Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsch.

Welcome to Metaviews, recorded live in front of an automated audience.

And today we're going to talk about a subject that, quite frankly, I've been wanting to talk about for a long time, which is embracing interdependency.

And this is where, Phyllis, I have to give you a heads up that our titles are often aspirational.

They're meant to be broader themes.

But one of the things I like to do in having these conversations is have a certain spontaneity that leverages the expertise, the wisdom, the insights, the analysis of the guest in general.

But we have two segments that we start every episode with really as a kind of icebreaker, but a way to really get intuitive answers from the guest, if you will.

And the first segment is always the news, you know, and we use the news partly as a hook, you know, to talk about what's new, but really it's designed to ask the guest, what do you think our audience needs to know?

And this could be personal news, this could be local news, this could be world news.

We do happen to be living in the most fast paced news cycle I've ever lived in personally.

And that's why we tend to throw to our guests and say, so what are you paying attention to?

What do you think our audience should be paying attention to when it comes to the onslaught of current events that seems to be going on?

Well, one thing that comes to my mind is the sermon that the bishop gave at the Episcopal Church when the president was in the audience, because I was so.

I was just so touched and moved by her courage, by her absolute compassion and bravery and really speaking love into power in a way that I think is an incredible role model for what we all need to be able to do.

And I actually just started reading her book, which is called How Do We Learn to Be Brave?

And so I'm just.

That's really what comes to my mind.

And as a psychotherapist of over 30 years, that's what people learn to do when they heal the worst of what's happened to them.

They are able to stand up for themselves and their values and what they think is right, without aggression, without shame, without blame, but really powerfully to stand for something that's healing and loving.

And so that's what comes to my mind.

Right on.

A stellar answer.

And if I could ask as a follow up, only because I too was super impressed and blown away with the courage and the leaders I felt she brought in terms of speaking about that message of inclusivity, in the face of the kind of othering that this administration is kind of focused on, other than purchasing her book, which.

Awesome, Fantastic.

Do you know what's happened?

Has she faced any backlash?

I assume she's faced support from people who are like, thank you for saying that.

But we live in such a contested moment.

Do you know if there was any consequences or any backlash, especially from the president, from the administration, for her bold words?

Well, what I read, and there may be more than what I read, but what I read was that there was immediate backlash and that she was really condemned by the administration and there was a demand that she apologize.

And to my knowledge, the church stood behind her and there was no apology given, because there wasn't, in my mind.

There was none needed.

Yeah, amazing.

That's fantastic.

Because leaders need institutions like that to back them up.

And I'm very much of the faith.

Dare we say that in this moment, people who say such things and stand up with such courage are gonna be rewarded.

They're gonna catch flack.

Right.

Because of the cultural nature of our public discourse.

But I want to see more examples of that, which is why I'm thanking you for using our new segment to remind us of why we need more examples.

Now, the second segment we have on every meta views we colloquially call WTF or what's the Future?

A bit of a double entendre, but again, as a future centric podcast, we like to ask our guests on an intuitive level, what's on your event horizon?

Like, what are you paying attention to in terms of the either short term or long term future that you think our audience should pay attention to?

And this is kind of under the larger rubric of nothing's inevitable, provided you're willing to pay attention.

Yeah, I mean, I think we live in a time where we're sort of being asked to pay attention to the short term and the long term future, that what we do in the short term is really going to affect the long term in a way that perhaps past cultures didn't really know or have to deal with.

Because we're making such vast decisions, such wide ranging and impactful decisions about how we treat one another, which I think is the most important, and how we treat the Earth.

But I think how we treat the Earth is a reflection of how we treat ourselves and one another.

Because if we really want to be sustainable here as human beings, we've got to do something different than the.

Than waging war and proliferating hatred and discrimination and inequality.

And that goes for how we treat the Earth.

So I think those things are very much tied together.

And I think talking about the bishop who spoke at the church, she's a good indicator of where I actually think a lot of people really want to go in their hearts.

I think we want to be safe.

I think we want to be good neighbors.

I think we want to have good neighbors.

I don't know anybody who in their personal life wants more conflict, more violence, more discrimination, more withholding of resources, more inequality.

Nobody wants that.

And as a psychotherapist of 34 years, I've never seen that happen.

In fact, those are the things that people come to heal when they come to therapy.

So I think in our hearts, we really do want peace, and I think we really do want brotherly love.

And I think the power dynamics in many countries, not just in the United States, have skewed our thinking to really believe that somebody else is the enemy when they're not.

And in the world of psychology, we know how to heal some of the worst effects of violence and discrimination and abuse.

And that's why I wrote my most current book, which is called America in Therapy.

And it's how to bring that healing message to a nation and take it out of the office and out of our individual family work and individual work and make it a national conversation for true healing and peace.

We have the means to destroy life as we know it.

What are we thinking?

Well, and let's use that as a kind of segue into what I call our feature presentation.

