Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's like with so many other areas of life, we need to love ourselves first. We need to simply make the decision that we're going to practice loving ourselves. That winds up making everything else easier because we're not holding a stick over our head the entire time, threatening ourselves.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: I'm Diana Earley, and I've spent most of my life learning firsthand what privilege actually costs.
The legacy control, the family expectations, the guilt of feeling trapped in a life everyone thinks you should be grateful for. If you've ever wondered why having everything still feels like something's missing, you're in the right place.
Welcome to Pressures of Privilege.
My guest today is Anna Holtzman, a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. Before therapy, she spent 3:15 years in publishing and television, a reality TV editor at MTV until debilitating migraines set her toward mind body healing and a whole new career. In her 40s, she's trained in somatic experiencing, internal family systems and pain reprocessing therapy, and she hosts the podcast how to Trust Yourself.
Anna wrote an essay that stopped me in my tracks. It's about wealth, but it's really about the quiet belief that some part of us has to earn the right to belong.
And you don't have to be a billionaire to feel this. If your parents paid your college tuition, you're an inheritor. A lot of us who got a leg up carry secret doubts. Do my wins even count?
Anna knows this question from the inside. Anna, welcome.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Diana. Thank you so much for having me here. And it's a real pleasure to get to chat with you again and to chat with your audience.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: I love that essay that you wrote. You kept your family's wealth private for most of your life, even in your own therapy.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Yes, yes, even in my own therapy. As a client, in other words. Yeah.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Not because you were ashamed of where you came from, but something else. Can you walk us through what that something else was?
[00:02:06] Speaker A: Yeah, and you know, what I'll say is that I'm a therapist, as you've named, and as such, I've done a lot of self examination and unpacking of internal stories, but it's really only been quite recently that I've become more conscious of this and have been talking to other people about it.
And it's sort of this conscious but unconscious, like underneath the skin, low grade, steady status quo, holding something in.
And it's not. Not always overt.
[00:02:46] Speaker B: Right.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: It's not always up on the surface, but it's just kind of this innate retraction in anticipation of other people's judgment. And as odd as it might sound, in anticipation of being othered and made to feel like I don't belong because of the privileges that I was born into.
It's an. It can be an embarrassing thing to talk about because, you know, my immune, my, even my mind goes immediately to, oh, poor little you. What a problem to have. Right? And therein lies the reason of.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: For holding back that need to belong. I mean, is such an innate drive in us.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And, you know, I. Even when I think about it now, you know, there's this term code switching, which is often talked about when we're trying to fit in with, you know, we're trying to step up in society and fit in that way.
But when you feel that the privilege in your background sets you apart from other people in your social professional communities, there is this unconscious code switching that happens because as human beings, we all. We all want to fit in and belong. That's one of our deepest desires.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: So what does that code switching look like?
[00:04:11] Speaker A: You know, I would say it. It can look a lot of different ways. Sometimes it can look like simply not naming something.
You know, for example, you talked about having your college tuition paid for, which is something that I was fortunate to experience.
And in conversations with peers, when people are talking about their financial aid packages and how they worked through college, my code switching could simply look like smiling and nodding as if I relate to what people are talking about because I feel that, you know, I don't want to be seen as different.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Because you, you write that you feared being judged for having privilege and that admitting the fear felt even more embarrassing than the privilege itself.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And I mean, we. There's the phrase, right? Poor little rich girl.
It's a saying. And it's understandable to me why many people would not have empathy for problems that are specifically associated with wealth or privilege.
It's not that I don't get it, but because I get it. There's this, you know, just innate instinct to not talk about those problems unless, you know, you're talking with someone who shares the experience and has the capacity to be empathetic toward it.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: I mean, it's. It's like now there's. When people talk about rich, they talk about, you know, it's like they. They really talk about billionaires. But then it's also lumping in together people who aren't billionaires. And not to say that we should feel any worse about billionaires, but there's.
I. What I'm trying to say is we don't have to be ultra wealthy to. To carry this fear.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, there's such a wealth divide in the world at this moment that we're all walking around having these vastly different experiences, even if we're not billionaires per se.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: So the fear that's so hard to say out loud is about this. Like, I don't want to be this poor little rich girl because people will say that. I mean, I've experienced.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Right. It's like the layers of fear. It's that I don't want to be seen as privileged. I'm impriviled. It carries this really negative connotation to it. I don't want to be seen as, you know, all of these projections that can come with someone finding out that you have some amount of generational wealth, like you're a snob, or you never work hard for anything, or you're lazy or, you know, just on and on and on, or you're just a bad person. Right. There's. There's that stereotype as well. And then the next layer of shame or wanting to hide on. On top of that is, well, if I say it, it really feels uncomfortable to have these projections thrown at me, then I'm not going to get sympathy for that because it's a rich person's problem, so to speak.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: I spent some time in Germany when I was in my early 20s and actually when I was 18.
