Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Mary Pipher. Mary Pipher is a clinical psychologist and the author of nine books, including Reviving Ophelia, which was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for 26 weeks. Her area of interest is how American culture influences the mental health of its people. With Sounds True, Mary Pipher contributed to a new book, Darkness Before Dawn: Redefining the Journey Through Depression. In this collection of perspectives, there are new insights and practices that reach beyond conventional models [and] that will help the reader receive depression’s uninvited-yet-singular gifts.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Mary and I spoke about the connection between despair and a lack of trust in the universe. We also talked about how personal writing can be a way to work through feelings of despair. She also offered her advice—you could say “dos and don’ts”—for young therapists who are working with clients who are suffering from a great deal of despair. Finally, Mary Pipher shared with us, in her view, how despair cracks open the heart. Here’s my conversation with Mary Pipher:
So, in this new anthology from Sounds True, we’re looking at depression from many different viewpoints—and especially from the perspective of people who know it from the inside out. That’s where I wanted to start, Mary—which is, to really understand what your view of depression is from your own experience. How you view it—how you see it as an experience.
Mary Pipher: Well, that’s a real complicated question. For starters, I think despair is almost universal. I’m—at some level—more comfortable talking about despair than depression, because “depression” makes it sound as if we’re talking about pathology and as if we’re talking about something that spares a good part of the human race. I tend to believe that despair is prevalent, if not universal—and that it’s a much more interesting word to discuss, [as well as] a more interesting existential state to ponder than the word “depression.” [That word] has really been pretty bracketed by pharmaceutical companies and the mental health profession in ways that I’m not extremely fond of.
That being said, I think despair comes to most of us. I think what it means to me is your inner and outer resources are not sufficient to cope with the world as you’re experiencing it. I also think it has something to do with trust. It has to do with one’s own trust in the universe and in one’s own capacities to deal with that universe. So, it’s sort of a disruption of trust.
Now, I think that there’s a genetic component. For example, in my family there’s quite a lot of depression and a history of depression. I also think circumstances play an enormous role in depression and social learning. I also think that, at some level—at this moment in time—because of the state of our Earth, because of the state of our society, because of the craziness that has become the world (but especially America), most people are struggling with the kind of issues that I wrote about and discussed struggling with in my book Seeking Peace. I think it’s a very common emotional experience right now.
TS: Now, you said something very interesting that I’ve never heard pointed out as a connection—which is the connection between despair and this idea that despair is a disruption of trust. So, the connection between despair and a lack of trust. Can you say more about that?
MP: Well, sure. First of all, on the personal level, I think despair arises when your traditional ways of coping with the world stop working. So, that confidence we have when we believe that if we do this or that, we’ll be OK—that if we follow our habitual patterns, things will work out OK for us—that really disappears with depression. We don’t have any trust that the way we do things [and] the way we see the world will enable us to move forward.
So, on a personal level, I think that’s the experience. But there’s also a trust for the universe. It’s a lot of trust in the idea that, at the moment, we’re failing and we’re despairing [and] the universe is not going to be kind enough to hold us up until we recover.
That’s a really important part of it because all of us have moments in our lives when terrible things happen to us. I mean, all of us eventually will if we haven’t yet. We certainly have moments when less-than-terrible but devastating things happen to us. We lose a job. We lose a partner. There’s struggles over friendships and so on. That’s really a moment when—without a faith in one’s own resiliency and without a kind of belief that the universe is ultimately kind—we can go to very dark places.
TS: What would you say to somebody who wants to cultivate more trust, but it feels out of reach in a way? It feels fake or phony. “I just don’t trust. I don’t.”
MP: Yes. Well, of course, that’s an enormous question because—first of all—one problem with talking about, “What would I say to somebody?” is there’s no “somebody.” There’s no Mister or Missus Somebody. The questions are always very, very specific.