And that's where we sort of take three pillars for the conversation, in this case, America in Therapy, interdependency and empathy.

And I wanted to start with the American therapy, both as a concept and to your point, your book, because it does speak to a radical solution to the political crisis that the country finds itself in, in part because where America loves to evoke strength, you're kind of evoking vulnerability in a good way.

Right to your earlier point that we all kind of want to love and be loved.

But to admit that requires level of vulnerability and risk and openness.

So let's start with this concept of what would it mean collectively and here, whether you want to or not, you can get into the pop culture of this moment.

But what does it mean to have America in therapy?

Because I'm assuming you mean more than just an individual or Lady Liberty as a metaphor, but a real collective consciousness in terms of what you're trying to address or describe.

Yeah, and I think you know what I address in my book in a lot of detail.

Are several things.

One of them are some major paradigm shifts which you're talking about as radical.

And actually they're not radical, but they're seen as radical because we don't employ them and they're not necessarily profitable in the way that a lot of people see the importance of profit.

And the other part is just specific skills like, so I'm going to start there and go back to the paradigms, one of which is this whole thing about interdependency and dependency.

But the skills really are.

We're not listening to each other.

Like, you know, one of the basic foundations of all healing work, whether it's an individual client in the office and the therapist is the listener and then the client, you know, begins to listen to themselves in a very deep way, or you're talking about a couple or a family where people are actually taught non violent communication skills, restraining their most aggressive impulses, reflecting on their own motivations and being accountable for their own behavior and responsible for the impact they have on other people and really reaching for resolution and reconnection rather than who's going to win the argument and who's going to beat the other person and who's going to force the other person to their will or to their value.

Although if I could ask you to kind of double down there because I think that's a really profound insight that we're literally not listening to each other.

And I agree with your point that part of it is that desire to win, that desire to better or dunk.

But could you unpack that a little more?

Like why are we not.

Why have we either lost the ability to listen or lost the desire to listen?

And which is it?

Again, I kind of feel this is one of those self evident yet powerful insights that I'd love you to kind of dig deeper into.

Well, for one thing, I just want to reference what you said about vulnerability.

I think in our present culture, and this isn't totally true, and I think it is changing, but it's only incremental at this point point, that vulnerability is actually a strength, it's not a weakness.

But for a long time, crying or having sad emotion or admitting that you're depressed or that you failed at something or that your life isn't working was seen as a weakness.

And the message was pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you know, dry your tears and you know, show a brave face.

And I think we know now in the world of psychology that vulnerability is actually an incredible strength and it evokes vulnerability in other people.

It invokes that kind of intimacy from other people.

And as long as we're living in a culture that still idolizes this sort of fierce independence, and I made it on my own and I don't need you, which goes to the dependency issue, we're going to be stuck where we are.

Because when people can't be vulnerable, then it's much harder to sit down at the table and actually listen to somebody else's pain without defending or justifying our actions.

And I could go on and on about that, but is that helpful?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then let me bring that back to kind of this metaphor of American therapy.

Because, you know, to your point, America as a nation, as a discourse, vulnerability is never there.

Like, there is this real fear of vulnerability in the way the American narratives are presented.

And even if you think about corporate America, there is such a fear of vulnerability.

Yet you're making what I think is another self evident but incredibly brilliant point, that vulnerability is a source of power, right?

It's a source of comfort.

Help me unpack that contradiction there.

Is that part of why America needs therapy, because they're so afraid, the collective sense is so afraid of vulnerability?

Well, yes, because the opposite of vulnerability is defensiveness.

And that's what I think we're suffering from on an individual level in our own lives or in our businesses or communities, but also on the highest levels of government.

What does defensiveness look like?

It looks like arms buildup.

It looks like, you know, focusing on the military and who we're going to conquer next and who, who do we have the bigger bonds for, which are all forms of playing with global suicide.

So on a mental health level, it's insanity.

And yet we don't ask those questions as a culture because we're so afraid to say, and I've talked about this so many times, and it seems so self evident to me and to people like me that I don't think it is to the general public.

What if we could have said after 9, 11, you know, we have some responsibility here.

We're not just a victim, we've been victimizing as a country.

We've been taking other people's resources, we've been turning over other people's governments for our own profit or power or whatever we've done.

Not that that's all that America has done.

We've done good things.

We have amazing people here, but we also have accountability for our actions that have hurt other people.

And why would we think that it would never come to bite us?

Why would we think that although the only caveat I'd say there is, I think the power of such self evident truths is I think a lot of people never even heard that.

Like, I think the people who did hear that, they're like, oh, yeah, Phyllis, you're making a point.

Our foreign policy has consequences.

But I think to go to your earlier point of people who just want to win, right, who don't even want to listen, they're not even in environments where they would hear that perspective.

They're not even in environments where American foreign policy would be explored, let alone debated.

Right.