And I do. I remember there was this collective guilt around World War II, even though, you know, my friends, I have no idea if their parents were Nazis or not, but they.
There was this collective guilt in society that the Germans had participated in what the Nazis did in some way, either by being quiet or by not being curious enough about what was going on in their neighborhoods.
And I still think that it's happening today that that collective guilt has continued. I was thinking about how the, you know, how that collective feeling can affect a society and cause people to do things out of guilt or out of shame or out of some other uncomfortable feeling.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: You know, it's interesting to me that you mentioned that, and this might bring us on a little bit of a tangent, but my. My family's Jewish, and I think I shared with you, my grandparents are Holocaust survivors.
And there's this, you know, feeling of otherness and separateness that can come with that experience.
I came across a book several years ago written by a woman named Nora Krug. She's my age, so I'm 49 now, and she's of German descent and. And her grandparents participated in the Nazi activities.
And she wrote a book about her experience, and it's called Belonging.
Yes. Yeah, and I got chills, actually, even just saying the name of the book again. It's called Belonging, and it's about this feeling of not really ever being able to go home again, because what home was doesn't exist anymore. What was so fascinating to me is that she comes from kind of like the opposite half of that Holocaust experience.
But I related to her emotional story maybe more than I've related to any story by. Written by a Jewish second generation survivor, or I'm the third generation.
So, yeah, it was interesting how we shared this kind of like, fractured sense of blood. Belonging. Yes.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: It's almost like, you know, people inherit wealth, but they also inherit, like, their. The culture and the history of their ancestors in a weird way.
[00:09:45] Speaker A: And all this stuff that can't be spoken because there's. There's shame. There's shame around the trauma that the survivors experience. There's shame around the. The perpetration. It just. Just shame all around.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: I have one child who's very much ashamed of being a white person who was a descendant of a colonizer. Like, even though I can say to her, look, Roger Williams was our ancestor, and he actually, like, wrote down the Wampanoag language, like, and created a dictionary so that we could communicate with them. And he advocated for them even after they, you know, there was a betrayal at the end of the story where they turned on him and tried to kill him. But does it. She does. She doesn't even want to hear that. She's like, no, we're colonizers and we're bad. And that sort of leads to this whole idea of goodism that you've referred to in some of your writing that.
What is it?
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'll go into that in a. In a second. But I just wanted to. To respond to what you're sharing, because what comes to my mind is that shame, I think. I mean, there are lots of different ways to describe what shame is. I think of shame as of fear of being cast out of the collective.
And that is the deepest fear that a human being can have.
And fear puts us into tunnel vision, right? When our nervous system is in fear, we go into tunnel vision. We go into black and white thinking all or nothing, thinking.
We don't have any capacity to take in nuance.
So it makes sense to me that, you know, not only your. Your daughter, but this is very common in. In the world at Large right now. You know, it's, it's this or that. I think that comes into conversations about wealth too. That wealth is categorically evil or, you know, or it's the thing, you know, that you should devote all of your energy toward achieving.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's the one, it's, it's strange how people demonize it on one side and then, and then they're just obsessed with studying it, following it on social media and.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think that's common for subjects that have become taboo for whatever reason and they're shrouded in fear. I often compare it to sex. You know, it's like you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. You're a loser if you don't have sex, if, but you're a slut if you do that. All of these impossible extremes that you get caught between.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: So going back to the German example, so the sense of belonging, if you don't belong, then you're bad. Right.
And, and yeah, there was growing up in Switzerland because of the World War II experience that was still pretty fresh. They had sort of a prejudice against the Germans.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: Yes. It becomes this like a conditioned response.
I like in mind body therapy we talk about a conditioned response. Like a, if you've ever been stung by a bee, your, your whole body will flinch when you see a bee.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Tell me about Sarno and goodism and
[00:12:59] Speaker A: what is it you had mentioned that? I, I, I've had a healing journey from chronic pain. When I was in my early 40s, I'd been experiencing migraine attacks throughout my career in television, which is not a coincidence. I experienced my very first migraine attack literally on my first day as an editor on a reality TV show. And it was an extremely stressful, you know, high stakes day. I was really wanting to make a good impression and get my foot in the door in this career. And I just got really overwhelmed and filled with anxiety and I wound up having this searing headache, which I had never experienced anything like that before.
Um, but anyway, throughout the years I, they steadily became more frequent until they eventually became chronic and really took over my life to the point where I was having to excuse myself from any activities up to three times a week. And you know, my kind of felt like my life was falling apart. So I went to Google, as one does, and it was looking for solutions and it was already predisposed to taking the emotional route, the therapeutic route. And I came across this whole body of work of mind body medicine for chronic pain. Recovery, all of it kind of descending from this guy named Dr. John Sarno, who wrote a book called Healing Back Pain. And subsequently he wrote a whole bunch of other books about the mind body connection.