You know, it’s interesting: I was just at this big conference in Los Angeles called Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference. Someone stood up and asked me a question after I spoke about what they would do with a particular suicidal patient. I said I would never answer a question like that when I’m giving a speech and talking to a group of people at a conference like this. But I said, “The reason that kind of answer is impossible in this context is the answer to, ‘What would I say to any particular person?’ is, ‘It depends.’”
It depends on who you are. It depends on what kind of community you have around you. It depends on your resources. It depends on your spiritual path, and so on.
One thing I can say, based on my own experience of despair—and I’m quite familiar with that experience—is that, for me, it’s been very, very helpful to have a spiritual path. That’s not the only thing that’s been helpful. It’s extremely important to have people who love me around in a community of caring people. I find great solace in the natural world. I find great solace in books.
But a spiritual path is extremely helpful because one way to think of despair is your problems have grown too big for you. The solution to that particular problem—that your problems have grown too big for you to handle—is to grow bigger. To grow bigger almost always means a spiritual transformation. It means moving into what I call a “transcendent response,” where you do grow bigger and you do learn from the experience of despair, “I must change, and I must change in ways that make me a bigger person.”
So, of course, one of the most obvious ways to do that is to find a spiritual path that will help you connect up to much larger than yourself.
TS: Can you share with us a little bit more about your own experience moving through despair and how the entrance of the spiritual path and trust was restored for you? How was trust restored for you?
MP: Sure. Yes. Well, I have had—over the course of my adult life—several times when I was very despairing. But, the one I wrote about in Seeking Peace and the one I’m comfortable sharing with readers or a radio audience is the despair I felt at some point during my career as a writer. I had a period of time where I was extremely lucky. My writing career was kind of a Cinderella story, and I went from being a very ordinary therapist here in Lincoln, Nebraska to being a New York Times bestseller and travelling a great deal of the time—living in hotel rooms and airports a great deal of the time.
At some point after several years of this—Reviving Ophelia, my first big book, was published in ‘94—about six years into that—seven, I think, to be exact—I just really had a meltdown while I was on the road. That was a sort of specific cause: I was tired. I had a cold. It was November. The planes were all breaking down. I had a very dispiriting job experience.
But it was also a more common or more generalized cause: which was I was just worn out. I’d been traveling too much. I’d been too far away from people who loved me and the natural world and my cats and my home and my own nourishing food, and so on. I kind of hit a wall.
I came home from this trip—the way I knew, actually, that I was in big trouble was I was travelling with my husband, and we went into a little cafe on the way to the job. We were very hungry and we had to eat, because we were on the way to this job. But we would have never stopped at this cafe. It was a kind of dirty-looking place in a little town. I’d been reading Fast Food Nation on the plane, and I ordered a bowl of chili in this place. When it arrived, I tasted this chili and I said to my husband, “This chili tastes like shit.”
He kind of looked at me like, “Are you crazy?” and I realized either I was eating chili that had fecal matter in it—and that’s why it tasted like shit to me—or I was so down and blue that I was imagining that. Either way, I realized, “I want to go home. I need to get off the road and I need to stop doing this to myself for a while—until I can build my strength back.” There’s a lovely Ayurvedic word: ojas, which is life-force. [So,] “Until I can rebuild my ojas—my life-force.”
Anyway, we did go home. I spent three or four months that winter—I didn’t have any speeches. I didn’t take any speeches. I wasn’t writing a book at that moment and I didn’t start one. I just stayed home. I rested and I read a lot of Buddhism. I cooked vegetable soup for myself and I played with my cats. I took long walks in the snow with my friends. It was just deeply nutritious in every sense of the word—a deeply healing experience.
But the other thing I realized was I had work to do on myself. Part of the work had to do with scheduling and taking on too much work and rearranging my life so I wasn’t so continually stressed and burnt out. But, some of the work really went much deeper than that and had to with the fact that I had always been somebody who pushed through pain—and who just pushed through discomfort, and showed up present. You know—with a smile on my face and a pleasant, happy, hardworking, cheerful attitude.
