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 after-show 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.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guests are Neal Allen and Anne Lamott, and this is a conversation I’ve been looking forward to. Let me tell you a little bit, to begin, about Neal Allen. He’s a writer, spiritual coach, and speaker whose chief interest is removing obstacles of the ego. He’s the author of Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside You and a new book, which is what we’re going to be talking about today. It’s called Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic.
The foreword to Better Days is written by Anne Lamott, who describes Neal as her personal husband, which, every time I hear that or think of it, I get a chuckle. And I don’t quite know why I am chuckling, but I chuckle nonetheless. Anne, as you probably know, is a New York Times bestselling author of 19 books. I learned that next year, Anne will be turning 70 and will be releasing her 20th book. Her books include seven novels and many books that are beloved by so many of us, including Bird by Bird; Help, Thanks, Wow; Traveling Mercies; and more. Neal and Anne, thank you for coming here and being part of Sounds True’s podcast, Insights at the Edge. Thank you.
Neal Allen: Thank you, Tami.
Anne Lamott: Yeah. Great to be here.
TS: Right here at the beginning. I’d love it, are ready for this, if you could introduce each other a little bit more as humans and beloveds for each other. How would you introduce each other in that context to our audience? Share a little bit about how you got together, that kind of thing.
NA: Two things come to mind right away. One is what you see in Anne in the books is actually what life is like with Anne. Anne provides most days with a running Saturday Night Live sketch comedy routine that changes every day and lightens things up. So neither of us is a big proponent of depth. We both think that when you get to visit with God, as often as not, it’s lighthearted and simple and funny. So that’s one thing.
The second thing is, when we first met, we met for coffee. And then we just hung out with each other every day and have hung out with each other every day since then, unless one of us was on the road and the other wasn’t. And it just has been a running conversation all the time. Early in the running conversation—and neither of us ever talked about this until much later—we’d be watching TV in the evening, usually Scandinavian detective shows, and one of us would hit the remote and hit pause and blurt out something we were ashamed of and then hit start again. And then the show would go on, and then the other one would hit pause and blurt out something they were ashamed of. And within a week or two, we ran through all of the most shameful things in our minds, in our heads, in our lives, however you want to look at it. And it just cleared away secrets and it was unintentional, but it was because Anne’s willing to be as vulnerable as any human being on Earth and knows that that’s a path to relationship and a path to the divine.
AL: Yeah, we really just got rid of it right away. I didn’t want to get busted, I didn’t want to have secrets. We really kept it in the soda-shop stage for a couple of weeks on one hand. And on the other, just from the first date on, we were just noodling around. I would disagree that we don’t do depth, because we really do do depth. But we’re also quite playful, and we’re big proponents of a radical silliness. Maybe people would call it a stupidity, but we have a lot of running routines. And we met on Match, on this form of Match that’s for old people, seven-and-a-half years ago, called Our Time. And we just looked at each other. We just grokked each other. And we were off and running conversationally in about 20 minutes.
And we just, I think both understood that that was the most important thing, that you felt like you could spend the rest of your lives together talking. And we talked about very serious soul stuff and spirit stuff. And it also turned out that he knew almost as much about the JonBenét Ramsey murder as I did. And then we had both had decided we wanted the Grateful Dead song “Ripple” to play at our memorial service. This is on the first date. On the second date, he made me cry, but on the first date… And so we had Ripple as our processional when we got married five years ago.
TS: In the foreword to Better Days, Anne, you write about how on one of your early dates, Neal wanted to share with you the work that he has done and this interest that he has in taming your inner critic. And your reaction was—
AL: I don’t even remember.
TS: You wrote that it was—
NA: You wanted run away.
TS: Well, it was like, really? I’ve done a lot of work on this. But it’s only because he has such beautiful hands. And we will talk about this topic, but I thought that there’s something about that that struck me.
AL: Well, I think on the first date we talked about his Diamond Heart work and the Shapes of Truth work, and I had come in a really disturbed state because of a personal thing that was going on at my house, and I brought it up. He said, “How are you, really?” And I brought it up, and we did the Diamond Heart essential forms over bagels and coffee, and I couldn’t believe it. And that was what the first book turned out to be about. And then on the second date, he started helping me to recognize the inner critic, this voice that has kept me scared and unsure of myself for almost 70 years now. But at the time, about 60, what was it, 62, something like that.
And thank God we were together, barely, for the 2016 election. But we did the inner critic work on our second date and the lights went on, and I all of a sudden understood. And I’ll let him talk more about what it is, but I went like this. I had one of those aha moments where you feel like you’re standing next to a Buddhist gong, because everything fell into place that this voice criticizing or belittling me wasn’t me. It was something I’d taken on as a very young child, encouraged by my family and the culture, that helped me A, stay alive and B, become socialized and a grownup. So yeah.
TS: Neal, your work with taming the inner critic, for me, was surprisingly fresh and effective. I was like, “What? Really?” Because I’ve been exposed to this in a lot of different forms, so I was a little bit like, “Is there anything here that’s going to be new?” I had no idea when I cracked open the book. And it was. It’s the effectiveness, I think, the stunning simplicity and effectiveness is what I really want you to introduce, how you help people work with the inner critic. And really give it to us right here, so that all of our listeners can get this gift.