And he was a physician, a medical doctor who treated chronic pain through a mind body lens, which was very anachronistic during his time and still even now.
And something that he noticed was a through thread among all of his patients is that they all exhibited a trait that he described as goodism, which essentially means like, they really wanted to be a good person and to be perceived as a good person. So a term that we're more familiar with in pop culture these days might be people pleasing and people who want to see themselves as always doing the right thing. There's a perfectionism that goes along with it.
And when your life is devoted to being good and to pleasing others and doing the right thing and getting everything perfectly, there's an erasure of your own needs, your own feelings, your own, like, spirit and personality. That happens because you're always trying to twist yourself into a pretzel to be pleasing to others.
And that's a metaphor, of course, but it's a pretty good metaphor for what happens in the nervous system and in the body, that things get very tight and twisted and compressed and held in.
And that creates an atmosphere in which the nervous system is feeling like it's in a constant state of not being safe.
And when the nervous system feels unsafe, one of the things it will do is to send out pain signals as an alarm.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: That explains it. I have some friends with chronic pain.
This could help them a lot.
So what's the answer then?
[00:16:38] Speaker A: I can share through the story of my own recovery, which is, everyone's path looks a bit different, but there's some archetypal elements of the journey.
And I would say that my own path started with psychoeducation.
So it was really reading and consuming and listening to things like the work of Dr. John Sarno. But then there are more contemporary people who've translated his work into more everyday language.
But it was really coming to a new conceptualization of what pain is. That was the initial shift for me. So shifting from viewing pain as a signal that, oh, there's something terribly wrong with me, to seeing it as, oh, my nervous system feels unsafe right now. What's going on? And how can I help my nervous system feel more safe? Is there something that's physically wrong with my body, or is there maybe a relationship in my life that is feeling unsafe?
And how can I find more safety? In my relational life, in my relationship with myself too. As I started to understand pain differently, my fear started to come down, and with it, the pain started to soften a little bit.
But the next phase, which was
[00:18:07] Speaker B: a
[00:18:07] Speaker A: much more in depth and very impactful phase, was learning how to really feel my feelings. I had been talking about my feelings in therapy for over 10 years at that point.
But what I came to understand is that I hadn't fully allowed my feelings to move through my body.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: And
[00:18:30] Speaker A: I realized in order to allow my feelings to move through and release, I needed to empathize with my own feelings.
I needed to validate my feelings the way that, you know, I always wished my parents would, but they never fully could.
I had to do that for myself. And I didn't realize that I hadn't been doing that, that I'd been placing conditions on relationships, whether I deserved to have my feelings validated. So I needed to let that go completely and just fully empathize with myself and validate my own emotions.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: I didn't know what validation meant. Like, as a parent, like, I had to learn that in the last two years.
I always thought validation meant agreeing with somebody.
And I've now since learned that validation doesn't mean I agree with what my kid is saying. It just means, oh, I can see that you're really angry because I won't give you what you want. It doesn't mean that you're right, like, you should get what you want. It's. No, I can see that you're angry because you really want this thing that I'm not giving you. I can see it.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Well, I totally relate to that. And the way that I describe it for myself is I had had stories and emotions were enmeshed in my understanding previous to this work. So I thought that in order to validate the emotion, you had to validate the story that went with it. You know, in order to validate the emotional pain, you had to say, yes, it's true, your. Your parents were terrible people that screwed you up in this, that and the other way, you know, and they're wrong and you're right, and therefore your emotions are valid.
But what I came to understand is that the story and the emotion are two completely different things. So you actually don't have to deal with the story at all. You could say, okay, that's the story. But what I'm interested in right now is what is the emotion? You feel sad.
I feel so much love and compassion for your sadness. You feel angry.
Let your anger come just Lay on my shoulder and let me love it. Know, just loving the emotions, which is like, you know, loving a child who feels like a baby, who feels sad or angry, who doesn't have a story attached to it yet, or loving a cat or a dog that feels these emotions and grief.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: I was just thinking, you know, I lost my father when I was five, I think. I don't really remember crying maybe beginning. I maybe cried a night or two, but. But then I was told that I was given medication to sleep at night.
And because, you know, and having been a parent, I had a kid who would cry, too. And when you're at the end of the day, you spend an hour, you know, giving them a bath, reading them stories, you know, saying prayers, getting them ready for bed, and then they won't go to bed. It's infuriating.
And I can totally understand why my parents or my mother, you know, gave me medication to sleep at night, but the consequence was I never processed the grief of my father.
And so by the time I was 43 and I was six years sober from substances, but still incredibly dysregulated, I finally did a trauma workshop where I cried so much that my shirt was wet and.
And it was like, whoa, where did that come from? And it was incredibly therapeutic because I, like, I just felt my body releasing a bunch of tension.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: I really can relate to your story, and the details of my story are different, but when I was in college, I had a sexual experience that was traumatic.
