I just think, okay, what if we do the opposite, right? What if we, not totally the opposite, right? But what if we think of anxiety differently?

What if we think of anxiety not all as clinical anxiety? Right? Because for me, there seems to be something, if 30% of Americans are clinically anxious, I just think like everything has gone off the rails. Like, either that's not possible or it's not true or our definition of clinical anxiety has

gotten so bloated or something. And so, or we have zero tolerance, right?

If the standard is zero anxiety, right? Keep calm and carry on. Those messages freak me out. Because then I think, oh, what am I supposed to be worried about? Why? Why is there a sign telling me to keep calm? It's because something terrible is happening and just open your phone and like 60,000 terrible things are happening.

So we're not wrong to be anxious. We're right to be anxious. And so trying to turn it off or doing everything we can to turn it off or just assuming that it's the enemy, that that's the thing that makes us broken. It's like, no, that's the thing that makes us human. That let's investigate it, right? I'm not broken because I'm anxious. I am attuned. I like the way Glenn and Doyle puts it. She says anxiety means that you're paying attention. Yeah. So what if we just like turn our ideas about it a bit, you know, however much you feel comfortable with to sort of say, what if this isn't the big bad thing that that that it's been made out to be? And what if we can up our tolerance of

in terms of society?

Not the individual. Again, I'm not prescribing much to the individual because I think we've been hurt enough by different industries trying to make us feel broken. But it's like as a society, if we could just have more tolerance, like I'd love to see shirts that are like, yeah, a bunch of bad days or like like like mediocrity, like life is okay, you know, like some good days,

some bad days, like just lower the bar for our emotional existence.

And then I think ironically, I think we'd actually see less anxiety and less of all this because the more you're trying to tell people like, "Fong out, you're right!" Then the more we're like, "Oh, something's very wrong." And so like instead of listening to ourselves, we begin to sort of listen to a world that tells us we shouldn't feel so much.

We shouldn't wear a hood on our sleeve. We shouldn't be so emotional, et cetera. And so I'm just trying to like defend the individual against a society that sort of pressures us to conform and to have a kind of a negative viewpoint of our own moods that may in certain cases be trying to tell us something. Yeah, absolutely. There's a reason that we experience emotions that were that way by design. So the idea that we're not supposed to, we're only supposed to feel some of them and not the others just doesn't make sense. Yeah. So how does this relate to some of, I would say that the theories out there pertaining to the way we practice mental health, psychology, counseling, social work, et cetera?

So I think it is on two levels. Like one, one, it relates to the theories and that I'd like to maybe get into. But the second one is as y'all who are listening are probably therapists. I think that a lot of what the relationship with a client looks like will depend on how you think about these moods, right? What are your assumptions or what's your education on grief? What are your inherent beliefs, right? Learned, of course, learned beliefs about anxiety because that's certainly going to affect the person you're working with.

And likewise, like, you know, I'm writing in the book that who you choose. So, so, I'm not anti-secretary at all in any way. And I'm certainly not anti-therapy, right? Like I think these things can be helpful. Using the case of anxiety, the whole point is to get it to a manageable volume. Like when the, when I experience anxiety, it is such a powerful noise in my head that I can't think, right? I cannot access anything else. So, I would think that meds or therapy is there to help me lower it, not get rid of it, right? Because if I get rid of it, I've just thrown away the thing that might help me figure out what's my next move in life, why I'm deeply upset, like like the deeper things, the existential issues about love and fear and death and all the thing that I think are worth thinking about.

And so, I think that these any kind of interventions are for the purpose of lowering the volume, not turning it off. But what I write about in the chapter on anxiety is if you're looking for a therapist, if you're going to find the therapist who says that all anxiety is bad and we should get rid of it, which may just be a made up person, right?

Like maybe nobody believes that anymore. Then you're going to get a very different type of therapy, right? You're going to get a different experience and you're going to think differently about your own anxiety versus if you get someone like existential psychotherapists, I think who are out of fashion now, but who would have a more holistic view or like a kind of like, let's be willing to go there.