And I say this because the reason I wanted to kind of not focus, but wrap our conversation around interdependence is I'm a Canadian and I've been doing a real hectic pace of podcasting over the last six weeks, in part because one of the Most popular Canadian TV shows 10, 20 years ago was called Talking to Americans.

And it was just a TV show of like this Canadian comedian going to America talking to Americans.

And Canadians would laugh because of the cultural differences.

And what I have found so frustrating in doing this podcast and Talking to Americans is how pervasive individualism is and how it is so difficult to get people to have a conversation about anything beyond the individual and the individual choice and the individual liberty.

And yet what I'm hearing in your message and what I'm finding really empowering is this notion of interdependence that emotionally, economically, culturally, psychologically, we live together and that influences our well being, our sense of health.

Like, my dog is here doing the same with me.

So I'm curious to hear both your thoughts on the essential nature, the essential role of interdependence, but how we communicate that back to our point of American therapy, right?

How do we.

Please, go ahead.

No, no, go ahead.

I was just saying how do we foster a greater sense of interdependence so that in the face of the politics, in the face of the bishop giving her remarks, we don't retreat from these challenges.

We lean in and we say, yeah, we gotta be better community members and we have to be engaged in our community to help those who need the help right now.

Well, I think we have to educate each other and just do our best to keep on having our voices and educating each other.

So my field is psychology.

My field is mental health.

Which one of the premises of my book and why I wrote it is because I really believe that our collective and individual mental health is the biggest missing piece in politics today.

And without it, we're just Going to have more of the same.

And we're, you know, moving toward more war, more pollution, and more discrimination and targeting of marginalized and less, you know, less powerful people.

So the.

But I think what often happens, and I hope we don't have to come to some even bigger crisis to get there, but if you're in a boat and the boat is sinking and somebody holds out their hand to you, you don't ask them if they're red or blue.

You don't ask them if they're a man or a woman or what religion they belong.

Stop.

Stop.

Who did you vote for?

I need to know who you vote for first.

Right?

And I think our boat is sinking.

And I think we have to educate each other in a loving, powerful, but very firm way that our boat is sinking.

When we invest billions of dollars in a bigger bomb, we're sinking the boat of humanity.

And I think we really have to tell each other that we're not independent.

It's actually not true.

It's a falsehood that we can be more independent or that we even are.

Now.

I depend on millions of people that I will never know or ever see to provide the food that I can buy at the grocery store, to create the computer that I use to talk to you, my phone to clean up the ocean, provide me with drinking water.

We depend on each other in ways that most of us don't want to acknowledge because it's scary.

And again, that was one of the things that I really hope that 911 could teach us.

It didn't, but I hope that it would.

That somebody in a foreign country who's absolutely fed up with America for whatever their personal reasons or political reasons are, had the power to turn our country upside down.

We depended on them not to do that.

You know, we.

And we depend on somebody else not to make war or to pollute the ocean or to, you know, to come and steal our children.

We actually depend on each other.

We depend on the person that we will never meet not to come into the grocery store and fire at random, you know, And I'm hoping that these things could be a wake up call.

Not to blame and shame and punish or hate anyone, but for us to collectively say, what are we doing in the family of America?

I'll just take America because that's where I live.

What are we doing in the family of America that's producing more mass shooters?

It's a family systems issue.

Just like if you're dealing with an individual family and one person shoots another family member.

What was going on in that family.

Not to blame and shame, but.

But to heal.

And that's the point in no small part because to go back to our example of the bishop, these are not isolated incidences.

The pain is widespread.

And that's where as much as the rest of the world kind of smirks at American exceptionalism in your frame, I think it works because the idea of America being the patient that needs therapy and the rest of the world can kind of benefit from that healing and learn from it too.

I think that's the reality TV show that we would be proverbially tuning into.

And I got a couple of follow up questions there and the first to bring it back to the political because we love to do that here on meta views, it does seem like the current regime's focus, even almost ideology, is based on othering people, on dehumanizing people of distracting from their own dysfunction, distracting from their own incompetence by making up targets and making up enemies.

Again, on a collective level, what is the response to that?

How do we both on the level of interdependence, but also to your point of recognizing that dealing with these things in the realm of mental health, of healing, of therapy provides us with a much more inclusive way.

So that the trap, the paradox of the politics of othering is it's easy to other the others, right?

It's easy to fall in that trap, which to your point, gets into the red blue banter.

So where's the short circuit here?

How do we deal in an era marked by the politics of dehumanization?

How do we snap that and focus it back on the interdependency and humanizing that that you're describing and that we so desperately need?

Well, I think, you know, one of the ways that I organized my book was to talk about family dynamics.

And what we're seeing in our country and in many countries around the world are abuse family dynamics.

It's an abuse family dynamic to other and target and withhold resources from certain people or condemn them to injustice or economically to withhold from them or to malign them from some righteousness point of view.

These are all abuse family dynamics and what they produce is symptoms in their victims.

