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Perfectionism. Anger. Envy. Worrying that you’re not doing enough – even when it’s a long weekend, and you actually have the day off, feeling inadequate as a mother, and feeling guilty when you do take some time for self care. Whether they’re coming in for period problems, fertility issues, an autoimmune condition, menopause symptoms – or anything else, these are just a tiny drop in the bucket of the feelings I hear from the women I care for in my medical practice – and I know all to well myself, as a mother, wife, physician, and female human living in this world. Then add the wellness world to it and we’re trying to be thin enough, healthy enough, blood sugar balanced enough, slim enough but not body shaming at all. Always trying to be better in some or many aspects of our lives. And in the process, denying our needs for rest, play, pleasure. Because we don’t want to be selfish. It’s exhausting to always have to do more, give more, and feel, on some level, we’re still trying to be good enough, or even good.
A few years ago, my guest, writer and editor, Elise Loehnen, got tired of feeling that way. Steeped in a world where health perfectionism reigned, she said enough is enough.
Elise, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two sons, is the host of Pulling the Thread, a podcast focused on pulling apart the stories we tell about who we are – and then putting those threads back together, and the author of the fascinating newly released book On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. The book weaves together history, memoir, and cultural criticism to explore the ways patriarchy lands in the bodies of women and embeds itself in our consciousness – and what we then police in ourselves and in each other.
On Our Best Behavior illuminates why we congratulate ourselves when we resist the donut in the office break-room, celebrate our restraint when we hold back from sending an email in anger, feel virtuous when we wake up at dawn to get a jump on the day, put others’ needs ahead of our own and believe this makes us exemplary.
Loehnen explains that these impulses – often lauded as unselfish, distinctly feminine instincts – are actually ingrained in us by a culture that reaps the benefits. She reveals how we’ve been programmed to obey the rules and how doing so qualifies us as “good,” women – and how and how we unwittingly reinforce this internalized patriarchy, for ourselves, each other, and the next generation.
With awareness, she reminds us, we can begin to recognize these patterns of self-restriction, break the story, and move ourselves and each other toward freedom and balance.
Join me for the latest episode of On Health as we explore the roots of perfectionism, being a “good mom,” and being a “good girl,” and discuss:
- Elise’s firsthand experience with high-functioning anxiety and its influence on the content of her new book
- The relentless pursuit of self-improvement and the longing to be “good enough.”
- The idea of “Hungry Ghosts” and how so many of us have narratives and ideas chasing us that make us feel inadequate
- What it means to be “good” as a woman and mother, and why we deny ourselves certain pleasures that don’t align with this societal mould
- The meaning and significance behind “The 7 Deadly Sins”, and the effect they have on women
- The art of balance and why it's what Elise hopes her readers will take away from the book
- Self-inquiry and how Elise is putting this into practice in her everyday life
- The wellness industry and the dangerous perpetual perfectionism and purity it pushes
- Changing the narrative to support other women rather than tear them down
Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in to your body, yourself, and this podcast! Please share the love by sending this to someone in your life who could benefit from the kinds of things we talk about in this space. Make sure to follow me on Instagram @dr.avivaromm to join the conversation. Follow @eliseloehnen on Instagram and at www.elisloehnen.com
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Aviva: We’ve had two convos about my book on your show! I’m so excited to have you here on my show to talk about your book baby. So welcome and congratulations.
Elise: I can’t believe! As you know these books – it’s a long incubation period – I can’t believe it’s out in the world:
Aviva: I want to start with something that I think most of my listeners are going to relate to and which can affect us at any time in our lives but seems to especially peak really big at hormonal phases, motherhood, menopause, probably puberty too. And so many smart, accomplished women are secretly, silently, chronically battling. And that's high functioning anxiety. When you're writing a book or you're releasing something, or anyone who's listening who's trying to do something big, and that something big could be raising your children because that's big too. It can be anything we're doing.
High functioning anxiety is something that I think we don't talk enough about, and it's even rewarded in our culture. As I started reading your book and reading some articles that you've written about yourself and your process, it sounds like you've struggled with some anxiety attacks in this, what I would call high functioning anxiety. Can you talk about how that's affected or plagued you, how you recognized it for what it is, and maybe how it even contributed or shaped the content in your new book?
Elise: Yeah. I mean, this book is a direct result of my high functioning anxiety. And I'm convinced that people listening will find themselves in this. The book opens after a therapy session where I am sort of heads down at feeling quite broken because starting in my twenties, I began to chronically hyperventilate. And not in breathing in a bag – that's what I thought hyperventilation was – sort of that frantic panting into a bag. But for me, chronic hyperventilation, I think for most people in this diagnosis, it is that you are over breathing, mouth breathing, whatever it may be, and your body is convinced that you don't have enough oxygen because your lungs are so saturated that you can't take a full complete breath. And you sort of breath up and you hit a point, then the only way that I can take a deep, full breath is by yawning. And I can't always achieve it in that way. It's an exhausting anxiety disorder.
The first time it happened to me, I was in my twenties, and I went to the ER. I was so freaked out, I thought I was dying, and they gave me Xanax and told me it was all in my head. My dad, ironically, is a pulmonologist, and my mom's a chronic hyperventilator, and my aunt as well, but it had never been described to me, so I didn't recognize it in myself. And the thing about it is that I can do it for days, weeks, months.