NA: Most people who I meet in everyday life and in spiritual communities and everywhere have been brought up to resent their inner critic and to believe, in some way or another, it’s part of them. And all I do, it turns out, is a very simple thing, which is I persuade people that it isn’t a part of them, that it’s actually a facsimile of a person who actually sits just outside of their true self and that it’s a parasite. And then, once it’s separated distinctly from the person, and the person buys into that, they get to investigate its qualities. And it turns out it’s really rather stupid and really rather a bully and idiotic and repetitive and has no business guiding an adult life.
It served a beautiful purpose when we were six years old and getting socialized in a complex civilization. And at six years old, you need an absent parent to have a voice in you for a while, because you’re making fateful decisions for the first time by yourself. Up to six, somebody’s watching over you vaguely, at least, you’re not allowed to cross the street on your own. And at six, you go to first grade, you’re allowed to cross the street on your own. It might be five in some households, seven in another, but somewhere around there, you need to learn how to look both ways. And the voice tells you how to look, reminds you in a scolding voice by the way, always a scolding voice, to look both ways. And that’s wonderful, right? And if you’re in a particularly dysfunctional family, it might provide you with some reliability and some reminders, get you to school on time, get you to function in a way that your unreliable parents or parental substitutes aren’t able to do.
So that’s good too. And that’s fateful too. And as you learn the ropes, it helps you, in confusing situations, get used to the rhythms of strangers in your midst and strange adults asking you to do strange things. And it provides you with some very elementary tools to get past the confusing parts and keep your life going and mature a little bit. By the time you’re 17, though, you’ve on your own tested all the strategies that are out there. There aren’t that many for how to get along with the world. And you’re much more sophisticated than your superego, than your inner critic, than this thing that continues to talk to you as if you’re a six-year-old. And by the way, it’ll continue to talk to you that way until you’re 90 years old, because it only knows how to talk to a six-year-old.
And even though you’re no longer a six-year-old, you’re convinced in some way that you are, right? Most cultures have to support this. It’s very helpful for everybody in a complex civilization to believe that they’re small, so that their only job is to contribute to the success of other people. And they aren’t allowed, as a mature human being, to make up their own mind about how to spend their time. And it keeps you constricted as that six-year-old until you’re 90 years old, telling you that you’re listening to yourself and, without it, you’d be predatory or homicidal if you’re from a Freudian background. Or if you’re Catholic, you’d have original sin. If you’re from almost any faith, you would have some bad seed that needed to be controlled. And you don’t. But to come to the idea that you don’t and that you can actually do this on your own without a nagging fake parent, absent parent around, you’ve got to see the nagging absent parent for what it is.
Apparently, at least I did. I lucked into seeing it. It objectified itself one day in a therapist’s room on my shoulder. And I started a conversation with it and I discovered it’s a moron. And I can use the word moron because it’s not a real person. It’s a facsimile of a person who only knows a few things and who keeps repeating them. And I am a much better decision-maker than it is because it’s conservative. And conservative decisions get you by, it can claim a very high success rate, but it never disappears long enough to notice that I can get to that success rate quite fine without it. And without it, I’m not anxious when I’m making my decisions. And so the main process that I talk about, I’m sorry this takes a while to get to, but the main process I’m talking about—
TS: It’s worth waiting for.
NA: It’s silly, but you literally pull the voice out of your head, right? You hold your palm in front of you, and if you wait long enough, usually about 30 seconds a face will appear. It’s weird, but a face for most people, not always, but usually a face appears, the face is usually slightly vague. The face is always suspicious or snarky, one or the other, because that’s the only attitude that the superego knows. That’s the attitude of a grumpy parent warning you of a danger and so it always has that expression.
And then I developed over time a series of questions that almost every superego answers the same way. And the first question is: “When did you take charge?” And it’ll answer, “Oh, when you were born” or “When you were five or six years old.” And then you ask it: “Who put you in charge?” And most of them say, “You did.” Some of them will say, “A parent did.” But most say, “You did.”
And those are just entry questions. They get the superego used to—oh, and by the way, it answers and it answers honestly, right? And so you want to give it yes-or-no questions mostly. The first couple aren’t, but after that, it’s yes-or-no questions. And the questions are things like—I have them in the book, but they’re just a series of questions. “Who put you in charge?” “You did.” “May I take charge now?” “Well, I don’t think it would be a good idea.” “Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?” “Because I’ve seen you take charge, and you failed.” And then I point out or have the person who’s inquiring to the hand, point out, “Weren’t you in charge back then? And isn’t that on you if I failed and it’s something that I should hold against myself?” And that usually gets them quiet.
But the two most important questions that we come to—and this is done as a quasi-Gestalt. In Gestalt therapy, there’s this one technique where you have an empty chair and you switch into that chair and you play the role of the mother who you’re antagonistic to, or you have bad memories of or the father or somebody else. And then you play their part. You ask it a question and get them to answer through your voice. And this works the same way. I’m talking to my superego, and they really do talk back. They all do. And the two important questions are: What are you worried will happen to me if I take charge? And we heard, “You’ll fail,” but the next question is the essential one in the end: What are you worried will happen to you if I take charge? And the superego inevitably, eventually, comes the answer, “I will disappear.”