But let me just back up and say one more thing.

Most abusers justify what they've done.

Well, she talked back, so I had a right to beat her.

Or he failed in school, so I locked him out of the house and threw away the key.

There's always a justification.

Well, he did this and she did that or they're inferior because their skin is darker or their hair is whatever.

So that's an abuse dynamic.

Not to see other human beings as equally worthy of loving and kind treatment.

But what we need to know.

And this is why I feel like the educational piece is so important.

And really one of the main reasons why I wrote my book is because when you hurt people, when you target them, when you withhold from them, when you kill them, we create masses of symptomatic people.

And what are their symptoms?

You know, there's many.

There's depression, there's anxiety, there's addiction, there's obsessiveness, there's over performing, there's people pleasing.

There's a million different ways that people cope with being hurt when they can't be rescued.

But there are two big ones that I really emphasize in my book that we really need to pay attention to in terms of our collective mental health.

And those two big ones are these.

Number one, learned helplessness.

If you're overpowered again and again and again and you can't escape and you can't protect yourself by fighting back, you learn to be helpless.

And then you're easily manipulated and controlled as you move into adulthood and go out into the world, and you're easily conscripted by people in power.

And the other is you identify with the aggressor and become the aggressor.

And these are two very well known outcomes for untreated abuse and neglect on a family level.

And we're creating masses of people who are learning to be helpless and who are learning to identify with the aggressor.

And that bodes for a very unbalanced society.

Sorry, that was my dog stepping on the last button.

Serendipitously, please.

You're making a brilliant point.

Super dangerous for society because then you have people who have identified with the aggressor who seek positions of power.

And that's a lot of what we have in America today.

I was going to say you're describing the kind of two pieces of flammable material that are fueling the fascist rise.

Absolutely.

And again, what I find really refreshing about your analysis is you're describing the collective dynamics because as individuals, people are lost in these seas of emotion, these seas.

The other thing I was thinking, as you were describing that is a lot of people say, well, democracy needs a greater civics literacy.

But what you're making me think is, no, what democracy needs is greater mental health literacy, greater literacy of abuse to recognize when abuse is happening.

And allow me to call out one of your biases and use that as an opportunity to push you a little.

All educated people often think that the solution is more education.

And while they're not inherently wrong, how do we achieve this kind of literacy that we're describing as fast as possible, right.

In the short term, I don't think.

Education is the only answer at all.

I think it's a starting point.

I think in my own life I had to hear a new idea to start to formulate a way to apply it.

But this was my point earlier about self evident ideas that I think they are inherently quite powerful.

But that's often why, to use our 911 example, they were so heavily restricted back then.

Like you in the months after 9 11, if you were to evoke the Malcolm X line of oh, these are the chickens coming home to roost, right?

Of this is the consequence of it.

Like you were maybe just on Amy Goodman's Democracy now, like you would not have heard that on NBC, CBS or abc.

So I'm curious now, given that I think what's different about this moment, this rise of fascism, is we have podcasting, we have email lists, we have a much greater diversity of voices.

So how do you, as a professional, as an intellectual, other than your book, which I highly recommend, and I'll bring it up back on the screen, how do you recommend we as a society start talking about these issues to foster that literacy we're describing?

So a more bottom up education, a kind of each one teach one because it's gotta happen now, right?

It feels like we're at that moment in history.

Well, I think it's a multi pronged approach.

And one of the things that I hope to foster among many messages is that every person can make a difference.

A lot of people are feeling resigned, they're feeling powerless, they're feeling like, what can I do?

I'm just going to take care of myself because I can't impact these huge policy changes and terrible dynamics that are going on in our country.

So I'm just going to take care of myself.

And that's understandable because it's a survival mechanism.

But the truth is we can all make a difference.

And people don't necessarily know the ripple effect of their kindness or their speaking out or their showing some kind of generosity to a neighbor or volunteering somewhere or just greeting people with like, I'm really glad to see you.

How many people don't have that in their life where somebody's actually glad to see them and looks at them with care and sees their essential Self and wants to support them to be the best that they can be.

We have so many places where we could all start.

You know, somebody who loves animals, somebody who shares from their garden, somebody who wants to clean up the water supply, or somebody who just wants to be a better partner and parent.

We can all contribute.

And I think we've lost that sense of a grassroots ability to change the dynamics in our.

In what I call the family of America.

But we know we can do that in our own families.

And, you know, one of the.

One of the challenges I think we face as Americans and as world citizens is, you know, if I'm really in a very dysfunctional or abusive family in America, I can leave if I have the resources and the emotional and, you know, strength and, you know, the wherewithal to do it.

We can't leave this globe.

If we don't work it out, what do we think is going to happen?

That we're going to win a third world war?

Well, that's where we have to watch out for that asshole Musk who's thinking, you know, we can all go to Mars, which is such a ludicrous response to the current challenges we face.