I opened the book after a period of, I'd probably been hyperventilating for a month or two. And it is so exhausting, Aviva. And what's so odd about it, at least for me, is that people, as they observe me, think of me as a very calm, sedate person. I don't get particularly excited or exercised. I very much have myself under control. And when I'm in a chronic hyperventilation phase, I look sleepy and I am in fact, tired. I'm yawning. It's sort of such a weird cognitive dissonance because inside you're like, “I'm dying. I'm dying. I'm dying.” And the world looks at you and thinks that you're narcoleptic, more or less.
I've had throughout my career and just growing up in a medical family, access to so much information, so many healers, so many modalities, and I've tried everything to no avail. Cutting my caffeine. I am really careful about trying to avoid a cycle of stress plus sleep deprivation plus over-caffeination and I'm really meticulous now about watching for that and making sure that, in particular, I sleep so that I do not kick off a cycle of hyperventilation.
But at that point in my life, I mean, I had a full-time job. I was traveling almost every week. I have a seven-year-old and a 10-year-old who were four and seven at that point. I was ghostwriting books on the side, just driving myself to exhaustion. But I didn't know any other way to be in the world. And that wasn't unusual for me. It's not like I was experiencing a sudden uptick in activity and was trying to recalibrate. I have always been a compulsive overachiever. In college. I realized, yes, I only needed four to five credits a semester, but that I got better grades when I took six credits a semester. And so that's what I did. I double majored. I recognized in myself that the way to achievement was overextending, that high functioning anxiety that if I didn't have enough to do, I would just be lazy.
And so that I've just driven myself like a racehorse for most of my life. The book really came because I had been in this chronic hyperventilation period. I was so exhausted, and I just had this dawning revelation, had a lot of success in my life, I'm married, I have two kids, I'm high achieving, et cetera, and I feel terrible, and I can't live like this anymore. And whatever is chasing me, these ideas of ‘achieve more’, ‘be better,”. You're not good enough, you're not thin enough, you're not all of these things, you'll never be safe. You'll never be secure. This anxiety that was chasing me, this not enough-ness.
Aviva: I call it these hungry ghosts. A patient one time who was in her sixties, grew up very poor, had spent her entire life, basically her entire childhood and teenage years saying essentially like, fuck if I'm going to be that poor when I grow up. And then drove herself. And her life on the surface is phenomenal, and she knows that, but it's like she could never rest. She was always over-filling her time, overcommitting, and exhausted all the time, and came to me ultimately for a thyroid problem. And she was sitting in front of me, and I think you're still running away from hungry ghosts that are chasing you, that you think are chasing you, but they're not actually chasing you anymore. And she was like, yes. I just watched her whole, her shoulders drop, her face drop. And then I went home, and I was like, wait a minute, Aviva, you're doing that too. You're just at that time, 30 years younger and don't have the health problems. What are you going to do about it?
Elise: Yes, I think we all are. I think that, and that was sort of this revelation of if I stop running, I turn and look at this, and what are these hungry ghosts or voices in my head that I think are specific to me? And then I sort of had this, wait, where is this actually coming from? Because it's certainly not coming from my husband. As much as I'd like to just blame my parents for everything, I love my parents, but it's not coming from my parents. My parents sent me to hippie alternative schools with no grades. My parents did what they could to protect me from this.
What is it? What are these voices? And then that's when I really started the process of trying to figure out what they were and to identify whatever it was that was telling me that I was not good enough. And the thing is, the hungry ghost chasing your patient, it's the same hungry ghosts that were chasing me. I think we're all, I mean, I'm sure there are some women who will be like I can relate to none of this, but I think for most of us, we're all plagued by these same voices that come from, actually come from culture, toxic ancient stories.
Aviva: It's so true. And it's so interesting because when you talk about not blaming your parents, but looking for a source, I was talking with someone I who was interviewing me for her podcast, and she was talking about how she had struggled with eating disorders for most of her teenage years and into her twenties, and she's kind of in her thirties coming out the other end. And she was saying her mom was in the fashion industry and she really held her mom responsible for this. And her mom was always, you know, should be thinner, be putting her on diets, buying her a size clothes too small, pushing her to fit that. But then we were kind of unpacking this, and her mom really thought that she was helping her daughter to fit into a culture and into a size that culture validates.
And I really have been reflecting on a lot of the things that we do tend to blame our mothers for, and how our mothers were just trying in their own completely culturally programmed way to pass on things to us that they didn't know were also internalized patriarch. It’s really complex when we start to think about that, and I think take the blame off of our moms in some ways. Not to say some of us have moms with very severe struggles, mental health problems and moms who just didn't do their best for us. But in general, how do we look at culture rather than continuing to blame the woman, which is kind of what that's all about too.
Elise: Yeah, no, exactly. I think it's our instinct, understandably, to find something, someone outside of us that's responsible. And it could be our mothers, our fathers, men in general, et cetera. And what I think we're starting to understand in recent times is one, how contagious culture is and how it's baked into our systems and ways that become highly invisible to us, but still exceptionally influential. And we know this with systemic racism, you don't have to be an active racist person to benefit or be harmed by systems that are in place. You don't have to build the system. You don't have to like the system; you don't have to subscribe to it. It's just present. And the same thing is true of patriarchy and internalized patriarchy, internalized misogyny. And you can say, it's funny, when I talk about the book, people are like, but I love women. I'm like, yeah, I love women too. It doesn't mean that we aren't policing ourselves and policing each other in part out of trying to keep each other safe and secure and belonging and conforming,
Aviva: We're trying to keep ourselves safe within a context where that is happening.
