ASM223 You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass) Part 1

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[Music] welcome to ask science mike i'm science mike wait a second i'm not science mike i'm dr hilary mcbride and i'm guest hosting this week's episode of ask science mike so that we can hear from mike himself about his book but to be faithful to the introduction i'll just continue on this is a weekly podcast where we believe every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response in this week's episode we're going to be talking to mike hearing from the man himself about this book the process of writing what he's learned along the way and what he hopes for you to know and experience in reading this work if i am correct mr mike mccarg this is the week that your book is releasing and so i'm curious just as we get started to check in what what does it feel like to be releasing this book what's this like for you i'm already crying hmm um i'm already crying thank you for for doing this hillary i'm so grateful to be doing this with you mike yeah it means a lot to me and um i was reflecting on how strange it is and wonderful but very strange that you're interviewing me about this book which is mostly a list of things i've learned since i met you yeah there's something very meta about all of this it's very very it's a it's definitely a wheel within a wheel kind of thing um it feels so exciting to finally release this book uh there's you know how this works as a writer you put your best ideas and your best feelings into a work and you hope that it will be helpful and useful for people you hope that it will be something that improves someone's life in some way but then you just like wait a long time after you finish that i can't think of any other media not even film uh is there such a delay between the completion of the work and when it reaches the audience but then with this like really daunting thing we are in right now with a global pandemic and all of the extra anxiety and all the extra fear and all the extra loss that people are facing i'm actually really glad the book didn't come out as soon as i was done with it because in a book about how i have learned from others to relate to and accept and understand and value my feelings seems like a good useful book for a lot of people today yeah i'm so struck with the timeliness of it and and this unexpected gift of yeah the specific timing of this release based on what we're going through but i i hear for you it the absurdity of that you write something you give it your best there's this huge push deadlines all of the uh energy and stress around deadlines and then just waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting and then here again this crescendo of feelings around it that's uh that's so unusual and yet i guess so typical in the book process you almost by the time a book comes out forget what it was about right yeah i was really lucky i recorded the audiobook relatively recently like much later in the process than i did with finding god in the waves kind of right before the shelter and place water landed in los angeles and so i got to re-read the book out loud in three days and re-familiarize myself with it and i was um this will sound strange to people who haven't really confronted a lot of their shame yet they might find this statement off-putting but i was actually struck with a an appreciation for the book and how much i liked it and how proud i was of it um i was really able i think i i have a particular talent for um being honest and sincere about what i am thinking and feeling and when i and communicating that to others and i think in this book i hit a different stride in that process of um of sharing what i've gone through in a way that hopefully is applicable to others i mean when i write a book i'm focused on the reader and not on me but i was also really proud and that um i felt like i established um better and more productive boundaries between myself and the reader with this book than i did with finding god in the waves um and i i didn't necessarily notice that as i wrote it i only noticed it on um reading it in that i wrote this book both as a way to process my own life and my own experiences and as something that could help readers but somehow this time those two things didn't get as blurred together as they did in previous works that i've done and i felt um i felt proud of myself as i reflected on that reading in a recording studio right and yet what's striking to me about that in reading this book is how you are also communicating to the reader so much of the things that you are learning at the time that you were writing it and so there is this measure of vulnerability but it sounds to me like like a healthier relationship to that vulnerability or some way to to transform your learning into this offering for other people without giving away parts of yourself that really were just for you yeah that is the key difference and finding god in the waves i like i let people into the deepest darkest scariest parts of my life and like there's glimpses of that here too but there um well let's let's focus on now here um as i became aware of a piece of information or a new activity or a new practice and the way it was impacting my life i took just a moment to really kind of sit with it and figure out what was mine and what i needed to keep and what i could offer to others without it costing me so um you know when i finished finding god in the waves it was kind of like um a hangover and a difficult a difficulty and when i finished you're a miracle i felt really good and really proud um but i didn't feel drained in the same way um well these are and these are difficult things to to explain and to articulate even for me um but i feel like the basic thrust of this book um comes out of an experience you