Let me throw another curveball at you because I love what you were saying there about the power of grassroots.

And I think also you articulated kind of the role of the individual in a powerful way because it is about supporting community.

It is about reinforcing the social bonds that as individuals, kind of keep us together.

So I'm curious, while I absolutely endorse therapy and encourage people who have the resources, because here in Canada, unfortunately, it can be rather prohibitive, and due to the pandemic, the scarcity of mental health professionals is really tragically a problem.

To what extent do you see a grassroots American therapy?

Right.

And I say this in the sense of.

To go to your earlier point about emotions and vulnerability, there was a time you and I are both of a similar vintage, when emotions were verboten, when they were frowned upon.

And we've.

Thankfully, we've still got distance to go, but we are in a much better world.

And part of that is grassroots of men saying to other men, no, it's okay.

You can cry or you can be angry and help them talk through their emotions.

So to what extent, I'd love for you to articulate as a professional what you see as a grassroots American therapy, where it's not so much, and I'm going to get to this, not so much a revolution of Jungian psychotherapists creating a new world which again I think would be interesting.

But what would be the bottom up community centric model of that that allows this to scale, that allows the patient of America to really get the therapy that we've been aspiring to?

Well, I wish that the grassroots motivation could come from really understanding the precipitous place that we stand on, but I don't see that happening right now.

So honestly, I'll just tell you all I do know and it may not be the full answer and maybe somebody else has a better answer, and maybe you do, but I can tell you that what brings people to therapy, even people who never wanted to go to therapy, and I used to be one of them, you know, when I grew up, people didn't go to therapy and it was a sign of weakness and something you would never tell anybody that you were doing.

But what brings people to therapy, even who don't necessarily want to go originally, is pain.

I think we have to be suffering enough.

We have to really know the boat is leaking and it's sinking and we're going to drown.

You know, I wish it wasn't like that, but I think that enough people have to get that what we're doing is actually going to directly affect them and their loved ones before we call for something bigger.

And then let me push back on where you started with that because I may be a little more optimistic that we're reaching that point.

Okay, great.

And I will acknowledge that collective America, right, if we have Lady Liberty on the couch, there's a lot of narcotics, right?

There's a lot of self medicating that is keeping that pain at bay.

So that's one of the reasons why a lot of people don't realize, whether from a climate perspective, whether from a political perspective, whether from an economic perspective, just how precarious and perilous this moment is.

But I still believe in the power of self evident truths that because the ruling regime is so absurd, so tyrannical, so straight out nasty, that we are going to see more people like yourself presenting some of these self evident truths that I think will start allowing people to see.

Yeah, we have a problem here and we need help.

But allow me to give you a specific example and ask for your thoughts on an institutional level.

Because I keep wanting to bring it back to the collective only because it's so rare that I get to talk to an American who can do that.

I found the Hurricane Helene and the, the weather disaster in Tennessee and North Carolina gripping.

And partly because for me as a futurist, it was the future Right.

Like that is the climate change that, that we are going to experience.

Those types of devastating floods that happen with very little warning and shut down infrastructure.

Like there are still highways there that are closed and won't be opening for months.

And yet the paradox that I want to throw to you both as a therapist, but also as someone who cares about politics and the climate, that on the one hand there was a lot of resilient community support, a lot of people coming together in the face of disaster, in spite of politics, in spite of all that, and really helping each other out.

But at the same time there was kind of a rash of concern, conspiracy and anti government sentiment that was, for lack of a better word, stupid.

Like I totally understand being critical of government, I understand being critical of government response.

But like trying to harm FEMA workers, right?

Or you know, trying to organize against people who are distributing relief, that strikes me as a mental health problem.

It is even though it was happening in a moment of community resilience, like there's this real disconnect between the distrust of the institution and the belief in the community.

I would love for you to both unpack that and give a sense as to how we heal that rift.

Cuz that strikes me as crucial when it comes to people feeling the pain of climate change and at the same time how they respond to that on a small d democracy or big institutional trust level.

Well, I think in the moment people help each other.

You know, like I said, if somebody reaches out a hand to you, you don't ask anything about them, you're just grateful to have a hand and you'll grab it.

So I think on the individual community level, on that sense, people are not asking what party you are before they accept your help.

However, we still live in a climate here in America of blame.

And instead of looking at, okay, let's look at the climate, let's look at how we're contributing to the causes of what's going on.

And this could be climate change, it could be flooding, it could be hurricanes, it could be mass murders, it could be, you know, mass exploitation, it could be, you know, all the things that we're looking, we still haven't said, what are the roots of this?

How can we heal them, how can we stop this?

We live in a culture and I think this comes very much down from the top in this particular administration of who do we blame, who do we target?

And when people feel helpless and powerless, sometimes that's what they want to do.

They just want to find somebody to blame instead of, look at how we could all come together and try to solve the originating problem on whatever level.

And that is a mental health issue.