I realized I really had to do some work about that. I’d been raised to believe—actually, I hadn’t even been raised to believe. I’d just created this theory all on my own—from the time that I was very young—that if I was a really good girl, and was loving and happy and pleasing all of the time, the world would work just fine. What I really had to face at that point in my life was that actually was a myth—that the world working just fine had very little to do with how I behaved. In fact, that belief that I was somehow responsible for creating a perfect environment for everyone wherever I was, was really destroying me—and I really needed to change.
So, that was kind of the beginning of meditating, working more on self-awareness, more curiosity about myself, and less judgment. It’s been a long process. I go to Buddhist retreats and I read Buddhism still, and have been in sanghas. I have continued to work on my schedule and develop ways to be more honest with myself and more nurturing with myself.
But, that was really the last time that I felt the kind of total despair that I wanted to write about.
TS: You know, you talked at the beginning of our conversation about how despair is a universal or nearly universal experience. I’m wondering if you think that despair plays some type of role or has some type of purpose in the psyche.
MP: Oh, absolutely! I mean, I think despair is a very healthy response to reality. Oftentimes, what’s happening is people are moving around the world filled with delusions and attitudes and self-perceptions and stories—about reality and about other people and about themselves. At some point, they’re confronted with a truth they cannot deny. At that point, I think despair can be a way to break through—a way to achieve transcendence.
In fact, one of the really interesting things to me about despair is many people say that their worst moment turned out to be their best moment. What despair often does is crack open your heart. When your heart cracks open, it begins to feel joy again. You wake up. You start feeling pain first. You feel the pain first. But then you feel the joy. You start to experience being alive again.
Before despair, often—in my opinion—there’s a much worse feeling than despair, which is a kind of a numbness to the world. Numbness to one’s own experience—a kind of deadening of the heart. A deadening of the sensory life, because the signals are too threatening to allow—I guess would be a good word for that.
TS: In your life, Mary, as a writer, do you see some relationship between the actual act of writing—the creative act of engaging the world in that way—and the potential experience or the experience of despair in any moment?
MP: Well, first of all, I think writing is a wonderful way to deal with despair because writing allows you to reflect on experience, explore experience, and to reframe experience. It can be a really healing, transformative process to write. Many writers will say that writing is what saved them and that they would not be alive if they weren’t writers.
So, in general, I think writing is a wonderful way to deal with despair. Just simply getting something out of one’s brain and onto a piece of paper can really be extraordinarily helpful.
On the other hand, I think writers—and many creative people—are more prone to despair than the general population because one of the things good writers tend to have in common is they’re exquisitely sensitive to the world around them. That means they’re more aware of beauty, but it also means they’re more aware of pain.
So, I feel like I’m this kind of person. I don’t have much skin. I walk around the world connecting to the world through nerve endings. I think that particular personality type—many people have that personality type—makes one more vulnerable.
This is kind of something my husband and I joke about, but there’s people in our friendship group who—maybe their maid has cancer or they’re losing they’re parents. And they seem to be fairly nonplussed by that. They’re kind of taking it as it comes and they’re not very worked up. There’s been several times in my life when I’ve said things like, “You know, I think I’m more upset about that man’s mother dying than he is.” We’re kind of laughing about that in the sense that I’m probably not really, but I’m someone who has a really open heart to the world. I think most writers do.
I think that’s a very good thing, but it has to be managed skillfully in order to be happy.
TS: As you were talking, I was thinking about this meditation teacher that I was studying with. At one point, he asked the people in the room—there were about maybe 100 people in the room—and he said, “How many of you have experienced great depression or despair, or are even in such a state right now? I’d just like to know how many of you.” Maybe five or ten people raised their hand. He said, “You’re the most intelligent people in the room. I just want to say that.”
MP: Oh, that’s sweet. [Mary laughs.]