Like we can hit these very, very difficult things. It's not a five week thing where you're going to

get rid of that anxiety in six weeks or whatever. So that's the overall kind of like the relationship I think between the practitioner and the person who's, you know, dealing with their anxiety. But in terms of the theories, I was just so, I guess, disturbed by the popularity of

positive psychology for one. And I understood it.

Like I was definitely like sort of on the train of

like, we don't want everything to be a pathology. We want to notice all the strengths and we want to like focus on gratitude. And I think Seligman is the king of positive psychology and I just find him extremely problematic because as a US American, I think he tends to conflate optimism with positive thinking. And I think those are very different. And I think that like he talks about being grumpy. And I'm like grumpiness is not what you're trying to get at in positive psychology. So he slips and slides through the mood to like the effect of like you should be smiling or you should be happy. And it's like, wait a second, t hat's not what positive psychology is supposed to be like.

But the whole point is again, like, what do you think about this mood? So I talk about positive

psychology and the chapter on pain, just emotional pain sadness. Right. So if you believe that like he does, that you have like these limiting beliefs, right, that these are the things that are getting in your way. He's talking about a woman who was out of the workforce for 10 years, tries to get back in or like wants to get back in, talks to her husband about it.

 And she's a negative warrior and he's

like the positive champion. And he's like, you can get a job, you just have to have the right attitude. And you don't know how great you are. And let me tell you all your you know skills and whatever. And let's brainstorm and she's like, nah, I just don't think they're going to want me who would want me after 10 years. I'm old. Well, but so she looks like the one who's broken and he looks like the one

who's great. And that's precisely the way that Seligman interprets it.

He's like, hmm, champion this guy. He's like, he's got a better explanatory style. And he's on victimist,  right? And he's really trying to convince her to believe in herself. And that is like super common today.

That kind of thing where the champion is the one who's the good one and the kind of negative one is the one who's painted is like, oh, you know, no one can make you happy. You just want to be negative,

right? With that attitude, you're never going to get that job. This kind of like blame the person

who is already suffering. And so what it just bothered me so much when I read that story years and years ago that I was like, what if she's right?

Like what about being out of the workforce for 10 years, taking care of your kids makes you like a prime candidate for going back into the workforce? Why do we believe that it's just a matter of the will? Like if you just have the positive attitude,

then you're going to get that job. I actually think that this woman, Jodie, had a better explanatory style. He called her a brooding pessimist. I'm like, I don't think she's a brooding pessimist. I think she's right. I think she's absolutely rational, which is one of the things you say against people.

 You say you're being irrational. I think she was actually more rational. I think the guy was wishful thinking. I think he was full of these ideas of like, oh, if you just, you know,

mind over matter or like bring it into being too is happy. You can make your dreams come true.

Like all the way, you know, kind of down into manifestation talk. So I just feel like I want to defend her and say, hold on a second. Let's like forget her affect. Her affect may be like you or I'm like, but like the point is she's right. Look, could the husband treat her like maybe she was being rational?

Maybe she's the right one. And he needs to start learning how to listen because what she's saying is actually quite informative. And she's trying to communicate with him. And so the whole idea of active sort of your, your actual question is like, if we believe that being pessimistic or that sort of having a negative affect or worrying or being sad, if we, if we believe that those are inherently kind of counterproductive or limiting, then we are limited. We are limited in our ability to actually talk to that person because as long as we think, well, I'm going to cheer you up. I'm

going to make you feel better. I'm going to make you feel like you can go out there and conquer the world.

Then we are the ones who are poor. We are like poor on emotion. We're emotionally enneemment because we're unable to like step into that space and say, wait a second, here she is in this spying. Can I get there? What can I do? And this is what I want to talk more about at the summit is how to step into sadness, to meet other people there instead of trying to bring them out. So my metaphor

is like the dark and we bring in flashlights. We like, they're in the cave. Jody's in this dark cave

and we're like, oh, let me make you feel better. What can I get you?