Elise: Yeah.
Aviva: So, let's talk about what being good means and why as women, especially as mothers, I think we equate self-denial with this concept of good as if good's even the goal, and I'm going to say good and self-denial, I'm going to say we can substitute the words self-care, self-time, and even self-development when it's monetarily related to our family income, like going back to school or writing a book or advancing your career or building a business.
So, we deny ourselves these things as if they're not good. And interestingly, the data really does show that men don't experience that on every level. They're not in self-denial. They're not taught to be in self-denial. They're taught to be in power. We're taught to be in service.
Talk about this and what it means to you.
Elise: Yes. So exactly that. Men are culturally conditioned for power, programmed for power. Women are culturally conditioned and programmed for goodness. There is nothing worse that you can say about a woman than that's bad. Reputational damage for a woman around badness, unkindness, uncaring is the lowest blow. Selfish. And men, it's weakness. But we don't really care what they do. They can do anything. If they're powerful, we will still revere and venerate them.
This is not biological. This is completely cultural. And this is how our society is structured and set up. So, this is whispered into our ears: pursue goodness at all costs, all costs to yourself. And part of that, of course is subjugating everything that you want to other people's needs. It's to be in service to the world, not of the world. And this is in us so profoundly and so deeply, and it gets so wrapped up as you know, as you know, in what it is to be a good mother and how women are sort of biologically, but also primarily, I would say culturally at this point, primed to be the only and sole caregiver, which is really not fair to same-sex couples or to all the incredible fathers who are very… they can't breastfeed, no, but they can certainly hold love and nurture a child.
So, I think it's old. It's as old as patriarchy. And when you go be before patriarchy, which was not an inevitable conclusion, and you look at sort of affiliative partnership-style cultures with alloparenting, you're like, of course this makes complete sense. People were doing life together: women were foraging, men were foraging, women were also hunting. We've all been sold a story about who we inherently are, that's like an inviolable this is who you are as a woman, which is just not accurate or true or complete.
Aviva: Well, and I think attachment parenting kind of feeds into that, no pun intended when it comes to breastfeeding, I remember I was training as a midwife. The midwifery collective I was training in was Afrocentric. All the women who were training me were African American women. Everyone had babies slung on their backs. And I was breastfeeding one of my babies. I was at a birth, and my baby who was 18 months was with her dad, and my midwife had her little baby on her back at the birth. And the baby needed to nurse, and the midwife needed to do something, so she just passed me the baby who's now in his thirties, and we joke that I nursed him, but she just passed me the baby and said, can you feed him? And I was like, of course. I'm nursing her baby. This idea within attachment parenting, which is so based on this nuclear model of mothering, which is impossible, but that we're supposed to be everything and do everything and nurse and carry and sleep with the babies.
Yes, we do all that, but historically we would've had breaks. We would've had a grandmother, auntie, sister. And I totally bought into that as a mom in the eighties, hippie mom doing everything to turn myself inside out to be a hundred percent in that sort of attachment, continuum concept model. And always feeling like I was kind of failing at it. And it was really that I was doing something that wasn't meant for one human being to do and for something that where really there is no failure, but our cultural model of the good mom is such that we do give everything. It's like that Giving Tree book that drives me crazy.
Elise: Oh, yeah.
Aviva: Chopping the tree until there's nothing left. I'm like, that is almost the quintessential model of how we think a good mother should be.
Elise: We were never supposed to do this alone. It was supposed to be communal. It was supposed to be multi-generational and able-bodied, able-minded people were supposed to work in whatever way: foraging, growing, gardening, hunting, building, sewing. We're supposed to extend ourselves in lots of different ways. And that's one of the primary tricks of patriarchal living is putting people in these nuclear families with the man at the head and women in subservient service-based roles, essentially servants to everyone except for ourselves.
And I think that we think that these things are so far in the distant past. Then when you start thinking about your life, this is true of me. I'm the primary breadwinner, but the instinct to be a good mother and to balance out anything that I do outside of the home with what I do for my children is so intense. That's also how we've now decided to achieve balance is, “Oh, I'm going to be up this book tour for a week,” and instead of saying, “Okay, I'm going to be really depleted and exhausted because this is going to take all of my energy as an introvert to go and do this in the world,” the response is, “Well, I better come back and parent with equal fervor.” Right? I'm going to spend all day Saturday working. Well, I'm going to spend all day Sunday on my hands and knees with my kids…
Aviva: Making up for it, right?
Elise: Yes.
Aviva: Yes. I remember one year, you've reminded me of this time where a woman in my midwifery practice went into labor and she went into labor kind of, I think it was, yeah. She went into labor the night before my son's birthday. So, at 11 o'clock at night, I'm making a birthday cake so that it would be ready in the morning if I were out instead of thinking, okay, my partner is a perfectly contributing, wonderful dad, capable of making this cake. So why am I staying up till one so that it's baked and cooled and ready to be iced? And making the icing, of course, also from scratch and homemade and organic, right? Because heaven forbid I go get a box while I'm at a birth midwife and a baby or send someone for one. And just these million little incidents where we give till depletion.
Elise: Yes. And it runs us. It's not like your husband is saying, “Well, you can go to this birth, but you had better bake.”
Aviva: No, he's not saying that at all – it’s just internal guilt, or an internal mechanism.
Elise: A thousand percent. It's just running us.
