Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge, with an aftershow community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.SoundsTrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at SoundsTrueFoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Susan Cain. Susan Cain is the New York Times bestselling author of the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Her book Quiet spent seven years on the New York Times bestseller list, and her TED Talk on “The Power of Introverts” has been viewed over 40 million times. In this episode, we’ll be talking with Susan Cain about her new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Take a listen.
Susan, welcome.
Susan Cain: Thank you so much, Tami. It is such an honor and a pleasure to be here with all of you. Thank you for having me.
TS: You have so many great gifts. I mean, you’re a beautiful writer, but I just want to underscore two additional gifts that really move me, impact me personally. One is that you have some kind of a “sniffer,” my language, some kind of instinct or intuition for what has been left in the shadows in our culture that needs to be reclaimed and elevated. And I want to thank you for that, because I think it’s great work, great cultural evolution work. But then a second gift too, which is to take something that could be considered kind of narrow or niche, and without diluting it, bring the topic to so many people. And that’s a tremendous talent. So I just want to start off, Susan, by acknowledging you and thanking you.
SC: Oh, gosh. Well, thank you so much for putting it that way. I guess it’s partly—I think for any writer, you don’t want to write about what everybody is talking about already. I always think that the purpose of writing books, and of reading books really, is to encounter the deep truths that people don’t feel comfortable chatting about at the grocery store, or with their coworkers, until they’ve been given permission to do it. That’s what a book can do, and that’s why I love them.
TS: Well, that’s certainly what your work does. So thank you. The topic of sorrow and longing, and how sorrow and longing can make us whole, that’s not necessarily what you would start a conversation with at the grocery store. So tell us, how did you identify “bittersweet: how sorrow and longing make us whole” as the topic you wanted to tackle?
SC: Well, I mean, what happened—it’s really what happened to me again and again and again throughout my life—was that I would have these experiences, especially when I was listening to sad music. I had one that I write about in the book, where I was a law school student. I was hanging out in my dorm, and some friends were coming to my dorm room to pick me up to go to class. And when they got there, they found me, as I often was, blasting on my stereo speakers Leonard Cohen or somebody like that. Because I love all kinds of music, but I’ve always been drawn to this kind of deep, yearning music, and my friends thought that was funny and were sort of joking around about, why was I listening to this funeral music?
And at the time, it just kind of seemed funny, and I laughed, and we went to class, but I really couldn’t stop thinking about this for decades after. Number one, about what is it in our culture that makes it seem so funny to listen to that kind of music aloud, let’s say, but also, what is the music saying? Why do so many of us love—whether it’s Leonard Cohen or Nina Simone or Adele—what is that kind of music saying to us?
And what I realized is, there is a deep bittersweet tradition that has existed for centuries all across the world—you see it in all the different wisdom traditions—that tells us that there is this place where joy and sorrow meet. That is the truth of being human. And it’s not that we love sorrow, none of us love it, none of us want it, but there’s something about acknowledging the joy and the sorrow together that connects us with all the other humans who experience life this way. And that is also a kind of route to creativity, and even to transcendence. And this is what we feel when we hear that music. It’s a hint of transcendence that exists. Music is a very easy way to identify it, but you quickly start to realize that it’s not only there. It’s everywhere.
TS: When you say a “bittersweet tradition,” who would you say historically are some of the figures—we all know this person was a writer or a musician in that tradition?
SC: Oh, gosh. I mean, there have been so many. There’s one that has become a kind of guide for me, which is the 12th century Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. He’s become a bestselling poet in the United States, so many people know Rumi, but I’m not sure they’re focused on that aspect of Rumi’s teachings. And one of the hearts of what he taught and what he wrote about over and over was the idea that longing—I mean, he spoke of it in terms of longing for the divine. I think it speaks to us whether we are overtly religious or secular. It doesn’t matter. The teaching is that the longing for that which is most true and good and beautiful and divine, that there’s something about the longing itself, the sorrow for its absence, that paradoxically brings you closer to that for which you seek. So he says the longing itself is the return message that we’re looking for.
TS: And it seems like this appreciation of what is bittersweet is a universal human quality, and yet some of us have a what you call “bittersweet disposition.” Do you have a sense of, this amount of people in the population have a bittersweet disposition? Is it like that? Is it not like that?