You know, let's go out for ice cream

and he brings her flashlights. And I'm like, he doesn't need to bring her flashlights. He just

needs to know how to get to her. And she's trying to help him get to her by giving him this little string with words to say, this is what I'm worried about. And he's like, oh, his hands are full of flashlights.

So he can't find her in the dark because he's so busy thinking it's his job to take her out of the

dark and put her into the light. So that's the one thing. So positive psychology has like for me, like it's dangerous in the way that it's not wrong. It's not bad. It's not awful. It's like

dangerous to play with. Like we have to be super careful in what we mean when we're just trying to focus on on all these, you know, the gratitude and whatever the positive thinking. So and I know it's not a synonym for positive thinking, but there's a lot of overlap in terms of how we think about negativity, how we think of it as kind of limiting and bad, whereas it actually could be quite informative for us.

And the other one is CBT, which sometimes overlaps with positive psychology, but I find CBT to be very problematic and not just because some practitioners take it off the

rails. That's not it. It's like in the very literature, at least like CBT one, the very literature

talks about limiting beliefs, negative thinking, ineffective behavior patterns. And I think it also.

it takes on the stoic tone of like it's not your current situation that you're upset about. It's

your beliefs about your situation. And I want to say, no, often it's just our situation. Like I don't

want to put it on the individual to say, okay, you may be, I mean stoicism was really like it works best in a jail. It works best when you actually have no options when you are like stuck and you cannot change your situation and you can't change your situation like from the outside, from the inside, there's nothing you can do. Then yes, there's ways to make peace and to like accept fate and kind of

live with what you have. But I don't want to give up. I find it a very defeatest kind of thing.

 I

want to change the world. I want to make the world more just for people who are oppressed. I don't want to just be like, well, how can I make my beliefs more palatable or more accepting of the situation I have going on? I don't want to I don't want to default to thinking that I'm upset because my beliefs upset me.

I want to more consider that I'm upset because the world is unjust. I'm more okay with that. And so at least to to explore that, right? So that's an interesting. It's just an interesting kind of things that I'm like wary of from both from ancient philosophy, but also a

very, very contemporary ways of looking at these documents. I think that they have something in

common and something to be sort of questioned and maybe reconsider. Yeah. I hear a lot of what you're

saying in terms of, you know, beliefs. It can be very difficult to change a belief when there's so

much evidence supporting why it exists in the first place. And particularly when we're talking

about people that have multiple barriers to kind of get to the same playing field as myself and my

white counterparts. It's very difficult. That's a very difficult ask. And, you know, to your point,

how much harm is that causing for that individual to say like, yeah, right? Change your belief and

you change your life, but their life is very, very different from my life because of all of the

advantages that come with having white skin in a world in the United States, especially

where there's so much, there's so the prevalence of racism and oppressive systems that

have been put in place for hundreds of years that are still in place. Even our schools have

oppressive practices for our kids. It's not a fair ask to ask set of someone.

Yeah. And like the irony is that I think it works a lot of the time. So here's the thing. Here's the

setup that I have. Like an individual can go into therapy and come out feeling better about their

situation that is still unjust, right? That has not changed one bit. And so, but what I don't want

is to see every individual who is oppressed go into therapy to learn how to accept their situation.

Right. Like the world will actually never change. If we're just like, well, I have a personal problem.

This is an individual personal thing that I have to learn how to deal with. It's like, no, wait a

second. Why can't we turn it around? It's almost like we're all saying, well, the world's not going to

change. You know how it is, you know, it is like I have this odd optimism about the world that like,

I'm like, no, let's take it on because I actually think we can change it as long as we stop saying,

it's your problem. You have a problem. I'm like, no, no, I'm reflecting a problem that is prevalent

in society. So I don't necessarily want to become more like accepting of my situation. Like that

just sounds sad to me. Even though it might make me feel better, then like the things aren't going

to change. And I'm not saying that it's up to the people who are in that situation to change it. I'm

saying like it's up to all of us to change it. But the whole point, if it's just to make me feel

better, then the systems will remain whatever they were before as long as we're seeing it as an

individual problem with your limiting beliefs. Like, wait a second. Aren't these all of our, like,

isn't this, isn't this a shared experience for many of us? So what would happen if we can empower

people to say, you know what you're right? Like just on a lot of these things, what if we just try

it on the idea that we're not wrong, that we might be right? Like what would change? I think that