and i shared at the first kin retreat um when i realized as much as i thought that i was close and intimate with all of my emotions i was close and intimate with emotions that i was already comfortable with and and burying the rest uh and somewhere in the process that moment uh one led to this book becoming a completely different book than it was before that point uh not a lot made it past that transition point just just probably a quarter of the words in the book survive that transition but through that somewhere i i started learning to not fill my pen from my vein wow wow oh what a striking image and what excites me about that is that that didn't make the book worse right i used to bleed on the page because i thought that was the only way to write well but i actually think you know when people have forget what i think when others have read this book they've told me that they've had some major insight in their life and let's be honest at this point my life i think insights are a dime a dozen but whatever insight they've had is then opened a period of change and growth um and that's the stuff that really excites me yeah uh i've i've this book represents a shift in my life to a post-insight period and into where i value much more the things in our lives that allow us to transform and i don't mean transform in the 90 days to a better u way which i couldn't be less interested in but i mean transforming to love ourselves and others more [Music] right which i think at this point is the only transformation i'm interested in well maybe we'll i'll ask it this way uh since we're kind of you're alluding to it in a few different ways but from what i know and from what you've said already the writing of this book really had a kind of unusual trajectory so can you give us a timeline of the writing of the book and some of the things that happened along the way to shape that i mean you already mentioned one of the things that happened which is a an experience we had together at a men's retreat what what was the trajectory of writing this like and what were some of the twists and turns that happened along the way you know i started this book a couple of months after finding god in the waves came out i had this very clear vision for a book that i needed to write since before i wrote finding god in the waves actually finding other ways is not the book i wanted to write first here's what i knew about myself that i was kind to other people that i um had developed a system using science and data analysis to drive behavioral changes in my life that i desired and i had all these outcomes i was proud of i had lost 100 pounds and run a marathon i had you know uh dealt with some hoarding and compulsive behavior patterns in my life successfully when when i looked in the literature the ability to actually make meaningful changes on that is statistically rare and uh i'd had a successful career in advertising and then transitioned from that into making much less money but doing work that fulfilled me and that i i woke up every day with a clear sense of purpose knowing that today i would make media that would help people feel more comfortable more confident less afraid less isolated that of course would be the work i did with the liturgists and then through my own media and i thought i know how to do this i'm going to write a book that's an instruction manual so people can have a life as good as mine and literally i called a friend and said that was my idea and my friend bradley was like that's a great idea you should write that book and so i started putting together a proposal and it went back and forth with my publisher and it took some tweaking and we finally landed on a book uh called you wondrous you that was a guided tour of the self by you know a beloved uh public educator mike mcgark and uh i got really far into writing that book i decided it was going to be the most cited book ever written so that's great to make i know but i was like i'm i don't have a phd i don't have any expertise so what i'll do instead is i will drown people in good referencing and so i literally wrote made a process where first i selected all my source material it was i don't remember more than a hundred books and over a thousand uh pieces of research in addition to a bunch of web material uh like uh pieces in the atlantic things like that uh i wrote the citations first wow i created the notes then an outline then started to write and then there would be sentences that had six or seven endnote markers in it uh and it was as riveting as you would expect a book like that to be and i got really lost trying to write that book and got really discouraged and then i started to have um panic attacks and anxiety and i'd never had anxiety before anxiety is a new feeling for me i used to uh guilt and shame were my go-to's so kind of i've addressed guilt and shame to a large degree in my life and then anxiety replaced them and when anxiety replaced them i started having all these difficult outcomes and then my wonderful curated life started to come unglued and during that process as my public platform was growing you and i hosted an event called ken it was a men's retreat that was so exciting because we were helping men understand how uh masculinity is often used as a tool of the patriarchy but does not have to be and we did a sculpt a psychodrama in that and during that experience i had this super intense panic attack which i now understand to have largely had um to be a dissociative event and i wouldn't have had those words at that time that is that is something i had to learn through months and months of trauma therapy um but i had a dissociative event because i'd been so triggered that my nervous system uh just kind of tripped a circuit breaker to try to protect me yeah and when i became aware through learning i had autism learning i had complex