And it turns out the main reason the superego has continued to take charge well past the time that it should have retired is that it has a weird, tiny, little, almost human survival instinct. It does not want to go out of business. It does not want to go out of existence. At which point I instruct my client to say to it and mean it, “I will not annihilate you.” And that relieves it a little bit. And then I ask it, or the client asks it, “Isn’t it tiring running the show all the time?” And usually the superego answers, the inner critic answers, the face, and the palm answers, “Yeah, it is tiring. It’s actually exhausting.” And then I have the person ask the superego, “How would you like to go into semi-retirement as my occasional ethical advisor?” And it turns out superegos are like narcissists, they love flattery, and that sounds like a really good title. It’s got a nice bureaucratic ring to it. And they almost all immediately accept the position of occasional ethical advisor.
And that’s the start. So you’ve identified it as something that isn’t deep inside you, that’s an inextricable part of you like your instincts are, but is actually a slightly externalized character who usually sits near the surface of the cranium. Some people feel it more in the body or in the pit of the stomach, but usually, for most people, it’s right around here, behind the eyes. And it’s not subconscious. It’s just slightly sub-vocal. So it’s whispering to you and pretending to be you and pretending to be necessary. And when you pull it out and start noticing that, everything starts up.
And then the rest of the journey is just various techniques that I’ve developed with my clients. They’ve taught me these techniques, by working with them, to continually pull it out in real time without having to hold your hand out and talk to it, so that you notice it during the course of the day and go, oh, wait a minute, that’s my inner critic. That’s you. That’s not me. I would never talk to myself. And eventually it stops crowding out your authentic voice, who is compassionate to you and the world and not endangered and not exaggerating danger, and doesn’t live in a world of hierarchies and right, wrong, good, bad, turning everything into a moral play, but wants things to happen as they naturally will and wants to be accepting of them. And that voice gets stronger and stronger. And as that voice gets stronger, it amplifies itself.
So it’s a continual rewarding system. It isn’t like some people look at various kinds of spiritual work as, oh, I have to work and work and work and work and work, and poof, I’m open. In this case, you open a little crack here and keep working at it, there’s a little more crack. And that’s nice. It’s nice to get a little reward along the way. And the only job is to continually recognize, wait a minute, that’s not me, number one. And number two, maybe I don’t need that voice. Maybe I don’t need to punish myself in order to get things done. Let’s see if I’m just as productive, just as charitable, just as helpful in the world without somebody telling me, “You’re not productive enough, you’re not charitable enough, you’re not helpful enough in the world.”
TS: Now, let me ask you both a question. What did it appear like in your hand? Anne, I’m curious, when you did this, what did you see? What does this superego character for you look and sound like?
AL: Well, it happened very quickly for me. I’m not going to name names, but there was an older man in publishing who had not published me, in fact, but who was involved in the house at which I’m published. And he was just an awful person, just had a harem of women beneath him and had just raging, raging ego and the value that the East Coast, white, male, intelligentsia were the writers of most value. And his being had an effect on me, my professional life, because he oversaw the imprint where I was. And so I saw it as him. It just came. And he was mid-70s and just grim.
It’s funny because I am coming up on my 20th book in April, and when I was writing it, the whole time, you’d think that I would just say, oh, this is a piece of cake. I write these little stories. They’re all about the same length. They’re usually the same story, that things feel very dark and weird, and the world is terrifying. And then something happens. I slip on the cosmic banana peel or the phone rings and, all of a sudden, I can breathe again, and I get my chops back. That’s the main story. And I would see him just rolling his eyes like, “Well, could you try to write more like Bernard Malamud or Salman Rushdie or anybody but a white West Coast woman?” But I would think it was true, and I’d hear this voice.
Boy, talk about beating a dead horse again. But little by little, under Neal’s tutelage, sooner and sooner, instead of three and four days later of having been discouraged this whole time, I go, what he just told you—I’d go, oh, it’s you. It’s not me. It’s not truth. It’s not the spirit. It’s this voice inside of me, by two very high-achieving, intellectual parents who taught. One of whom was English, who taught us to have exquisite manners and taught us to do better than anybody else. And we did, and it has kept me so clenched my whole life to have to achieve on this one path instead of to bloom and to flower and to do less, done with a lot more freedom and joy. So I’d say for me, over and over again, for seven-and-a-half years, I’ve been starting to get into the attack. It sounds true to me. Sounds True. It’s a great name for a company, don’t you think?
NA: Yeah.
AL: We should—
NA: Let’s write it down.
AL: OK, write it down so we don’t—
NA: Can we patent it?
AL: Yeah, definitely Sounds True. And the critical voice sounds true because I was hearing it my whole life, that I should try to write with more irony. I should write more New York. I should write less hippie, less spiritual. The spiritual stuff annoys my left-wing fans. And of course my left-wing politics annoy the spiritual fans. But now, instead of buying into it or being silenced, shutting down, I go, “Oh, it’s you. Thank you. You go read, there’s great light in the library. And I’m going to just get my day’s work done.” And it really works like that, because it becomes the habit of noticing it, thanking it, helping it think of another place it can be.
TS: Do you bother, Anne, with any kind of reassignment or higher task, or are you just placing it someplace in the other room where it can go do something outside of being close to you?