And he’s probably right. I would say, though, that it’s very important to emphasize that not all intelligent people are sensitive and that one of the really important things about trauma—and it applies to despair too—[is that] no experience is wasted if you learn something from it. If you can look back on the dark night of the soul and go, “Because of that suffering I did, I’m a stronger person or a kinder person or a more connected person or a more spiritual person.” That dark night of the soul was a good thing.
Another thing that I think is really important to talk about when you talk about despair is, one of the elements of despair is you utterly stop loving yourself. You just have given up on yourself and the world.
So, one of the things that is really important to do while moving through despair is a kind of self-cherishing. That’s what I was talking about when I was talking about that winter I stayed home—of making my favorite soups, patting my cats, and lying on the couch in front of the fire [while] reading history books, and so on.
Again, I’m very lucky. I can take three months off and do that. I know a lot of people couldn’t. But, whatever it is people can do in their specific situation to cherish themselves and to be good to themselves is so very important. It’s so very important in terms of beginning to heal from despair.
Most of us are our own tormentors and our own grand inquisitors. So, unless that piece that involves dealing with our own inner harsh critic—our own inner hanging judge—is dealt with, we can’t heal from despair because we continue to inflict it upon ourselves.
I think one of the reasons I love Buddhism so much and switched from—you know, I’m a psychologist. I’ve been a psychologist now for over 40 years. But, I switched from psychological language to Buddhist language because what psychological language made me feel—I was reading about depression during this time, and the more I read, I more damaged I felt. The more I felt damaged and unique, as if I were a list of symptoms and neuroses and so on.
When I switched to Buddhist writing, I stopped feeling damaged immediately. I felt something much different. I felt human. I felt as if I was a member of a human race of seven billion people who suffered—and that I, like everyone else, to avoid suffering would need to learn some skills.
It was a tremendously hopeful way to look at suffering at that point in my life.
TS: Now, I know in response to a question about some mysterious person out there you said, “Look, I can’t answer that kind of question. It depends.” I respect that. I get that.
And yet, you’ve written a book, Letters to a Young Therapist, where you’re addressing young practitioners—young psychological practitioners. I’m curious if it would be possible to talk a little bit about how you might talk to a young therapist about working with people who come into their office who feel a great deal of despair or who report on feeling depressed. What would be—if you would—the sort of dos and don’ts, or any kind of guidelines, for that young therapist?
MP: Oh, sure! Of course, the first job of any therapist is to listen—and to listen really carefully—to what people are saying about what their story is, what their emotional experiences are, what their relationships are with the world, what they think is making them unhappy, what they think they need to feel better, and so on. The listening is always the first step.
And the listening—really, in several ways. One is listening as a form of love. It’s a very high form of love and it’s a form of love that many people find a very hard time either receiving or delivering. So, listening as an act of love is a very important part of that early therapy work.
Another reason is you can’t possibly help someone unless you understand them. So, unless you have a pretty complete feel for, “How does this person see the world and how do they frame their own experience?”—what are their habits of thought that might be contributing to this, and what ware their losses, and so on; and what skills don’t they seem to have, and what skills do they seem to have—it’s very hard to know how to help that person move forward.
Then the other thing is embedded in the listening is you listen to the problems. You listen to what psychologist Michael White called “problem-saturated stories.” But you’re actually listening for solutions. You’re looking for ideas about, “How can I help this particular person move forward and find within their own life repertoire the healing elements necessary for them to recover and be a more resilient person?”
So, for example, one of the things I would really be listening for early on were any kind of positive statements about connection to others. Someone who says, “Yes, my husband has been more patient with me,” for example, “very patient with me.” I might really stay with that kind of sentence and go, “Well, how lucky you are to have a patient husband. Tell me how that happened. How did you win such a patient husband?” and start pulling for less problem-saturated stories.
Another thing I would say is, “How do you understand your depression?” to really make sure I understand the system that person is operating under. For example, they might say at that point, “Well, I think it’s genetic.” Well, that’s important information in helping the person understand that, while genetics can’t be changed, there might be other things that could be, then.