And that experience also brought up unprocessed emotions from earlier sexual memories from childhood.
And there was. You know, this was the 1990s. There was nobody to talk to about this stuff.
Talking about anything having to do with sex was not modeled for me at home.
I was sent to a therapist, but I. Because I.
After this. This traumatic experience in college, I fell into a very deep depression.
And so I was sent to the school therapist. I think.
I don't really remember what, if anything, I really disclosed or even if I was able to make the connection between that experience and the emotions that I was having or the depression.
But my mom was so worried about me, and she really insisted that I be put on Prozac, which I didn't want to take.
But I think that she. You know, it was so distressing for her to see me going through what I was going through, and she couldn't. She didn't know how to deal with it or what to do about it.
And, yeah, I felt that the.
It was with good intentions, but my experience was that the drugs were trying to make me more convenient to be around.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: And kids need to sleep. You know, if you don't sleep, you'll die. I think faster without sleep than without food. Right.
It's so important that kids sleep. So I totally get it. But the whole practice of grieving, I think they have a wailing wall in Jerusalem. I always wondered if that had anything to do with grieving.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: I actually don't know. I. Yeah, I don't know.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: And they have the old practices of, you know, you wear black for a year and you don't.
I think that, you know, the sort of like when you're in mourning, you don't throw a party for a year after the death of someone. And they had all these traditions to ought to honor the dead, but also to allow people to grieve.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. There's a reason why funerals exist and these mourning rituals because we need support for our, to feel our feelings. We need to feel supported in doing
[00:24:45] Speaker B: that and not to be judged for having those feelings. Right.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Which is very rare.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: It is rare. Like my last podcast guest was talking about boys and how they're taught to not cry and that, you know, don't be a sissy, don't cry.
So if society is sending the message that you're a sissy, if you cry, then why would you cry? Even even though you're going through immense grief?
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
And you know, I, I'm someone who cries very easily, but I tend to, or have tended to cry alone. You know, there's this. Even as, as a woman who wasn't brought up with those man up messages, there's this sense that there's something embarrassing about crying in front of other people. It's not something we're socialized to see as normal.
[00:25:38] Speaker B: I think, you know, at the funeral of a good friend of mine, her husband spoke and the whole family was like, oh, he didn't cry. He did so well.
I'm like, no, actually, that's just.
I don't think that was good. Like, he didn't. He modeled very unhealthy behavior, in my opinion.
I don't know, maybe it's a. Yeah, I can sort of see that. I mean, I think if he had cried while he had spoken about his wife, everybody would have.
It would have been an expression of how we all felt.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Right. It gives permission to everyone else to feel their, their feelings too.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: Instead of like, oh, it's really good to hold it in.
This leads me to. I was thinking about the cat, your cats and how you a practice about unconditional worth and how you turned it into an actual healing practice for yourself.
Yes.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: So while I was in the process of recovering from migraines, there were many different phases and stages of it. And one of those stages was about self compassion, was about realizing that unconsciously I was just so used to yelling at myself in my own head. You know, like I, I noticed one day that I would. There was a period of time I was waking up with a low grade headache nearly every morning.
And one of those mornings I said to myself, I'm just gonna stay in bed and have a conversation with myself until I figure out what's really going on here. So I said, what? Like we. There's always chatter going on in my mind. Like what is the chatter saying the moment that I wake up?
And the answer that I got was, oh, you didn't finish that email yesterday. You didn't clean the, that part of the kitchen yesterday. You didn't do that. You didn't. All these things you didn't get done yesterday was what I was waking up saying to myself.
And that equated to, you're not a good person, you failed, you screwed up.
So I thought, of course I'm waking up with a headache, I'm waking up yelling at myself. This is stressing out my nervous system.
And so that led me to many different types of self compassion practices. And one of them was something called mirror gazing, which I think I might have learned that from a book by Louise Hay.
She, she talks a lot about affirmations. I think I also got mirror gazing from her. So mirror gazing is like looking at yourself in the mirror and trying to look through kind eyes, which was very, very difficult for me as it, it is for many people.
But I got an idea one day that really helped me. I've my husband and I have three cats whom I adore. And it's just completely unfettered, unconditional love. I mean, they could scratch me bloody, which they have, and I still just love the crap out of them.
And I realized, wow, it doesn't matter if they didn't get their chores done yesterday, they don't have to earn my love by being nice or doing good.
So what if I looked at my, one of my cats, notice what, how I'm looking at them, what it feels like, what my physiology is like when I'm looking at them, the quality of my gaze, and then pick up the mirror and turn that type of gaze onto myself, which again takes a lot of practice.
But it was A really helpful exercise. And as my gaze started to soften, my neck started to soften, my head tension started to soften, my breath started to soften. And it just had this ripple effect of softening everything up.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: I've actually practiced looking at my dog now.
Oh, he's so sweet. And I just. Oh, I just love him. And he's so wonderful.
