The Secret of Charisma

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

In the 1930s, an unlikely man from rural Louisiana rose to political stardom.

Huey Long appealed to working-class Americans with fiery speeches and a populist agenda.

He promised free textbooks, better infrastructure, and redistribution of wealth.

That while we might have millionaires, and men worth two million, and men worth three million maybe,

and men worth maybe five or six million, but nonetheless I must see a limit on how big any one man could get.

Thousands gathered to hear him speak. His promise to make every man a king soon on him and nickname,

the Kingfish. But Huey Long also made powerful enemies along the way. Critics saw him as a dangerous

demagogue. They warned that he was crooked, cunning, and completely unconcerned with checks and

balances. He fired those who opposed him, took over state agencies, and appointed loyalists.

When Louisiana State University published a newspaper article criticizing him, Huey Long sought

to it that the seven students who wrote the piece were expelled. Huey Long wasn't just popular.

He was magnetic, dangerous to some, divine to others. He rewrote the rules, and dared the system to stop him.

In 1929, after he became governor of Louisiana, Huey Long was impeached on charges of bribery, corruption,

and abuse of power. Rather than prove his innocence, he orchestrated a political blockade in the state

senate. He persuaded senators to sign a letter, vowing not to convict him, which made a trial pointless.

He went on to become a U.S. Senator. His popularity didn't just survive. It's sword.

Today on the show, we take a deep dive into the psychological forces that draw us to charismatic

figures in the worlds of politics, sports, and religion. The science of loyalty and the building

blocks of devotion, this week, on Hidden Brain.

We often turn to history to understand how the world changes. We examine the lives of leaders

who sparked revolutions and gathered thousands behind their cause. We ask, what made these leaders

so powerful? What explained their influence? How did they manage to change the course of history?

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, historian Molly Wurden explores how individuals

inspire change, create movements, and sometimes change the world. Molly Wurden, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you for having me. Molly, I want to talk about some unlikely leaders in American history.

Let's start in the 18th century. Jemima Wilkinson was born in Rhode Island in 1752.

When she was 23, she fell ill and was on the brink of death. When she recovered, she claimed

to have undergone a profound spiritual transformation. What did she say happened to her?

She reported that she had seen two angels, and they had delivered this amazing message to her.

They told her that her body was a vessel for the Holy Spirit. That in fact, Jemima Wilkinson,

the 23-year-old human female, had died, and now her body was a vessel for this androgenous,

divine presence. She stopped dressing like a conventional woman of her time. She stopped using

female pronouns whenever she could, wore her hair long and wore a large gray felt hat,

began dressing in a smock that concealed her figure, looked a bit like a dressing gown,

sometimes wore a purple cravat, and she launched a preaching campaign.

Her message in the context of the revolution, right, this is 1776, that she has this attack

and is reborn as the public universal friend, is a kind of vague one that is compatible with a lot

of different theological questions and doubts about existing churches, questions about the end times,

that a whole range of followers were having in this era. And she begins speaking to

all kinds of crowds of people who are out of sync, I guess you could say, in some way or another

with the prevailing rhythms of society. So she goes to funerals. She speaks to prisoners.

She also addresses kind of open-air markets. If a sympathetic minister will give her his pulpit,

she takes advantage of that. And some wander end to hear this unusual person who they can't quite

place, maybe they can't quite figure out if this is a man or a woman, they can't quite make out the

actual import of the kind of vague theological pronouncements.

Some find it ridiculous. They see this as a young woman who's kind of put on a costume,

but a surprising number, I mean eventually a few hundred people, are compelled by the public

universal friend's invitation to step out of whatever role you've been handed by your place

in revolutionary American society and find something new.

And so we're talking about followers who range from young women who perhaps had not quite

landed in a family arrangement that was acceptable in society to very established kind of senior

men in the community. One of her most prominent followers is a Rhode Island colonial judge,

named William Potter, who puts a lot of his personal fortune to the service of her growing ministry.

By the 1790s, she is leading a crew of about 400 followers to found utopian community that she

calls New Jerusalem in upstate New York to fully break from the rhythm of life in ordinary

communities in revolutionary era America.

I want to jump forward to the 19th century. Marcus Garvey was born in 1887 in Jamaica.

He spent his teenage years working as a printer as apprentice and eventually joined a nationalist

club that promoted Jamaican independence. He spent some time in Europe working as a journalist

and then founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and moved to New York. I understand

that he was an unlikely leader, Molly, not a great speaker and with lots of critics.

Absolutely. The type of African-American leader that the mainstream media, Black and White,

paid attention to in the early 20th century, tended to be college educated, tall, lean,

fair-skinned, handsome, eloquent by the standards of upper-middle-class, white-educated,

English speech. Marcus Garvey was none of these things. He shows up in Harlem in 1916. He's

fairly short, kind of built like a wrestler, very dark, complex, not a great public speaker.

I mean, we know that he got heckled whenever he went to the street corner to try to practice.

He was fearless, though. He just kept at it. He had no financial resources. I mean, he lived on

cans of corn, beef hash, and beans in this tiny, squallet apartment. While he was beginning to

try to interest African-Americans in Harlem at this time in his message of pan-African unity,

which as it emerged through his speeches and his publication, The Negro World, was, I think,

it's clear a really creative combination of previous iterations of this message, of the dignity

of African people and the need to unite with other kind of spiritual and economic and political

strains that proved to be this kind of amazing, combustible mix.

Especially when enacted with Garvey's flair for ritual and uniform, he really,

he himself loved to wear a plume helmet and purple gold and green sashes in a kind of military

regalia. So this movement over just a few years developed significant momentum.

So, he also had unconventional views about black liberation. I want to play you a clip from one

of his speeches. We want to do like the decoration of this country. We want to work for what

covered objects, that of building a nation of his own, of the great continent of Africa.

So that recording is not great, Molly, but what he's saying is he wants African-Americans to leave

America and build a homeland in Africa. Now, wasn't that also what white supremacist groups like

the Ku Klux Klan might have said? Marcus Garvey was, we would say, a separationist. He had meetings

with segregationist politicians from the South, with Ku Klux Klan members, to discuss their

mutual interest in keeping their races pure. He wanted, in the context of America, he wanted

African-Americans to achieve economic autonomy. With an eye toward eventually returning to Africa

and establishing political independence for people of African descent on the African continent.

Often framing it in a way that was rather condescending to the African's already living there.

But it was a message that had a great deal of appeal and it was a spiritual message as well.

I mean, he was very interested in awakening in people of African descent a spiritual power

that he said had been dormant. They had been in a state of amnesia, you could say.