So, one of the things, for example, when I was working with refugees, I always said was, “How do the people in your family and how do the people you know go about feeling better?” because I have my own particular ideas about feeling better, which we’ve talked about. Being outside and exercising and reading good books and friends. I think those are pretty much universal, actually. If people have those experiences, they tend to feel better. But, I also want to be very attuned to the fact that people have very specific ideas about what it is they need to feel good, and we want to incorporate those into the therapy.
So, for example, one story I tell in Middle of Everywhere—the book I wrote about refugees—is there was this man who came in and talked about the trauma in the African refugees who were here, and how almost all of them had seen family members murdered and seen terrible, traumatic things. I had some ideas about what might help that community. But, before I shared my ideas I asked him, “Well, what do you think that community needs to heal?” He had a really interesting response. He said, “We need a place in the country where we can kill a cow, have a feast, stay up all night long, sing, and dance.”
Well, that’s not something as a therapist that I would have thought of. But, it was actually something that was pretty easy to arrange. It was enormously helpful to bring that community together and share food together, and have an evening where they could celebrate in ways they were familiar with celebrating. They could be with each other and talk about their lives and so on.
Those are all thoughts. I was a therapist a long time. I have a lot of thoughts. But, that’s probably enough for the moment.
TS: You mentioned this idea of “problem-saturated stories.” I know that often when people report being in despair or being depressed, they talk about these repetitive thought-loops that go in their head—a type of endless rumination over the same depressive ideas. I’m wondering— whether from your Buddhist experience or from any insight you might have—what your recommendation might be to people when they find themselves in these repetitive thought-loops.
MP: Yes, yes. Well, I have those repetitive thought-loops. I’m very familiar with them. The main thing is self-awareness, so that you can catch yourself in those thought-loops.
This morning, for example, I very rarely have a scone for breakfast. I usually am very much a fresh fruit and plain yogurt kind of person for breakfast. But, this morning I had a scone that I’d bought yesterday when I was out at the movies. So, I start in the scone and I go into this thing—that is so me—of, “Oh, you shouldn’t be eating a scone. You don’t really want carbohydrates and sugar at breakfast. Why are you doing this?” Just this crazy self-talk where I’m giving myself a hard time for enjoying a scone, which I have twice a year.
I just noticed it and I thought, “Oh, for goodness sake, Mary. Just enjoy this scone. Just stop this story. Just sit and enjoy this scone with your cup of coffee.” That’s all I needed to do—was just recognize it and smile.
But, two things I want to say about this way we are—our problem-saturated stories. One is there is an urban legend, probably. This probably never happened, but there’s an urban legend in New York City about this famous psychoanalyst—who doesn’t really have a name, because it’s an urban legend. There isn’t really a specific psychoanalyst. But, he would sit listening to people who lay on his couch for hours at a time and, periodically, he would hold up this card that he’d had printed up and laminated that said, “Yours is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
[Tami laughs.]
MP: It’s a funny story, isn’t it? It’s funny because we all think we have the saddest story ever told. His intervention was actually very funny, because I’m sure people—when they would see that—would realize both their cognitive misperceptions about themselves and also the fact that everybody had those same crazy misperceptions. That card worked on everybody.
But, one of the things that recently happened to me that was just so healing in terms of this negative self-talk, problem-saturated story, feeling like a victim of my own life, and so on—which all of us can do that. All of us can do that so easily. [It] was this beautiful Thich Nhat Hanh poem. I was at a Buddhist retreat with Joanne Friday—who’s just a wonderful teacher—and this retreat was in this little town in Missouri called Conception Junction.