And then I try to shift that to myself, and it. It goes away.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: It takes a lot of practice. And sometimes it's just, you know, for. For a split second.
But part of it also is just noticing the difference. Like, it's not. We don't look at our pets with mere acceptance. Like, fine, so you didn't do the dishes. Like, I still love you. No, it's like, I adore you. I can't get enough of you. It's like, wow, how different is that from the way that I'm looking at myself and what's going on, going on there?
[00:30:31] Speaker B: Just over breakfast, that was with my family, we were talking about, why do boy like fathers and daughters and mothers and sons. Why is there such a bond? And I have a little theory about that. I don't know if there's any literature behind it, which is that if one can't. If you can't see the. Like, if I can't see the little girl inside of me and feel that empathy and that unconditional love for that little girl inside of me, how can I feel that for my daughter?
I'm gonna see it for my son because he's very different from me.
Like, when I read the Kite Runner, I felt. I was really disturbed by that. The little boy, what happened in that story. But then I read A Thousand Splendid Sons by the Same, and it's about a girl going through horrific abuse.
I felt empathy for her, but I was like, okay, she's tough. She can. She can deal with it. But with the little boy, I was like, oh, no.
You know, like, I just felt, like, just this incredible grief. And. And I don't know what it is, but I'm wondering if it has something to do with that, that we're able to see our.
Our. The opposite sexes. Vulnerability and their un. Their. Their value. But our own sex, we may not be able to see it.
[00:31:48] Speaker A: You know, I. As with everything, I think there's no one size fits all, and we're all different. Cause I. I kind of have the opposite experience in a way.
Um, I tend to feel more empathy for stories about young women, although I have certainly empathy for both. But what I heard in the way that you told that is it sounded like those are your own self protective mechanisms of like, oh, it's fine, not such a big deal as a way to protect yourself.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: I'm a minimizer for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a, I had a school psychologist. I went to him and I started to open up about the pain I was feeling. I was like, ah, you're just going, you're just, you're just going through your period.
He totally minimized. I was like, oh, okay, all right.
Jerk, right? I was like, all right, maybe he's right.
It's just hormones.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: I had again, my very loving and well meaning mother ascribe my depression to maybe it's a vitamin D deficiency.
And in a family therapy session that we finally had when I was already in my late 30s, I think the family therapist said to her, we're not going to do that in here. All emotions are allowed in this room. And I was like, whoa, this is different.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: So now you've been able to see your unconditional worth by practicing looking at yourself.
[00:33:09] Speaker A: It's gotten more, more easy. That doesn't mean that I don't have to. It's an ongoing practice, right? It's, it's like exercise. It's. If you go to the gym a few times, you're not going to be in shape then for the rest of your life. So the, this self compassion exercise is a practice and I drift away from it and then I come back to it again. I drift away and then I'm like, oh, I'm getting a lot of headaches lately. What's going on? Let me come back to these practices.
And lately I've really been tying it together as I did in that essay you read, with the topic of wealth shame, specifically like internalized wealth shame or privilege guilt.
And I've been thinking about the cats too.
Thinking like I've just accepted this assumption for so many years that, well, of course if you have any kind of financial advantage, you're going to feel guilty about it and other people will resent you and yada yada, yada.
But then I thought, I don't see a cat living in a, in an expensive home and think, ugh, that lazy cat's got it so much easier than the stray cats in our neighborhood. Like, I don't see them any differently because they're the same creatures and they have different life experiences, but they also have the same set range of emotions and sensations and tenderness.
[00:34:41] Speaker B: So your, the migraines help teach you the link between how we treat ourselves and what our bodies do.
[00:34:46] Speaker A: Yes. In such a visceral way in. In such a life transforming way that as.
As strange as it might sound, I am grateful for the migraines, even though, don't get me wrong, they are miserable and I don't wish them on anyone, but they were such a teacher for me.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: You also wrote in your piece that on October 7th, that was the litmus test, right, that you suddenly faced in your. In your progressive circles, and you say that's when you. It finally revealed your blind spot around wealth.
[00:35:20] Speaker A: Yes, it did. That was in addition to, like the thinking about cats.
This was something that really woke me up to my own internalized wealthism.
Because after October 7th, I have long identified as politically progressive and I'm also a therapist, and that field tends to be very politically progressive predictions, particularly in New York City, where I live. So my whole, you know, little bubble that I move around the world in is very progressive. And when the attack on Israel on October 7 happened, and as someone who's Jewish and has family in Israel and had friends of family members and, and family members of friends as well who were affected by those attacks, it was, of course, a very upsetting event.
And immediately I saw on social media many of you know, the friends who. Or maybe, maybe not so much close friends, but people I knew and knew of who identify as social justice activists and progressives saying just such dehumanizing things, not about the Israeli army, but about the victims of this attack. And it was so destabilizing and derailing.