SC: I don’t know the exact amount who has the disposition. What we were able to do was we developed a test that you can take to measure where you are on this bittersweet scale, and in a minute I can tell you some of the questions if you want, so people listening can get a sense of where they might fall on it. But what we found is that people who score high on this scale tend to—there’s a strong correlation with people who also score high on the scale of high sensitivity, which is the construct that was identified by the psychologist Elaine Aron to describe people who just react really intensely to everything in the world. The good and the bad. You feel the beauty of the sunsets more intensely. You hear the grinding noise of the construction site more intensely. So these are sensitive people, and that tends to go along with bittersweetness. And that’s about 20 percent of the population.
But then there’s also a lot of people who come to this more bittersweet way of being, just through traveling through life and experiencing the joys and the sorrows alike all the time. It starts to kind of open our eyes to what I would describe as the nature of human reality.
TS: Now, this notion of happy-sad—let’s just say for the sake of this conversation, being one word for a moment—we don’t get that much. Is there a word in our language that says that, happy-sad at the same time? Or is that what you’re saying? “Bittersweet” is that word?
SC: “Bittersweet” is the word that I found in our language that best describes it. I don’t know that we have a word that works better than that. And an interesting sort of by-product of the absence of that word is, if you look at positive psychology, the field of positive psychology over the last 20, 30 years, the field developed—well, I’ll take a step back.
TS: Sure.
SC: Psychology in general, psychology became mainstream, let’s say, in the era of Freud, at a time when it was all about the negative. It was all about the illnesses that a human mind could withstand, and what could we do about those illnesses and those problems and those neuroses and so on? Then along comes positive psychology, 30 or 40 years ago, and it says, “Oh, we’ve been focusing too much on the negative, and we should be thinking about what makes a human being thrive, what makes us flourish.” And so the field of positive psychology for a while was all about optimism, cheerfulness, gratitude, all these things. Everything positive. And it was almost unseemly to talk about the negative within the field.
Now we are suddenly at this moment that some people are calling positive psychology 2.0, that is being led by people like Tim Lomas, if I’m saying his name right, Scott Barry Kaufman, Paul Wong, and others, who are saying, “No. There’s always been this kind of dialectic. There’s always been a kind of push-pull between that which brings us joy and that which brings us sorrow, and we need them both. This is who human beings are.” And we’re coming to this recognition.
But to come back to the question you [asked], I don’t know that we’ve had great language for this, and that makes it hard to talk about.
TS: Well, I also want to just have a moment of, thank goodness we’re moving into positive psychology 2.0. I noticed, and I’m sure a lot of other people with a high bittersweet disposition noticed, this sort of pressure in our culture to be positive, in a way that I’ll say, for me, felt inauthentic. I got feedback from some of my early video interviews that I should smile more. And I was like, “Well, how do I smile when I don’t feel like smiling?” “Well, just smile more.” And I’m like, “No. Screw you. Forget that. I’ll smile when I feel a natural smile.” But there’s so much pressure, and it seems like that is a phenomenon in our contemporary Western culture, specifically North American culture. And I wonder if you can speak some about that. Is it culturally specific?
SC: It definitely is culturally specific, and psychologists have even studied—they’ve compared cultures to track, “How much do people smile?” and also, “What is the meaning that people make in a smile?” So there are many cultures where people regard excessive smiling as a sign of either foolishness—like clearly you’re not getting what’s going on or you wouldn’t be smiling all the time, it’s like that feeling—or as a sign of insincerity. Again, nothing could be making you that happy all the time, so you must not be telling the truth.
So there are cultures for sure that have that disposition, and in American culture, what happened is that during the 19th century, as we became more focused on how to become a business success out in the world, it became really important to distinguish ourselves as winners and not as losers. And so people wanted to take on the attributes of somebody who was going to become a winner, and that meant not taking on the emotional attributes that had anything to do with loss. So the psychologist William James writes about this, how in the 19th century, it started to become out of fashion for people even to comment on bad weather outside. You shouldn’t say, “It’s cloudy,” or “It’s rainy,” because that was focusing too much on the negative. And we’re still really living with that heritage.
TS: So just one more kind of clarification about this notion of positive psychology 2.0. How do you see that kind of paradoxical balance, if you will? People do want their business leaders or leaders of all kinds to be visionary, to have a sense of the possible and “we can do this.” That’s a good thing, and yet to embrace our sorrow simultaneously. How do you understand that in its paradoxical nature?