Absolutely.

And we've been conditioned here in America to believe it's a partisan ideological divide.

And that's why I really like the kind of mental health frame of looking at these issues.

Because to your point, when you answer the question of what's the root of this problem, in politics, it becomes a blame game, but in mental health, it can become a healing game.

Right.

It can become looking at the trauma, acknowledging the trauma, but then saying, how do we restructure so that we feel safe, so that we can be happy, so that we can be comfortable.

Right.

I mean, you.

That's the essence of my book right there.

You just said it, and you said it beautifully.

So when somebody shoots up a classroom with first graders, not only do we want to know what their life was like, nobody's born a mass murderer.

A little baby in a bassinet is not a mass murderer.

Something happens to that person that disconnects them from their humanity or fills them with rage or fear or hatred.

Something happens to them from other people and with other people that creates that kind of disturbance that they would act out in that way.

And so we have to look not only at what happened in their family, but what hap.

What's.

What's going on in the family of America that we're producing more families like this?

How can we actually take care of people instead of jail them?

How can we prevent this?

Well, and, you know, on that point of empathy, it seems that whenever there are these types of crimes, whether sensational or even localized, that the frame is often one of disability or mental health.

Right.

That, you know, instead of actually analyzing what the trauma was driving it, it's just dismissed of, oh, that person was crazy or that person was broken.

What role do you think empathy can play, especially in looking at people who commit the crime rather than othering the criminal?

How do we get into a frame in which we have empathy for everyone involved so that we get more to a restorative form of justice rather than punish and dehumanize form of justice?

You are absolutely speaking my language.

I love what you just said because it's so close to my heart.

I think that what we've learned in the field of psychology that is still not common knowledge is that inside the perpetrator is a victim, an unhealed victim.

And unless we're willing to know that and to feel empathy for that, it doesn't mean you don't hold people accountable for what they've done, but we don't hold them accountable like they're, you know, a demon or a devil.

Like I said, we're all born innocent little babies and something happens to us that twists the way that we respond to the world and other people, and sometimes in very lethal ways.

But if we really want to stop the cycle of violence, if we really want to stop mass murders, if we really wanted to stop mass exploitation and tyranny, then we would devote ourselves to treating every single person that we could possibly treat.

And there are people that we don't know how to treat, but there are many more that we do.

So even if we had, and to.

Your point, the people we don't know how to treat in the attempt in doing so, that would be research unto itself.

That would probably lead to new insights and new methods and new opportunities.

Because you're pushing your luck by complimenting me here.

You're just pushing me to drive the conversation even wilder.

Okay, go for it.

Let me throw another crazy idea at you.

We wrote an issue of our newsletter maybe eight weeks ago, sort of floating the radical but self evident idea that maybe instead of hiring security guards, as many condo buildings and corporate office buildings do, and I was at a hotel where I had this insight because they had to lock the doors at night and have a security person.

And I thought, you know, why hire security guards when you could hire social workers?

So could you?

You know, again, the privilege of metaviews is we can explore these ideas as intellectuals, as researchers.

Because what I'm about to say on CBS on many American mainstream media would be so controversial.

I, like the bishop, would probably get a lot of flack, but could we reform law enforcement so that it was more focused on prevention and mental health rather than militarization and intimidation?

And I say this in the sense of what you're describing in terms of the problems that ail America.

The solution is not prisons.

The solution is therapy.

How do we institutionalize that on the level of security and law enforcement?

To go back to my idea that we don't need people with guns, we need people with social work degrees and psychology degrees and a much more social science approach to this.

I'm curious if you could take these random thoughts, these threads of an incomplete idea, and try to operationalize what American therapy could look like so that we do actually stop these mass shootings rather than saying, hey, let's give teachers guns.

Oh, well, I mean, first of all, I totally agree with you and I hope you can be with that but no, I think absolutely 100% that we are in desperate need of a psychology of restorative justice.

And one of the models that's already been tried is the truth and reconciliation model that happened in South Africa.

It wasn't perfect from what I read, but it was an amazing start.

It brought perpetrators and victims together in a place of safety with no retribution, where a perpetrator could listen to the effect of their violence on other people who were totally safe to say what had happened to them and how profoundly it had destroyed, you know, loved ones or damaged their lives.

And the perpetrator was able to have a safe place where they could be accountable without being, you know, without being thrown in jail or shot or whatever.

Is that the whole solution?

No, but it's an amazing beginning.

What if we made that kind of space in our places of business, in our schools, in our houses of worship and in our government?

What an amazing thing it would be if we had a government official who had done something terrible that had resulted in the death of many people who said, I'm sorry, terrible.

And, you know, there was a.

I don't know if you read this story, but the president pardoned the January 6 offenders who invaded the Capitol.

And there was a woman, and I believe I heard that there was another person, but there was at least one woman who was one of the people who invaded the Capitol on January 6th who didn't accept the pardon.