AL: Oh, no. I just help it find something. I distract it so that I can concentrate better. It’s like having all those years when you’re doing homework and your parents are breathing down your neck. And it’s like, “Oh wait, I don’t know. Why don’t you erase that? I’m wondering if you might want to try it from this…” And they’re just breathing their hot, worried, neurotic, high-achieving breath down your neck. And that’s how I would experience the critic. And so every time I’ve seen Neal do this with other people, at the end, when he asks them to send off the critic somewhere comfortable for them to spend a few hours, he always says, “Well, thank you for having kept you alive.” None of us ran into the street and got hurt. We didn’t swim out beyond our ability to stay afloat. So people thank it for having kept them alive, and inevitably they cry. They cry with gratitude.
NA: I cry as they watch it. They really did do a great service for me when I was six or seven. And it’s very sweet to see that.
AL: And it’s also painful to realize, for whatever length of time it took you to get to the awakening, that you’ve been held back, you’ve been made small and clenched and worried about whether or not you’re good enough as is. The American way is, if you do this and that and buy that, marry that, lease that, and achieve this, then you’re of really good value. But that was the inner critic and it was just the great palace lie. And so it’s a path to freedom, to create, to play, and to wonder and to wander. And Neal talks a lot about, in Better Days, about just getting your curiosity back. Curiosity was not a value of the inner critic, because it was not productive. But if you read Shapes of Truth, it’s a synonym for joy. It’s why we’re here: to become, in my tradition, the Christian tradition, to become again as little children.
TS: Neal, what about you? How did your superego/inner critic appear?
NA: Yeah, it was interesting. So I had this lovely teacher, a guy named Bob Birnbaum, who had studied under Fritz Perls, which may give it that Gestalt feel. He had studied under Carl Rogers. So he had a sense of a nonmedical approach to psychology, to optimize a life instead of improve a life. And he had been in the Rajneesh community—I think he was there—known as Swami Amitabh. And he had been the head of the psychology department for Rajneesh for a while. And he had all this background that I knew nothing about—he was just a therapist who was in the neighborhood. And I asked him later whether what happened to me was guided by him or whether it had happened spontaneously, because I couldn’t remember. But at any rate—and he wouldn’t answer me so I’d never know. But at some point, a gremlin appeared on my left shoulder and I started talking with it. And that’s the genesis of all of this work.
I happened to be, right then, starting to embrace the Buddhist idea of disidentifying from identities—destroying identities and moving through identities, my identity as a good or a bad father, my identity as a writer, my identity as an employee, my identity as a parent, my identity as this, my identity as that. And I used my gremlin, who looked just like the classic gremlin in the movies, who by the way, I always thought that must be an age-old mythological creature. It was actually invented when it was painted on the fuselage of a World War II fighter plane, right? It only dates to 1941 or 1942 or whatever. But we all know that gremlin, and it’s a rat with wings and really toothy and long face. And it sat here. I didn’t know yet to bring it out and that I could face it, but I would talk to it and it would talk back. And I went in and went through my first round of identities, one a week. Some of them were tougher than others and would take two or three weeks.
I spent an hour in Bob’s therapy room a week, and I really looked forward to it. And I moved through my first round of identities with my gremlin and asking it, “Why do you tell me I’m a bad parent? What’s a good parent? How do you know what a good parent is? Why do you think it’s helpful to me to call myself a mediocre parent? Or I need to be better as a parent? What if I’m a good-enough parent?” Those sorts of questions. And it turns out, that’s enough. It was enough work, at least for me, that after about six months, I had a massive reduction in anxiety.
Because it turns out, you’re not actually—and Freud got this right—anxiety is the fear of being punished by the superego. The anxiety isn’t over the fear of the outcome of the circumstance. We’re adults. We know some things go south and sideways. And 20 to 40% of the time, we’re going to have predicted badly, and it’ll go wrong, and we can deal with that as adults. What we can’t deal with, apparently, is that you’re going to get a scold from your absent parent hidden in your semi-imagination back here. So anxiety is the fear of being scolded. Weird, right? But I think it’s true.
And I think at least for me, by getting my gremlin to show how moronic it was and show how it lacked any good authority over the provinces that it had embraced, I lost a lot of my anxiety. And it was years later, it was probably 10 years later, before I started to have private clients. I was an executive coach. I’d had a first career as a journalist, a second career as a corporate executive, and I became an executive coach. And very quickly, my executive coaching went straight to the heart of the problem, which was the superego. And I discovered things like, oh, you can bring it out in front of you and talk to it directly, like in a direct Gestalt rather than let it perch on your shoulder.
TS: OK, I’m going to get personal here for a moment, which is, I’ve had a very, very, very intense superego figure in my life, which is why, when I said I was surprised, is this Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic, is it going to help me or not? I was like, I hope so, but not particularly optimistic about it. And when I tried to see it in my hand, I didn’t see it. I don’t see anything in my hand. But I could sense a figure and I could sense this figure. And as I said, an intense superego.
It’s a sadist figure with whips and the ability to take a hatchet and chop my hands off and a frying pan that it can hit me over the head with. And I’m like, oh my God. There’s this tremendous female sadist, costumed figure with all kinds of torture tools. So first of all, just a question to pause, and I don’t want to make this too much about me, but people may also have experiences themselves where they don’t see it on the hand, but they sense, like I see a small movie or something with this person, which is a little different. What do you think about that? But it’s not like a face.