I think that in time our society can change. If we begin by opening ourselves up to the very fact

that these moods don't make us broken. Yeah, I appreciate that expression and intention for

empowerment. If we can empower somebody to make change. And if we're all working to that effect,

then we can change the systems. We need to change the systems because the systems are not working.

They're not working well as somebody who's been practicing therapy for 20 years. Our systems

are really messed up. They're not working well. They're not as effective as they need to be. And part

of it is relates to exactly what you're talking about as to why. And of course, just other

oppressive practices that exist in the world that have nothing to do necessarily with therapy

and psychology, but it's the business. It's the business of it that is really broken. And that

impacts people too. Because then they go, well, I'm reached out for help because I've been told,

there's something wrong with me. I have to change so that I can fit in and be okay in the world.

And now I'm trying to access care. And I can't get it anywhere.

It's messed up in so many directions. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you propose for like how do we,

what can we do? All of us, what's like one little thing we can all do to make these changes?

To start to shift the systems. It's kind of an outward and an inward. Like the outward thing I

would like everyone to do is be a little more critical of the signs of, you know, what we're seeing in

our world. Kind of read the walls of our society and see what it's trying to get us to do or feel

or whatever. So just to like see things. And then on an inner inner inner worlds to try this

night vision, right, to try to see in the dark, to try not to put a light on as soon as we feel

uncomfortable, to try to sit a little bit more with it. And there's caveats for depression.

And, and, you know, people have limits and all this, right? It's not an all or nothing. This is the

hard thing about my book is that it can easily get misunderstood as like, oh, your depression is

your superpower. The five, the gifts of your dark moods. I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying like

we have them. They're already here. They've already landed on our doorstep. I don't care whether

you call it a gift or not. I don't need that. Like nobody, you don't need to call it a gift to try

to say like, maybe there's something here that I need to be listening to. Maybe this is a form of

self, I mean, Audre Lord calls Andy herself care. Not Audre Lord, Maria Lugones. But like, oh my god,

how can Andy be self-care? Like if we could just open our mind a little bit to, you know, be kinder

to ourselves knowing that it's not us who created these poisonous stories or these like, kind of

ugly stories about our moods. It's not us. We didn't, we're not to blame. It's like the world has

tried to, the world tells us to feel bad about ourselves. And then when we do, they're like, why are you

feeling so bad? Right? And it's like, I just want to get more critical and be like, yeah, look at

that. Look at that. Look at all these forces in our world that sort of thrive on us feeling bad.

And then feeling bad about feeling bad, right? That that that juncture of shame of just like, oh,

here, here we've got you in a great place because then you will never advance. You'll never turn

against the world. You'll just think you're messed up, right? So in the book, I try to say it like

succinctly and say like, instead of thinking, there's something wrong with me. I want, I would like

everyone to say, okay, there's something wrong and stop there, right? And not it immediately

default to like, I must be messed up. I must be ill. I must be broken. Like, maybe there's just

something wrong in the world. And it doesn't mean we're going to fix everything, but it certainly means

we can stay on our own side. That's what I want for us is to stay on our own side, take our own side,

not become our own enemy as I am so, so want to do, right? Just to say, well, it's me, you know,

Taylor Swift says it best, right? I'm the problem. It's me. And I just think she's a philosopher and

she doesn't even know it, but it's like, that's our temptation. It must be me. If something's wrong,

I must have done something wrong. I didn't choose happy. That's why I'm in the dumps. So yeah.