When I listen to him and read his speeches, I hear him as kind of a combination of Moses and

Napoleon and Dale Carnegie, the kind of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you know, aspect of

that message. So the effect that he had on his followers was magnified following a very

dramatic incident in October 1919. He was in his office in New York when a man burst through the

front doors. Tell me the story of what happened next, Molly. This man is clearly in a fury. He's

searching for Garvey and is armed. He gets off a couple of rounds and fires at Garvey. Garvey

falls to the ground. It appears to be mortally wounded. The man takes off and is later captured

by police. And it is widely reported that Garvey is killed and his followers are grief stricken

in mourning. And then a few days later, Garvey appears limping with a cane to greet his followers

at a rally. And many of his followers, especially since they've read these newspaper reports,

suggesting that their leader had died, view this as a miraculous, clearly a divinely ordained survival.

And so that assassination attempt, if anything, it solidifies Garvey's power over his followers.

Their faith that God has selected him for a specific mission and that he has a kind of

invincibility that ordinary mortals do not have.

So we've looked at a spiritual leader in the 18th century and a political leader who was born

in the 19th century. Let's jump forward to a completely different world, the world of sports in

the 20th century. In the 1960s, Tim Garvey was a nationally ranked tennis player. He was

captain of the Harvard tennis team. After graduating, he began teaching tennis in California,

but he became famous for his unusual coaching style. What was his approach, Molly?

He really burst onto national consciousness in 1974 with a book he published called the

Inner Game of Tennis. And his message was quite counterintuitive, I think. Essentially he said,

you've got all these coaches advising you to pay close deliberate attention to every detail of

your forehand and backhand and your serve and to drill down until you're absolutely mindful of

every detail. I'm telling you that's the wrong approach and that successful tennis is an exercise

in self forgetting, in silencing the ego mind. This is a phrase he used. He brought to bear on

first tennis and then later sports and subsequent books, kind of vague mix of Buddhist and Hindu

ideas, notions from mid 20th century pop psychology regarding self actualization.

So Tim Garvey suggested that high performance comes from quieting the mind and trusting your

natural intuitive self. I want to play you a clip that ABC News film featuring one middle-aged

woman who said that she had not done anything athletic in 20 years when she took part in a

group lesson with Tim Garvey. She surprised herself when she started to hit the ball beautifully.

So there's something wonderfully seductive about that idea Molly. If we can only get out of our own

way you know skills come to us effortlessly. That's right and this idea of your leader or your

coach as someone who is helping you unlock your potential that there is inside you this authentic

flame of who you really are and your true capabilities and it's already there and all you have to

do is nurture it and release it. It's a very late 20th century way of thinking about personal identity

and the relationship between leaders and followers. When we think about powerful figures in history

it's easy to explain their influence by pointing to their unique personality traits.

Barack Obama was confident and optimistic. Steve Jobs was intense and visionary. Martin Luther King

Jr. was a brilliant speaker with strong convictions. But it's an important part of the story we don't

explore. That is the story of how charismatic people awake something in us.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. We often conflate charisma with likeability.

When we think about charismatic people, we think of people with beautiful smiles, great social

skills and relatable backgrounds. People like John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, or Oprah.

At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, historian Molly Werden offers a different view.

She says that charismatic people in history aren't always charming or beautiful or even inspirational.

Rather she argues, we are drawn to them not because of their traits but because they reveal

something to us about ourselves. Molly, I think it might help to first understand what you mean

when you use the term charisma. What is the history of this word?

If we go back to the way that ancient Greeks used the word and bequeathed it to the authors of

the Bible, it's best to think of charisma or carus as a kind of grace, a gift from God or the gods

that in the ancient Greek context brought with it power that could redound for good or for ill.

It was power that the recipient could not completely control, a gift that the human recipient

didn't necessarily ask for. And the word remained in that Christian theological context

for really 1900 years. It was a fairly obscure term. You would only have occasion to use it or

know it if you were very active in church or you were a professional church historian or theologian.

How did the tongue come to be secularized, Molly?

Around the turn of the 20th century, the German sociologist Max Weber was casting about looking for

ways to describe all the complicated changes. He was seeing unfold in Western modernity. He was

really interested in leadership and in the way particular individuals could turn into disruptive

forces. So he borrowed the term charisma. He heard it in a lecture when he was a student, a

lecture in church history. And he borrowed it to describe a particular kind of authority that

he saw manifest in both religion but also importantly in politics. A type of authority that he

said was different from authority based on institutions, the institutional role of a president or

prime minister, different from authority, premised on a society's tradition, and separate

two from authority that comes with military power. Charisma instead is the quality of an individual

seen by his followers that this leader has superhuman qualities. And therefore can promise for them

a new path forward that is totally impossible except for his leadership.

By the late 1950s and the 1960s, American journalists start picking it up and kind of

playing with the word charisma as a way to describe contemporary politics here.

When I think of the word charisma, Molly, I often associated with people who are magnetic.

Has that been a part of the meaning of the word for a long time?

I think one reason the word charisma is so interesting is because it's a term we

punt to when we are observing a dynamic between a leader and followers that we can't quite make

sense of. We know something's going on but we can't account for it by pointing to a policy

proposal that this person is making or some other kind of common sense quid pro quo arrangement.

And I think as Americans have played with the word charisma, it's gotten a bit muddled together

with the ideas of charm and celebrity. And it surprised me to observe how few of the figures I

ended up studying across four centuries of American history were particularly charming. I found

myself again and again writing about individuals who were not that good-looking, who were not

reported to be amazing public speakers, whose presence was maybe better described as polarizing

rather than kind of universally magnetic. If we think about people who are really good at working

the room at a cocktail party, they have the ability to invite you into a conversation that quickly

starts to feel like an exploration of your own best thoughts and experiences. I think that's really

the secret of charm and it's important but it is not enough to launch a new religion or build

a political movement. The leaders who do that I think have to have to offer something much more

powerful and disorienting and compelling.

Can you talk a moment about the very interesting idea that likeability can actually be an impediment

if you're trying to break through social norms and customs? Humans are storytelling and story-making

creatures. We're constantly looking for ways to organize our chaos and the most successful

politicians and religious leaders are brilliant storytellers who not only offer a set of slogans,

a critique of the other side, but a plot arc, a story of where we have come and where we're going

who the villains are, who the heroes are, and they invite certain people in, but a narrative only

has tension. It's only worth being a part of it. If there are also people who don't belong,

who are or who are cast in rather undesirable roles. So I think if a leader is too preoccupied

with being all things to all people, that can result in a message that is not activating,

that doesn't grab and elevate a certain subset of the people hearing or reading him to the point

of really building a movement, really breaking through and building a movement is going to involve

eliciting quite a lot of disdain and anger from people who are not part of the story you're telling.