NA: Well, they can morph. And some people do see full bodies and more active things. There are people out there, a tiny percentage have seen multiple people, but they’re really just one, it’s an overdramatizing of the exact same thing. Which is at heart, it’s saying the same things to you as anybody else’s says to them, slightly different words, slightly different. And they can morph, a lot of them morph into this very kind, fake insincere kindness of, oh, I’m just helping motivate you to feel better about yourself. And they have some cleverness, they’re honest, but they’re also sly. And yours sounds like it just knows that it’s in big trouble, so it’s going to make itself look fiercer and more as if it has more tools than it really does. And one way that they appear, for instance, that is also not at all like a face, is often when people meditate, the superego comes in and says, “Oh, you’re too tired.”
And so there’s a good percentage of meditators who say, “I just struggle with, as soon as I’m meditating, I feel tired.” Well, anytime you’re trying to do any kind of emotional work and you feel tired all of a sudden, it’s probably your superego basically saying, “Oh, you feel tired” because it recognizes that’s a way to get out of your doing something that it thinks isn’t a good idea for its survival. It’s worried that you’re going to meditate. And with you, Tami, it’s worried that somebody as spiritual and smart as you is going to come and try to encourage it to go away, so it’s going to puff itself up.
AL: Why don’t you just do it with her right now?
NA: Well, I think she’s already done it, and so I prefer to—
TS: It’s OK, but let’s keep going here for a moment. What if somebody doesn’t necessarily know how to link their biography, or I don’t really understand the connections between how this particular figure is appearing. It doesn’t all quite make sense, the figures there. I get that.
NA: Yeah. Well, one clue is listen carefully to the inflections of the voice. And for most people, you’ll hear the inflections of a parent or parental substitute from childhood. About 80% of my clients—and this probably goes a long way to explaining the cultural misogyny out there—about 80% of the clients, it’s a nagging mother. That’s the inflection. Most of the other 20% is a nagging father figure or mother figure, it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference, because it’s incorporating both mother and father and gender-neutral messages at all times. It just picks a particular voice from your childhood. And that’ll start you into the recognition that, oh, my mother nagged me by telling me that I was too big for my britches. And actually I noticed that the stories that I keep telling myself are, I’m too big. They’re kind of like, I’m too big for my britches.
And so like any work that crosses over into psychological work, it will take you back to these hoary childhood keys to the kingdom moral tales. We call them traumas and triggers nowadays, but they’re really just little tiny moral tales that the superego pulls up to control you and curates. So we think that our memories are accurate reflections of our past when they’re really just a series of little fairytales that have a beginning, middle, end. And you remember that portion of the event that has a moral at the end that can protect you in the future.
Very common ones that I hear from my clients are the second- or third-grade story of going to the party and wearing the wrong dress and being humiliated for wearing the wrong dress. And so people have this—they’ll be 70 years old and talking about the party. Well, they do that because the superego keeps reminding them of that story, right? On that same day, presumably there were a ton of events that weren’t humiliating, but that one was selected out. And so when you do this kind of work, it takes you back into, oh, who told me that lesson that exaggerates that danger that I won’t be accepted by my tribe, by the world, because I’ll wear the wrong [dress], and I’ve had to worry about fashion ever since?
TS: Now, one thing that was very interesting to me, Anne, when you said, “I’m going to have my superego go into the other room and read a book or something.” What I noticed, in exploring this, reading Better Days, was that when I put my superego someplace out of my personal space, someplace else, different, out on the ocean on a raft or something—I’m by the water here, so not that far away, but just away—go out on the raft and float around for a bit. There was something geographic, I don’t know how else to explain it, but something about personal space, being free of this being, living in it with me, that was very powerful. I wonder if you both have anything to say about that.
NA: It’s very cool. I hear that a lot. I don’t write about that experience, because it doesn’t happen to me. So I just put mine back in my head and leave it at that, and it still decreases. But I’ve heard that a lot, and I’m all in favor of it.
AL: Well, with me, God, I have it. We have an intern at my tiny, tiny failing church, African American woman of 40. And she’s been waiting for a liver, and she’s been dying for a couple of years, waiting for a liver. And I was talking to her in the hospital, it turned out to be two days before she got one, and she’s doing really beautifully. But I said, “Do you feel death nearby?” Because she talks about dying. And she said, “I feel something sniffing around me.” And she said, “But the truth of Christ inside of me just keeps fending it off.” And I pictured a modem, and it wasn’t like Jesus with a paintball gun. It was like a modem of spiritual energy that just was aware and keeping it at bay. And when I heard that, I realized that’s a lot of the way I experienced my inner critic, because I feel it’s sniffing around.
It’s been my whole life, is that I didn’t look right. I didn’t quite do what I might’ve done. I was a tennis champion until I was 16, and then I dropped out, and I dropped that, and I could have, and I didn’t. And also all the bad thoughts. You know how Gabriel García Márquez says, “There’s your public self, your private self, and your secret self”? Well, my inner critic can really prey, can really find a crack in my turtle shell with my secret-self stuff, my bad thoughts, my judgment, or my raging narcissism and all of that. So I’ve just been picturing the voice that can talk to the inner critic as being what Chitoka, our intern said, that there’s this truth inside of us. For me, it’s the truth of Christ, but it’s the truth of the sacred world, of the divine one, that there’s only this love energy, it surrounds us. But this voice, it’s so sneaky, it’s so good at what it does. It gets in, it goes, “Well, wait a second.”
