Welcome to "Tell Me More."

I'm Kelly Corrigan.

I'm a writer, a podcaster, and a mom.

This season, number seven, is unlike anything you've seen from us before, because everyone who works on this show is reading the same headlines.

There is so much unsettling news about how people are actually feeling, so we have recruited the best scientists and researchers to separate fact from fiction and surface a set of practices we can all live by.

Join us for a ten-part conversation on wellness.

How do you get it and how do you keep it?

♪ It is the idea that you exist inside another, that when you're not there, they think of you.

And that connection is what gives us a sense of meaning, that "I matter."

Kelly, voice-over: This is Esther Perel.

She is a psychotherapist.

She hosts a podcast called "Where Should We Begin?"

She's written some huge bestsellers, "Mating in Captivity," "The State of Affairs."

Basically, she is one of the most insightful and original voices on modern relationships.

My daughter, actually, through her own therapy, taught me that you can hold two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time.

"Yes, and..." Kelly, voice-over: This is Katie Couric.

She's a former guest of "Tell Me More," a good friend of mine.

Of course, she was the first female anchor on the "Evening News" at CBS.

I first met her when she anchored "The Today Show" and I was her guest.

And she is the co-founder of an awesome organization called Stand Up To Cancer.

I mean, I think it's about in this digital age, like, How do you really carve out sacred time?

Whether it is as simple as just, "OK, at 10:00, we're turning off our phones."

Kelly, voice-over: This is Timothy Goodman.

He is a graphic artist, whose work is on walls and packaging, clothes, products, magazine covers.

He writes his own books.

He's also done work for Apple and Nike and Google, "The New Yorker" and "The New York Times.

And he did a very cool basketball shoe for Nike with Kevin Durant.

I think if you're going to talk about being well, then you have to talk about relationships.

I mean, it's often said that the number-one driver of happiness across time and across culture is meaningful connection to others.

And so I thought we would spend our time together thinking about what gets in the way of relationship and deep connection and what facilitates it.

I think you can also make it as a statement that the quality of your relationships will determine the quality of your life.

You agree?

I do to a certain extent.

I mean, I think that's one of the key components, but I also think thinking of other people-- and I guess that falls under the rubric of relationships-- but looking outside yourself, acts of service, you know, trying to help people in need.

To me, that gives your life purpose and relationships gives your life...

Comfort.

comfort and connection and bearing.

I keep thinking about, Well, what about the relationship to myself?

In this society, like, we have this stigma that loneliness is bad.

I think it's an incredible raw feeling.

It's a testament to my humanity, especially as an artist, to feel this loneliness, to honor it, to give space for it.

You know, I create some of my best work when I'm like that.

I'm thankful as an artist that I can write about it, that I can create art about it.

I want to connect to other lonely people through the work.

Which is so interesting because if we're saying that connection is this fundamental piece of being well, you're going through loneliness to get to the same place.

You're leveraging it to connect.

In both cases-- you're saying: "I want to do something with this sensitivity, "this connection that I have to my solitude or my loneliness or my aloneness."

And you're saying it involves, of course, doing for others, knowing that you matter.

And that-- knowing that you matter-- one of the main ways we have it is by doing for others.

But it is the idea that when-- that you exist inside another, that they carry you inside of them, that when you're not there, they think of you, that when they're not there, they live inside of you.

And that connection is what gives us a sense of meaning, that "I matter."

Kelly: I wondered if it would be interesting to think about the sort of societal barriers to connection to, like, juicy, great, sustaining, productive connection and then the personal barriers.

This idea of ambiguous loss that you talked about.

Can you tell these guys about it?

Ambiguous loss for me comes because I've been thinking about the rise of a new form of A.I., which I call the rise of artificial intimacy.

I thought of the concept of ambiguous loss because Pauline Boss, a psychologist, coined it and talked about it, as in, What happens when a person is still physically present but they're psychologically gone, they're emotionally absent?