You see that there is a paradox of charisma and it has to do with the dual urges we have to feel

like we are in control of our lives but also to fear the responsibility that comes from having

that control. Can you unpack that idea for me Molly? Most of us want some feeling of agency,

some sense that we know what the point of all of this struggling and suffering is that it hasn't

been for no reason at all, but we don't quite want the responsibility of being wholly in charge of

it all ourselves. And those two impulses, wanting that sense of freedom and control but also

wanting that security, they exist in tension, but I think that they're always there and the most

successful, at least briefly, not always over the long term, but those religious and political

movements that have really made a mark on American history have been led by individuals who master

the art of that balance. You see that the religious leader Joseph Smith exemplifies this paradox.

How so Molly? Joseph Smith was a child of kind of poor New England,

homesteader, farmer, family members who couldn't really make a comfortable life in the context of

the turn of the 19th century America, they were constantly scrapping and struggling to make a

living materially, and also his parents were seekers who were frustrated with existing church

options really interested in the supernatural side of life prone to having dreams and visions,

but unable to really find an institutional home. And that's awfully confusing and disorienting.

Joseph Smith had this genius. I mean, Mormons would say he received revelation that helped him to

diagnose the gaps, the ways in which the existing religious story, the way of understanding the

Bible and the relationship between humans and God, was just leaving, I guess, a critical mass

of early Americans feeling frustrated and lost. And so he offers, as he's reporting his revelations

and interpreting these golden plates that he says he's been led to find in a hill on upstate New

York by the Angel Moroni, and then he spends the next two years kind of spinning out what this new

religious community built around this new scripture will look like. In many ways, he offers a deeply

American form of Christianity that is very much in line, I think, with the desires and anxieties

of Americans at this time. They want, they want to have their free will

celebrated and recognized, and the Mormon faith is kind of the ultimate free will faith. I mean,

it's very clear in offering a roadmap for earning your exaltation and your access essentially to

different stages of heaven. So it is this story of both tremendous empowerment but also an invitation

to subsume your individual struggles and your efforts to scratch out an existence on your little

homestead in upstate New York or Ohio into this broader story that God has ordained in some meaningful

way. And so that, I think, is a great example of that paradox of offering both empowering agency

and security. As you're talking, though, Molly, it feels so clear to me that when charismatic people

have these followings, it's clear they have these followings because they're unlocking something in

the people who they are leading. The people are hearing something about themselves in this message.

So even if the charismatic leader is not charming and is not good looking and is not likeable,

the point is the message makes me think differently about myself. That's right. And Joseph Smith

is a great example of this. I mean, some people who met him in person found him really physically

compelling. He was tall for the era. He had these electric blue eyes. One follower said just by

shaking his hand, she felt the Holy Spirit electrify her whole body. But then you can also find

skeptics who encounter him and say, this guy is a clown. He has this dishonest face, his hands

are kind of fat. I wouldn't follow him to the grocery store, you know, let alone to found a

new Zion on the banks of the Mississippi, as his followers did in Navu, Illinois. And Joseph Smith

story also was an early case that helped me understand in my research that the power of charisma

resides much more in the story and the message than in the individual.

One of the elements of charisma that you explore is that charismatic people often promise to pull

back the veil on a secret truth. I mean, that's that was true of Jemima Wilkinson,

that was true of Marcus Garvey, even true of Tim Galway. Talk about this idea that in some

ways charismatic people offer to show us a vision of reality that is in some ways behind

the reality that we are seeing every day. I think charismatic leaders in many different

contexts are positioning themselves alongside the message that people are getting from established

sources. From tradition, from institutions, and the charismatic leader says, you think you've

been told how the world works. You think you have a full picture of reality, but you don't.

You've been denied some crucial facts about your existence and your relationship to the powers

both material and supernatural. And that can take the form of a very legitimate revelation of

true access to the full picture of what it is to be human. So I think this is one way we could

understand Martin Luther King Jr.'s message that he is someone who destabilized complacency

and a willingness to just suffer Jim Crow by reorienting the way that Americans, Black and White,

saw what was possible, saw the reality of who each person is as an individual and the

vast chasm between the lived experience of Black Americans in the mid-20th century and what

justice really consists of. So there is a case of a pulling back the veil that was absolutely

rooted in a true revelation, if you will. But I think this can take darker forms also,

and this is where I think the word charisma can trigger perhaps in our mind a kind of negative

connotation, because it can sometimes go along with a false story about reality.

An effort to undermine the news people receive from the mainstream media or what they're

told by experts, and sometimes that can cross over into the realm of kind of pseudo facts.

So really crucial, I think, in how we use this information in our everyday lives, how we evaluate

leaders is to be constantly holding up the story that leaders tell us against other sources of

information, and doing our best, although it's never possible to be perfect at this, to discern,

you know, is this leader really showing me something that is true and that changes everything,

and that I have to take seriously, or perhaps do I have reason to be skeptical?

Charisma is a powerful force. It has the ability to inspire, unite, and give people a profound

sense of meaning and purpose. When a charismatic person speaks, their followers aren't just hearing

a speech, they are seeing a new way to understand their own lives. When we come back, the different

forms that charisma has taken over the years, and how and when we should question it.

You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Do you have personal stories about being drawn

in by a charismatic leader, a question about charisma, and how we can be swept up in the spell of a

mesmerizing person? If you'd be willing to share your question or story with a Hidden Brain

audience, please record a voice memo on your phone. Then email the file to us at feedbackathiddenbrain.org.

Use the subject line, charisma. Again, that's feedbackathiddenbrain.org.

Charismatic people draw followers in, shape movements, and alter the course of nations.

At the University of North Carolina, historian Molly Wurden is the author of Spellbound,

how charisma shaped American history from the Puritans to Donald Trump.