post-traumatic stress disorder learning all these things my daughter struggling with an eating disorder being diagnosed and us rallying our family around to support her ultimately my co-dependent relationship with my work leading me to be hospitalized with heart disease i became aware that i was not an expert on life who should stand on a pedestal and advise others on how to live and the book uh pivoted into words of comfort from a survivor and uh i found that that place where i believe my work is best uh my favorite thing about finding on the ways which is arguably a book on theology is it was written from a perspective of someone who does not believe themselves to be a theologian or qualified to speak on matters of theology and you're a miracle and a pain in the ass is this deep look at really really really modern and nuanced movements in psychology and are really detailed examination of how our neurobiology and our physiology impact our daily lives and behavioral economics and these really complicated systems from someone who knows they are not qualified to speak on those things that's one of my favorite parts about this mike is that there is so much more credibility in you and your humanness being the place that you speak from that i think whether it was intended or not it gives us the reader an opportunity to see how we are like you both in the places that need attention but also in our ability to speak with expertise into the things that we have learned and discovered in our own lives in ways that can make us helpful and wise for others without that excluding the places where we have felt pain yeah those things are so related yeah was there more in that trajectory i feel like it summarizes it for you no there's um i saw a review i have a bad habit of reading the reviews of my books everyone says to don't do that and then and that's good advice and i ignore it okay uh but um a review came on amazon from one of the vine people and it was a five star review and there was a sentence um in there and i'm paraphrasing but it was uh mike mccarthy is one [ \_\_ ] up dude and he knows it and i love him for it and i think there's something to that i think there have been the periods that have set me up for the most pain and difficulty in life and which have caused the most destruction and relationships with others are those periods in which i start to believe that i have arrived or i have completed my arc of emotional growth and that i have found a place uh where i am wise and i don't mean i i believe in many ways i'm a wise person but i mean in this use of wise that i am a a fount of wisdom without fault and um i'm actually really grateful that a couple years of my life uh shook me of the notion that i was um you know some kind of elevated being um because i've been finding i'm i was so afraid of myself as a child for so long from my whole life uh to the point it made me uncomfortable with children to even be around children and the process of me writing this book it led me to understand that these times that i think i am i've arrived are the times that i think i have defeated and evicted my inner child from my emotional landscape and that came to a particular intense point in the arc of writing this book as i as i worked through things in trauma therapy and i went to trauma therapy understanding that traumatic events were encoded in my brain and i wanted to decode them and when i learned these traumatic events were in many ways a neurological snapshot of myself in the past in my case as a child i said oh great we just gotta have we have to get that kid out of there right and i remember my therapist a man named ron frederick um who's been a guest on this program uh saying with such kindness in his eyes no mike we don't evict the child you learn to protect him and even saying that now brings tears to my eyes because that moment of insight was not the moment that i began to learn to do that it was the moment i began to face the reality of what was ahead and somewhere very near the end of writing this book i saw a picture of myself as a child and i was filled with such affection and pride for all that little boy survived and that despite all i went through as a kid i am still so kind and i care for other people and i was so proud that the little child in that photograph was able to do that and i found that after that when i would look at my adult self in the mirror the sense of constant self-consciousness i usually feel was not there and i also found the next time i interacted with a child i enjoyed it what integration took place for you to be able to see the continuity in self and that you could love that young part of you and see that you are today an extension of that young part of you that's exquisite i would want that for all of us me too yeah me too wow there's something so striking for me about this book and i've already mentioned it but it's the way that you are moving your learning in real time into something you share with us and there's a i don't know how to explain it except to say that there's a kind of quality of the writing which feels like it has this this pace or energy to it that's different than someone who's like oh here's a lesson i learned 20 years ago it's almost like as you are learning as you write this book we get to learn along with you and there's some sort of energetic pull to the parts of us that feel stuck to join you in that transformation and i don't know if that's a quality that's possible to capture if you write a book any other way i wanted to uh to ask you about your author's note at the beginning i have some very specific questions about this book for you mr mccarthy okay let's do it in the author's note you mentioned the following and i'll if it's all right with you i'll read your words to you yes please this is a dangerous book the process of researching and applying