But anyway, she read us this beautiful Thich Nhat Hanh poem, “Our True Heritage.” I won’t read the whole thing to you, but the poem is celebrating joy—the joy of breathing, the joy of the pines chanting and the flowers blooming, and so on. Here’s the line I really want to read you in this context: “You—the richest person on Earth, who have been going around begging for a living—stop being the destitute child. Come back and claim your heritage.” And then the poem moves on to remind you of what a beautiful heritage you have with the Earth and the skies and so on.
I love that line: “Stop being the destitute child.” That’s one line that I use right now as a kind of skillful tool to pull myself back into joy and gratitude.
TS: I might have to put up one of those signs—”Yours is the saddest story on Earth”—and just look at it a few times myself. You know?
MP: [Laughs.] Yes.
TS: In talking about your own experience of becoming so physically depleted and despairing when your book, Reviving Ophelia, was becoming so successful and on all of the bestseller lists, et cetera—and obviously you point this out in your book, Seeking Peace: Confessions of the Worst Buddhist in the World about here you are and your despair [or] depression comes as a result of success. The irony in this.
Here are people—I mean, you’re working with refugees and other people who have had such great losses—in your life. Your despair came from something like being so successful. I’m curious how you were able to be kind to yourself, thinking, “Here’s the saddest story in the world. I’m making lots of money and having lots of invitations to speak all over the place.”
MP: Right. Well, actually, that really contributed to the depression because I felt so guilty for not being happy. I had things everybody I knew wanted, and I just felt so guilty. And I would never claim to you or to a radio audience that mine was the saddest story ever heard. I’ve had an extraordinary, lucky life and I’m grateful for it.
But, despair does not come from, is not a cognitive state. Despair is an emotional state. It proceeds on a very different level than thoughts.
So, for example: for years, I’d been telling myself I was happy [and] I was lucky. I was doing just great. I was extremely protective and so on. But, my body was telling me something totally different. My blood pressure was very high. I had terrible insomnia. I lost my appetite. I lost weight. I just was a very different person. By the time I came home from the road, one of the phrases I used in the book was, “I was too nervous to eat pie.” I was just really a very agitated person.
So, at some point, I really had to admit that—I told a friend. Here’s one of the things that helped me realize I was not doing very well. I said to a friend, “I’m really theoretically very happy.” She said, “You can’t be theoretically happy any more than you can be theoretically angry.” I realized, “I’m not happy. I’m telling myself I should be happy.”
One of the things I was real careful of in that book is to never compare my despair with the despair of others and say, “Oh, I somehow have suffered more than anyone else.” Actually, that’s kind of the point of the book—that despair is universal. It’s not only people who are struggling financially [who] suffer despair.
I’m reading Johnny Cash’s [wonderful new biography] right now, and obviously he was an extraordinarily successful man by most counts. His life was filled despair, and never more filled with despair than when he was at the top of his game in terms of celebrity and fame and red-hot records, and so on.
Actually, it’s very common for people who are doing very well to be filled with despair because their lives are changing so rapidly, and they’re often pulled very far away from what feels safe, familiar, comforting, and good to them. They’re finding themselves in very difficult situations, where they’re far from home and anxious and so on.
But, I think it’s a very interesting thing. People who feel lucky financially, lucky in terms of good work, or wonderful family or whatever tend to feel very upset with themselves if they’re not grateful every moment. Being grateful, from my point of view, is not a virtue. Being grateful is a skill that we all need to learn. It’s a skill. It’s a way of looking at one’s life.
For example, one skill I have that that I talked about in Seeking Peace—[which] I really encourage other people to consider learning—is at this point in my life, if I have a really strong moment of despair, one of the things I know to do is find something beautiful. I read a poem or a play a beautiful piece of music or I look out the window with binocular until I see a bird. All of those things are skills. They’re not character traits, or they’re not even the result of circumstance. People in very difficult circumstance can feel joy.
To deny privileged people their despair really is just as crazy as denying people who do not have privilege their joy. We all are in entitled to experience the whole gamut of human emotions, and we all do. We experience them in different ways. Certainly, people living in Syria today are suffering on a level that we living in Boulder and Lincoln can barely imagine. That being said, I think Buddha was right when he said, “Life is suffering.” I think most of us experience that as part of the human condition.