Molly, I'm wondering whether you can talk about the idea that charismatic people sometimes

fuse their personal story with their message. So long before Donald Trump became president,

for example, he was crafting a narrative that fused personal mythology with his worldview

that America was being taken advantage of by the rest of the world. Can you talk about this idea

that charismatic people are very good at placing themselves in the flow of the stories and the narratives

that they're crafting? I think that's exactly right, and a crucial step for a charismatic leader

who's offering a story that is supposed to draw followers into a special relationship with him

or her as an individual. Looking back over Donald Trump's career long before he formally entered

politics, I think he showed a real instinct for doing this. And if you go back and read his

conversations with tabloid reporters in the 1980s, or you can find old footage of him on the

Oprah Winfrey show in the late 1980s. And you can you find him talking about his experience

with all kinds of evil actors who have tried to take advantage of him and rip him off. That's a

phrase he uses a lot from early in his career. I think people are tired of seeing the United States

ripped off, and I can't promise you everything, but I can tell you one thing, this country would make

one hell of a lot of money from those people that for 25 years have taken advantage. It wouldn't be

the way it's been, believe me. His account is one of, you know, himself as a self-made man, you know,

really glossing over the degree to which he inherited his business empire from his father.

And instead he describes it as this brilliant exercise in entrepreneurial creativity,

one that has required him to evade at every turn people who would try to take him down. And it's

required him to develop a facility in working the system because the system is fundamentally corrupt.

And why do laws that have no legitimacy deserve consistent, you know, good faith respect? That's

a line he's always walked very carefully, I think, never suggesting in his own narrative of his

career that he broke any laws, but at the same time suggesting that someone who doesn't take

advantage of, you know, loopholes in the tax code, if you don't do all of those things, then you're

kind of a fool. So, you know, he has crafted the story of himself as this master of this kind of

working the system and taking revenge on people who are bad actors. And so it was really

not a far leap at all to cast himself as he trained his eye on national politics as the hero

of the forgotten man of the hero who would really rectify injustices and go after all of the people

and the powers and the institutions that are rigged against the average American that have

screwed people over, you know, to use another phrase that he's used frequently. And so he set

himself up, I think quite brilliantly, to fuse his personal story of triumph in the business world

with the revenge and justice and ultimate triumph that he promised to offer his supporters if they

elected him president. Do you think his story in some ways mirrors the stories of other people

that you have looked at, other charismatic people and that, you know, there are followers of his who,

you know, almost quite literally are willing to die for him and believe so deeply in what he stands for.

And simultaneously, there are other people who look at him and don't know whether to roll their

eyes or just to throw their hands up and disgust. You know, he seems to have worked extremely strong

passions in completely different directions. Absolutely. And it was observing those very polarized

reactions back in 2015 that helped send me down the path of trying to understand the phenomenon of

charisma across the centuries. And I absolutely did find that that polarizing effect on people

is echoed, you know, all the way back into colonial times up and to the present.

I'm wondering, Molly, when you think about someone like Donald Trump, you know, his views have

actually been fairly consistent about some of these issues for a long period of time. And

well before he became president, his sense, of course, that he's being ripped off, that the country's

being ripped off, that you have to, you know, take on these institutions and these elite forces that

are, you know, arrayed against the common man. These are all views that he's held for a long time.

Do you think that charismatic people carefully select their views to figure out what will be

effective in driving their followers? Or are they really accidents of history, which is that

they happen to have a set of views and beliefs and perhaps even personal stories. And these

happen to fit almost like a key into a lock into the needs of the people who are around them at the time.

That's a great question. And I think the charismatic leaders have to have a kind of

genius and instinct for reading their time and identifying the driving anxieties and desires of

their cultural moment, especially among people who are not being served by the narratives

currently on offer in the culture. But I have never run across a charismatic leader who struck

me as 100% pragmatic and just adopting, you know, some, some mix of views and, and making up some

story willy-nilly purely because it seems like it will play well. Instead, I think you're right

that there, there has to be this kind of magic, this, this synergy between the leader's

natural self-understanding and aspects of his or her own story and the way he connects specific

parts of that story to this, this grander picture.

As a reminder, if you have questions or comments from Molly Werden that you'd be willing to share

with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone.

Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org.

Use the subject line, Curisma. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org.

Molly says that we live today in the age of the guru. I asked her what defines this type of

charismatic leader. I think it's interesting to play with the term guru in a in a broad sense

and and to remember too that charismatic leadership very rarely exists in in a pure form.

It's often combined with other kinds of authority. So so the frame of the guru as a radically

anti-institutional figure who is positioning himself as the gateway to truth and knowledge.

That that's a useful frame I think for understanding Donald Trump while of course also recognizing

that he has conventional institutional authority as as the president of the United States.

But I think it's a it's a broader cultural phenomenon that we can see manifest across the political

spectrum. I became fascinated by the story of Oprah Winfrey and the kind of personal

do-it-yourself spirituality that she developed alongside her media career. And I think much of her

effectiveness and popularity and really rocketing to fame in the in the mid 1980s when she was in

her 30s lay in her ability to convince many Americans that what you were seeing on her show was

was her authentic self. It was it was just you know straight shooting asking the difficult questions

pulling back the veil on reality that you know more polite talk show hosts would ignore.

I say this on my show all the time. Can you really forgive if you haven't gotten angry? If you

haven't dealt with how you really feel. I don't know if you can go from having been abused

to forgiveness. But it becomes folded into this broader story of how you should be in the world

that draws on various new age religious influences you know Deepak Chopra and really a kind of

she's a sort of omnivorous consumer of of all kinds of religious and spiritual tools you know

every everything from her own Christian heritage you know what you grew up with to more kind of

Eastern religious techniques to just a way of talking about shopping and acquisition as self

empowerment in a way of actualizing your potential. These are all a way of recasting religion not as

joining a traditional community you know deciding to obey an institution but rather think of it as

a toolbox or a smorgasbord if you will of of options that are just all about suiting yourself.

Because only you have the power to take responsibility to move your life forward.

And so it's a whole picture of reality that I think she offered her most devoted fans and

it's part of why you encounter in Oprah's fans a sense that this woman is is laying out a path

a way of being you know she's not just a talk show host. So I think that frame of the guru

helps us make sense of this whole cultural picture and people as disparate as Donald Trump and Oprah.

