Episode 259: Hard Feelings: Daniel Smith on Embracing Shame, Envy, Annoyance, and the Wisdom in Dark Emotions

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No Conflicts of Interest

Puder:

Hi. Welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today by Daniel Smith. He is a psychotherapist in New York. He is also a New York Times bestselling author. Previously he wrote Muses, Madmen, and Prophets and Monkey Mind. And today we're going to be talking about a book he wrote called Hard Feelings. Daniel Smith is someone I know. He is a psychotherapy cohort member. So, you know, weekly we get to hang out, talk about reflective function [see episodes 206 and 213], talk about psychotherapy. We've been doing that for about seven months now. So I feel like I know Daniel Smith pretty well. And today we are going to be talking about topics like envy, annoyance and emotion. So, welcome to the podcast.

Smith:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Why Hard Feelings Was the Hardest Book to Write (00:52)

Puder:

So you said this was a hard book for you to write. In the email you said it was a very difficult book.

Smith:

Yes, it was. I mean, it was hard in a bunch of different ways. You mentioned two books I'd written before. The first one, Muses, Madmen, and Prophets was about hearing voices, the experience of hearing voices and partly memoiristic, in that my father heard voices. I was very young. I was in my twenties when I wrote it. So there were difficulties there in sharing what was essentially the family secret. Monkey Mind  was easier, because… I mean, there's no easy book to write, but it was a straight memoir, and I was able to be a little bit more humorous. And it was about one subject and had sort of a clear mission, which was I looked around and I was like, there are lots of mental health memoirs.

Smith:

But weirdly, at that time, there had been, I think, only one other memoir I know of about anxiety. And none that I thought adequately described what it feels like to kind of go through the world in a body that's hardwired for that particular experience. So the mission seemed pretty clear, and the narrative arc was clear. It was kind of structured, like a classic comedy, right? Like, it was going to end. It was going to end with a marriage. My marriage to my first wife. So, I knew the arc. But this book, it ended up being like seven or eight books in one because I knew that there were particular emotions that I wanted to dive into, but diving into each emotion was opening up an entire new world. And delving into the literature of each one was kind of like starting anew so I kept having this feeling like I was writing many books all at once.

Smith:

And that's one of the things that made it arduous. Another one is, that you mentioned, I'm in this cohort with you. And I'm a fairly new therapist. So I went to graduate school while writing this book. Sort of made the decision a few years in, of writing this book, to go back and become a therapist. And becoming a therapist changes a whole lot of things, including one's angle of approach, how people view you, the sense of vulnerability you feel when being autobiographical. Essentially self-disclosing in between the covers of a book. So there were all sorts of things that made this book look a lot weirder and harder and more prolonged.

Reading the Childhood Stationery Store Shame Memory (03:53)

Puder:

Yes. You are a therapist. I can tell from your writing. But you also are a writer, which I think, for those of you who after this, get to enjoy the book, it's not like you're reading a psychotherapist write about stuff. It's colorful. It's honest. It's very honest. It's  palpable. I think a good writer can draw you into a memory, to a time period, and kind of make you feel what it felt like. Actually, I was thinking I might read a little bit to kind of get people into some of the experiential piece of it here. 

Puder:

“An early memory. I am seven or eight years old. My father and I are at a stationery store in a nearby strip mall buying gum and crayons or stickers. I have just gone grocery shopping. We have paid, and I'm dragging my feet before we leave, thumbing through the Spider-Man comics on the thin wobbling wire rack. As I spin the rack around, I notice a boy only slightly older than I am at the register, and he's buying a candy bar. That is, he is trying to buy a candy bar. He has brought a little plastic bag with coins in it, and he has emptied the coins onto the counter. The clerk, an old man with a bulbus pocked nose, counts the coins, slides each from one side of the counter to the other. He shakes his head, not enough.

Puder:

The boy is 20 cents short. A line has formed behind the boy, impatient grownups with their pens and greeting cards. Now, in view of these staring others, the boy must gather the coins from the counter and place them back in his plastic bag. This is not an easy task. The coins are hard to lift from the smooth countertop. He levers them up with his grubby fingernails and they clatter back down. I watch him, he knows full well that he's being watched. His face is like a Macintosh apple molted with shades of red. When he has finally managed to get all the coins into his flimsy plastic, he rushes to the door, his shoulders slumped his eyes on the linoleum floor. The door dings it's jaunty welcome as he leaves ....” I'm feeling embarrassed that I can't say linoleum. Linoleum. There we go.

Smith:

It's a tough word.

Puder:

I'm feeling shame as I'm reading this. “Now, all at once, I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed for the boy. Vicariously, ashamed. It feels like the shame is mine. Like it is owned by me. His shame is now my shame. In my body and mind. My face is aglow. I don't want to look at anyone and certainly not at his eyes. What do I want? I want to get home as soon as possible, hurry to my room, and get under the covers. I want to cry, but out of sight. A confusion. A kind of psychic haze overtakes me. I have forgotten what I meant to do or what I want to do. The comics no longer hold my interest. They're frivolous or simply absent. My father is outside in the breezeway. I can remedy this situation, I realize. The boy’s and my own.” And by the way, in reading this, I so want you to remedy the situation. “All I need to do is to ask my father for 20 cents, find the boy, and hand it to him. I resolve to do this, but I find that I can't. The act, however charitable, seems terrible and extreme.

Puder:

My father will detect my oversensitivity. He will see and judge my susceptibility to the emotion of others. My girlishness. Already, I have a reputation in my family. I'm the crybaby, the tattletale, the wuss. My father asks me what is bothering me. I start to tell him. I can see the boy, now at the end of the breezeway getting on his bike, but the words won't form. They won't cohere. I say that nothing is wrong. ‘Nothing. I'm fine. Can we go home?’ Now the blood rises in my face again. My ears and my neck. For I know that I have missed an opportunity to do good. I've proven myself a coward without speech and without action. Full of nothing but useless, pitiable, pointless emotion.”