Aviva: Some of the women or people who see the title On Our Best Behavior, which the title grabs, then they see The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good may think, okay, I'm not religious, so this probably won't be relevant to me. But you're not religious. I'm not religious. I definitely found the book relevant. Tell me why the seven deadly sins are writ large in the book as the backbone of the content and how that came to be your focus.
Elise: Yeah, and just to be completely candid, I had to look them up because I consider myself to be spiritual but I was not raised in a religious household at all. But religion is culture. And again, you can say that.you're not subscribed, but it is in us. It is baked into all of our systems and the way that we perceive ourselves. And so, as I was contemplating this idea of goodness for women and what that looks like and how I police that in myself, and I was writing down sort of my list about body size and no need for rest and no wants or desires, no overt ambition, no need for recognition, not upset.
Aviva: And not comparing, right?
Elise: And not comparing. And I'm looking at this list and I'm like, and this idea of wanting, which is so shameful in women. We do not want, we just service needs. I sort of had this revelation of, oh my God, I know this list. And really started for me with envy, which we can talk about in a second. But this list is ancient. This is the seven deadly sins, which I'm going to remind people of what they are. They are sloth, pride, envy, greed, gluttony, lust, anger.
I was like, okay, I recognize how cultural religious tenets are. Let me find the context for these in the Bible. And that's when I had another sort of “aha” where I realized they're not in the Bible. They emerged out of the Egyptian desert in the 4th around the same time that the New Testament was being canonized. It was this Egyptian monk named Evagrius Ponticus, who's also credited as being an early father of the Enneagram for anyone who's interested in that system.
He wrote them down as eight thoughts, eight demonic thoughts, but not demon in the way that we would think of it, but in sort of the etymological root of distraction – things that would distract monks from prayer. He wrote them down in this little chat-book, and then it circulated in the desert for hundreds of years. And then 590, Pope Gregory the First turned them into the cardinal vices and assigned them all to Mary Magdalene, who is described in the New Testament as the one from whom Jesus cast seven demons, which just so you know, that would make her the most sanctified person in the Bible. He cleared all of her chakras, whatever, however you want to think about it. She was really the first apostle, anyway, I won't bore you with… but she's an amazing figure.
In this homily, Pope Gregory assigns all the cardinal vices to Mary Magdalene, conflates her with the woman who anoints Jesus' feet with her hair and turns that woman, and thus Mary Magdalene into a penitent prostitute. And then she wore that reputation until 2016. Pope Francis turned her into the apostle to the apostles because she was the one who witnessed his resurrection. That's where it started.
Aviva: Going back to what you were saying before where we sort of assume certain things are just how they are. They're either biological or just how the universe is. Women are the ones who have to nurture the babies and men somehow can't; that's not their biological imperative. Or this idea of goodness is somehow inherent in women, rather than being able to step back and say, these are intentional constructs that were politically created to create an effect, and then over time we have become acculturated to them to the point that we don't recognize that they came from somewhere intentional. We've internalized them and now we're living them out in these self-judgments.
Elise: I think because they come in this Trojan horse of religion. People are like, oh, it doesn't apply. And then religious people sort of hold, I've seen that as well, where they're holding them tightly and I'm like, guys, these weren't just made up by a man. This isn't gospel. This is a cultural list.
Aviva: Let's break it down because the way you do it in the book is really fascinating and so relatable. I've written about “Good Girl Complex” before about the helper versus feeling like we have to be a martyr. These are themes that I have really spent time paying attention to in my life. And the way you articulate them in the book is fascinating.
For example, I think a lot of listeners, pretty much all the women I know personally would relate to, when we say the word sloth, it sounds like such an outdated word. But when you break it down it's that feeling we get that when we're doing nothing, we should be doing something. Or even when we're doing something, we should be doing something better or different.
Can we walk through, let's say sloth? Cause I think that one's so common, maybe envy. As women, we tend to allow ourselves to do things if we need it, if our family member needs it, maybe if we deserve it, if we've earned it, right. We'll reward ourselves, but not just because we want to. So maybe we can talk about those, too.
Elise: Yes, sloth is such a funny word, but essentially, I mean, you could of it as laziness, but I think that the way that it's internalized by women goes to much of what we've already talked about. Which is we don't deserve rest. There's always something that we should or could be doing. I feel like there's a cattle prod on my butt at all times sort of chastising me for not doing more. I write about not watching a movie more than 20 minutes, maybe, of a movie in a decade, because I will make myself get up and go and get something done.
Aviva: I have done that during yoga, like yoga at home on video, and I have gotten 15 minutes into yoga. Let's say it's a Monday morning when I most need to be doing it, and 15 minutes in my list will start getting generated in my head. And then the word ‘should,' the word ‘should,’ I start should-ing on myself. And I have had times in the past – I don't let myself do this ever anymore – but I have actually shut the yoga to just go do something.
Elise: Yeah. My husband is not plagued by this at all.
Aviva: Mine either.
Elise: And thank God that we're starting to understand the value of sleep, because otherwise I fear for us even more. But this idea of “I cannot be, I just have to do” is so pernicious for so many women, and it only gets more extreme with the addition of children. So that's sloth. I think it's probably the most relatable sin and the most relatable chapter.
Envy is fascinating to me because I think it is the one that we need to address culturally and collectively most acutely, and really help each other start to identify and diagnose our envy because I think that it's the foundation of so much of our women on women hate and the way that we tend to take each other down with comments, like “I just don't like her.” “She rubs me the wrong way.” “Who does she think she is?” etc.