I think what I'm struggling with Molly is um you know I'm trying to imagine what if I was

you know somebody living in Nazi Germany in 1936 and this messianic leader comes along and

basically tells me a story about you know lost glory and the glory that is achievable

if Germany were to achieve its full potential and I'm inspired by this story and I want to follow

this person. What should I be doing when I feel like I'm gripped by somebody who has the story that

feels like it's unlocking something within me and I feel like I need to follow this person. What are

the questions I should ask myself that you know I don't have the luxury of hindsight waiting 30 years

to see how something has turned out but in the moment what kind of question should I ask myself

to determine if I'm on the right path. Boy that that is in some ways the question right and I think

part of what your question has to compel and all of us is a recognition that even in these cases

that hindsight seem kind of black and white morally if you're in it it can be very hard to tell

up from down and get your moral bearings. I guess I have two main thoughts. One is that there's a

real power to being embedded enough in a long-standing ancient philosophical or religious tradition

that you can avail yourself of all of its resources and perspectives on a range of different

challenges in human experience. So when I think about the the small number of German Christians

who resisted the Nazis and remained deeply critical of Hitler even you know in the case of

Dietrich Bonhoffer attempting to assassinate him I see that clarity of moral vision as a reflection

of staying grounded in the in the whole of the tradition not whatever kind of attenuated useful

version of this old tradition the the leader happens to be endorsing. The second

needful thing is to ask who is this charismatic leader casting as my enemy who is he telling me is

the villain and what do I actually know about those people what are my sources of information

in most cases right I mean that that set of questions was not at top of mind for for Germans

you know who were looking the other way or directly complicit in the Holocaust but for for the

minority that that helped save Jews and worked in the resistance that personal knowledge of these

victims as as individuals as you know multi-dimensional humans was absolutely crucial in

inoculating them against Hitler's anti-Semitic propaganda. So you know in our in our current moment

and you know I don't I certainly don't want to accidentally draw analogies I think we always

have to be very careful in drawing historical analogies but certainly we live in a time when

very few Americans know in a personal way people who are on the other side of this of this political

divide and those relationships are hard to come by for all kinds of reasons but at the very least even

if we don't have access to those relationships we can remind ourselves of of that dearth of

information the fact that human beings are complicated and any kind of monolithic story of the

other side has to obscure far more than it clarifies in the best of times charismatic people

can make a chaotic world feel more orderly they can imbue our daily lives with purpose and meaning

they make us feel good and we want to be close to them I was in New Orleans some months ago

and word got out that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey were eating at a private room in a restaurant

word-linked out and soon the crowds started gathering the intersection was soon swamped with

hundreds of people all they wanted a glimpse of their heroes it made me think about the connection

between charisma and romantic love when we fall deeply in love the person we adore seems to walk

on water every gesture they make is beautiful every word is a pearl when you think about it we relate

to our lovers as if they were imbued with charisma their quirks their habits their sense of humor

we find every aspect of them to be fascinating and charming so what happens when one of these

relationships comes to an end breakups are devastating because they demand that we wrench ourselves

from the orbit of someone we found irresistible it becomes something like oh you're not entirely

the person I thought you were I thought that you would honor the relationship the way I hope to

honor the relationship when we come back we dig deep into the psychology of breakups as we

respond to listener questions about the end of relationships stay with us you're listening to

Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta

this is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta there are certain painful experiences

almost all of us will have to go through we'll have uncomfortable first days at a new school

or a new job we'll fight with your friends we'll grapple with the grief of losing a parent

and unless we're very lucky we'll break up with someone or have our heart broken by someone we love

in movies and on TV break up scenes often make us laugh it seems so obvious to us the audience

that this relationship is doomed but in real life there often isn't much to laugh about when you're

in the middle of a break up when you're the one sitting across the table from the person you love

hearing them say I'm leaving you can be an agonizing experience

the period that follows the initial shock of a breakup can often bring its own distinct heartache

you start to question everything did they really love you what did you do wrong

could you win them back was there someone else how long will it take you for you to stop thinking

about them at the University of Windsor in Canada Antonio Pasquale Leone studies how we process

breakups and how we can make this particular type of loss less painful Antonio joined us as part

of our recent love 2.0 series if you missed that episode it's the one in this podcast fee titled

how to move on today we welcome Antonio back to respond to listener's thoughts and questions in

our popular segment your questions answered Antonio Pasquale Leone welcome back to Hidden Brain

thank you shanker Antonio after we released our episode with you we heard from listeners who shared

how they had struggled or were continuing to struggle with really deep sorrow in the aftermath

of a breakup I'd like to start with this message we received from a listener named Molly she went

through a breakup about 13 years ago and it took her a long time to get over the loss of the

relationship why is it that if I were dating this person and he died I would be allowed and

in fact even expected to continue loving him for the rest of my life but because he is not dead

I am expected to get over it to stop loving him to move on what I don't understand is sort of

what is the difference I mean isn't a breakup essentially a death that relationship is dead the

person that we knew is dead to us now why are we supposed to approach breakups differently than

an even more permanent kind of loss so Antonio I think Molly is looking for permission to

continue to grieve are well beyond the point that others think she should stop grieving is she

right I mean I think it's an interesting question I can hear that the pain in Molly's voice and how

she sort of has been sitting with this for 13 years over a decade right and part of the problem

you know let me just answer her question which I think is the first part is our breakups the same

or similar to somebody just dying and I mean they're both going to be very hard but you break up

because someone doesn't want to be in the relationship someone is unhappy and and someone wants it

to end so there's a difference in vision and that has to be dealt with that has to be accepted

by the person who's being broken up with right in death it's possible that that both people are

really happy and then somebody dies and so it just has to be accepted you know you might feel like

the universe is unfair but but it's not a struggle between two people's visions of what we could do

together right so when someone dies we may grieve them but we don't necessarily feel rejected

by them but in a breakup the person who splits up with you is still walking around still doing

that thing perhaps now with someone else you know I can see in some ways how that can be more

painful yeah I mean you have a disagreement a difference in how you see things right there's

the relationship has um expired or turned sour or run its course you know the other

piece that Molly kind of points at or that comes to my mind is this been a long time right and of

course one's resources emotional cognitive and otherwise are trapped kind of stuck on this and

there might be more life to live right it's important to end something so that one feels freed

up to explore new possibilities Antonio a listener wrote in with a hypothesis about why things

often get worse before they get better after a breakup Carlos Alberto saw something online that

said that after a relationship ends people may experience a withdrawal of sorts from their ex

partner essentially the post suggested that the struggle we feel after a breakup might be similar

to the cravings of someone experiencing an addiction here's Carlos Alberto and I feel that this

view is very reductive of the relationship and it doesn't really encompass all the complexities

that are going around but on the other hand I do feel that it makes sense in a certain way so

my question is specifically if there is value in this understanding of breakups as recovering from

addiction or if this is a rabbit hole that is not really worth exploring what do you think Antonio

is the comparison between breakup grief and addiction withdrawal on the money you know when

you first introduced it I thought I don't know and then the first thing Carlos said I realized