And then I had a personal experience with a former therapy client of mine who emailed me out of the blue, this, like, diatribe about how they thought that I, you know, was someone who understood social justice and that's why they were attracted to work with me. But now, because I have not denounced any association with Israel on Instagram publicly for all to see, now they know, like, I'm basically one of the bad ones, you know, not a good Jew, but a bad Jew. And it was that I had not experienced anything like that within my lifetime. I knew that my grandparents had experienced bias to, you know, the most extreme, but I had not experienced that. And it was.
I mean, it really threw me off balance for a long time. But what I came out of that with was this realization that, speaking of goodism, I could twist myself into the most convoluted pretzel trying to present myself to the world as a good person.
And there are going to be people who project the craziest crap onto me anyway, based on my ethnic background, you know, there's nothing I can do about that. And when I had, you know, it's like, you know, these things intellectually, but then experiencing them viscerally brings that understanding in on a whole new level.
And I realized, gee, I've been kind of doing that to myself in a way when it comes to wealth and the privilege of, you know, of inheritance, I've been judging myself as someone who needs to prove my worth or to prove that I'm a good one more so than someone who doesn't come from financial privilege.
And that doesn't actually make sense now that I'm looking at it through this lens.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm not Jewish, but I felt an incredible amount of pain following October 7, reading some of the, those comments online. And I, you know, I'm, I being a woman and in having friends who have family in Israel and who confirm that the atrocities against women on that day were actually true, a lot of, there's a lot of sort of like denial about what actually happened that day. And I do know that it's true because a friend of mine has documenting all the atrocities and they are true.
And you know, having been being a survivor of sexual abuse as a kid, I, I, I, that just triggers me to no end that people woke up on that morning at six in the morning to be, you know, abused in that way and to be killed. I mean, that just, it's horrific. And, and I, I think there's no excuse for that, absolutely no excuse for that.
And I think we cannot minimize what happened on that day. And I think there's a lot of minimization going on in society saying they're justifying it for whatever reason they have. There's no justification for what happened on that day, period.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: There's a lot going on in the world for humans to be understandably upset about, outraged about. There's a lot of inequality and you know, speaking about Israel, Palestine, a power imbalance in that region.
Right. That I understand why people would be upset about that.
And a very human response to feeling distraught is to project all of that pain onto one group and make them responsible for all of your pain. I mean, it's easier to do that than to deal with it.
So when, when that former client sent the email to me, I felt like I was being, you know, thrown like a hot potato of this person's grief that they were just projecting onto me because of what I, for whatever reason signified to them.
And I could feel that it wasn't okay and it didn't make sense and it wasn't right.
And that's what clicked for me, that, yeah, I understand why someone who hasn't grown up with financial privilege would feel resentment towards someone who has.
I get that.
And to, to actually project that on someone and tell them they're a bad person, you know, because they grew up with wealth, which, which happens. And it's not something that everyone does, but it's something that does occur in the world.
And that doesn't mean that it's correct. That doesn't mean that it's right. It's just a human behavior of projection.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: So going back to the whole sort of belonging topic, like who am I when I no longer have to earn my right to belong.
[00:42:28] Speaker A: Yes. I think this is a lifelong question for any of us to pursue because we do need to belong.
We need that sense that we belong somewhere. We don't need to belong with all people and in all spaces in order to feel connected.
We, you know, sometimes we just need a tiny little community of people to belong with. But we do have that need.
So it's an ongoing project, I think, to experiment with ourselves and experiment with unconditional self acceptance to create these little spaces of safety in which we can explore who we are when we're not trying to people please and shapeshift that
[00:43:19] Speaker B: people pleasing, shape shifting, like the fawning, trying to stroke the abuser so he won't hurt me anymore. That I totally get that. I guess what it does is it erases one, doesn't it?
[00:43:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it erases your own innate personality, your needs, your emotions, your authentic expression. You're trying to cover that up and mask in order to be palatable to someone.
[00:43:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So what happens to that person who's masking, trying to make themselves palatable all the time, what happens to the inside of someone?
[00:43:54] Speaker A: Oftentimes chronic pain. That can be one of the manifestations and you know, also just a losing touch with ourselves.
I've heard from many of the clients that I work with, you know, I don't like if I had time just for myself and if someone asked me what I, what I want to do just to please myself, I don't even know anymore.
I don't know what makes me happy anymore. Because there's so much habitual shape shifting that we can lose touch with what our innate desires are. And it can take a while and a lot of safety creation in order for those things to emerge again.
And one of the ways that we can create that safety is through safe relationships, through finding those people who don't want us to turn ourselves into something else, who, who actually resonate with who we are. And it's, that's the reason why I reached out to you because I had heard you say something on a podcast that I really related to and I hadn't heard anyone else talk about before.