its insights from psychology and sociology to neuroscience and behind behavioral economics sorry greg from psychology and sociology to neuroscience and behavioral economics changed my life in dramatic and unexpected ways there has been pain struggle and loss in the pages that follow i'm going to be honest and open about what i've learned in the hope that it might help anyone else who's fighting to emerge from their own cocoon so what i was struck by in reading this was the tension that's there that there's this danger in knowing that things that you're writing about could elicit something for someone but also wanting to offer them to them at the same time implying that somehow this thing that is dangerous is also helpful so i'm curious if you could tell us just about that tension and healing the knowing ourselves the emerging the transformation about that that razor's edge where where it is dangerous but also something that you want for us one thing about me that i know is i carry very much about empowering people to make their own choices that i have been trusted by so many uh to be a guide and advisor in their life and that i've never wanted to follow the example of people in media or the public eye who abuse or manipulate that trust and i made a decision very early when i realized where this book was going the entire book was written in order by the way i had the great great fortune of a computer crash that erased the manuscript and i had to start from scratch late in the process uh bringing out from memory what i had written before which ended up making the book so much better because the the manuscript had gotten too heavy the last thing i wrote however was the author's note and i wrote it because um i would rather someone pick my book up read the line and say this is a dangerous book and read that paragraph and go oh not ready and put it back and me not get whatever my author royalty is for that copy then for someone to start reading this and to enter a process they are not prepared to enter if i would have read this book when i was 24 it would have been very difficult we have all faced challenges in life that are significant and we are an incredible thing known as life and my understanding is that life created bodies first to be successful and then added brains to make bodies more successful bodies are a tool of the brain and because bodies and brains are designed to survive they are designed to store and process experiences about the world that help them survive and i know this sounds very heady right now folks but this will go to the heart because of that i don't care who you are your body and your brain have stored experiences of pain in an attempt to help you survive and most contemporary cultures do a bad job of offering us the kinds of tools that help us process and cope with those experiences in real time so instead we tend to take on perhaps what i'd call a personal emotional deficit we do deficit emotional spending and sooner or later the bill comes due so there's two things we can do we can enter into a process volitionally and begin to process those things and in the process we will experience some more pain and suffering because our bodies in order to to fully process what we understand today medically and psychologically is in order to fully process those repressed experiences we will have to experience pain and suffering again or we can push that process off into the future and in doing so pay more interest and i wanted to equip the reader in the author's note to make the decision is this the time when you're ready to start facing those things or not because it's your choice but i also understand by looking at outcome data from studies um both in mental health and and of the medical field is if you push these things off forever and you live long enough the reckoning is all the worse for the delay so i think there is some wisdom in being aware when we have the resiliency for a process like this and when we do not but also to be understand that our bodies and our brains will start giving us warning signs when we're going to start to face some of our our repressed things and if you start seeing those things things like panic attacks things like chronic anxiety things like disrupted sleep patterns uh if you heed those signals and respond it's difficult but you can you can move toward a place that is ultimately um oh gosh this is so hard to articulate into language you're doing so great um you can move into a place where you feel more well and i i was careful not to say more happy you feel better you feel no pain nope none of those are true but you feel more well and as you feel more well are able to relate more intimately with others you know and and i've seen what happens when people don't face that when we don't face those things we have heart attacks we have strokes we have latent life suicides we have public health crises and what i would tell someone who heard that that warning about a dangerous book is that yesterday i came out of my office and i was aware that there was so much tension in the kitchen with jenny and madison and macy and i knew not because i am a genius but because i've been through trauma therapy that they were all feeling feelings that they were aware of and couldn't name and in their anxiety were experiencing conflict and i asked and did not mandate if we could all take a moment just to share what we were feeling and then everyone said that they felt like and then explained the circumstance and i said you know when i've talked to my therapist that he says anytime i say i feel like i'm sharing a thought and i'm thankful to hear your thoughts but could i hear your feelings and then one two three three people told me they felt fine and i said i'm gonna check the great book of feelings here i don't see fine listed persistent so i would love it if uh and no