Carlos and I were on the same page I it is a bit reductionistic right you know there are some

things that are just very sort of functional in terms of getting over an addiction that might be

similar behaviorally in terms of getting over a relationship you're going to have to change your

lifestyle you're going to have to change who you hang out with so there's some similarity there

but I think the issue of relationships and grief become also more complicated it is reductionists

just think of it as just that because as Carlos was kind of hinting there are other issues of personal

meaning of attachment of of identity and you know there's no correlate there with respect to

to drug addiction Antonio a listener named Cliff reached out with a question about how to know

when we might be stalled out versus taking time to recover from a breakup Cliff and his wife got

together when they were teenagers and they were married for 25 years but eight years ago Cliff's

wife asked for a divorce it threw him for a loop and he says he's still struggling to move on

here he is I'm healthy active and have a good career yet I feel unable to move forward

emotionally the idea of dating again in my 50s even after eight years still feels impossible

being alone feels safer than risking being hurt or blindsided again at the same time

I recognize that this belief may be rational my question for Antonio is how can I tell the

difference between thoughts that are irrational and those that may simply reflect caution or

self-protection is choosing to remain alone indefinitely in a rational response to my experience

or could it be a reasonable choice for where I am now and how might someone in my position

even if I tried dating begin to trust the emotional role or coaster that can come from it

so Cliff raises a really interesting point Antonio it isn't always easy to tell where the

line is between healthy self-protection and irrational fear do you have any advice for him my heart

goes out to him when when sort of speculates that it may be irrational that suggests that

it's something that's crossed his mind you know but there's also no obligation to date other people

you don't have to there's nothing wrong with deciding well I'm fine on my own that's okay too

so really the question sort of becomes what hurts more what's missing in your life

is something missing in your life I mean life is risky business so you know you date somebody and they

might not be interested in you or you might be not so interested in them and then there's that

hole I mean it's a lot of work finding the right person but you know we don't look for people

because it's convenient we look for people because we want to connect and so I think Cliff it might

be useful to sort of consider to what extent am I depriving myself of possibilities right I knew

somebody who once said I broke up with someone so so that I would have the possibility of falling

in love again you know so so what do you need I guess and what hurts the most because it it

costs you something to be so safe as well many of the most common questions we ask after a breakup

are why questions we want to understand why this rupture happened we find ourselves pouring

over our relationship looking for clues when we come back we dig deeper into this process

and we'll talk with Antonio about how to know when it's time to start letting go you're listening

to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta

This is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta

Throughout our lives we all will experience various kinds of rejections maybe we'll be turned

down for a part in the school play our dream university will say no to us we'll toil over a job

application only to receive a generic response saying thanks but no thanks but one of the worst

forms of rejection is the end of a relationship to have someone say I know you I loved you but I

no longer want to be with you Antonio Pasqualeone is a psychologist who studies the impact of

relationships on our well-being and how we can navigate the emotions that engulf us after a breakup

Antonio when you tell people about your research there's sometimes skeptical about whether the

emotions we experience after a breakup are generalizable they assume that each person's response

is unique isn't well each person is unique you know in the details in the way you experience

and what it means to you obviously that's it's like a thumbprint that's your unique experience

and at the same time you know is it unique isn't actually going to be an opinion question this

is an empirical question there are some common patterns that predict wellness outcomes

and you know that's probably because we're humans and humans have a similar parameters for

their functioning you know you attend to certain there's a lot of overlapping human needs

um it's a funny puzzle though because if I were an astrophysicist I would say well it's like this

and people would sort of nod and go okay I guess so I can't I can't see that far so I'll take your word

for it but relationships and emotion everybody everybody has direct experience and um which is

kind of wonderful but it also means that people hold up what we find against their personal beliefs

system the personal kind of experiences

now after a breakup many people find themselves turning things over and over in their minds

a process that it's known as rumination talk a moment about why we do this and why it can sometimes

be a problem well rumination is almost always a problem right I mean it's tricky to know am I

ruminating or am I getting stuff done um rumination is a busy work right you it's emotional

there are emotions there right um you can think of three kinds of rumination the anxious

rumination is always worrying about the future and creating scenarios what if this and what if that

when we talk about about things like unfinished business or losses relationship losses you'll get

more depressive rumination depressive rumination tends to be about the past it's not about problem

solving but it's about if only I should if only I had you know it's regrets kind of replaying

events of the past and if they had been a little bit different of course there's an overlap

between depressive and anxious rumination the third kind I'll just mention to be complete here

I'm sure we could make up others but um when we're talking about relationship is angry rumination

so you know but and these also are scenarios they tend to be vengeful at at the end right in certain

kind of ways if only I had said that clever thing and and I hope so and so gets their come up ends

but notice these are all scenario based they tend to be a replaying of a scenario it's the plot

and characters uh being reworked and um it tends to be a very cognitive verbal loop keeps you

really busy so especially when it's anxious you feel productive in some sort of way and yet

that that verbal cognitive loop insulates you from sinking a bit deeper into what's really going on

which is the present right and issues of loss issues of shame um that can be very painful

you don't get caught up in those much more maladaptive emotions because you stay on these

secondary hopeless helpless rageful sort of things we received a lot of listener questions about

rumination um I'd like to share a couple of them with you the first is from a listener named Sophie

Sophie told us that she and her boyfriend broke up earlier this year because of something that she

did here she is I'm trying to piece together this version of me that loved him so much and then

this version of me that did what I did and hurt him and the two are just aren't connecting and it

really scares me and freaks me out and makes me question whether or not I am a good person a person

who should be in romantic relationships is it possible to truly move on and heal from a breakup

that was essentially your fault so Sophie stuck on the idea that perhaps she is in the kind of

partner or maybe even the kind of person that she thought she was um what can people do when they

find themselves in this sort of ruminative cycle Antonio one thing Sophie is doing is uh or at

least in this uh excerpt right is thinking of herself in a relatively static way right it's like