Like this.

Yes.

This notion of you're here but you're not present.

And I thought, "Here it is.

We spend our day at a laptop.

We go home hoping that we can finally close the screen, but then we go home and we turn on the TV.

Then we watch the TV, and while we watch the TV, we take our phone.

Now we are on two screens at the same time, and then we lift our head, and there's another person sitting right next to us doing the exact same thing, and then one of us says something really important, actually, to the other one, and we hear that thing: "Uh-huh.

Uh-huh."

It's the worst.

It's the worst.

Esther Perel: You know, that knows that they are actually doing multitasking.

They're there, but they're not present.

You talk to someone, but the connection does not happen anymore.

That's ambiguous loss.

And to me, it's like a little rejection.

Like, "I'm much more interested in this or that than I am in you."

I think there's a lot of ways to be rejected right now that didn't used to exist.

Like, you could have a post that's kind of rejected.

You could make a comment to somebody that doesn't get picked up on.

You could start a conversation that dies, or you could have this ambiguous loss moment over and over and over again.

Modern loneliness often masks itself as hyperconnectivity.

You can have a thousand virtual friends but no one to ask to feed your cat.

You can talk about it as modern loneliness.

You can call it ambiguous loss.

For me, they're part of a family, a cluster of experiences...

But it's eroding relationships, in essence.

If the quality of your relationships equal the quality of your life, these devices are eroding that quality.

Esther: I think at this particular moment, relationships are undergoing a massive makeover, and the norms have shifted at full speed under our feet, and we don't really have the skills to respond to it.

How did that happen?

Because we had for most of history and in most parts of the world still, social structures, religious structures, hierarchies, communal structures that basically dictated how you do relationships.

With the loss of these institutions, the loss of the scripts follow.

Now you have a lot of freedom, but you also are crippled with self-doubt and uncertainty.

And then come the devices.

And the devices basically are set up to create a life without friction.

It tells you where to go, how to get there, what to listen to, what to eat.

You know, I mean, it's like assisted living, you know?

So what gives you an ability to deal with relationships is that you have experimentation, friction, uncertainty, trial and error.

You know, free play on the street.

I go and I ask people all over the world, like, "How many of you grew up playing freely on the street?"

Yeah.

And how many of you know people with young children who are playing freely on the street?

It's a generational thing because what happens on the street?

Decades of social negotiation, social interaction, unscripted, unmonitored, unchoreographed, where you fight, you make up, you have conflict, you make alliances, you compete, you are jealous, you restore again.

This is social skills.

That is the whole ground of that.

And that is not happening, so you lose touch with how to have difficult conversations, how to deal with difference, how to deal with conflict.

But do you really think that it's-- I don't know if you're saying it's worse than it used to be.

It's different.

It's different.

Especially when I think about it in terms of, like, men, when I think about how I was raised in the neighborhood I was growing up in and when I think about-- male figures in my life from, you know, previous generations, so many more men now are in therapy, so many more men are willing to accept trauma in their life.

And I think that, you know, you have more men outspoken about mental health, and that's never really existed from my point of view.

And so for that, I applaud that.

And you see that happening more and more.

I mean, I'm a newer generation, and--35 until I was able to admit that I was abused as a kid, you know, in therapy.

And we need more men out, like, speaking about this that gives license for other men and boys to admit, you know, things that they've gone through in life... That's a positive thing.

Yeah.

I think, you know, I mean, for every positive, there's a negative, I think, and, you know, the digital stuff, I think, has created a real crisis in so many ways, but in other ways, it has opened doors of communication.

What do you do to foster connection?

I mean, I think it's about-- in this digital age, like, How do you really carve out sacred time?

Whether it is as simple as just, "OK, at 10:00, "we're turning off our phones, and we're going to be present for each other."

Or me and my partner, we meditate in front of each other, and we try to do that as a form of really feeling our energy.

You're talking about the power of ritual.