And there’s a Christian saying from the Deep South that the voice of the devil is sweet to hear. And the devil doesn’t say, “Oh, you’re a piece of…” The devil says, “I really want you to start writing. I really want you to start meditating, but right now, it’s not a good time. There’s too much going on. Let’s revisit it at the beginning of the year.” It’s that voice that keeps you from stepping into this shape that you found finally after these lifelong loving friendships and a partner and all the work you’ve done. But that for me, the inner critic is going, “Oh, honey, no, that’s OK. Let’s just not go.” And so instead, I can ask it to go off, maybe go into the kitchen. There’s a very comfortable stool in there. Just sit and maybe have a cup of tea or something, because I’ve got work to do. I actually am on a deadline. Or I can just picture the modem, just fending it off and creating a space around me that it can’t get into.
NA: There’s one thing I do want to mention that you don’t want to do with it, and you probably will want to try this a couple of times. I’m just saying in the long run, you don’t want to do that, and that’s yell it down or argue with it or debate with it or try to reason with it or try to get rid of it with your anger or with your strength or with your power or whatever you want to call it. Because if you address it in a hierarchical way, as if you’re in conflict with it, you’re amplifying its voice, because it’s there all by itself, happily grinning anytime you’re in conflict. I know that if I’m in conflict with anybody about anything or I’m self-righteous about anything, my superego is running the show at that point.
TS: For people who are hearing this term superego, and they’re a little bit like, wait a second, are we just equating the superego and the inner critic? Is that a fair equation? Help me understand, when you use the word superego, how that relates to the ego as a whole. I’m a little confused.
NA: OK, so this is the standard psychological model that Freud came up with in the 1910s and ‘20s, and it hasn’t really shifted in this sense that there are three parts to an ego. There’s the id, which is your instincts, and there are two instincts. He calls them death and sex. I think that nowadays you would call them the survival instinct and the libido instinct. And so they’re mostly built in, they’re totally built in. You arrive with them at birth, they’re in all animals in one form or another. And then at five or six, you develop a superego. There might be traces of it before then, but mostly socially, you’re actually not doing right, wrong, good, bad conscience things when you’re two, three, four, even five years old, less than. People think less than. Parents think, to the extent that you’re learning good and bad, you’re learning more or less like a dog does or a cat does by a weird association with reactions and not as something that you store and use to find cognates for things that you’ve seen before.
So you don’t really have much free will. You’re really just moving with the world in a nice little Buddhist dependent arising in your first few years. And then the superego comes in to socialize you and it comes in to teach you, oh, now you’ve got to grow up and learn the rules. You’re in a civilized society. You need to learn right, wrong, good, bad. And the superego will help you. And we’ve talked about how it appears. In the classic theory, the superego is at war with the instinctual id. It is that you’ve got these predatory and homicidal interior instincts, is the way Freud looked at it. Augustine would say, you’ve got original sin, you’re a bad seed. You’ve got these terrible instincts and you need something to offset them so you don’t go on rampage and you don’t hurt people and you socialize and help people instead. And so you have a third thing, which confusedly also has the name “ego.” All three is called an ego. And so is this third thing in between.
That was the standard model that everybody bought into. And all different forms of psychology, whether Jungian or Freudian or this or that, even cognitive bought into it to a certain extent. And it always thought that they were both necessary, and they were opposed to each other. And I think there are a lot of people who would agree with me now that I actually don’t live in my homicidal survival life very much as a civilized person. I am very seldom in danger for my life. And in fact, I’m only episodically, even if it may seem different when I’m 17 in particular, episodically within my libidinal life. And even that most of the time, if I’m not drinking heavily, controls itself. Most of my life is actually spent over here in the social life center. And by the way, my superego is running all the time in my social, everyday life. It isn’t spending most of its time counterbalancing bad urges. It’s actually spending most of its time creating artificial dangers and then solving them for me.
TS: Let ask a question, Neal, to help complete my understanding here, complete the meaning of the map you’re offering. So leaving the id and the instincts aside, what’s the relationship between that, what most people think of as their ego, their operating sense of a personality framework and this superego critic being? What’s the relationship there?
NA: I think they’re the same thing. I think that the superego constructs your entire personality. Your personality is an externally facing structure. Duncan Trussell, the great comedian, calls it, oh, when you meet me, you don’t meet me. You meet my bodyguard. And so your personality is all the shiny stuff you want people to know about you. And all the stuff you want to conceal is in your personality too. And all of that is curated by your superego.
TS: I’m glad we’re getting to this, because when you hear, “Just tame the inner critic,” you think of this small thing like this critic. There are all these other things about me that are also problematic, and there’s my critic. But you’re actually describing something different, that if you’re able to transform the superego’s influence and put it in this advisory capacity or in another room or tame it, to use your language, the entire space opens up. There’s a wholesale change. And Anne, one of the questions I wanted to ask you, because Neal writes in the book, he uses a number, which I thought was funny and curious, 85%, not 80%, reduction in anxiety after he did this work for six months. And I thought to myself, well, first of all, that’s a lot. That’s a huge reduction. And I’m wondering, in your own experience of anxiety in your life, have you found some numerical reduction? Or would you just say a whole lot? Or how would you describe it?