SC: Well, I actually believe that this way of being is incredibly linked with creativity and, “Wow. We could do this. We could do this. Here’s what we could reach for,” precisely because there’s something in the noticing of the gap between what is and what could be, or what is and what we wish were.
There’s something in that gap that stimulates us creatively, and you can see this in many of the different studies of creativity. But even if you look at the word “longing” itself, we think of that as being—you’d be mired in longing, that longing is a negative state, a kind of quicksand, an emotional quicksand. But the etymology of the word literally means “to grow longer” and “to reach for.” So it is very possible to be a visionary leader who is reaching for the stars, and other people want to follow that person precisely because that person is noticing what is missing.
TS: Can you give me an example, a specific example, of noticing that creative gap? Maybe someone whose work you studied and how that inspired some terrific accomplishment. Because once again, I’m stuck in this, I want the winner or loser thing. I want our—I can see even in my question—I want our bittersweet tendencies to produce winning. It’s so deep what you’re pointing to, this winner or loser thing.
SC: No, I get it. I get it. We all go that way. And so yes, I have a lot of examples I give in the book, and I’ll just give you one right now, which is the amazing, incredibly sensitive, and talented Pete Docter at Pixar Studios who brought us Up and Monsters, Inc. and Soul and Inside Out. And Pete is a very sensitive, gifted soul.
And the story of Inside Out, which as I’m sure many of you know, it was this movie that basically depicts the emotional life of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. And the [movie] is literally about her emotions. So it’s her emotions who are the central characters, and they’re like running around her brain guiding her actions. OK, so he’s creating this movie all about emotions. And as with any narrative work, you need to have a central character or two. And he’s trying to figure out which ones it’ll be. And he decides it’s going to be joy and fear. Those are going to be the two central characters.
And he works on this movie for three years, and it’s getting set to be debuted for the executive team. And he suddenly realizes that the movie, he believes, is a disaster. And he starts spinning out and he feels like, “Oh my gosh, the successes that I’ve had up until now, those were just flukes, and now I am going to be revealed as a failure. I’m going to lose my job. I’m going to lose my career.” And he’s really spinning out, and he becomes overwhelmed with sorrow and longing.
And he’s longing preemptively for the colleagues who he realizes how much he loves them and the work that he’s realizing how much he loves because he’s about to lose it all. And he starts to realize that this is the function of sadness itself. That there’s something about it that makes us realize how connected we are with each other. And this is when he has his light bulb moment that he should put sadness at the center of the movie.
And just like you, Tami, he’s very acutely aware of this culture that says you’re supposed to be bright and upbeat all the time. And so he’s prepared for the executive team to think this is a terrible idea, but somehow he manages and he gets it through and they put sadness at the center of the movie. And it goes on to become, I think, their highest gross at the box office at the time that it was released. And it’s all because he had this insight that he saw in himself about the powers of sorrow and longing.
TS: Now, Susan, as I asked you this question of help me understand how people with bittersweet tendencies can actually be even more successful or extremely successful, I realized that I was still sort of trapped, and I am—and I think many of us are who have been raised in, we’ve swum in the waters of the American culture for so long—trapped in this idea of win, win, win at all cost, win even with my bittersweet nature. And my question to you is, do you think this is something that’s important to step out of, just to step out of that whole paradigm of winning and losing all the time? Or not?
SC: I guess I’d say being like—I think both are true, really, at the same time. Because on the one hand, I want to be realistic and people do want to be able to make a living and people want to be able to be successful in whatever their chosen pathway is. So those things are important. And I think it’s important to realize that you can follow—if you have a bittersweet nature, you can follow that and be successful contrary to the message you’ve been sent.
And at the same time, it’s important to realize that this bittersweet way of being has all kinds of rewards beyond the material and beyond the realm of achievement and that kind of thing. And you know this, we all know this, because we feel it all the time. If you’re a lover of sad music, you know exactly what I’m talking about, these moments that you have when you’re listening to it where you experience such a transcendence and such a feeling of overwhelming love, and you can’t quite figure out where it came from or why it should be connected to plaintive melodies, and yet it is. And I think we all feel this through different manifestations, and I would just urge us to be open to it when we do.
TS: Now, when I asked you, is there some part of the population that has this bittersweet disposition, you said that there’s an overlap with Dr. Elaine Aron’s work on highly sensitive people. And I’m curious to know what you think the connection is between high sensitivity in general and having an attunement to the bittersweet.