You're talking about the power of a contemplative practice.

In the past, in your family probably, people went to church and sat in silence and then went to mass and did the ritual.

The vocabulary may have changed, but the fundamental needs are remaining.

What is a ritual?

It's a routine that is imbued with creativity and intention, and it elevates it.

We're carving out time and space and attention.

We sit in front of each other.

It's all of this that people have done from the beginning of humanity, and now we're looking for new ways to do that.

And one thing that has probably always been a continuous thread is that it's done together.

There were three things that I think are barriers to relationships that I thought might be worth opening up with this group.

One is fundamental attribution error.

The second one is the essentialist idea-- that you are who you are and that's how people like you act.

And the third is reactivity.

So can you talk a little bit about those?

It came up for me as I've been studying conflict because part of, for me, the social atrophy that I'm looking at is that there is a lessening in the ability to deal with difference, which then leads to people heightening polarization.

There's 27% of Americans that are estranged from a family member.

I think that's a lot, you know?

So then I said, "OK, how do I work with conflict?"

And so I created this whole course around conflict.

And one of the things that I began to notice, of course, is in a relationship, especially in a relationship that experiences distress, there is a tendency to see oneself as more complex and to see one's partner, family member, friend-- whoever the other is-- as more simple.

"This is just who you are.

"I happen to be in a bad mood today "because there was traffic.

"You are in a bad mood because you are a cantankerous person."

You know, "Mine is circumstantial.

Yours is characterological."

That's fundamental attribution error in very simple terms.

Why do people do that, Esther?

It's a way of organizing information that basically says, "My behavior is influenced by what's happening around me."

And it's a way of not having to contend with the complexity of another person.

It's a way of not having to truly take in the circumstances of the other person.

It's a way of not being able to deal with difference.

So fundamental attribution error goes with another cognitive distortion that is very much a part in relationships that are in distress, and that is confirmation bias.

Mm-hmm.

Because now that I have pegged you as something, then I start to look for it.

We tend to look for evidence that reinforces our beliefs, and we disregard evidence that challenges it.

It reminds me of parenting, when it's, you know, if you have a good friend or a good therapist or you read the right book, they will tell you to be so careful about your language and your own thinking, which is, "She's lazy," or "She was lazy today."

Mm-hmm.

"She's a liar," or, "She told a lie today."

And we're doing that to each other, where "I told a lie, but you're a liar."

Mm-hmm.

Right.

You know, right now, the world is so divided on so many things both globally and domestically.

Mm-hmm.

And I think social media also, kind of with the algorithms and with whatever you're getting in your feed, they discourage a more holistic view of a situation, and you have to pick sides.

And my daughter, actually, through her own therapy, taught me that you can hold two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time: "Yes, and..." And people just don't seem to want to do that, and I don't know why.

Part of what is happening is-- that contributes to the polarization-- is that there is something in a technological era that looks at problems as all having a solution.

It's binaries, whereas relational dilemmas, relational problems are often complex problems, and they don't necessarily have a solution.

You don't have an answer to those questions.

You have paradoxes that you need to manage.

The more divisions we have at this moment and the more difficult it is to hold both ends.

When you think about what accelerates connection or facilitates connection, there were some things that I pulled from all of your work, and one is the idea of repair.

Have you ever had to-- Are you good at repair?

No.

You're not?

Mm-mm.

I'm very stubborn, and I hold grudges.

Wow...

Someone who knows herself.

I don't want to be on the other side of that, ever.

No, it's not good.

It's not good.

I want to be the bigger person, and sometimes I'm really the smaller person.

At least you're the honest person.

Ha ha!

In essence, people fight about three things.

We fight about power and control; we fight about care and closeness; and we fight about respect and recognition.

"Do I matter?

Do you value me?"

Right.

And it takes such guts When you're in a fight to say, "I'm actually not mad that you're late.