AL: I don’t think I can describe it numerically. It’s not like that. It’s like, I am a very high-strung and anxious person. I have OCD and I have needed and gotten really beautiful help for that. But what I notice is that during the day, the thing will raise its head. I didn’t get any exercise today. That’s not good. And it will mention this, and I also have a sore hip, and I’m trying to baby it, but the thing thinks that I could have found other ways to get some exercise. And instead of feeling that panicky feeling about it or that anxious feeling of, oh my God, I try to get exercise every day. I think, “Oh, it’s you.” And there’s a higher being inside me in my heart cave, as Ram Dass would put it. And there’s me, there’s my own beingness. And so I keep thinking, “Oh, it’s you.”
And then it will come up with something else in another realm, with my writing. It came up today, and I’ll start to go, oh, this is a good point. This sounds like the last thing. And then I’ll think, “Oh, it’s just you.” I haven’t finished what I’m working on. It doesn’t even know, I and the writing don’t quite know what it’s about yet. We’re working it. I’m working it. It’s wet clay, and I will just keep breaking the trance that the inner critic sets up with me of getting me to look at it. It’s like the vampire dance floor. It’s smoky and trippy and seductive, and I move toward it and then I go, “Oh wait, it’s you.” And I don’t want to go out on the vampire dance floor, I want to sit on the couch with the New Yorker and the dogs. And so it’s not numerical. And for me, I don’t think I could calculate it, but all I can say is it’s a number of times a day I am able to avoid holding my neck out for it to feed on.
TS: All right. Neal, you write in the book, there are three ways of looking at the point of this work. It’s a path to less anxiety, it’s a path to more freedom, it’s a path to enlightenment, and then you continue. “I’d say it’s a pretty good path to enlightenment, an excellent path to more freedom, and a pretty sure path to less anxiety.” So when you started getting to, it’s a path to enlightenment, I was like, “OK, I’m going to have to ask Neal about that.”
NA: When I did my first round of talking to my gremlin—and I told you that I got a little more freedom and a little more freedom—I actually had, in those days, I had, what do you call visualizations like Joan of Arc? What are those called? Visions, right? I had visions in those days. I don’t anymore, but I had special effects. And I never had special effects, except on acid as a kid. But here, all of a sudden, I’m talking to the gremlin. That’s a special effect. And after a few months, I had literal velvet curtains in front of me as my superego, I felt, was shifting to the right, in my periphery, from the center.
The center opened velvet curtains and beaming, shining light came in. And it was illustrious, angelic light with gossamer and colors and all sorts of things. And it bought me some currency to actually think through my convictions of atheism and go, well, if I’m getting these weirdo visions and they seem at the time real to me, maybe it’s worth my investigating whether there is a divine world that people have been talking about that I’ve always scoffed at and scorned and whatever. And it started me on an exploration of metaphysics, where I had always been a physics guy. And so I started to do all sorts of different traditions.
I found that almost all of the effective work that I had in coming to a satisfaction with life was destructive. And almost all of it was destroying the messaging of right, wrong, good, bad, higher, lower, better, worse that was all being curated by my superego. And so for me, on my path, besides some yoga nidra work and some meditation work and this sangha here and that dharma talk there, sure, I had all of that going too. The central work always was getting the superego out of the way. And my epigraph for the book is from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a great Buddhist master. He basically says that the work is destructive. It’s getting the obstacles of the ego out of the way. And to me, ego obstacles are out of the way when this chatter is out of the way and I’m able to not project myself into a near future to protect myself from or improve what’s already here.
When I’m there, when I’m sitting there, I don’t care what form the divine takes. I don’t care whether it’s a Hindu form or a Buddhist form or a Jesus form or a Muslim form or a Sufi form or this form, or I don’t know what it is form. I could care less. I don’t know what to call it. All I know is it is cool and it doesn’t prevent me from being productive in the world. It doesn’t prevent me from my chores. It doesn’t prevent me from caring about people. It’s a lovely thing that in these ancient traditions, determinism doesn’t turn into fatalism, right? Determinism actually enlivens the activities of life, because it increases the fascination and the appreciation of things that are suffering as well as things that are blissful. But you don’t learn much from bliss. You learn a lot from suffering.
TS: You describe, in Better Days, that there’s this natural arising of presence. You use the word “presence” when the superego is not active, running the show. And Anne, you mentioned, you used a phrase in this conversation, something like a Christ-self or a Christ-presence. So you didn’t use quite that word, but you used the word “Christ,” and I was curious to hear more what that’s like for you and what does that feel like? How would you describe it?
AL: Oh, boy. I know I could write a book about that.
NA: I think you have.
AL: I think I described it as the truth of Christ, but it is the truth of who we really are beyond all the identities and the layers and the persona. I love what Duncan Trussell says, that, “When you meet me, you’re meeting my bodyguard.” The truth of the divine is the truth of my part in the divine, and my reality, my Anne-ness, and the presence is too. I call it the sacrament of ploppage, where I unclench. I stop trying. I stop trying to impress you. I stop all of it, and I just plop and I breathe, and I experience the gratitude and joy of being here.