I hurt somebody I ended the relationship so in life and in relationships you get to

you get to reinvent yourself you have choices now you you you get to decide to do things differently

if you have regrets about the way you treated somebody you can commit to not

treating other people in that way um and I don't think you should sit around and wait

until you're perfect before you're in a relationship because that's not really how it works

nobody's nobody's got it all sorted out perfectly and the truth is you grow the most on on the contact

points on the boundary line between you and someone else you grow the fastest it's hard to compromise

it's hard to negotiate it's hard to to have a sense of we but that changes you

and so you'll become a different person by being in a different relationship

I would imagine that the rumination process is particularly common when a breakup is

satan and you don't know why the other person cut things off

Elissa named Frida wrote in about her recent breakup her boyfriend ended things with her out of the

blue she writes I really don't know exactly why he broke it off I've asked to talk with him several

times and he always makes excuses not to talk previous relationships have ended gradually

or with a clear reason I'm having a hard time moving on and still want to talk with him about

what happened any advice on how to move on I'm wondering Antonio how can we find closure when a

relationship ends and the person who has ended it won't give us any answers yeah I think a lot of

people get stuck there um sometimes there's even ghosting or other sorts of very abrupt

endings and the person's out there somewhere but they're unresponsive and the episode we did

something that we talked about was the idea that although the relationship was a shared project

me letting go and moving on after the relationship is not a shared project we will not be doing

that together just like we we don't break up together meaning in synchrony right and hence forth

it's like this is this is my own project obviously reaching out there's nothing wrong with that

trying to have a conversation trying to get closure maybe there are things that you want to tell the

person maybe the things you want to ask um but you know that you will make use of that in the way

that's useful to you and if they're unavailable or unwilling and then that is actually information it

it becomes something like oh you're not entirely the person I thought you were I thought

that you would you would honor the relationship the way I hope to honor the relationship um so

that's that's another loss in some ways but um the relationship is yours to move on from is what I'm

trying to say a listener named Jennifer wrote in about a situation where a relationship ends

amicably but the two people actually want to stay in contact with one another and try to remain

friends here's Jennifer i'm really struggling with how to do that because i'm just still working

through my emotional baggage and um the hurt that i feel and at some point i want to do it can it be done

as my question what do we need to do to make that happen each of us individually or is it a giant

mistake i'm wondering Antonio have you seen any success stories of exes finding their way to becoming

friends yeah um that's gonna be a long road though it's not gonna happen overnight um and i

think it's wonderful when people do you know depends how long ago the breakup has been and if that

has been put to rest right but you know sometimes that's just a way of letting the other person down

more more easily you know one of the puzzles here and one of the reasons why there there's gonna

have to be some some time off let's say um you know are are we wanting to be friends just because it

follows on the heels of a very intimate and tight romantic relationship or are we wanting to be

friends because if i didn't know you and i bumped into you at the library we might become friends

one of the puzzles i just want to be really clear about it is the goal of the relationship

that that would be the new relationship because you've kind of maxed out in terms of intimacy

in the relationship with the person as you know them you have been together shared life

had dreams made love uh that's probably more intimate than most friendships so now you're looking

for friendship so it's kind of to roll back the relationship it's not gonna be the same relationship

if you're able to become friends it'll be getting to know the person in a whole different context

my parents is a funny example my parents split up when i was 10 um my father remarried

and in some ways i guess they kept in touch well for many rather want to speak for them right but

it's like well they had kids that becomes a shared project right so when i say redefine the

relationship it's the relationship becomes then about co-parenting and that's important right we

have different goals and there's a different end not now my parents are are quite elderly and i

remember you know we get together for holidays or birthdays my father my mother my stepmother my

brothers everybody is at the same table i mean it's great right and it you can tell these are now

these are friends right in the sense of community um so there's gonna be a reinvention of the

relationship uh for Jennifer if that's what she wants and it's it's it's not gonna happen overnight

right you're really gonna have to give some time you still have to end the relationship

when we go through a breakup it can feel like we are saying more than just goodbye to our partner

we're also saying goodbye to the future we imagine together the trips we would take the life we

would build it's hard to imagine how to move forward how to fill in all the gaps left behind

up next Antonio will answer your questions about how to find peace after a breakup

and offer guidance on how to avoid a split in the first place you're listening to Hidden Brain

this is Hidden Brain i'm Shankar Vedanta

this is Hidden Brain i'm Shankar Vedanta

Antonio Pasquale Lione is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada

he's the author of Principles of Emotion Change what works and when in psychotherapy and everyday life

he joins us today for the latest installment in our series your questions answered

Antonio breakups are not always a surprise sometimes we know that a relationship isn't meant to be

and we pursue it anyway this happened to one of our listeners named Celine her partner recently

broke things off and Celine is coming to realize that her own emotional issues might be playing

a role in undermining her relationships here she is basically long story short in my scenario

i know why it didn't work out there was a lot of communication issues and emotional disconnection

and lack of effort because of it what didn't help and a punch in the gut was the fact that i was

dumped through a voice note um so what i'm currently struggling with is a lot of self blame

that i couldn't get myself to end it and i guess my other issue is that i fall into loneliness and

crave companionships before i get any work done on myself and basically start seeing other

people before i know i'm ready uh and i know myself enough that this is another struggle that

is for sure to be expected so it sounds like Celine is aware of what she needs to work on Antonio

but finds it really difficult to follow through before loneliness compels her to start a new relationship

what do you make of her dilemma i think what Celine is saying is i hope she feels like it's okay if

it's like she's saying i'm a work in progress right um but we all are i'd say to Celine i am too

you know so so there's work to be done and um you know that doesn't mean one has to

change relationships to improve oneself one is often reinventing relationships as when changes

who one is but when she says about her own emotional issues whatever they might be she made reference

to sort of a lack of effort and that that peaked me a little bit because i you know sometimes people

say things like well you know we'll see where it goes um when when i hear somebody say talk about

lack of effort or or we'll see where it goes i cringe a little bit i kind of go well

i can make a good guess where it's gonna go because the reality is that the rate of successive

relationships is relatively poor right if we go by divorce rates are maybe you know they're close

to 50% depending on where you are i'm just talking statistics 50% that those are bad odds um if you

aren't sure that you want it to work well now you've given up your only leverage right relationships

work because you lean into them and for that reason one needs to sort of um think about in what

kinds of ways am i not leaning in what gets in the way of me loving someone or allowing them to

love me so i think that's really key so lean's question really highlighted how difficult it is to

find a sense of ease when we've gone through a breakup um you've explored strategies that can help

in these moments um one idea is to focus on identifying what you call unmet needs um say more about

the centonia that's right yeah all emotion is about needs and negative emotions are about unmet needs

and you know when you get to deeper feelings i'll call them primary emotions they're about

not just highlighting something's wrong to you but organizing and orienting you to what you need

right um so emotion becomes procedural i need to have a sense of camaraderie i need to feel like

understood by someone i need i need a sense of playfulness i need fun i need fun with somebody where

toss it back and forth um those are existential and and attachment oriented needs right um often

moving on is about figuring out what's missing now and once you're identifying it you can kind of

put it to rest the relationship i mean and you organize to start looking for that specific thing

that you're missing

we received a number of messages from listeners who wanted to share their strategies for getting