"I'm mad because I feel like if it were someone else, "you would have been on time "and that, for me, it's like I'm just not that important, I'm not that big of a priority."

Like, then you sound weak and wimpy and needy.

And like, there's this hesitation to go to the bottom thing of like, "I don't really, totally feel like I matter to you that much."

One of the reasons these friends were mad at me-- my two friends--is that I didn't have a picture of them in my office.

Oh, because they didn't feel like they mattered.

Yeah.

This is a beautiful example.

You find yourself now in an argument over the importance of a picture and which pictures you put.

"And I only put pictures of my children, and I don't put pictures of my friends, and it's not..." And you have this whole blah, blah about pictures, when, in fact, all you want to say is, you know, "I was hurt because I like to know that I'm important in your social dependence."

And you say, "I get it."

And then you, as a joke, get a giant photo... Kelly: Yes!

and put it in your office.

That's where the humor comes in.

Kelly: I wonder if you see in your therapy with people that their conflict styles or their ability to sort of loop quickly into repair behaviors is passed down to them from their families or if it's something they develop on their own.

How you repair is not the same as-- it's not just tied to your fighting styles, it's actually also connected to how you experience hurt.

The question is, you know, when you make up, when you are in repair mode, is it you who reach out?

Are you able to let the other person reach out?

The choreography, the choreography of repair, it involves expression of guilt.

It involves expression of how much you care about the relationship and how vigilant you are about the value of and the importance of the relationship.

It involves doing rituals that give meaning to what happened and that marks what is about to happen for in the future.

It involves forgiveness or not or partial forgiveness.

It involves acceptance without forgiveness or forgiveness without acceptance.

You know, it's very beautiful and very rich.

Kelly: One of the things you talked about that was super interesting and novel for me was the idea that apologizing is kind of self-aggrandizing, and that saying thank you is an alternative that sort of makes explicit that "I'm dependent on you" in a way.

Can you talk about that?

It's in a particular context.

There was a person who would come home late, and they would say, "But I apologize.

I had an important meeting."

And I thought, "Why doesn't that sit well with the partner?"

It's exactly what you were saying before.

It's not about the fact that you're late.

It's about the fact that "I don't feel important."

So I turned it and I said, "If instead of saying 'I'm sorry,' "you said thank you-- "thank you that you were able to be home "to do whatever-- take care of the kids, "to take care of my mother, you know, prepare the dinner," whatever it is.

"Thank you for doing what you did because it allowed me to stay at my meeting."

That says, "I can't be what I am without you being what you are."

Instead of saying "I'm sorry," you say thank you.

Right.

Because it resurfaces, like, the teaminess of it all.

Yes.

It's like, "We're a team.

"And today I had to do this, and so you did that.

"And tomorrow, maybe you'll be the one who has to..." What do you think of this?

I totally agree.

My girlfriend has done that, actually.

She said thank you?

Yeah.

She's advanced.

You know, it's interesting, too.

Also giving confirmation-- I don't know if this is part of it--but just saying, "You have a right to feel the way you do," because so much of, like, just saying "I'm sorry" is sort of being just dismissive, and you expect that to be a solution.

But saying you have a right to feel the way you do-- It validates your experience... Yeah, exactly.

and your experience of reality.

"It makes sense that you would feel bad "because I did something that can elicit those kind of feelings."

And that is the respect and recognition... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

and the care and closeness.

And that melts away-- you know, you can still be annoyed that you sat there for two hours, but it doesn't become a relational conflict.

Mm-hmm.

In our psychological era, we put a lot of emphasis on boundaries, but we don't put as much emphasis on accountability.

We put an emphasis on empathy.

We put emphasis on a lot of things, but accountability is "I own it.

I take responsibility for it."

Because responsibility says "I have conscience.

I realize what I did to you."

Mm-hmm.

Imagine if in a political debate, someone had the capacity to say, "You know, "in the seventies when we raised taxes, we were wrong.

That was a mistake."

