ASM139 The Holiday Hangover

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the holiday hangover and dealing with deconstruction all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemight [Music] well happy new year everybody uh it's me mike mccarthy your host also called sciencemike for this weekly podcast about science faith and life and at the end of last year i asked you for your feedback about this program and i read all those emails and all those tweets and all those patron messages and really digested them and i've got a lot of ideas about what to do with ask science mike in 2018 and that starts with this episode the first episode of the year one thing people asked me to do is uh sometimes deviate from the normal patron poll for question format to dive into topics that are on my mind or things that i care about so that's what we're going to do with today's show and before we do that let me go into the announcements because uh now that we have a new year there's actually new things uh for you to know these are really quick don't hit the forward button you'll you'll miss uh content because to be so short basically i've got several events coming up in february there's going to be an ask science mic live in orange california on february 7th and an ask science mike live in cincinnati ohio february the 10th and then i'll be speaking at the revive conference in san diego california february 23rd you can get links to all those uh events on asksciencemike.com just click the events tab and you can get more information there i do have other events in the spring but those aren't on the website yet also want to let you know that uh through the liturgists michael gunger and i are going to offer a couple of online video courses we've had people say they can't get to our events but they'd like to dig deeper into some of the topics we cover on the podcast so we're doing two one on meditation the other on the enneagram and we're selling those like a two for one right now at shop.theliturgist.com and those will be two for one until the first class comes out at which point the two for one deal goes away so if you're interested in that go check it out shop.the now back to this episode why am i going off script in the very first show of 2018 as a person who loves routine you may notice this podcast tends to be very routine there's just a couple of formats i do over and over and it's because i very much view this podcast as your podcast you being the listener i want to talk about what you want to talk about i want to respond to what's happening in your life and your experiences and your questions and so as i looked in my email inbox i had lots of questions that were telling me you know what people thought about ask science mike sure or a lot of emails but i had many more centered around just two topics and i mean these came in hundreds of times each uh one theme was gosh why do i become someone else when i go home for the holidays and you're probably home now uh we're further into january as this episode comes out and this may be a memory but that puzzle might remain like what happens when we go home for the holidays why do we tend to revert to older behaviors why is it so much harder to get along with family members at home than friends where we live now so we're going to unpack that a little bit and then the other topic which is actually related so i'm not going to do the little do do do do segues in this episode we're going to discuss this as kind of a long continuous thread there's a lot of folks entering into deconstruction for the first time so even though science mic has been around for a couple years now the literacy podcast has been around fighting on the waves has been out for over a year there are people just discovering that work because they're just starting to question you know the most fundamental ideas in their faith that they've held on to for their whole lives i mean it seems like based on my emails and based on book scan a lot of people had a copy of my book under the tree which i really appreciate but the data is pretty consistent between 42 and 44 of people uh will go through a major faith transition in their life and for those of you who are long-time listeners to the podcast for those of you who've been deconstructing longer than i have this may seem like a review but i wanted to take some time on this first episode of 2018 to talk with folks who are just starting down the road of deconstruction who are wondering what they do in their families and in their faith communities and in some cases their seminaries so we're going to unpack those things this episode why do we become different when we go home again and what do we do when we start to question our most closely held ideas in religion so let's start with this idea of going home for the holidays and why is it so weird why do we fight so much why am i in a new city with new friends and a new job uh where i'm a competent professional person or an artist or whatever it is that i do and i have a community that works pretty well but when i go home i'm fighting with my sibling about uh who stays in the bathroom longer again what is it about going home that brings back uh all of these older behaviors and patterns in our lives i mean personally i gained 20 pounds 20 to 0 20 pounds over the holiday break just going home to tallahassee florida for two weeks i weighed myself before and after and the difference was 20 pounds which is depressing because i just lost 20 pounds if you listen to the program you know that i moved to los angeles ate a lot realized i was eating too much lost 20 pounds so i went home gained the 20 pounds back and i'm back where i started before thanksgiving kind of depressing but when i went home all i did was eat a lot of junk food and i wasn't very active i just sat around all the time and it was cold that's part of it but that's not it one thing i've learned as i studied you know neuroscience and cognitive science and even psychology is that humans are nowhere as in control of themselves as they believe there's a book called the happiness hypothesis it's one of my favorite books and the author there jonathan hate uses a uh analogy