one has to do this this is an invitation if you can tell me a feeling and then one two three i don't know what i'm feeling and so then i asked if people could describe what they felt in their bodies and they said what do you mean i feel nothing i said well check your forehead and your cheeks and your neck and your shoulders and your back and your chest and your belly for warmth or cold or tightness or looseness or something coiled or something tingling and then finally i said and if you can't find anything there check your eyes and when i said check your eyes one of my daughters started to cry and i could see that she felt shame and embarrassment at crying and so i walked up to her and i put my arms around her and i said thank you for sharing your feelings with me i feel so safe and connected with you when you share your feelings with me and then my other daughter and my wife we came and we surrounded this person and we all cried together and it was wonderful because after that we realized together that we are all sad and afraid at what is happening in the world and trapped in a house together and then we just sat in that clarity for a few minutes and if and then i was so excited i didn't raise this one of my daughters said could we talk about strategies on how to keep this communication open and can we talk about strategies on how to reduce the stress we have living together and then we sat at the table as a family and openly discussed strategies to one communicate when we need support and two to make it less frustrating to be in a house together for months and all of that was facilitated by a journey into appreciation acceptance and even affection for all of our feelings not just joy not just excitement or surprise not but also sadness and also anger and also fear and that process is difficult for everyone me and my family are all still in that process and i believe perhaps will always be in that process but i just would i would just say i don't know what other people's home life is like but that was a different experience than i would have had with my family three years ago in the same situation a marker of all of the transformation that's taken place in you since then that's an incredible story mike just just to demonstrate that it's dangerous because we're confronting old things and changing and upsetting a system but we want it because or we want it for each other or you want it for us because it takes us somewhere healthier richer more present more connected which we could argue is really um maybe one of the things that makes being alive worth living you know when we were starting to become friends i pulled this up just in preparing for this interview i was i was texting you about something i think messaging somehow and uh i sent you a text that said i i quote i wanted to tell you that all last week you were showing up in my clinical work i've been recommending your book finding god in the waves to lots of people i'm seeing and i keep hearing about how healing it is for them it's like a key to unlocking some stuck shame it seems that your story has been a lighthouse for them thank you for your sharing thank you for sharing your voice your knowings all of it as someone who has also had a fairly personal first book coming out this fall what did i say as someone who also has a fairly personal first book coming out this fall i appreciate more than ever the courage that takes to publicly be naked and emotionally and intellectually yourself in front of others and you sent the following message back there was a post-it note on my desk as i wrote this book and it said kill the shame i'm so happy that subtext is connecting with people it was the animating energy of the work so this exchange that we had years ago now had got me thinking that maybe there wasn't a post-it note by your desk or maybe there was but i'm wondering if there was a heartbeat or a phrase or something that stands out to you that guided how and what you wrote what is that can you share with us what you would want what what was maybe the animating energy or force or language as you were writing this thanks for sharing that story with me i had forgotten about those messages um there was an animating energy behind [Music] this book uh gosh this is hard to say if you love yourself they may love themselves yeah and uh it was written down and it was um some days i love myself so deeply and so profoundly and other days the defensive strategies that help me survive a lifetime of incredible trauma roar back into being and they take over and they win for that day and i just can't stand myself and on those days if i write from that mindset i either have to put on a false bravado and pretend that i'm great or i write things that are so self-critical that they're not only not helpful to read they're painful for others to read and so when i would sit down to write i would uh i would think about what i like about myself you know if people listen to me often they're probably aware i say i'm kind very often because that's an easy grounding statement that i don't question it's easy for me to believe that i am kind to people i have lots of evidence internally and externally to support the fact that i am kind um but i can't write a book to people about encouraging them to love themselves if i'm not taking that medicine myself and in the cultural context in which we live where self love and acceptance is so often grotesquely conflated with narcissism i actually believe that people loving and accepting themselves is the foundation for genuine and sincere friendship and for actual social change when i don't love myself and i am a white man and someone speaks of patriarchy or white supremacy or ableism or heterosexism then i feel a profound insecurity because these are reasons i should not love myself these are these are confirmations that i'm a bad