SC: [Yes], the connection is actually really direct because an attunement to the bittersweet is really about being acutely aware of the joys and sorrows of the world and of the impermanence of everything, the experience of passing time, but also this kind of piercing joy at the beauty of everything. And that—in a way, you could say that’s almost an alternative definition of what it is to be a highly sensitive person in the first place. It is someone who is very sensitive to all aspects of life, the good and the bad. So in some ways, you could see it as an alternative definition almost.
TS: “Piercing joy.” That’s a very interesting combination of words. What do you mean by the “piercing” part?
SC: I almost don’t know how to describe it. C. S. Lewis talked about this. He talked about—well, he wrote a lot about what he called “the inconsolable longing for we know not what.” He was writing about bittersweetness, in other words. And he talked about how you can experience joy as a kind of stab of, I forgot how he put it, was something like a stab of longing. A stab of longing.
And here’s what I really think is happening underneath it all. You look at all of our wisdom traditions and our creative traditions, and you see always this human longing for a more perfect and beautiful world. And you see this in the longing for the Garden of Eden and in the longing for Zion and the longing for union with beloved of the soul, which is the way the Sufis put it, and in Dorothy’s longing for somewhere over the rainbow. There’s always this feeling of that the beautiful and the perfect and the true that it exists somewhere, and yet we’re not quite there yet.
And when we have that perception, it’s piercing beauty, because we see it but we’re also experiencing the gap between the perfection we’re glimpsing and where we actually are now. A theologian sometimes calls it “holy tears” that we feel. So it’s this—it’s a kind of ever-living paradox.
TS: Now I have a couple of questions about this. One is just a personal question for a moment, Susan, which is, in the research and writing and deep introspection that went into Bittersweet, did it change you “spiritually” in some way? And if so, how?
SC: [Yes], it really did. And I wrote about this a little bit in the book. Just to say, I have been all my life a—I’ve been kind of a lifelong agnostic. I was raised in an orthodox Jewish religious household, but really was quite agnostic from a very early age. I would still describe myself as agnostic. And yet, at the same time, I started to realize that these experiences of transcendence that would come—as I say for me, especially at moments of listening to music, but they come at other times too—I don’t know, it just oriented me in a much more spiritual direction.
I still don’t know what to call it exactly, because I am still agnostic. But C. S. Lewis, who as I say also spent his whole career trying to figure out what this thing was, this kind of holy longing, in his case, he ended up concluding—late in his life, he became a practicing Christian, and he ended up concluding that if we have this kind of a beautiful hunger and thirst, that the answer must be that we’re not made for this world, and that the hunger and thirst is pointing us to the reality of God.
And he said that the beauty and the art and the music in which we thought the longing was located, that those were only signposts, really, directing us to God. And I’ve reached for myself at this moment at least a different conclusion, which is I don’t really see any distinction between the music and the art and nature and wherever we find that transcendence. I don’t see a difference between that and the divine. To me, in a way, it’s a semantic difference.
TS: OK, well, let me go at this in a slightly different way for a moment. This notion that there’s some realm of perfection and then there’s our very imperfect lives in our bodies, in our relationships, in our world at this time. I think a lot of people who are on a spiritual path of some kind, they feel that, but they sense—they sense this realm of perfection. It’s possible right now. You hear about it from wisdom teachers even to go so far as to say, we can practice the perfection. We can sit in a state where we feel infinite love, beauty, grace. We can feel it and there’s an imperfection in the world at the same time, and they’re coexisting. And I wonder how you relate to that, this notion of different dimensions that are both here right now.
SC: [Yes], that’s exactly how I see it. I see it as everything is simultaneously broken and everything is simultaneously beautiful. They’re both here right now, and [yes], that there’s something about leaning into that gap that I think gets us a little bit closer to the place that we lean for. I don’t know. There’s an experience I have when I listen to that kind of music or have these moments, I will become aware for a few minutes of time. I think, “OK, even if I knew I were going to die tomorrow or my loved ones would, it would be OK.” There’s something in this moment that’s telling you that it’s OK. And then that feeling wears off, usually after a few minutes. I still remember it intellectually; I just no longer feel it. But there’s something—there’s probably some truth that those moments have to tell us when they come.