And I thought, oh, I want to speak with this person who I can talk freely about this particular, particular experience with. It was you. You had talked about working with a client of wealth and then chatting about the case with someone else, a therapist, I believe who, the way I remember it is they kind of rolled their eyes at, you know, rich, per. Rich people's problems and maybe didn't show empathy and that something incredibly similar had happened to me when I had spoken with my then supervisor when I was, I'm still getting my license about a client I was working with who was navigating dynamics, family dynamics that are particular to being part of a family of generational wealth. And you know, I was working with this client on these issues as a therapist through an empathetic frame. And my supervisor did something very similar, you know, the eye rolling, the rich people.
And I just felt so protective of that client in that moment.
I thought, gosh, I'm really glad this person, this person's working with me and not with this supervisor because that would not be a safe relationship for them.
And then I also internally felt protective of myself because I knew that, you know, I grew up with particular advantages that might be included in what this, this supervisor was being so dismissive of.
And there, yeah, I really like retracted in that relationship.
[00:46:57] Speaker B: Well, I always think that if somebody has a rich person problem, it means that there, that's actually just the tip of the iceberg.
There's usually something going on underneath that's not superficial, but they just aren't used to talking about, it's too painful to talk about and just don't trust they live in isolation and they are not going to open up easily.
[00:47:21] Speaker A: I mean, wealth is simply a context, right? We're all inhabiting various contexts and then experiencing human problems within those contexts. And sometimes those problems are shaped by the context, but the problem is a human issue.
[00:47:40] Speaker B: I mean, Paul Hochmeier, I don't know if you're familiar with him.
[00:47:43] Speaker A: I, I was introduced to him on your podcast as well and then yeah, reached out to him.
[00:47:48] Speaker B: He has the, the three markers for, for wealthy, powerful people, Isolation, distrust. But then the hyper agency, which is probably why people don't feel the empathy because somebody can pay off the, you know, pay up, pay off the use lawyers to get out of the consequences of their problems.
But what that leads to is never learning from the mistake. And then, then it creates even bigger problems down the road. And then it just sort of snowballs into bigger and bigger and bigger problems until the problems are so big, they're not just rich person problems anymore. They become like existential problems.
[00:48:24] Speaker A: And by the way, there are many other ways of shielding ourselves temporarily from problems that don't have to do with wealth. For example, substances is a way to avoid dealing with an emotional problem. Right. That protection only lasts so long and it breaks down somewhere along the way.
[00:48:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Eventually it stops working.
And he found a big correlation between the sort of underprivileged population he worked with in California and the super rich in New York. They, he actually found more similarities between those two extremes.
[00:49:01] Speaker A: I thought that was so fascinating. I read his book book and chatted with him a bit. And it did make sense to me because both groups are outliers and therefore othered from, I guess, mainstream society. They're living on different fringes.
[00:49:21] Speaker B: And also we're thinking Janis Doplin song. You know, freedom is having nothing to lose.
So if freedom is having everything and you can sort of like use your money to have freedom, then the converse is, I have nothing to lose. I can do whatever I want. Like, like, who cares?
That's also a scary place to be because I, you know, I have a very good friend who's, who's kind of lives above the poverty line. And he has absolutely no commitments. And his only commitment is living in Costa Rica on a beach, taking care of people's dogs. And he has no, that's the only commitment. And even that, you know, he, he, he travels with a backpack. That's it.
And I sometimes find, oh, that looks so attractive, that kind of a life. But then I always wonder, well, he's on Tinder all day long and doesn't really have close relationships, which I think he really would like to have.
And so he sort of, he's very like, like has bravado about it, but I think deep down inside he would love a loving relationship. And because of the way he's living, that sort of like, freedom is having nothing to lose.
I think he's missing out.
[00:50:30] Speaker A: There are studies that show that folks living in a context of extreme wealth do find it difficult to form intimate, safe, stable relationships because they're, you know, their experience is so different oftentimes from the partners that they connect with. And the same is true on the other end of the spectrum.
[00:50:58] Speaker B: So belonging.
A lot of people are going to hear this and realize that they've been quietly earning their whole lives. Their whole lives.
[00:51:07] Speaker A: It's so insidious. And I keep discovering new layers of it popping up in my, in my own internal world. I work with a life coach that I see every other week and I feel like every session with her is another iteration of, oh, gosh, look how I'm being hard on myself. Look how I'm placing conditions on my self acceptance. You know, I kind of healed it in this one area and then it migrated to this other sneaky place in my life and it needs to be unpacked again.
[00:51:41] Speaker B: Well, it even, it's more than just the, I think the inheritors. I mean, I've been reading Rich Roll. I don't know if you know who he is listening.
[00:51:49] Speaker A: I put the name, but I don't know.
[00:51:50] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's Guy Williamson. And there's a topic going on about the sort of achievement, this drive for achievement. Even people who achieve certain levels of success, they can't stop.
[00:52:00] Speaker A: Yes, yes. It's the never enoughness.
[00:52:03] Speaker B: It's a never enough. And it's, it's not just inheritors feeling not enough even though they have the money. It's also people who've earned it. They can't stop.