She said she felt genuine remorse for what she had done, and she said so.

And she said, I deserve to be here, and I'm not accepting this pardon.

How amazing is that?

I was going to say, that does give me a little bit of hope in the human spirit, because I wrote about that particular pardoning, because it's very disturbing when the president of the United States desires his own militia outside of the traditional power structure.

But again, you've been offering really powerful examples of resilience and hope of what is possible.

As a fun fact, not a lot of people know this, but Canada actually invented apartheid, applied to our indigenous, our first nations, really.

And then South Africa copied it and was like, wow, you guys are doing so great.

So we actually had our own Truth and Reconciliation Process after South Africa did.

And while it was actually healing for many involved, I think where it's fallen short of expectations is in South Africa.

It really did change the regime, right?

Imperfectly so.

But the way South Africa is governed, the political culture was directly influenced by the Truth and Reconciliation Process.

That didn't happen here in Canada, or it has not happened yet the process of healing has started.

But I think the institutional change has to be part of that healing process.

And that's where there's still a lot of frustration and anger amongst first nations communities here in Canada as a result of that process.

But I love your vision of a kind of for America kind of truth and reconciliation process.

And that may be required after this regime falls.

And I, as a futuristic, can predict that it will fall.

It's just a question of when.

But I want to ask you one last question on empathy, because this is something that I've seen a lot of Americans wrestle with.

I think some have gotten close to really providing a wise answer on this question, but others are given really stupid answers.

And I think this is something that you are going to have something really interesting to say about, which is what advice do you have to Americans when talking to each other with regard to empathy?

And I anticipate you're going to bring up listening again, but this is within a very hostile, scary climate to go back to the bishop's remarks.

So what advice do you have for people to hold on to that empathy, to employ that empathy when it comes to talking to people who are trying to dunk on them, who are trying to win, who are spouting the nonsense that is so prevalent in this moment in history?

Well, I think it does come back to a certain degree of vulnerability.

And I'll say this, that there's probably not one among us who has been hurt by other people at some point in our life who also hasn't hurt other people, said something unkind, done something that was rejecting, you know, or more violent than that.

But.

And that takes a certain kind of the strength of vulnerability to say, I've been there, too.

I haven't been perfect.

I've made mistakes, I've hurt people.

There's things I look back on my life and I wish I could do it differently.

I wish, you know, so much that I could have handled that situation differently or been more loving and kind to blah, blah, you know.

And so I think it's that kind of strength of really owning our full humanity.

We're fabulous, we're wonderful.

We can do amazing things.

And we're not perfect, none of us.

And so, you know, this whole righteousness movement that's happening in the United States denies the shadow side of the people who are so righteous and so indignant and so targeting other people.

And as long as they're projecting their shadow onto other people, they feel entitled to do what they're doing.

And so the Empathy really comes.

And I have.

I can tell you I've experienced this in my own life, and I've seen it over and over and over again with other people, that when we have a chance in a safe place to heal the wounds that we have sustained, we become better and more empathic and more loving and kind and generous and forgiving and supportive of other people.

And I have never seen that not happen, ever.

And I would point out, not only does it make life better, but it makes life more manageable when you're living in a dystopian shit show, as we currently find ourselves in.

So it's both an individual and a collective or communal strategy.

You know, on a kind of last note and more for my own individual curiosity, I love this message of vulnerability.

And I've been trying to find a way to articulate it to organizations.

And this is not necessarily like nonprofits or lefty organizations.

I mean, corporations too, in that so many of these organizations want to be trusted, want to be loved, and have the similar projections, and yet they still see vulnerability as like kryptonite, as the enemy, as something they need to stay away from.

And you've made a really powerful argument today for vulnerability on kind of the personal level, on the individual level, I would love your help trying to make that argument on that organizational level, why organizations need to embrace vulnerability as a source of strength, a source of resilience, a source of cohesion, a source of prosperity.

I would love to hear you take a stab on that of how we take this argument, take this frame and elevate it to the organizations that have so much influence and power in our society.

Yeah, I mean, I think organizations are made up of individual people.

So, you know, the goal, I think, is to have more and more people in positions of power in some of these structures who are not identifying with the aggressor or with the helpless person.

And usually it's someone who's more identified with the aggressor who's unable to be vulnerable.

But it's really what is vulnerability.

It's being accountable.

It's being like that really upset me.

And I want to talk to you about it because I want to work it out with you.

Not because I want to shame and blame and punish you, but because I want to work it out with you.

And I will say, here's where I had a misstep and I didn't listen to you.

But it's so that vulnerability and accountability is taking responsibility for your own actions, being willing to hear the impact you're having on other people and also treating people as equals.

Even if you're in a position of greater power, which means if you have an idea about how to do this part of your business better, I want to hear it.

I may be your boss, but I don't have to be the know it all.

I want to, you know, not only that, but I mean, they don't want to hear from customers, right?