TS: Then, in your own experience, how did you work through guilt? You said that part of the creation of the despair was this sense of guilt. “I have all these things, and yet I feel terrible.”
MP: Well, for me, guilt is a very important part of depression. One of the things that is just unique to me—but I am not, of course, the only person—is I tend to be someone who’s very up-tempo and mostly kind to other people and good to other people, and tend to cut other people quite a lot of slack. But, I don’t with myself. I can just really give myself a very hard time about eating a scone or not being as polite and kind as I think I should be every minute of my life.
So, guilt is not just at that moment in time. It’s always been something I’ve had to work very hard at. One of the ways I deal with it is—again, these are all Buddhist skills—the Dalai Lama—it might be Thich Nhat Hanh, actually. One of the great Buddhist leaders says to just hug yourself and go, “Darling, I love you just the way you are.” That always makes me laugh when I do that.
The other thing is I say a prayer for all the people like me. For example, say I am irritable with my husband and feel bad about that later—that I’ve been a little snappy with him. I’ll say a prayer for all the women in the world who have ever been snappy and irritable with their mates. Just saying a prayer for all the people who missed an opportunity to be kind, or didn’t drive as carefully as they should have [while] driving on icy roads and almost caused a car accident, or whatever it is.
If I say a prayer for all the people like myself, I find it much more [easy] to open up my heart to myself, because I bear those others no ill will. I easily can forgive them. In fact, one of the real moments of peace for me in writing Seeking Peace was this moment when I brought myself into my circle of caring and figured out the vehicles to do that. That’s one of those vehicles—to say a prayer for all the people who are feeling like I am, or have made a mistake that I have made. When I do that, I open my heart to myself as well as all those others.
TS: Now, Mary, you said something that I thought was really interesting—that, in your view, despair is not so much cognitive as it is an emotional process. I think some people might say that that emotional process is also a physical process—that our emotions—
MP: Oh, it’s absolutely physical. Well, and of course, I bet you agree with me on this, but these strange divides we make in the Western world don’t really exist. The body, the mind, the emotions, thought—they’re all much more connected, interactive, and synergistic than our American way of talking would suggest.
But, I’ll give you a very good example of this business of despair not being cognitive. You happen to remember—it’s a very old poem, and if you’re much younger than me you probably wouldn’t—but there’s a poem called “Richard Cory.” Do you remember that poem?
TS: I don’t.
MP: It’s “Richard Cory,” and it’s C-O-R-Y, but we could both Google it after this interview. But, essentially what it’s about is a very good-looking banker who walks the streets of his town. The women all smile when he comes around. He has everything. He has money, he has charm, he has good looks, and popularity. And the last line of the poem is, “And Richard Cory went home and put a bullet through his head.”
That poem is talking about how—no matter how a person looks on the outside or no matter how objectively we can evaluate their life via a checklist as lucky—we never know what a person’s thinking. I remember, as a therapist, I would see people who had—on one level—such beautiful lives. It’s sort of like, “Well, how dare you not be happy? You have a wonderful husband and an interesting career and tons of people who love you.”
But, the fact of the matter was the way the person was feeling about their lives—the emotional pain of their lives—was really beyond their cognitive control in some ways. It was in their body, and it was in their heart. To work with the body and the heart requires some different things.
TS: That’s what I’m curious about. Specifically, the body and the heart—and what in your own experience has been helpful in terms of working through despair at a physical level?
MP: One thing I mention in Seeking Peace is massage. I’d never had a massage until 2001. I’d been all kinds of places where part of the pay was a free massage. I never took it. I just didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of a stranger touching my body.
But, I was so jittery and so tense and so insomniac that I decided, “I’m going to try it.” I started getting a massage—originally, I think I got one once a week for maybe a month until I started feeling a little better. But, massage was the absolute best thing for me at the early point, because it started just allowing my body to calm down.