We all have had those feelings of discomfort that we then project onto the person because we don't have any modeling or mechanism for identifying what is envy, which is really showing us what we want. When we have sort of an irrational reaction to a fellow mom and it's like, I don't like her, she bugs me. It's because she's doing something that you want for yourself. It might be that she has an incredible career doing something that's very aligned with how you see yourself. It could be that she is really forthright and clear. It could be any sort of quality. It's not that you just want everything that she has, but there's some, she's pushing on a dream that you have for yourself.
Aviva: it’s almost like we’re conflating the words envy and admire, but we're unable to just admit that we admire or aspire.
Elise: And there's so much scarcity in our culture, which is completely understandable. We have one woman in the boardroom, we have never had a female president, et cetera. We see it everywhere. It also conditions us to believe if she has that thing, then I can't have it too. So rather than seeing each other's achievements as models for what's possible for us, we see it instead as scarcity and restriction. And this is, I just want to be clear, so subconscious. This is not malicious, we don't know why we're doing this, but I'm convinced that we are. That the person who is receiving your ire, probably behind her back, is just full of information. It's your soul knocking, saying pay attention to this woman.
Aviva: For me, it's more like, what can't I have or what's wrong with me? Or why can't I achieve that? But it would definitely spur a kind of tension feeling. There's a word called schadenfreude, which is the almost taking delight when something less than positive happens to someone else. I started doing this practice where anytime I identified somebody who was doing something that caused me to feel those pangs of envy. I would intentionally go on Facebook and honor what they were doing. It was a big shift for me to start to recognize, “Oh, I'm feeling this way because that is something I aspire to.” And it's triggering something in me that is exactly what you're saying. “Oh, if that person's achieved it, they've taken up all the resources and now I can't.”
Elise: Yes, exactly. That's exactly it. For me, it would be another woman writing a book in the vein, and historically it might be my instinct to be like, it's not a very good book, and pick it apart and discuss all the reasons why she got attention for it, et cetera. I think anyone who's listening can recognize that tendency in whatever area it is. And now it's like, “Oh, wow, that's amazing.” I'm going to study her. How did she do this? I'm going to buy her book. I'm going to celebrate her, et cetera.
This is the thing about all of these bad feelings that we suppress. When you actually let them come up and diagnose them and feel them, you're like, wow, I'm fine. This does not kill me. It actually feels good. And you brought schadenfreude, which is joy plus harm, and that's really what pride is about. The chapter on pride is about how scared, understandably so, many of us are to be seen and celebrated for our gifts. And yet that's a very essential human impulse, more than any other time we need all people bringing their gifts to bear, and we all have different gifts.
That's the other thing, when you start to think about it, you're like, oh, what Aviva wants is very different than what I want. And she's very differently equipped than I am. And you can start to see it once people start to show it. But culturally, we do not like this quality in women. Everyone can sort of recognize the typical trajectory of any woman who is seen and celebrated on a big scale, primarily famous women. We celebrate them, we love them. They sort of reach a certain point in the culture where it's like, oh, no, no, no, this is too much, too much. And then we tear them down, or we're not actively tearing down. we're sort of getting that little schadenfreude hit of like, this is fun to watch. And then we like to celebrate them posthumously. Or once they've really been humbled. You know, can think about tons of women in our culture, Billie Holiday, Princess Diana, Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, et cetera.
And we can say as sort of civilians, this has nothing to do with us. These are celebrities or famous people, or they've asked for it in some ways. But this is the playbook. Again, the contagion of culture. Our girls and other women are like, this is what happens. Why would I ever, ever want to publicly share my gifts with the world? The programming is: Stay inside. Stay invisible. Stay in your lane. Be humble. Do not be a tall poppy; you will get your poppy head cut off,
Aviva: Be seen in and not heard…
Elise: Yeah. This is so insidious. And men are not concerned at all. We do not do the same thing to men.
Aviva: You've used the term policing yourself and how as women, we police ourselves. I think call out and cancel culture has also made that part of pride even worse. It's made people really afraid to bring their gifts to the world in many ways.
Elise: Because reputational damage for women – saying someone's bad, toxic, racist, all of these things – is the worst thing that you can say about a woman. And I'm not condoning racism, I'm just saying, just even saying it is enough to sort of bring a woman down. And part of it is this lack of durability, which again is part of our culture for women, around any threat to that. Instead of saying, okay, I need to learn. I am not perfect. We don't have many models of women who have said, “I’m not going anywhere. I'm going to try to do better and be better, and I need to learn.” We don't really see that. You just see women sort of exiting stage right, moving upstate, disappearing themselves. Whereas men, it's like they can be convicted of a crime and they're not going anywhere.
Aviva: And be President?
Elise: And be President. It's wild. The standards for women and men are so different. And then we sort of fall back on this, but I just expect more from women. It's really because the people with power and the ability to sort of ruin things for everyone are men. Maybe we should expect more of men. But it's interesting how the responsibility is attached to morality for women.
Lust and the way that women and girls are set up as the babysitters to rapacious male desire. that whatever happens to us is our fault for not keeping ourselves safe. That our bodies can be weaponized against us. And yet that's on us. This is so pronounced and pernicious, and again, kind of invisible and yet so known. The way that men can't be trusted, their appetites are out of control, boys will be boys, what was she wearing, what was she drinking?