TS: Now, the first half of Bittersweet, you delve deeply into what you call the “hidden riches” of sorrow and longing. And I just want to cover a couple of points there that I thought were very helpful. And the first about sorrow, and you actually quote Naomi Shihab Nye, “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” And I wonder if you can help us see, and there’s even the science behind this, this connection between sorrow and kindness or compassion.
SC: [Yes], I think we’ve all experienced this in our bones, the feeling of we’ve all had sorrows in the past, and then if you see someone who’s in a state of sorrow in the present, you feel seized by it because you know what that person is experiencing and you want to make it stop. And I think looking at this from an evolutionary point of view is actually incredibly enlightening. We think about Darwin, about Charles Darwin, as the “survival of the fittest” guy, but Darwin was actually a very melancholic, gentle type of person. He was very aware of the cruelty of nature, but he also started to observe over time that humans and other mammals, too, had this thing where they would just viscerally, instinctively, and instantly react when they would see another being suffering. And he describes this in The Descent of Man. He describes this feeling of, that when you see somebody else in sorrow, something happens in you that makes you want to attend to it. And this was kind of a theory that he had, but he described this as the strongest of all the impulses of mammals. This compassionate instinct was the strongest one.
And 150 years later, the scientist Dacher Keltner at Berkeley has come along and showed in his lab what Darwin had been observing all along, which is that human beings are born with this kind of instinct. So, for example, we have a vagus nerve, which is the biggest bundle of nerves in our bodies. It regulates our breathing and our digestion. It’s very fundamental. And when we see another being in distress, our vagus nerve reacts. So if you see a sad movie and you start tearing up or wanting to do something, that’s in part your vagus nerve that’s telling you to do it. And the reason we evolved this way is because we had to be able to take care of our babies, who come into this world crying and defenseless. We wouldn’t have been able to survive as a species if we didn’t have the ability to react this way.
But it so happens that we react this way not only to our own infants, but that capacity for caring radiates outward from there. And it doesn’t mean that we’re perfect, because we certainly have other impulses, also, that we’re well aware of. But we do have this one. So this thing about compassion, it’s not just a Sunday school piety that we teach ourselves. It’s something that’s wired into us.
TS: Now, one question I have for you, Susan, is in your observations—I’m curious what you think about this—some people who have had great sorrow have become deeply compassionate souls, as you’re pointing out here, this potential. And some people become bitter.
SC: [Yes.]
TS: I mean, they’re just like, “Whoa. That’s not very helpful.” What do you think is the difference? And how can we relate to our compassion, our sorrow, so that we become a compassionate type and not a bitter type?
SC: [Yes.] And I do think that really is a crossroads, and you can understand it. I mean, you hear stories of what some people have been through in their life, and you think how could they not? How could anyone do anything other than just curse it all when it’s been so awful? And so you can understand why people take that path. I think what happens is when we are confronted with our sorrows, whether great or small or somewhere in between, there’s a fork in the road, almost. And you could take them out on yourself or on people around you. And you can do that in a thousand different forms, whether it’s cutting or passive aggressiveness or outright aggression or addiction or depression or whatever it is. You can do that.
And you also have the capacity, all humans have the capacity, to take suffering and try to turn it into something beautiful. And it doesn’t have to be a great work of art or a great work of saving thousands of souls. It can be very small acts of beauty. But there does seem to be this capacity in human nature to do that if we turn in that direction. There’s been always this archetype of the wounded healer. And the idea of the wounded healer is that the person who is wounded in a particular way then is granted the capacity to heal that kind of wound in other people. And again, you see this in all the religions. And then you see it in everyday life, like the mother whose child is killed on a highway, and she starts Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Or in the wake of the pandemic, lots of people have signed up for medical school and nursing school. There’s something in the human spirit that somehow is or can be drawn to go in the exact direction of the wound rather than away from it.
TS: I wonder what you think about this edge of, how do we honor our sadness and let it inform our creativity without wallowing, if you will, or what other words you could use for staying stuck and kind of like glorifying it or indulging it or, I don’t know, words like that. What do you think?