And we all know that there are real and true and valid reasons for feeling sad, for feeling anger,

for feeling bereft. And I think for grief itself, you know, so many people attribute it to, well,

I lost a person or I lost a pet, you know, I lost a friend, but there are so many other ways that we

grieve. We grieve a loss of our hopes. We leave grieve loss of dreams that were unfulfilled.

All kinds of losses that warrant that feeling of grief. And we need to make space to feel it. I think

the only way out is through. We have to feel our way through them. The more we avoid the feeling,

the bigger that feeling is going to get. And the stinkier it's going to be when it finally does come out.

So yeah, the world is particularly harsh on griebers. Like it's twice. Like the grief is probably just

fine if the world would change and allow it. But because the world tries to push us out of grief,

then we have to grieve secretly when no one's looking. And we can't talk about it. Like it's

incredible how griebers suffer doubly just because of our world. Like it's hard enough to lose a person

or even what you're saying, right? For things that you can't even point to, that's even harder to

explain to someone. And they just want you to be happy. We just want everyone to be happy. And I think

we need to radically rethink that because it's too, it's too one sided, it's too lopsided,

it's unrealistic, right? Like we need to just, you know, take it down a notch and just create some

better language for what we want for each other and ourselves because they're happily over after,

they're like, okay, now I'm good. Like that doesn't exist. So, right. Yeah. There's so much here to

this topic. I feel that's valuable for not only other therapists, but for all of us to make space to

allow for and to be okay with having emotions, whatever they are. I think just to be able to cry,

to cry when that feeling comes, you know, some people are like, I can't cry. I don't want to cry if I

cry, then I'm weak or, you know, there's no room for tears. We have so many things about, you know,

I'll give you kids hearing from their parents. I'll give you something to cry for, right? It's like a big one.

And crying is an essential function. I want to live to see the day where nobody says, I'm sorry,

I'm getting emotional. Because that's purely stoic, right? I can stop it. I am sorry. This thing is

inappropriate. I am sorry. I'm putting, we know, but he says, I'm sorry, I'm laughing. But I'm sorry,

I'm getting emotional. I'm sorry, I'm crying. What? We are crazy. Like that the world is just really

lopsided, right? Like it is super messed up and we need to just, especially in raising

boys, I think like the crying thing is particularly terrible, but also for girls, like just everybody

is discouraged and you just shouldn't cry. That's what we help people. Like, wow, you're just

turning off the thing that is actually going to help me. Right? Yeah, I totally agree. I'm a cryer,

I cry wherever it strikes, it happens. And I prefer to just let it happen. Because if I don't,

then I know I'm going to be feeling, I'm going to be feeling way worse than if I just allow myself to

move through the process, whatever it is. And however long it takes. And sometimes it takes a long

time, depending upon the situation, the life scenario. I'm jealous of cries.

So it's hard when you can't, like it's like I'll strain for every tear. I mean, I'm going to think

God, I got one because it does help. But the thing that I've heard that I also would love to

never hear again is if I start crying, I'll never stop. I just think, have you analyzed that?

Like is that a critical point of view or did you just like hear that somewhere? I don't think

that has ever happened. I don't think that's actually a phenomenon. I know what you mean when

you say that, but that's not what happens when you cry. And so the point is I think to, you know,

not just be 100% against it. Like my point is so modest, right? I'm not saying like go in the

caves, stay there forever, only feel dark moods. I'm like, can we just not default to thinking that

all the dark moods are terrible? Can we try to think that maybe they have, they're part of us,

they have something, you know. They have a lot to offer, really. If we're willing to

explore them and to be with them and spend time with them, they have a lot to offer.

The real point of my book is in fact not even about defending the moods themselves because I don't

care as much about moods as I care about people. The point of my book is to defend the people who

experience those moods. I don't want to hear people being talked about as broken. So it's the person.