They don't want to hear from the public.

You know, it's one thing to have that internal dialogue, which I think is a fine first step, but I would love to see them be open to external dialogue.

Because we live in a world where people are talking.

So if you're not hearing, if you're not open to that, if you're not vulnerable to your point of being wrong or even being criticized, then and again, this is my own kind of hobby horse.

But it brings back to something you've said a few times, which I will articulate in my own very political way.

Politics has attracted a lot of lawyers recently.

It's attracted a lot of reality television stars.

Would you like to make a call to your colleagues as to why politics should be attracting more psychologists, social workers and those involved in broader mental health profession?

Well, I think that would be an amazing thing if more people who had expertise in human relations, in healing human relations and in being all the things that we're talking about, vulnerable, accountable, open minded, tolerant and willing to work together for a greater good than just their own.

That I think that's.

I think there are people now calling for that in the United States.

I don't know how many, how, you know, how quickly that call will be answered.

But I think that is part of what you're saying when you say you have hope.

Because I think a lot of people are so alarmed that they're willing to step out of their comfort zone.

And I'll tell you, writing this book was really stepping out of my comfort zone.

I never imagined in a million years that I would be saying anything that had political significance.

I loved working in the one on one in my office, but I couldn't help but see its application to the broader strokes of our society and our government.

And I felt like I had to speak out.

But does it feel risky?

Does it feel scary?

You know, I think people are scared.

They're scared of the blowback.

They're scared.

They see what the blowback was that the bishop got, but they also see the role model of her being brave.

And I think more and more of us want to Say, okay, I'm willing to take the risk.

I care that much about my family, my children, my grandchildren and all of humanity and this earth that I'm willing to have a voice and take the consequences.

And I think, you know, one of the lessons from history we've learned is that under fascism, if you don't leave your comfort zone, that comfort zone will be taken from you.

So better to do it on terms of your own choosing, where you could make a stand, than to do it in terms of desperation.

I thank you very much for this conversation.

And it kind of brings to the last segment we have on each MetaVews, which is the shout outs.

And this is under the spirit that we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

And just like with the news and the future, where we're asking, is there in this case, anyone that you think our audience should know about?

This could be an influence of yours.

This could be a family member.

This could be someone who right now, like the bishop, is standing up and saying things that you think others should be supporting and contributing to.

Well, I don't have a specific person in mind, I think, but I will say this.

I think we might take a look at our martyrs, because our martyrs had a message of love.

They had a message of peace.

They had a message of brotherly cooperation and brotherly love.

And we killed them.

And somehow we managed to not honor their message until they're dead.

And so one of my messages is, can we see the people that are putting themselves on the front line of calling out fascism and calling out hatred and calling out war from a healing, loving, powerful point of view of really wanting us to bring us together in harmony and love and peace.

Can we listen to them before we kill them?

Yeah.

And, you know, you kind of evoked, I think, for my shout out today, I'll give a shout out to Greta Thunberg, because on some levels, even though she's still alive, thank God, she's been pillared and kind of held up in effigy by so many powerful people because she has had the courage to speak to power.

And for those of us who are aging, we need each generation to give us those voices to give us that example to remember why we're here and why we love each other.

So thank you, Phyllis.

This has been an absolutely fantastic conversation.

I would love to have you back, only because I suspect the psychosis, if I use that word correctly, in which our society is engaged, is going to get worse before it gets better.

And the one thing we didn't really talk about today that I would love to get into is the climate side of this and the extent, the mental health effects of climate change, climate volatility and the mental, the discordance we have of being disconnected from nature and how we bring that back.

Because I think, you know, that's something that you would have a lot of really brilliant insights on.

Because your point about vulnerability today, I thought is something that we will very much be coming back to a lot here on Meta Views only because I think that is a focus for us to be looking at in the politics of dehumanization is to bring back a politics of vulnerability to just sort of riff, I've got a dog here who is harassing me because it's well past her dinner time.

And now that I've said dinner instead of spelling it out, the persistence will not end.

Phyllis, where can people reach you other than your website, which we've had up previously?

How else can folks learn about you or connect?

Yeah, I'm on most of the social media.

I have lots of videos on YouTube, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Facebook and Instagram.

The best place to reach me though, is my website because you can contact me directly and I have some free offerings on my website if you sign up for my newsletter that have to do with how you apply some of the skills of conflict resolution in your life.

So please, anyone, reach out, if you personally, I'm happy to talk to you and connect and pick up a copy of my book.

And for yourself, what might be available for you from beginning to grasp some of these radical, but really not radical concepts?

Well, it's, it's the power of self evident ideas.

And as Harriet is insisting, we've come to an end.

So thank you, Phyllis.

That's been an absolutely fantastic episode.

Normally when I have a great episode, I predict that the next one's gonna suck.

But I actually know that the next one is gonna be just as good as this one.

So tune in everybody, and we'll see you soon back here at metave.