that i find really helpful or a metaphor and that's that our our brains and our minds are like an elephant and a rider and if you think about the relationship between someone riding an elephant and the elephant itself through some training the writer can learn to exert influence and some degree of control over the elephant but ultimately the strength of human arms and limbs are not enough to actually steer an elephant anywhere so if an elephant decides it wants to go a different way there's not a lot that the writer can do about that and we have a similar dynamic between our conscious and our unconscious minds or our irrational and our emotional minds and so when you go home your elephant finds a lot of familiar paths your elephant finds a lot of familiar environments and food sources and no matter what the writer says the elephant just kind of comfortably walks a road that it's walked hundreds of times before another book i enjoy uh it's called the power of habit and it breaks down a lot of our behaviors our unconscious behaviors into three pieces a cue a routine and a reward so for me a really common cue in my life is that i get to the end of a particular task so i'll finish working on something for example this podcast and then when i save it i get up and i walk around and i i walk out of my office and what i normally do is walk to the kitchen and rummage around for a little snack and in the kitchen i'd invariably find that ginny is out in the kitchen or somewhere around the house uh we have kind of an open floor plan so basically the kitchen the living room dining room all very close to each other and uh and then i talked to jenny and i ate a little snack and i get back to work well if you do that over and over that adds up to a lot of calories but the cue is what finishing some work the routine is walking around the kitchen and talking to jenny and the reward is a little sweet treat and some quality time with another person which as a social animal of course i love time with other people especially my wife who i'm incredibly fond of so when you go home the cues that were there for your whole life show up especially if you're returning to a childhood home but even if you don't return to a childhood home the other members of your childhood household and indeed your extended family offer behavioral cues that kick off routines of your own that come with some kind of reward even if they drive you crazy i don't like it when my belly gets so big that my shirts are tight that's not a reward but i do like a little sweet treat now i've figured out that if i walk out of the office and walk into the living room instead of the kitchen and i meet jenny there then i don't eat a sweet treat i just talk to jenny for a few minutes and then i get a reward that i like and then i go back to work and guess what just happened i got i got a reward i appreciate but i didn't consume an extra 100 or 200 calories uh several times a day that adds up over time but that's what's hap one of the things that's happening when you go home is you're encountering cues that you have carefully excluded from your new environment that's why one of the reasons you're different in your new home or your new city or your new profession or your new church or your new whatever is because the cues are different and you've created a different set of routines right it's like a needle in the groove of a record our behavior in our daily living of course that's not that's not all we have conscious behaviors not all of our unconscious behaviors are exclusively habits for example our relationship dynamics were honed over time to allow us to exist together as a family even if your family is dysfunctional your emotional and relational dynamics were created to survive in that context and to allow others to survive the old you played a part in keeping people vaguely sane under one roof as you grew up so the new beliefs and behaviors and ideas and approaches to living that you have now haven't seen the same testing the same trials in the intimate dynamics of this home this gathering of people as your old ones have and so your elephant does what it does best it helps you survive tend to be much quieter when i go home and visit family and i don't talk as much i tend to withdraw a little bit i tend to sleep a lot and i didn't grow up in a dysfunctional family by any measure but it's just you know the kind of weird stuff i'm into uh the the all the science stuff all the the stuff that you listen to on this podcast and appreciate uh is not you know necessarily a similar interest that my family holds so i just you know i just kind of hang out and listen to people that's an old behavior that's not something i do you know in my larger life but i go home it comes back now sometimes these old behaviors are are things you really don't like about yourself maybe you become more shy maybe you become more combative maybe you experience more feelings of guilt or shame when you return to this older environment and you don't like it and it makes you dread going home and it makes you dread seeing your family and maybe all that's amplified right now because of our politics and our social media the data is telling us that we are indeed historically polarized right now uh one one interesting data point i saw is that for a large part of recent american history there was a lot of uh concern about whether you married across racial or ethnic boundaries but not very much uh concern if you married across political parties and that has flipped in preference data in most regions of the country that's profound people are more comfortable now you know in in the south if a a white republican marries a black republican then if a white democrat marries a white republican that's that's incredible so the way we view politics is is very polarized there's some good reason for that the left and the right coalitions political coalitions do have fundamentally incompatible values right now it's not just a matter of meaning in the middle uh the kind of centrism that americans love so much there are truly fundamentally incompatible values in those two coalitions right now which i'll leave a link on uh