SC: [Yes.] [Yes.] No, I don’t think—glorifying and indulging is not the answer. It’s more just to understand through sadness how connected we all are, that we all feel this at times of our lives, regardless of whether people talk about it or present it in their faces and body language or not, so to see it just as a source of connection. But one of the best frameworks that I’ve come across for thinking about this—I wrote about this in the book—it comes from the writer Nora McInerny. And she talks about the difference—when we’re confronted with bereavement—the difference between moving on versus moving forward. And moving on is the slightly toxic cultural message that we all get to basically get over it. You’ve had your day or two to mourn, or your week or two, and now move on.
Moving forward is different. And I should say that Nora McInerny came up with this because she herself had lost her beloved husband at a very young age, and she was completely devastated. And she started talking to other bereaved spouses, and she found that the number one piece of advice they all resented was the move-on advice. But Nora eventually did go on to get remarried, and she now has a blended family. And what she says is that she would not be the person she is today and the wife she is today had she not had the experience of loving and losing her first husband. And so what she’s done is moved forward. She didn’t move on. She’s moved forward, and she’s carried her lost husband with her as she goes. So she’s not feeling like she needs to abandon him, put that part of herself in the past in order to be over here, nor is she feeling that she needs to dwell in the past. She’s carrying the past with her even as she’s making a new present and future, and that’s moving forward as opposed to moving on.
TS: I wonder, Susan, if you have an example from your own life, whether it’s of sadness or being in that gap space of what’s actually happening compared to this perfection that you know is possible, sense deeply, and how that mobilized you in some way?
SC: Gosh. Well, there’s a whole, long story that I wrote about in the book that I feel like I can’t exactly explain in a few minutes of talking. But I can say that as I was writing the book and I was already very deep into this whole inquiry, that’s when COVID came along. And my brother was one of the first people—my brother was a doctor in a hospital, and he caught COVID quite early and died from it. And then my father also died from COVID about a year after that. So I was going through all these losses even as I was writing this and deep into this frame of mind.
And what I found, I don’t know. I mean, my father was the one who taught me to love music the way that I do. He was always playing music for me from the time I was a little kid. During the moments and hours and days after losing him, I kept listening to the music that he had introduced me to, as if I was hoping to find him in it. And I didn’t find him in the music. In those first few days, it was really, really hard.
But what came in the days after that and ever since then is this feeling of—I don’t even know how to put it into words, exactly. It’s just a feeling of—it’s not that he’s to be found or that I can have a conversation with him around the music that he introduced me to, but the music itself is the same river of love that my love for my father was. So there’s something about diving into love itself or representations of love itself that is incredibly healing, and it’s like I find my father there.
TS: That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful, Susan. As I’m listening to you and as we’re entering the territory of talking about things that are hard to talk about, I’m going to share that towards the end of the book, you had a chapter Do We Inherit the Pain of Our Parents and Ancestors? And If So, Can We Transform It Generations Later? So you asked this great question as the title of the chapter. And I’m reading this section of the book, and your working hypothesis, I think throughout Bittersweet, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that we can transform pain and sorrow into a beautiful offering through our lives. [Yes?]
SC: [Yes.]
TS: That’s kind of the working—we can do that. We’re here to do that, to take our pain and sorrow and let it work through us and create something beautiful, an offering. Can we actually do that with our ancestors and our family lineage? And at one point reading this chapter, I actually—I was on the plane, an airplane, and I actually started shaking and crying, which is not something that happens to me very often, to be honest with you, very rarely. And it did have to do with this notion of pain that I had inherited from my family line, pain that belongs to other people, and that somehow my life was designed to be an expression of healing and an offering to them, for them, and for others moving forward in the future. It was so moving to me. So I wonder if there’s something in what I’m saying as we move into this unspeakable territory—it’s hard to talk about—that you could comment on?
SC: Sure. [Yes.] And I’m not sure if you’re asking me to comment on my own story or not?
TS: [Yes], I am. Just, I think this is such an important pointing to people for them in their own life experience to find this thread of transformation of the pain of people in previous generations.
SC: [Yes.] OK. So part of the research that I did for this book is I went to this really great conference at The Open Center on grief and dying and bereavement. And I went in particular to this seminar for bereavement counselors, even though I’m not one. Excuse me. As part of the exercise that we had to do at the beginning, we each of us had to share with the group a recent loss or grief that we had gone through. And as this exercise started, I was in a pretty matter-of-fact kind of mood that day. I was not feeling anything particularly emotional at all one way or another as we went around the room. And I was kind of thinking, “What am I going to share? I’m not really sure.” And some people were sharing really, really tough and heart-wrenching stories.