It’s like Warren Zevon’s famous line when he was dying and his last appearance on The David Letterman Show, he said that dying had taught him to enjoy every sandwich. And I think that’s probably what enlightenment, how it has come to me. But it’s the presence. It’s a warmth. It’s a warm, quiet light of truth and radiance, and it’s just love energy. And because I’m on the path of being a Jesus lover, I experienced it as the risen Christ. As the eyes, as the gentle, forgiving, compassionate, sweet eyes of my older brother, Jesus.
TS: OK, just two final questions here. You said, “I could write a book on that.” And it made me think, I wonder what Anne’s 20th book is going to be about, anyway.
AL: It’s about love. It’s called Somehow, and I wanted to write a book for my son and grandson, because I think the future is going to be pretty dicey for them. I think it’s going to be pretty harsh and scary. We were in Egypt a couple of months ago, and it was 113 a couple of days. And that’s going to be the good old days in five years. And so I wanted to write a book for them about every single thing that has always worked, and that will almost certainly work again for them, no matter the circumstances. And it’s all varieties of love. It’s the love of community. It’s the love of the old-time, lifelong best friends. It’s the love for me with my Sunday school kids and church. It’s the love of nature, God, the great outdoors. And so it’s 12 essays that are all somehow about love.
TS: And then Neal, a final question for you, which is—
AL: Oh, and Neal adds, and the love of Neal.
TS: Which is the love of Neal and Neal’s love of Anne, which is where we started. And we’ll end our conversation on that note. You have a section of Better Days where you write about just saying yes, and how something about this taming of the inner critic led you to this experiment of saying yes. And believe it or not, I decided to start trying this even before. This has been a recent experiment of mine in my marriage. It’s been working fabulously, and I mentioned this to a couple other people. They’re like, “Why don’t you just say yes to me too?” These are people I work with. And I was like, “No, I’m reserving this.” But I’d just to be curious to hear how you came to that as an experiment.
NA: Yeah, I had two different periods with it. The first period, I’m not sure I talk about this, maybe I do in the book, but the first period was, I know, I was working as a newspaperman. And I know that I was worried that I wasn’t interviewing people well and that I needed to hone my interviewing of people. Somebody said to me, “Well, what you’re saying is you’re worried that you disagree with the people because all you ever have to do in life, if you’re not disagreeing with people, is ask them questions.” And so one form of saying yes is to never mention your own belief or mention your own judgments, is just to ask people questions. And it fits in with where I think I’ve landed later in life, which is, I like being fascinated by the world. And maybe love is mostly fascination with the other, if not totally fascination with the other.
And maybe my disappearing is my way of moving into the world. Later in life, I was in a corporate setting and I had a very dysfunctional group, and they were passive-aggressive to each other. I had a group of 14 people who reported up to me, and they were a disaster zone when I walked in on them. They were all female, I was male. So I was a plantation owner also at the same time that I was supposed to herd these cats. And I was told I could fire them all when I explained the situation to my boss. And I’d inherited this disaster zone, and I decided I would try to have some principles that I had learned in a previous company. And this is a company that became Wyndham Hotels. And it was the weirdest corporation I ever worked for in one respect, which was if you asked somebody to do something, they had to do it for you.
And it was totally unspoken, but it was weird because you could ask somebody who worked above you on the org chart, somebody below you or somebody next to you, hierarchy didn’t matter. You had to do what you were asked to do. And if you couldn’t, for good reason, you absolutely couldn’t, your responsibility was to find the resource that would serve that person. So I discovered that even though it went counter to every command and control system that I had encountered in every single other organization I had worked for, it worked perfectly. It was the smoothest, most friction-free operation that I’ve ever seen. And it turns out that we’re fair. We’re by nature fair, and the greediest people are the stingiest. And so people who have the urge to ask everybody else to work for them, in their greed, also know it’ll come back, and they are more likely to be asked to do something for someone else.
And so it balances out. It becomes a natural quid pro quo system. So I took what I had seen there and I took it to this dysfunctional group. And it’s a long story, but within a year I had a really high-functioning, happy group. And it was simply because I wasn’t doing anything. I simply imposed a foreign principle on them. And I told them that they would get fired if they didn’t obey this principle, and so they had to obey the principle. And even though the rest of the organization didn’t, it was a heavily matrixed organization. It still worked. And I took it to heart. And after particularly seeing it work in this dysfunctional organization, I asked myself, why haven’t I done that for myself? And I started doing it for myself. I did it for six months. I just said yes to everything that came my way.
Anybody who asked me anything, I said yes. Actually, I’m sure there were things that I couldn’t do, and I can’t remember them, but there were very few. And then I had set a limit, six months, I think. And at the end of the six months, I turned off the requirement. And for the rest of my life, I have used no at a much lower level than before. You know what I learned? I learned that other people really do have good ideas for me. Other people really do know what’s better for me often, and that in fact, we’re all the same enough that people are pretty fair in what they ask of each other. And they’re pretty compassionate, and they’re pretty caring. And if you do go along with things, you’re not resisting as much, obviously. And that non-resistance, even though it isn’t particularly spiritual, encourages a spiritual non-resistance. And so it was a huge help to me over the years as I encountered the need to explore acceptance and surrender in those sorts of spiritual ideas. Long answer.
TS: Good answer. So great to be with you both. I’ve been speaking with Neal Allen and Anne Lamott. Neal has written the new book Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic with the foreword by Anne. Thanks, friends. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