over a breakup this one comes from a listener named Deb at the age of 41 Deb went through a divorce

she struggled and felt like she'd never move on until about a year later she decided to try

something new here she is i took out a yellow line writing pad and pen and on every single line

i wrote thank you and then i would fill in the blank for some way shaper form that my former

husband had made my life better five pages later i had let out from my head and hard all those

aspects of my former life with him that made a difference for my stories of the past my impacts

on the present and possibilities for my future that's what that letter meant to me outside of my

new bedroom window i made a sundial on the ground and after crumbling up those heartfelt statements

of gratitude i burned them and imagined the resulting smoke moving through the air and two

it's intended recipient my former husband from that moment on i could tell my story without

pain or tears or anguish it was fabulous so there's abundant research that finds that gratitude

is a powerful tool for many realms of our lives Antonio is it possible that it can also help

us with breakups absolutely i think it's wonderful it's very creative and it's very

agentic and she runs with it right so part of his very action or to do something nobody

ruminates with a piece of paper the way umdeb was talking about i mean at least not usually

so notice that one of the things here is she's committing to paper or to conversation with someone

or to write it's it's not just in your head going around turning it around in circles

there's a there's a sense of undertaking a task and the other piece that dead mentions is

is ceremony right i mean there's a ritual the idea of right and i think i'm often saying to people

after you've done all the work not before you can't do it at the beginning but after you've

done the work you still have to decide that it's over there's a decision point where you say

and i'm going to put this to rest and that serves several functions one it creates a sense of closure

notice the other person doesn't have to be here for this ceremony um it can be private you do your

own thing it has to be done after you do the emotional work of course but it also becomes a reminder

a memento there was that time in that moment in time and space where i let it go and walked into

the rest of my life um which is what she describes right um then there's the piece about gratitude

and the original episode we talked about a goodbye exercise where you might write down what are the

good things you're saying goodbye to what are the bad things you're saying goodbye to you know

goodbye good rhythms and what are the hopes and dreams right because the reality is

we had something together and it was a value this next question is from a listener who is on the

outside of a breakup looking in her name is Christine i'm wondering how to help a friend who's been

through a difficult breakup and seems to be stuck in a never ending loop of rumination after a year

or more and they just can't seem to move on how can i be of help what do you think cantonia

yeah that was a good question right um if you care about people um and you see them suffering

you want to help them depends how long they've been stuck this sort of way it depends how long

the relationship is right i think in some sense if somebody were in a with with a life partner and

then the marriage ends or the relationship ends a year after the breakup they're they're still

stuck with it and working through it i wouldn't say that's outside of healthy right i mean

it takes time and the longer the relationship the more it's going to take time right um

you know so so it kind of depends on the context of what we're considering but let's imagine it is

kind of getting a little it's taken a bit of a while maybe the relationship wasn't as significant

in this person's life story but obviously important enough for them to be feel broken over it

maybe the relationship was a year long and they're grieving for a year this is starting to be a bit

well yeah it's that's long time then right and if you're a friend or family member or somebody who's

still grieving or it seems stuck um i would say give them company to fill the void i would say help

them figure out what's important to them you know what i mean often at the end of a relationship people

don't really know what they're looking for so maybe give them some space to actually do that the

third thing would be if people are really stuck in a hole that's almost always from a first person

perspective right yeah i feel sad when i think of myself and first person in this situation but

you can move the person to a third person perspective kind of like somebody else looking in right

and that that would be you of course so then when starts talking about a life story a life narrative

and and you might have a story that's a sad story but dot dot dot where to from here and the

story's not yet finished there's still life to live so what do you want to do with that right and

i think that is also important to help on shake people up and lift it lift their chin a bit to

stare at the horizon we focus most of this conversation on how to cope with feelings that come

after a relationship ruptures but i'd like to end with a listener question about how to support

relationships that are not yet at the point of no return a listener named Lou sent us a question

along those lines Lou says i'd love to ask advice on how to break through the distance and

silence that occurs when our romantic relationship feels like it's drifting apart when both parties

are feeling vulnerable and unsure of where they stand what are some key questions we can ask

our significant other to bring us back to honest communication what do you think Antonia i think

this is a lovely question from Lou i have already said if you're just waiting to see what happens

that's a coin toss heads or tails right and is that what you want um because if that's what you

want then you'll you'll get that right um and yet you know you move through the the the procedures of

life the comings and goings and we're busy with work and we're busy with stuff maybe you're busy

with kids you have projects relationship maintenance takes time you got to put time into it where there's

a sense of we that's a very strong predictor of good outcomes so how do you do that you look at

your partner and you say how are things right you make time for the relationship you check in how

they're doing um and and sometimes the years roll by and you actually have to reinvent the

relationship if you think of projects you've done uh uh i don't know i wrote a book but people do

other sorts of things right they you renovate a house or you start a career or or or have children

these things are a big project in life takes six to eight years you know from beginning to end

and i mean if you're having kids it keeps going but of course the first six to eight years are really

special and very hard so you know if that's true for everything else it's probably true for

relationships too um and if you don't reinvent the relationship every six to eight years

well then it will probably expire right um which is okay too but if you wanted that

relationship you got to lean in as i've been saying and uh take the time to find a date night again

you don't have time for that you have a date breakfast

often one is kind of rediscovering i find myself with my wife we have kids our kids are like

nine and ten now and it's sort of like oh oh that's oh that's who you are that's interesting

that's exciting be curious that would be my advice be curious don't take it for granted

you know i remember hearing someone say if you don't make time for health you are going to make

time for illness and i love that line because it suggests that uh being healthy is is a proactive

exercise and as you're talking now Antonio i'm realizing the parallels here if you don't make

time for your relationship you will make time for your breakup it's very true and

it's very time intensive if you have a breakup

Antonio Pascoa Leoni is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada he's the author

of principles of emotion change what works and when in psychotherapy and everyday life

we also heard today from Monty Worthin she's a historian at the University of North Carolina

Chapel Hill and the author of Spellbound how charisma shaped American history from the Puritans

to Donald Trump hidden brain is produced by hidden brain media our audio production team includes

Annie Murphy Paul Kristen Wong Laura Quarelle Ryan Katz Autumn Barnes Andrew Chadwick and Nick

Woodbury Tara Boyle is our executive producer i'm hidden brain executive editor

our unsung hero today is Kelly Rudin Kelly has worked for me for many years as my lecture agent

she's fielded incoming calls and emails and set up many speaking engagements she's retiring

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i'm Shankar Vedantam see you soon