When it got to me, I talked about a rift that I had had with my mother when I was a teenager and the ways that that had shaped my life over the next decades. And I found myself crying and sobbing. I was crying much more than anybody else had been, even though the story that I was telling was not on its face as heart-wrenching as some of the ones other people had been telling. And I felt kind of embarrassed about it, about how much of a mess I was, and maybe a little embarrassed about the story itself.
But the teacher—his name was Dr. Simcha Raphael—he describes himself as a death educator, and he had this great moment of insight, and he said, “I think that your tears are not only about the actual story you’re telling. I think you’re carrying the tears of your ancestors.” And in fact, I had—we lost most of my family in the Holocaust. I have almost no relatives because everybody on both sides, my mother and father’s side, all their relatives were killed. When he said it, it was kind of like a great opening of a dam. I suddenly became aware of the enormity, the emotional enormity, that I had been carrying around.
And I started—of course, being me—I started then doing the research and finding there’s all this research that shows the way we inherit the traumas of the past, not only through cultural familial traits, but also literally the way our genes seem to change or the expression of our genes seems to change. So that a person going through a trauma in generation one, the expression of their genetics changes in a way that then gets inherited for subsequent generations. And that can seem on its face to be maybe a depressing realization, because it’s like, “Well, what are you supposed to do about that? Somebody suffered five generations before you, and now here you are. Now what?” But Rachel Yehuda, who is one of the pioneering scientists in this area of epigenetics, what she talks about is just the way a gene can change in one direction, it can change in the other too. So it’s possible to heal also and to heal for the generations to come and also the ones who came before you.
And there’s this amazing song—I wish I could have quoted it in the book; I wasn’t legally allowed to—but there’s this amazing song by Dar Williams, a musician, where she talks about having fallen into a depression. And she says her only way out was she had to travel down the whispering well and find out what the secrets were that her own family had to tell. And she starts exploring the stories of her mother and father, who had never wanted to talk about their painful childhoods with her. She says in the song they couldn’t see what their pain was for, to them it seemed to have no point. But it was only once she traveled down that whispering well that she was able to heal herself. So I think there really is something about that.
TS: Can you share with me specifically your own traveling down the whispering well and feeling, sensing, the pain of the people in your family tree? The people who died in the Holocaust. What is the act of transformation for you in your life of that pain?
SC: I think that in the past I had trouble—it felt to me as if to love and to honor those people meant to not feel entirely free to live without an echo of their trauma. It feels like a way of loving them or a way of honoring them. And I started to really make a distinct—to start to realize that you could love and honor your ancestors at the exact same time that you have the freedom to chart your own life path forward. And I actually think it helps a lot to be a parent in coming to that realization. Because when you’re a parent, you want your children to have ultimate freedom to carve out their own life paths and to do it the way they want. You want to still have your bonds with them and your love with them, but you want them to have that freedom. And you start to realize just the way you want that freedom for your children, you want it for yourself too. And everyone’s actually better off when we have it, a simultaneous love and freedom that exists side by side.
TS: Now, Susan, after you wrote the book Quiet, helping us appreciate the power of introversion, it became a movement, the quiet movement, if you will. A movement that helps introverts know their value and unique gifts. With Bittersweet, I’m curious what, if anything, is your hope for how this work will ripple out into the culture?
SC: Well, it’s a couple things. One thing is that the letters that I’m getting from people about Bittersweet in some ways are so similar to the ones that I got from Quiet with people using this same word, “permission.” “Finally, I have the permission to actually be myself and realize the gifts that are involved in being myself.” So just like a gigantic, one by one by one, everyone realizing, “Oh, here are these gifts and superpowers that I had never understood all along.” But I also get these letters from people where I have this incredible impulse of like, “Oh my gosh, you have to meet this other person who just wrote to me two weeks ago. Because you guys have so much creatively to be sharing with each other and so many different ways of connecting.”
So in addition to my regular social media channels, there are actually some young creatives who have really felt like bittersweetness has opened them up creatively, and they want to start a Bittersweet Discord, a kind of channel where bittersweets can come and interact with each other and cross-fertilize and cross-pollinate creatively and beyond. So I see it as being a movement that will bubble up organically within different subcultures.
TS: And implicitly, you’ve pointed to this connection between the people who identify as bittersweet and creative people. Can you say, why is that so connected?