[00:52:11] Speaker A: Yeah, there's this illusion that if I only achieve enough, I will finally be able to validate and accept myself and feel good about myself.
And that's a nice fantasy, but in my experience, it's not true because the bar is always going to shift.
And, you know, it's like with so many other areas of life, we need to love ourselves first. We need to simply make the decision that we're going to practice loving ourselves.
And that winds up making everything else easier.
It makes it easier to achieve the things that we want to achieve because we're not holding a stick over our head the entire time threatening ourselves. It makes it easier to connect with another person in a healthy, loving relationship.
Because when you're constantly telling yourself that you won't be lovable until that other person validates you, you know, it starts off in an inherently unhealthy place. So we're, we're always trying to put the cart before the horse in order to get out of the work of practicing loving ourselves.
[00:53:25] Speaker B: You know, I had another friend of mine who's a therapist. I tend to have a lot of therapist friends. She said to me When I was saying I was going through this terrible breakup and I said, I've got to learn to love myself, I've got to learn to love myself. She's like, Diana, it's really hard for somebody to love themselves if they don't feel love from somebody else. And I, I don't know, I just feel like in a way she's right. Because in the rooms, the 12 step rooms, I've often heard we're going to love you until you learn to love yourself.
And I love that coming from a group rather than one person. Once you learn to love yourself, I guess that's the validation of the self.
[00:54:01] Speaker A: And think of those as two different things. Like the group loving you until you learn to love yourself is.
It's a group or a mentor or you know, in some cases a parent. For most people it's more likely a group or a therapist or a friend modeling that for you.
Which is a different thing from trying to earn the love of, you know, a romantic prospect order to then earn your own self love. It's having that unconditional love modeled for you.
Yeah.
[00:54:37] Speaker B: For just showing up to a meeting. There you are. I love you, you know, like the
[00:54:41] Speaker A: cat or the dog. I love you because you exist. Which actually makes me want to just exhale those words. And here's something that really surprised me and I still think is kind of funny about the self love practices that help me recover from migraine. But one of the, the most impactful ones, which we didn't even talk about was journaling.
I would journal the. I did this like dialogue style of journaling where I would just let my feelings spill out onto the page and then I would reply to my feelings with compassion and love, just unbridled love.
And, and what I discovered is that on some days I didn't really feel connected to the words of love as I was writing them. You know, I sort of had to fake it until I made it type of thing like I love you, I like I believe you, I understand you.
So I could write those words without really feeling fully connected to saying them. But once they were on the page, the experience of receiving those words felt like such a relief, even though they were coming from me.
[00:55:55] Speaker B: That's so nice. I'm. I'm a big journaler too. And I just finished reading rereading PM Melody's book Facing Codependency.
And in there she talks about feelings, thoughts, how's the body and behavior and looking at those every day and I guess validating them.
Now I write those four words at the top of the page. And I ask myself, okay, what am I feeling? Sometimes I don't know. So then I have to go into the body. Okay, I feel tension in my stomach. Oh, I wonder if that's. Am I feeling guilty about something like it. Just like I kind of, I now know where emotions are supposed to be in the body or where they generally are felt. And, and then I get into the thoughts and then, oh, how did that behave yesterday? And, and then all of a sudden some new emotions come up and then I just write it all out and it's, it's very, very cathartic.
[00:56:49] Speaker A: And it's a trust building process because when you build in a habit of checking in with yourself, acknowledging your feelings, empathizing with them, that's a trustworthy relationship and you come to expect that acknowledgement. So the system moves out of that embracing, you know, fearing the, the lecture that you're going to get from yourself and softens into just expecting the love.
[00:57:20] Speaker B: Oh, on that note, that's beautiful.
So people can find you because you're. You also work as a coach besides being a therapist for people in the state of. The state of New York.
[00:57:30] Speaker A: Yes, for folks outside the state of New York. I do offer coaching.
And yeah, folks can find me at anaholtzman. Com.
[00:57:40] Speaker B: And you have a podcast, how to Trust Yourself.
[00:57:42] Speaker A: I do have a podcast called how to Trust Yourself and I sometimes hang out on Instagram less these days, but I am there sometimes at annaholzman.
[00:57:53] Speaker B: Your clients are lucky to have you.
[00:57:55] Speaker A: I feel so lucky to be here chatting with you, Diana. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:58:00] Speaker B: You're welcome. Thanks for coming on.
If this episode landed for you, share it with someone who might need to hear it.
[00:58:10] Speaker A: And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming.
[00:58:14] Speaker B: But here's the real thing.
[00:58:15] Speaker A: I want you to know if you're
[00:58:17] Speaker B: carrying something you can't talk about, if you have every resource except someone who actually understands what wealth costs. I work one on one with people that like you. Navigating exactly that. You can reach me@diana oehrli.com thanks for listening.