Or, like, I think Obama said it about gay marriage, that he was wrong.

If he could have passed it sooner, he would have.

It's like we're not seeing that modeled anywhere.

Everyone doubles down.

The system at this moment is not really set up for people to say, "I made a mistake."

In a society that values certainty as much as ours does, how can we model that comfort with uncertainty?

My teacher, my mentor, really, very early on said to me, "Certainty is the enemy of change," because if you are certain, you are less curious.

If you are less curious, you're not...

Growing.

Mm-hmm.

discovering new truths, new ways of looking at things.

I think the other thing is a little bit cultural for me as well.

I think that the United States is a very pragmatic society that believes that most problems have a solution-- you just roll up your sleeves, you get to work, and you do effort optimism.

How do you hold a position?

I think there is something about gender in this.

I am often surrounded by many men who are very certain.

I know that when I give a talk, I often say, "I sound very confident, I'm sure of nothing."

That's because I can speak with confidence, but that doesn't mean that I think I'm right.

My very dear friend Terry Real often says, "Confidence is our ability "to see ourselves as flawed individuals and still hold ourselves in high regard."

Kelly: Either we're in a mental health crisis or we're having a perfectly adaptive response to a society that's in crisis.

Do you have an opinion about where we land on that continuum?

Mental health is a reflection and a reaction to the ills and the pains that people experience in their lives.

In this moment, we are in a psychologized society, so our vocabulary is a vocabulary of mental health.

In many ways, it helps, it destigmatizes, it offers clarity, and it takes things out of secrecy.

This experience that you had growing up that is so important, that helps you understand some of the ways that you became.

And, you know, it's important to name things.

And on the other end, there is something about just living in that language that sometimes can put people into boxes, that sometimes gives people who have zero understanding about diagnosis, you know, a kind of a power-- a TikTok power-- to talk about things that, really, other people have learned about for decades.

Mm-hmm.

There's a flippancy.

A field like mental health, a reality, it comes with a vocabulary, a language.

Language is power.

It defines, it helps to describe what you see, but it also defines it through the very words that are being used.

It's also highly individualistic.

It puts the responsibility on the individual rather than looking at things systemically, you know.

And that's when I say some of the mental health is mental health, but some of it is actually a rather healthy response to an unhealthy society.

And people don't have access to health care.

People don't have the privilege or the money, the access to afford therapy, you know, to think about how they feel.

They're trying to survive.

And I just think that, you know, that's such a important piece of this puzzle because that is happening everywhere, and it's continuing, and you see the wage disparity in this country and in this city.

And also how the physical and the mental intersect.

Yes, yes.

Like, how a physical state can affect your emotions and how your emotions can affect your physical state...

Yes.

And if you're stressed because you're going from 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning to take care of someone and then you arrived late at work and then you had to deal with the stress of work because you were late and, Ohh... and then you come home and you're not the most patient person, and then you certainly don't want to be intimate with your partner.

When you're not getting sleep and then that's playing into-- Esther: This is what we talk about in terms of relational health.

It's not just to, How much do we communicate nicely to each other?

And how does that intersect with obesity, with sleep, with food, with all the ten other chapters... Of this conversation.

of this series?

Yeah.

Thanks, guys.

You want to do it again next week?

Like, this is like therapy with Esther.

What could be better than this?

Katie: I know!

Timothy: I was just thinking that.

Like, this is my group.

Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Esther, Katie, and Tim.

Number 1-- The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives; number 2-- Knowing that you exist within another matters; number 3--Be on the lookout for the other A.I.

: artificial intimacy; number 4--We need friction; number 5--In this social media environment, you can have a thousand virtual friends but no one to watch your cat; number 6--Ritual works; number 7--Tune in to fundamental attribution error and confirmation bias; and, finally, number 8-- Certainty is the enemy of change and change equals growth.

If you'd like us to send you this list, just send an email to PBS@kellycorrigan.com.

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