SC: I don’t know if we really know the answer other than what I was talking about before. I think there’s something about perceiving acutely the gap between the desired and the actual that makes us want to be creative. We want to fill that gap with some kind of expression, some jewel, some aspect of beauty or divinity or whatever it is. I think that’s what the creative act can be, a turning of pain into beauty. And we see from studies that there’s a lot to this theory. There’s one study that looked at some of the most creative people in different cohorts, and an astonishingly high percentage of them had been orphaned by the age of 18, had lost one or both parents. It was something like 40 percent, crazy high number.
And then you see these other studies that show it in much more subtle ways. Like one study where they had the research subjects give a speech, and half of the people gave speeches to audiences who had been instructed to applaud loudly and the other half gave speeches to audiences who were instructed to look very bored and annoyed and not to applaud very much. And so the people who gave speeches to the unhappy audiences were themselves likely to emerge from that experience in a pretty bad mood. Well, they had all the speakers afterwards create collages, which were then rated for creativity by a panel of artists. And they found that the people who had given the speeches to the disapproving audiences produced more-creative collages. They were rated higher by this panel of artists. And we see study after study like this, and I don’t know if anybody knows exactly what that connection is, but I think we know it in our bones that it’s there.
And I want to say this is very different from the state of depression, which is not what I’m talking about. I really want to make a clear distinction. It’s very hard, if not impossible, to be creative when depressed. So I’m not talking about a state of utter hopelessness or despair, anything like that. It’s more something about the attunement of the beautiful and the broken simultaneously from which creativity seems to emerge.
TS: Now Susan, I just have one last question for you. And it has to do with this notion of longing and the power of asking the question, what am I longing for? And I wonder if you can give our listeners some tips on how they can enter that question effectively.
SC: [Yes.] And I’m not sure how much time we have, if you want me to tell that story or not, but I had this experience myself where I’d wanted to be a writer since I was four, but I’d been a corporate lawyer for almost a decade so that I could support myself, make a living. And then I found out all at once that I wasn’t going to be making partner. And I left my law firm and also at the same time left a relationship that I had been in for the previous seven years that had always felt wrong. And so now I was sort of adrift in the city in my early thirties with no career and no love, and I wasn’t sure what was happening. And I fell into this relationship with a musician; he was a very kind of lit-up and alluring kind of person. And it turned into this kind of obsession that I could not free myself from. Whatever I did, I couldn’t get over this obsession for this guy.
Until one day a friend said to me, “If you are this obsessed with somebody, it’s because he represents something that you’re longing for. And so what are you longing for?” And this question really was a kind of epiphany moment for me of like, “Oh, I’m longing to be a writer.” This guy, what he represents to me is an emissary from this world of creativity and writing that I had always wanted to be a part of all my life and had denied for all those decades. And as soon as I understood that, the obsession fell away and I started writing. It was instantaneous. And so I tell you that whole story to say, what are you longing for?
And longing comes up at different times and in different spurts throughout our lives. I’m not really in a state of longing right this minute. It comes up now, and then it comes up again. But when you have these moments when you’re really beset by a kind of longing, you would say, to really look underneath them and find out, what is it telling you? What does that longing tell you? And can you follow that longing, can you follow it in the direction that it’s telling you to go?
TS: I’ve been speaking with Susan Cain. She’s the author of the new book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. She’ll be with us for an aftershow question-and-answer session, where you can ask Susan your questions. Before we break and go to the aftershow, Susan, for people who are interested in learning more, studying with you, going deeper into this topic of bittersweet, what do you suggest?
SC: Of course there is the book that you can read that’s available in all book places. I would ask you to follow me on my—follow my newsletter, and you can find that at susancain.net. And if you go to my website, susancain.net, there’ll be lots of prompts for the newsletter. I also have a class on Bittersweet: Practices and Reflections. It’s a really cool format. It’s just little daily texts that you get every morning to your phone, and it’ll just be my voice in your ear giving you different meditations and practices for that day. So it’s just a few minutes every morning. And if you’re interested in that and you’re curious about it, there’s actually—I believe it’s a 20 percent discount for your audience, Tami. And the way you find out information about that is just text the following number, and you can just say your name or anything. Just send any word to this text number, and you’ll get info back. And it’s 833-256-5359. So I’ll say that again, 833-256-5359.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Susan Cain, the author of Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