person which is my deepest fear but when i love myself then i know that there are societal systems that i am a part of that i did not create but at times i have helped maintain and so if i love myself then i can love others and i can be present with them in their pain and i can listen and i can decenter myself and i can substantively change in response to their critique of a system that may overlap with my own behaviors but if i love myself then i don't feel attacked or destroyed by those statements quite the contrary i feel excitement that i've been given the opportunity to be the person i know myself to be when i love myself and a person shares with me who is a friend their pain whether it is systemic or personal or both i am able to sit with them in their pain and not need to rush in and solve their problem and advise them and be their savior nor do i have to withdraw and fear because they have provoked pain in my own life because when i love myself i'm in touch with my pain and i'm processing my pain and i know when i have the space and energy to be supportive and when i need to set a boundary and say could we talk another time i've been so struck honestly by knowing you hillary um what love true love of the self does to facilitate true love for other people i think so often in our culture we have confused and conflated codependency and flattery with love and the animating energy of this book is true sincere and genuine love for the self which leads to the same love for others wow whoo i don't uh i don't really know what to say to that except in listening to you say those words and feeling your pause before you shared them was such a deep resonance for me with with what you shared just now and how i experienced reading the book and experienced myself reading the book i you did that mike that came through in how you wrote what you wrote and what it did to us as the reader and that that kind of references what i was saying before too about how there's something unique about writing writing a book as you're learning things instead of it being something old you've known for a while and you're finally getting around to distributing and to me it is so obvious that as you've led us into your process of transformation and healing that it invites us into the same that there is something contagious about the learning and the growing process and i've heard it said a few other ways but like there's no such thing as one-way liberation that there is no such thing as me actually disconnected from you and and total individualism and that that comes through to me in this book that as you have done healing work so that awakens something us and up awakens something in us up as we read this book what was the pause before you shared it before you shared that that phrase um there was some sadness there um my empathy sometimes makes me hyper aware of all the things people feel and um the combination of my friendships and my my work in media means i get a an interesting and sometimes terrifying bird's-eye view of how people feel day-to-day in their lives and the magnitude and the difference of my aspiration for how folks would feel for themselves and how they actually feel so there was sadness there and then there was a shame that i had to push back on because um i was aware that people are trained at a societal institutional scale not to accept the idea that they should love themselves um and because of that some people would have a a reflexive reaction to such a notion they say well wait is science mike uh a hippie now is he uh whatever and i i i had that shame and that fear of disconnection and then uh so i kind of went through two full emotional waves wow and then i sat and waited for the sense of clarity on how to open my heart the most to the most people while still uh protecting myself it's quite a quite a pause oh but gosh what modeling for us what modeling to demonstrate all of those things that could take take place in that span of time and that you could be so uh with yourself and that being with yourself in that way and taking the time to do that could lead you to some clarity i mean that's you demonstrating one of the things that you learned in this book too around staying with your emotion being with what's happening in the moment and that it takes you somewhere good on the other side i became aware of people in my life who spoke more slowly and i didn't know why for a long time the people would stop and reflect before they spoke i'd be like what are they doing why you know i have such high verbal acuity i can begin to speak instantly if i wish and i noticed often that people who said really wise or kind things they took all this time before they spoke and i think i started in as i wrote this book and the journey i've been on to understand why they are quiet before they speak that the parts of our brains and our bodies that can speak instantly often are the least prepared to offer something of value or substance uh and if we give those those um older and more ancient parts of our physiology the time to do their work often they better equip us to genuinely share something of value and to to respond to what is happening around us instead of being so reactive thank you for modeling that for us in that moment that was really moving to me and it said to me what you're about to say is important that pause made me lean in and tune in and wait with great expectancy about whatever you were going to say next thank you for for being with yourself so that we could get to know what was happening as you were writing this book and then for sharing that that pause with us this has been part one of hillary mcbride's interview of science mike about his new book you were a miracle and a pain in the ass this interview has been broken into two parts you can download and listen to the second half tomorrow [Applause] [Music]