Aviva: That was the first thought that came to my mind when you said that. It’s that what was she wearing question? She was asking for it, which then means we're really judging women by how we dress.
Elise: Oh, yeah, still, the onus is on us to keep ourselves safe. It's wild. Of a thousand reports of sexual assault, only 25 go to trial. That is stunning. There is no evidence that women lie. It is humiliating to admit that you've been sexually assaulted. It is deeply shameful. You have to expose your inner life to outer opinion. There is no incentive. Plus, keep in mind that then women are told like, oh, but you, you're going to ruin his future prospects. Do you really think that that's an appropriate penalty because he made you uncomfortable? I mean, it's, it's wild. And we know this, and yet we also participate in a culture of, but that was dumb. Why'd she get into that Uber?
Aviva: Yup. So recently a dear friend of mine who is a dedicated, supportive, loving mom, all the things, she texted me, and she just kind of quickly bemoaned that one of her kids was home from college for awhile and she was so ready for him to start his own life and not back at home. And then within seconds, she sent me another text. And it was almost as if she was censoring herself, kind of to herself and also to me, but then also kind of asking for validation. And the text just said, “Am I a bad mom for feeling that way?” And, of course, I reassured her. It's completely natural and there's no bad way of feeling as a mom. We have a lot of feelings as a mom.
And in a recent piece in the New York Times, you talk about how it's really profoundly important that we acknowledge this reality of maternal ambivalence. And you said you can love your kids deeply and hate being a mom. I wonder how your work, your book, your own experiences are informing your experience as a mom right now so that you're able to mother in the ways that you do want to without being in this chronic judgment of yourself or fake-ness that I think so many moms feel obligated, especially if you have a social media presence or platform, to be this mom with this ever ready smile and how much we love it. Because we get judged if we say we hate being a mom.
Elise: And particularly with social media now. I mean, there was already sort of this ritual performance of mothering, and now it's just taken onto a new stage in terms of how we're expected to express this and share this with the world.
At least for me, before I wrote the book, it wasn't clear to me. This wasn't the way that we've taken the identity of mothering and loving your child and conflated and conjoined them, whereas we don't do that to men. We're not talking about are you a good father? A good father is someone who's sort of present and teaches their kids how to play soccer, in the American mythology, at least. It's a very different identity, and there's no expectation that men will love it. We expect parents to love their children. That's a fair and reasonable expectation – sign me up. I love my kids to the bone.
Aviva: And to keep them safe. To what you're saying, and I really hear this and totally experience this and myself, you can love your kids. That doesn't mean you always love the role of motherhood. The role of motherhood in our culture is also really intense and complicated, and yes, whether you're fully at home, whether you're working outside the home and then coming home and mothering. How can we have a more honest conversation about this and how can moms integrate all their feelings, do you think?
Elise: I write about this a fair amount in envy because I think that there's so much that we pass on, particularly from mothers to daughters, around what it looks like to sort of usurp your mom's ambition or to do things differently in a culture that insists that the crowning achievement is to have children and be a wonderful mother. I think it's essential not only to sort of emotionally liberate women who feel deviant when they're having those muttering under their breath moments as they're like slapping together sandwiches in the morning, but also to air it out so that we're not passing this on to our children.
My mom was incredibly intelligent but came of age at that time during second wave feminism where some of her friends became high powered attorneys and judges, and many of them didn't work outside of the home. It was sort of this turning point culturally like a real divide. My mom did so much outside of the home. She was on the board of Planned Parenthood on the school board. She ran my dad's office. She ran the school that I went to, all unpaid, but she never had a career. I knew how devastating that was to her. I knew how much she envied me, the opportunities that she gave me, which were really the opportunities that she wanted also for herself. And in a way, it made it, I think, possible for me to write a book like I did and to be liberated from her anger, frustration, rage, and to recognize that it’s not about me. That's about sort of where she was. But it doesn't have to do with her love for me.
Aviva: Sometimes that's the grace of maturity and having our own children, isn't it that we can see our mothers with a more gracious lens?
Elise: Totally. But I think for women who didn't voice that, and so we're like I, who, being a mother, I love my kids, but I hate being a mother, and they don't speak it because they can't admit it feels too bad. What that's passed down is that ambivalence. Kids know, they know. I think what happens then is that you internalize that anger and rage and feel like you're the cause.
Aviva: No, because you don't know it's not about you. You're just immersed in the emotion and the feeling, and then you internalize these feelings.
Elise: Yeah. I write about being my mom's jailer and her joy, and how difficult that is. I think for all of us, particularly in a culture where we don't talk about it,
Aviva: It's so important, I feel, to talk honestly about how we really feel about the motherhood experience in this society without feeling like or fearing we're going to be judged by other mothers without fearing that we're somehow saying we don't love our kids. And really recognizing the context in which we're mothering, which has so much of an influence on how we experience mothering. Not having paid leave, not having support, living far from our families, socioeconomic struggles, so many folks experience. It's really hard to be a mother right now,
Elise: And it pits women against each other. It's like that amazing Angela Davis quote, which I'm going to sort of try not to butcher her here, which is like, childcare should be communal, and housework should be institutionalized.
It's all such a complicated stew for women.
Aviva: Well, I think it's also a motherhood in our culture – it's either or, right? It's all or nothing in the sense that culturally we're expected to give all to our children and if we have ambition to work outside the home or have to work outside, which is the case for most women.
Elise: Yes, since the seventies.