I’d rush into my massage stressed, intense, and worrying about if I should even be there. After an hour, I would just feel so good and so calm and so much better about my life. So, massage was really good.
I also did a lot of work on having more body awareness, because one of the ways I’d been able to cope my whole life with my sort of driven nature and putting aside my own needs was to just ignore all kinds of bodily signals about being uncomfortable or in pain or tired. I started taking yoga.
Yoga was also tremendously helpful for just this basic body awareness that I really needed. It’s also very helpful—I do hotel room yoga when I work now. It’s a very good way to rapidly realign the body and have a body that feels better 15 minutes after you notice you need some body work.
So, yoga—and one thing I’ve done my whole life that I love [and] that I do religiously now as part of a sort of healthiness project is swim. Swimming is wonderful. You’re moving through water. You’re moving in a way that balances your body. It’s very rhythmic. It’s very tied to breathing. So, swimming—to me—is just one of the most beautiful and pleasant ways to work with the body.
So, that’s kind of the body work. The hard part is really more—as body awareness comes—[to] start being able to experience literally the sensations in the heart and paying attention to them—as opposed to overriding them with cognitions.
I remember when my little granddaughter Claire-Annalise was maybe two or three. We went to this big family reunion and we were just having so much fun. We were staying in a Super 8 hotel or something where we got chocolate doughnuts for breakfast—which, believe me, those kids don’t ever get except that one time—and there was a little swimming pool in that hotel. Then they spent the day playing with their Ozark cousins out-of-doors. She was just having so good a time.
At one point, she turned to me and she said, “Nana, my heart feels very big.” I go, “Oh, Claire. What do you mean by that?” She said, “Well Nana, my heart feels very full. It feels very full, like my stomach would feel full.” I realized she was still young enough and in touch enough with her body that she could feel her heart swelling with joy.
That’s something most of us forget. We forget to notice our heart is swelling with joy and we forget to notice when our heart is aching in sorrow. That particular piece of body awareness is immensely valuable in terms of orienting yourself toward, “What is it I need to be doing right now to heal and to be in a healthier spot?”
TS: On that note, Mary, just a final question—because you made a comment and I wrote it down because it was such a beautiful sentence. [It was] that, “Despair cracks open our heart.” I wonder if you can just help me understand a little more. It’s kind of been implicit in our whole conversation, but how [is it] that you see that despair cracks open the human heart?
MP: Pema Chödrön has a wonderful line: “The cure for the pain is the pain.” Especially we Americans—but really, people all over the world; it’s a human condition—we’re socialized to avoid pain, to not feel pain. Someone called America “the culture of perkiness.” We’re all socialized to be perky.
What we do is we bury pain. We drink. We have road rage. We gamble or shop or watch a lot of TV. One way or another, Americans are very good at numbing themselves.
Really, the cure for that is despair—because despair is realizing, “I now am feeling my pain. I’m feeling it. I’m experiencing it.” Hard as it is to experience despair, it’s the beginning of revitalizing myself and re-experiencing my life. It’s the beginning of a growth project.
I had a friend who was diagnosed with cancer. It could have been terminal. It was a very severe case of throat cancer. The doctor said to him, “You are about to embark on the most life-affirming project you have ever encountered.” That’s a really beautiful way to tell someone they have cancer, because what happens to people who have cancer is they tend to realize how much they love their family [and] how much they love being alive.
Actually, it’s kind of ironic, but I remember this from my days a therapist: many people stop being depressed when they get cancer because that despair that cancer causes cracks open their heart to joy and love. You don’t have to have cancer to feel despair. But you do have to have despair, in many cases, because that is the portal to waking up for most of us.
TS: You’ve been listening to Mary Pipher, a bestselling author who has contributed a new anthology from Sounds True called Darkness Before Dawn: Redefining the Journey through Depression.
SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