sciencemac.com this week this is going to be episode 139 if you want to look it up read an article that i've linked there called why social media is terrible for multi-ethnic democracies and it'll talk a little bit more about those fundamentally incompatible values but then when those fundamentally incompatible values show up in the presence of people falling into old behavioral dynamics you have got a recipe for conflict and discord and disunity and an anxiousness to get back in a car train or airplane and return to your new life why do we become someone else when we go home well because our unconscious mind and emotional dynamics were honed over our entire childhoods to protect us and to help us survive and this is true whether you have warm [Music] intimate secure relationships with your family or if you have very difficult and dysfunctional relationships with your family either way you have an overwhelming absolutely overwhelming set of environmental cues encouraging you to behave differently than you normally do now what can you do about it well that's a completely different question i think mindfulness helps i think practices of forgiving others helps i think therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy can help but uh also just acknowledge that it's normal and appropriate to change a little bit when you go home that you're not a static fixture you're not a statue you're a dynamic and living organism that has the incredible capacity to change based on its environment and instead of dreading the old you perhaps see what you can appreciate about who you once were and how it helped shape you into who you are today but about those left and right coalitions and their fundamentally incompatible values let's read an email from an anonymous student at liberty university and it reads hello i am a student at liberty university a large private university with a baptist foundation i have grown up in a christian family yet i have never felt at home in the church even when i was quite young i was what i now know to be agnostic though i would say i am spiritual i feel like i have pretended to be a typical strong christian for the sake of my parents as well as for my own longing to feel like i am part of a community that is secure in what they believe though i attend a christian university i have been able to find a rather large circle of like-minded students many of whom have found much comfort in your book and podcasts because we often feel like outsiders in our own community at this point i feel like i'm living two lives one of my friends where i can freely explore faith and religion and one with my family where i have to hide my deconstruction of faith and read certain books in secret my parents have already threatened to pull me from school and bring me back home and i know friends in similar situations i would love any advice for myself and young people like me who are working through this deconstruction of faith in an environment that doesn't feel safe to do so and uh this young young woman didn't leave a name on the question so i assume it's anonymous and um my email box was full of questions like these and in fact i had over 60 emails from people who said they are students at liberty specifically so dear listener you are not alone on that campus as you've discovered but if you're listening to my voice at liberty university you are not alone it is not just you and in fact if you're at a conservative christian college almost anywhere in the united states statistically let me assure you it is not just you now back to the email it's okay to be cautious about how open you are about your faith journey your concern could absolutely be warranted there are teachers in the conservative evangelical tradition specifically who advocate and instruct very harsh reactions to people expressing doubt and it grieves me and it troubles me it doesn't mean that i question the sincerity of the faith of evangelicals or even very conservative fundamentalist evangelicals that's not what i'm saying but i am saying the teachings on how to respond to people who are having substantive doubts about their faith going through deconstruction or having a faith transition are harmful and because of that you're concerned about how open to be this dual life thing is probably warranted now you are in a great position relative to many people because you've already found some friends that you can be honest with so the first thing i would advise you to do is invest deeply in that rather large circle of like-minded students live in an invulnerable authentic community with trustworthy people in that circle and you'll find that's an incredible refuge i lived in that space for years years with people in community when i couldn't talk to my larger religious community about where i was spiritually so treasure it invest in it be thankful for it allow those people the most access to your life now if your parents are controlling or conditional about your life and you and your face specifically my advice would be to seek independence from them as quickly as you possibly can and i know that stuff i'm not saying write them out of your lives but i'm saying if you have controlling parents establishing healthy boundaries can be difficult beyond difficult it can be traumatic genuinely traumatic like for example who is paying for your schooling for their education are you taking out student loans to get a degree that you're going to repay yourself later then your parents don't have a lot of say you know they said they're going to pull you out of school how would they pull you out of school i can't imagine any means they would do that unless they are paying if you're paying and liberty is a place that is caustic to your faith experience have you considered a different college environment leaving the school entirely may be an option now if your parents are paying and you're not going to accrue student loans maybe a dual life is worth it for a few years to get a college degree and then to find a job and then define financial independence so that you can establish healthy boundaries because living two lives isn't actually sustainable over the long term i tried it it's