It's not like here's the reason why your, you know, grief is good for you. It's to say, no, no,

you already are dreaming and it probably sucks, but you're not broken. You're not wrong, right? Like

you're not messed up. That's what grief looks like in some people, right? So it's the person I'm

trying to defend not really the mood, although, you know, like you said, all these moods do have a

little something and that's what I'm trying to tease out in the book. But even if you kind of

scrap that, it's to say like, we're not trash, you know, and I've learned from my college students,

a lot of them just think of themselves as trash, right? Because if it weren't for my depression,

if it weren't for my anxiety, then I'd be an okay person. And they want to trash the mood and I'm like,

if you trash the mood, you're trashing the whole human. So like, I don't want you to trash either one.

Like so it's for me, it's just a given that we live with these. And so now what? It's not to say,

let's try to seek them out or that suffering is good for you or any of that kind of mistakes that

people kind of get into philosophically. It's just to say we have these moods. Can we think of

ourselves other than as broken? Yeah, because clearly it's just it's biology. It's part of

the human phenomenon being human comes with.

I think people aren't worse than non-anxious people. That's like a premise that I want to,

you know, really enforce like we're not worse than people who aren't anxious. We're not less human.

Here in verse says we're more human. I don't need to get into a debate about whether we're better

or worse than other people is just the fact that like we're not less human. We're not like ducked

points on humanity because we live with certain moods that are really difficult and painful.

Yeah, that yeah, they are difficult and painful. And and yet I think life is difficult and painful.

There's so many things that like you pointed out every time you look on the look in the news or

read the newspapers. I there's so many difficult, difficult experiences that we go through and

along with that we experience different moods, different feelings and feelings.

Feelings just are just as much a part of the human physiology as our heart beating and our

stomach digesting food. I feel like if we could think about think about that in a different way of

like it's just part of the process. Well, where can people find your book?

Anywhere you get books. So it should be in all the bookstores. You can get it online.

You can order it from a bookstore. This is what people don't know. They like go to a bookstore.

And if it's not there, they're like, oh, it wasn't there. And I'm like, you can order it. Like if you live

in a place, you can ask them to buy it and then they will get it. And then you go get it. It's very

quaint. Like a real, you know, kind of old school bookstore. But a lot of books do already have it.

So I've heard of people sort of saying, oh, I just picked it up, you know, but you can also get it on

the the a word. Oh, the big place. Yes. Yeah. And I have a website, MarianaLessandri.com and an

Instagram, Mariana.allessandri. So you're welcome to follow me. I mean, I don't post, you know, happy,

fun, exciting gratitude things. I post things that I'm feeling and that other people are feeling. And I'm

you know, trying to take the temperature. And I think some people find it a relief. And then for

others, it's not for them. And that's okay. Right. Like if it's for you, you know, join me. And if not,

that's okay too. Like that's sort of the world I live in. And I've talked to enough people that

kind of live in the same world that feel badgered by positivity. That it's like there's enough of us

to merit a little community, whether online or at the summit or whatever to be like, oh, let's

talk about how the world is making us feel worse by trying to make us feel better, by trying to make

us focus on the light, they actually make us feel worse because we just have bad days. Yeah. It highlights

the comparative, right? Like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. That divide. It's the underbelly. Whenever someone's saying

choose happy and you're not, then it's you. You didn't choose it, right? It's the underbelly that

necessarily accompanies every story of I did it. And so can you? Well, I didn't. So I guess I'm not

as motivated as you, you know? No, I, I hear you. I think that I still go back to self-help all the time.

I'm reading a parenting self-help book. I love them. Like, I love the pain. I love the pain of someone

telling me you're doing you wrong. Here's how to do it right. And then I'll try it and then I'll get

discouraged and I'll go to another one. Like, it's also addictive, you know. But there is a sort of

reeducation that can happen knowing that like these people sort of, they're trying to help, but they

also inadvertently make us feel bad. I think too, you know, it expresses itself in the mood,

but it expresses itself in other ways too, along the same line, that very like extremist kind of thinking

that you have to do it this way. It is your responsibility to do it this way. And if you just

took that responsibility, then X in your life would be different. It's very American. Like, the

bootstraps, like you can do this yourself. And I think like, whoa, there's a lot of luck involved in

these self-help authors. There's a lot of luck involved in communities. There's roots. There's all kinds

of things that made that thing possible, not just them white knuckling it into their own happiness.