Aviva: Yes. We're judged either way. It's funny, I was doing my pre-med and have a dear friend who asked how I was doing, and I said, I'm tired. I've got four kids. I'm doing my pre-meds. And her response shocked me. “She said, well, if you just focused on your kids and you weren't doing the pre-meds, you might not be so tired.”
And I was like, okay. Totally shifted my friendship, first of all. I was like, we are so not on the same page. Ironically, she went and got her nursing degree a few years later, but I was the primary income provider for my family. There were intergenerational and very real economic reasons that I was pursuing a next level of my career. This wasn't just some privileged thing I was doing. Even if I was, that should be fine. But the judgment from another mother was really a punch in the solar plexus to me. Okay, well maybe that is why I'm tired. Maybe I shouldn't be doing this. The second guessing I started going through around this and the lack of cultural support.
Nobody would've ever said to my husband if he was the one in medical school, and I was home with the four kids like, oh, I bet you could never have done this without your wife. But people would say that to me like, oh, you could never have done this without your husband. I'm like, wait a minute.
Elise: But it's interesting, what your friend too said was clearly coming out of her own envy as you just said. Then she went on and more or less did the same thing. It's just a good example of what we were talking about earlier of what it looks like to actually diagnose that rather than judge it or project it onto you, where she was clearly holding that against herself. Like I should be doing that too. Or I want to do that too.
Aviva: You made a statement in a recent Vanity Fair interview that I loved. “Let's come into balance with all of these very human impulses that actually bring us closer to ourselves, show us who we are, help us identify our needs, our wants, and can be the source of pleasure and joy.”
To me, that statement summed up the book so beautifully. It’s kind of a takeaway you hope for people who read the book.
Elise: Yeah, my hope is balance. A lot of people will see the book is about the sins, and they immediately go to, we don't need more greed. And I'm like, calm down. This is about enough-ness security. This isn't a bid to say, let's just be lustful, envious, gluttonous. It is about actually finding some place in the middle. It's not saying we're never going to do anything. It's saying it's okay if you just need a bed day and you're going to be in bed with a book or not a book and just rest and relax and restore.
Aviva: It’s also okay if you want to create a hundred million dollar, billion dollar company and you're a mom and you still also want to do that, and you do want to work really intensely, that's okay too. Both sides.
Elise: That’s okay, too. Yes, all of it. It's all okay. It is all good that you can go out for dinner with friends and be slightly overserved and overeat, and you're not going to spend the next day chastising yourself and talking about how bad you are and how good you now need to be. It's just starting to release ourselves from all of this programming where we have ourselves and each other on such tight leashes. It's like we treat each other and ourselves, like we're convicts, and that if any of this badness comes out, all is lost. We’re going to be run away with our appetites and our desires and our wants. And meanwhile, it's the amount of energy that we spend suppressing and repressing all of these very human instincts, the way that we connect with the world and with each other, the way that we serve the world with our gifts and enjoy the world with our appetite. It's like we're not living, we're missing the whole thing in some ways by just trying to keep ourselves under control.
Aviva: I feel like the book is just essentially about giving ourselves permission to actually feel what we feel, to identify what we feel, and then find ways that are helpful for us to express our true nature.
Elise: My hope with the book is that this is the list we know or have heard, but that it will be so clarifying that people will be able to immediately identify, oh, this is me harassing myself about sloth, or this is me around my inability to let my anger come up, that we can start to see the system and then override it with a voice that's ours. That's true. And that's not coming from some exterior authority but is actually who we are.
Aviva: What are three concrete ways you've started to break some of the patterns that you talk about in the book for yourself?
Elise: Self inquiry. So, just examining whatever it is that I feel coming up in me and asking what it is and where it comes from has been so, and then stopping myself again from projecting it. A good example recently was I was in New York for an event the week before my book launch. I flew home. I took a 10:30 PM flight from New York back to LA on Thursday because I had a Friday morning parent-teacher conference that I could have totally Zoomed into. And then I flew back to New York first thing Sunday morning. I was home for two days, essentially. Terrible for the environment. And I sort of had this moment of frustration where I was like, oh, this is ridiculous. And then I was like, but why am I doing this? And maybe before I would've expressed some of my frustration at my husband, even though he was like, “Why are you doing this? And do we even both need to go?
It's those moments of interrupting myself to be like, where is this coming from? What's at play? Is this really the right choice? And then taking responsibility for where I feel I'm putting it on myself versus being mad for some reason at my husband. And I do that a lot. I do that with food now where it's like, “Oh, I actually do want pizza and I'm going to enjoy this piece of pizza, and now I want another piece and I'm going to enjoy this pizza” instead of eating the pizza, shaming myself with every bite and then either doing something about it or not. And then just, I'm really still so bad at rest, but building in things that I find so pleasurable. I pulled out a puzzle yesterday and that it pulls me away. I love puzzles. I just love it.
Aviva: It’s such an interesting thing that we really didn't talk about, but I'm sure you are well aware of and just worth saying that some of the ways that we're driven by culture to be constantly productive and then not letting ourselves rest are actually counterproductive to productivity. So doing the puzzle – and we don't have to do the puzzle so that we can relax so that we have the eureka moment and become more productive, I'm not suggesting that – but that is often the result too. We enjoy the zone, we get into flow, and then what we were struggling with, or we're stuck on actually becomes easier.