it's exhausting it's more exhausting uh the more frequently you have to do it so in my case i was living at home but not with my parents but with my wife and lying to my wife about what i believed and that was really tough that was a daily slog but if you're at if you've got this circle of like-minded students at liberty and you're living in that community the toll emotionally you're paying may not be as severe but ultimately i think it's important to be able to live vulnerably and authentically in life for your basic emotional health for your psychological will being when you know you either have the independence or a healthy enough trust relationship that you can be honest with your parents and with your community then it's time to have careful conversations one person at a time one intimate relationship at a time about how your beliefs have changed and where you're going and where you are frankly where you're going is tough i never know where i'm going i can only tell you where i am today i unified my entire world and it cost me it cost me an entire religious community that i loved a great deal and it made my hometown that i grew up in feel like a strange and foreign land and i never got over it you know that when i went home for christmas tallahassee felt like a strange and hostile place don't get me wrong when i went i cried when i walked into good samaritan church i wept it was so good that felt like home it felt great to go to my mom's house walk down that street but the rest of the city had become too associated with all that rejection for me that i didn't enjoy the city as i once did that's a big cost it's a big cost so the stakes really can be high some people face higher stakes than i have some people have literally been rejected by their families disowned but you never know who people are and how they relate to you and if you can trust them until you are vulnerable with them so if you think that it is safe for you to do so i would encourage you to have an honest discussion a non-hostile honest discussion with your parents at a point in which you feel secure in doing so again i don't know your parents i don't know the dynamic so that's why i emphasize if you feel safe your judgment about whether that conversation is appropriate or a good idea is better than mine you live your life and i don't but in my experience life is better on the other side of total honesty what a blessing it is for me to have the same opinions in my living room with my friends at church on stage on a podcast it's liberating it's tremendously liberating and when i compare it to the time i spent as a pretend christian closeted atheist oh i wouldn't go back for anything but do what feels safe to you and invest deeply in those friendships that you found at liberty and for all of you who are listening all of you who have just started this year or the last few months to deconstruct and doubt for the first time you're okay you're going to be okay i know it feels terrifying i know it feels bizarre i know it feels like you're in a completely different place than you've ever been before but you're here you're listening to this program and you found out it's not just you so as rob bell once said to me let's celebrate that let's celebrate that it's not just you that there's literally millions of people in america who aren't sure what they mean let's lower the stakes whatever god is god is regardless of what you believe if you're afraid of spending eternity in hell how do you know whose rules about hell are the right one lower the stakes if god is love trust that god is love and will love you through what you're going through if the idea of god seems absurd that's okay if you can't stand to read your bible don't worry about it there has been something something in your life started this cascade towards doubt and towards deconstruction and towards questioning what you once knew and trust that this is part of growth trust that this is part of finding a new life when you've been taught that certainty in your beliefs is the most important thing it's terrifying to start to embrace the unknown but i'm here to tell you from experience that there is freedom on the other side of that certainty that a god that i find logically absurd meets me every morning when i wake up that a bible that i once found inerrant and authoritative became ancient and full of superstition and now is one of the most treasured things in my life again because it reflects the experiences of people like me people who want to know who and what god is and what we do about it so for those of you who have read finding god in the waves and are new to the liturgist podcast and asked science mike let me say to you welcome we've got a large library of episodes you can go check out you can listen to you can tell stories of people who have been through experiences like yours and attempts to build new world views and new ideas about god and new ways of trying to make the world a better place for those of you who've just started this podcast and haven't checked out my book finding god in the waves if you're in a season of faith transition or deconstruction or doubt i wrote that book for you you may find it helpful but to everyone as we enter into 2018 with fear and trembling here's my pledge on this podcast everyone's welcome everyone's welcome i'm going to do my best to create a non-judgmental responsive environment where people can unpack their ideas and their questions whether those are questions that you feel maybe aren't allowed at church or maybe you're starting to wonder about justice issues and you have questions that you feel like you get attacked for asking on social media i want you to know that i created this space specifically to honor the basic dignity of sincere questions and i don't know exactly where this show will go in 2018 but i will tell you this we will continue to honor and welcome every sincere question and you can know that week after week i'll be here absolutely thrilled to speak with you thanks for listening everyone i hope you had a wonderful holiday season and with all the challenges we face moving ahead may we find a way to move forward together in grace [Music]