So I also think there's binaries like, like, I think a big

giga complain I have of the world is just, are you happy or are you sad, right? Are you this or

you that is it black or is it white? Are you good? No, I'm not good. Like, even how are you? I think it's

just a setup. How are you? I don't know. I don't know. What do you mean? I don't know what the question

means today right now. Like, I don't know how to how to answer that. It puts pressure on someone.

So it's almost like I just now say, that's good to see you, right? Like, there's there's all these like

bent bends or biases toward this is what you should answer. This is how you should feel. People

just tell me you're good. Like, please don't make a problem. Just tell me you're fine. Right. If you say,

okay, just okay. You're just okay. What if like in the grocery, I'm like, no, I'm actually not well.

Then they'd be like, oh, I'm so sorry. And they're like, no, it's just every other day. Like,

what it's just the day, it's just Monday. Like, I don't know what you want. What do you expect of me?

Like, why would I be better? Why do we have these great expectations of our roots? You know,

I feel like it's perfectly fine to be just okay. I do too. Yeah. Or to be pissed off.

Right. Or to be deeply sad. And so I would like to live in a world where we could say these things

if we want to and not say them if we don't feel like it, you know, but the where they would be not so scary to people.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Well, I appreciate you coming on and sharing about your work and your philosophy. And obviously if folks want to hear more from you, they could sign up and attend your workshop, speaking at the summit, which is November 16th from 7 to 8 30 PM. And the title is against toxic positivity, embracing sadness for genuine empathy, which you shared a lot about  today. It's like we don't have to change somebody's mood. We can just sit there and be there with them and experience it with them and just say, yeah, you're not alone. I'm here. And that's enough.

So thank you for that. Thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun to talk to you.

Yeah, it's been fun for me as well.

And I'll put all of your contact information, the website,

we're to find the book and a link for the summit in the show notes. So if listeners can't

you can just go to the show notes and get that information and and connect that way. So thank you.

The book is also in like e-book and audiobook. People react differently when they say that. They're like your face. Yeah. People they're like, oh, I didn't know it was an audiobook. Like now maybe I'll get it.

So if that changes anyone's mind, some people are like, I only listen to audiobooks. It is

available. I'm not the reader, by the way. I wasn't invited to and that's okay. But there's a professional reader. She's an actress and she's wonderful. So that's awesome. Maybe audiobook, yes. Yeah, I do both, but I love audiobooks because it helps me to I can get through the material just the way life is. Like I can listen to it on a commute and or if I'm traveling or if I'm going walking and that kind of thing. So just make somebody. Oh, Tisela Tipper is the reader and she's great. So awesome. Yes.

Happy reading. Happy listening. Well, thank you so much, Mariana. And I appreciate the time that you spent today. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Creative Psychotherapist Podcast. We're grateful for your listenership. If you like the conversations that we share with you, please like share, subscribe wherever you listen to helps us reach a greater audience who may also be interested in hearing about these conversations. And make sure to check out the expressive therapy summit full range of training and CEU opportunities that they have for you, whether it is the virtual conference on the East Coast. It's happening in November 2023, where Mariana is going to be talking and teaching or it is one of their other options.

There's a Midwest option that's happening in Chicago. There's usually an option that happens on the West Coast out in California. And as I'm doing this recording, they're actually having one, a small one in Sedona, Arizona. It's the second one. I didn't get a chance to go last year and I got so overwhelmed this year that I didn't even realize it was happening until like literally seeing somebody post about it on Facebook. But that's one I really want to check out. Anyway, you can find more information about all of those offerings at www.expressivetherapysemit.com.

There you'll be able to click on virtual offerings or in-person offerings and you'll find you know all the places that they're offering trainings. I hope you check it out and enjoy.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Creative Psychotherapist. If you like what you heard, please rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

For show notes, downloads and additional resources head over to the website at www.createofcliniciansquinter.com