Elise: A thousand percent. A thousand percent. And I am pretty good about that with any creative process. If I'm not feeling it, if it's not coming, I don't make myself write. I wait, it is being pregnant, and then you wait, and then you're like, oh, it's coming. I need to get to my keyboard. Letting your conscious brain relax is a boon for work.
Aviva: You've written really powerfully and in the last couple of years about the dark sides of the wellness world, which you were deeply immersed in for many years for your work. And you've written about how health and wellbeing are increasingly commodified and commercialized so that we're left with this long checklist of more and more things to do and to measure ourselves by.
Now, I want to be really clear that I am not wanting to knock the wellness movement. Partly as a physician and a midwife and an herbalist, I see the dark sizes, shadow sides of wellness. I also want to acknowledge that they have arisen in a vacuum of where western medicine is not meeting women's needs at all.
I don't want to talk so much about that, but what I really want to hear about from you is the intersection of things like cleanses that I see personally as these modern day internalizations of outdated, puritanical, religious and patriarchal myths that were, actually if you go back in history, you can easily track the thread from today's cleanses to the 1970s detoxes and the 80s and 90s colonics all through. And you go back to these threads of women's bodies being dirty, sexuality being dirty. So how does this current wellness movement fit into this construct that you've written about in the book?
Elise: Yeah. Well, I write about it a fair amount of gluttony. But yeah, that's really interesting to think about the way that it's connected to the perception of dirtiness of women. I think it's also, we see the world as so broken and uncertain and out of control and toxic, and so we're trying to sort of clean it in ourselves. It's misplaced, understandable, but misplaced – sort of like, I can't save the world and I can't keep the world safe, so I'm just going to try and work it all out in my own body as some sort of bulwark to the chaos and uncertainty out there.
Aviva: And to some extent, I mean, we're kind of being asked to do that, right? We have an out-of-control dysregulation, deregulation of the EPA.
Elise: Yes.
Aviva: And we do have rampant environmental toxins that in order to avoid, we do have to be mindful of the foods we're eating and the products we're putting on our skin. And then there's this interface of that to me, which is very real, as an environmental scientist and physician, and this rampant perfectionism that we have internalized, the sloth mindset that we're always trying to fight against, which is, I'm not doing enough. I'm not clean enough. I'm not thin enough, enough, enough, enough, enough.
Elise: Yes, and I think too, what's also happened is that sort of wellness and the rise of wellness as an antidote to western medicine, which is wonderful and problematic, and this emergence of women's intuition and this feeling of, I know something's wrong. I need someone to pay attention to this. This is all very familiar to you, clearly, but this antidote to “hysteria” of actually no, something's wrong. In that sense, it's such a stunning and important movement, and I think it's done a lot. We still have so far to go, but of moving western medicine forward.
I think what's also happened is it's been taken over by patriarchy and capitalism and bro-wellness and longevity hackers and anti-aging. Then it's sort of spun as like, well, it's about increasing your healthy lifespans.
Okay, sure, I can get on board with that. But the whole longevity movement, I'm like, you guys, we’re not living to 120. It's not happening. Live the life you have. Why are you spending your whole life trying to extend your life when you're clearly not enjoying your life right now? You're spending your whole life obsessed with not dying, which to me doesn't sound like living.
You're treating your body like a machine. You're overriding all of your own natural intelligence, your body's ability to create homeostasis. That is what the body does. And it's not to say that it's not overtaxed by the environment, by stress, by our woefully out of date food system that was engineered for famine and against nutrient deficient diseases in the forties that desperately needs a revamp. But you're not a machine and everything doesn’t need to be dialed.
It's the masculine in a toxic way coming in and just taking over something that's quite beautiful and then sort of hijacking something and turning it into something that was never intended to be.
We're women. We need to let our intuition come up and let ourselves emerge as the primary healing principle. And now it's like, no, up to the right, up to the right, up to the right. It's totally bat shit.
Aviva: I think you and I both know this as insiders, a lot of these stories are made up to create brands and marketing and selling machines.
Okay. I have a question for you that I'd love to ask each of my guests. If you could tell your younger self anything, how old would she be and what would you say?
Elise: It's a great question. It's hard to answer because I'm so grateful for all of my experiences. In some ways I don't want to circumvent my journey by giving myself advanced warning.
Aviva: I love that answer.
Elise: You do?
Aviva: I actually love that answer. Nobody has ever said that. It's like, okay, you're not burying a time capsule here.
Elise: Yeah, no, I'm not burying a time capsule. I think I've had the experiences I needed to have at that time, some hard ones, but I do feel like it's divinely guided in some way, and I'm where I'm supposed to be.
Aviva: That's beautiful. It sounds like a lot of your process, and certainly what you convey in the book is about deepening self-awareness, deepening awareness that some of the things that we put on ourselves or most of the things we put on ourselves are really cultural context, not to blame someone else who's often someone who loves us, and that some of this is also about dropping into our bodies, dropping into our feelings, so that we can be honest with ourselves and act from that place. It’s a beautiful book. It's been my bedtime companion many nights recently, and I thank you for writing it, for shedding light on how we can be more honest with ourselves, live more full, rich, less judgmental of each other and of ourselves lives. And for joining me on the podcast.
Elise: Thank you for having me. Such a pleasure.
Aviva: Always. And everyone, in the show notes you can find out all the places to get Elise’s book, learn more about Elise, follow her, dial into her phenomenal podcast, Pulling the Thread and all the things. Thank you everyone for joining us. See you next time.