The Contagious & Atmospheric Nature of Shame (09:23)

Smith:

Yikes.

Puder:

I felt that.

Smith:

I felt it again, too.

Puder:

I felt it. But oh, there's something about shame and the contagiousness of it, right? I imagine the audience is feeling some of that too. You know, it's like almost you feel the embarrassment, multiple layers of it, right? For the boy not being able to pull up those coins from the countertop for you. Both your shame of telling your father out of a sense of your own sensitivity that he would shame you for having that sensitivity, for the historical prior experiences of you being shamed for that sensitivity. And then for me, it's almost like I'm put back into my own shame of my dyslexia, the difficulty of pronouncing some words. And then, on top of that, I think you are drawing the listener in. They're feeling it as well. Right? And so, you are imagining they're feeling embarrassed that you didn't speak to your father courageously. It wasn't courageous at that time, of course. Hindsight is 20/20. It was you knowing the repercussions of sharing emotion would be worse than sharing it.

Double Binds, Screen Memories & Freezing in Shame (11:01)

Smith:

I mean, I'm not sure. I guess I bristle a little bit inwardly at the word courageous, because what becomes clear to me, hearing that it's useful. It's useful hearing it from someone else. Sort of having it externalized is the double bind. Like, there was no w ay, there really was no way out of the shame. If I spoke up, I would feel ashamed at my sensitivity. If I didn't speak up, as I didn't, I would feel ashamed at not speaking up and doing what I felt was authentic to me, which was I felt empathy for this kid. You know, I felt for this little boy, and this is truly a kind of indelible memory for me that has just been sitting around for 40 years or so, and found the right place for it. But there was no way. And I don't think my father would've shamed me. But, that almost doesn't matter because there was a kind of ambiance of shame I had already been taught. I had already been socialized into some belief that I was oversensitive. That this was weakness. I'm going to mess this up because I'm not well versed enough in the terminology. But there's a, maybe you know it better, there's a term Freud has called “screen memory.” Do you know this? 

Puder:

No.

Smith:

I'm going to, as I said, I'm going to mangle it, but it's a memory from childhood that it is kind of really bright in our minds and that sticks.

Puder:

Yes

Smith:

And if I'm getting this right, he believed that those memories are representative of certain larger conflicts in the childhood.

Puder:

Yes. It's like a screen underneath. There's often a multiplicity of similar memories that consolidate, or that make that certain memory more memorable, something that sticks. And I like how you talk about that as a double bind, because a lot of my patients get in double binds in their marriages. You know, “If I'm vulnerable, something bad happens. If I'm not vulnerable, something bad happens.” 

Smith:

And then they freeze, right?

Puder:

And then there's a freezing in the double bind, there's a freezing. Yes. It's interesting. As I was reading it, towards the end, I started to feel a little bit like a haze of dissociation even, and just dissociation and shame. I always say. “Shame is the shadow of dissociation,” or, you know, it's what follows, right? It's always there. And I know dissociation is there in my patients, when I feel the shame, right? It's thick. 

Smith:

It's really fascinating that I felt that as well. Like after all these years and having written it. Which is to say, to kind of externalize and objectify and turn it into a narrative. Which is often a good way to diffuse it somehow. But, I too, sort of found myself zoning out towards the end of the anecdote and getting confused and dissociating a little bit. 

Puder:

Today, as I was reading it? So maybe I was either picking up, either you were picking up what I was feeling, or I was picking up what you were feeling.

Smith:

It was there, though. But that's what interests me about shame, is the kind of atmospherics of it. The ambiance of it. And how it transmits almost in an environmental way, in a kind of atomized or diffuse way.

Shame in the “Still Face” Experiment & Intergenerational Transmission (15:13)

Puder:

And, I think that the very sensitive person has a lot of behaviors that are bent on reducing the potential of shame in others and it's very hospitable. And you kind of go into that in your envy chapter (which envy is a topic I really want to talk about. It's so thick) in how your wife introduces people to your home. It's almost as if … So, the backstory is it's a beautiful home, and she.... So the chapter on envy is okay, how do we reduce the potential envy of my visitors to the home? And is that part of why there's kind of this elaborate telling of the issues of the home. Right? So that anyone who comes to the home may feel a little bit less envious. Right? Or less shame? Shame would also be part of that. I would imagine. I'm adding that in, of course.

Smith:

The backstory is we had a second child. We were growing out of the place that we were renting. We needed to buy a house. We felt we needed to do it pretty quickly for a bunch of reasons. And my wife's family has some wealth and they were able to help us to buy a house. And the house has a bunch of problems with it still. So my wife would, in her sense that it was kind of, there was something wrong socially to have a large house given the kind of, our friends being artists and journalists and cartoonists, and maybe don't have the same privilege. But her going through that over and over again, whenever someone came over was either to reduce their potential envy, but to reduce her fear at their potential envy.

Puder:

Not that they had envy.

Smith:

They might not have had any envy whatsoever, but her apprehension, her sense that any envy would be dangerous somehow to whatever the social structure that had been established over the course of years and years.

Annoyance as Temperament: Noise Sensitivity & Hyperpermeable Nervous Systems (17:41)

Puder:

You know, it's interesting. A lot of these thoughts are not fully formed as I do these interviews. They kind of come up in the midst of it. But the the prior chapter on annoyance. This part, a lot of the story of annoyance that really resonated with me and just, it seemed like absolute torture, was you trying to write in these apartments where you could hear so many sounds around you and I actually bought some noise dampening headphones. I researched the highest decibel.

Smith:

I think I've got a pair here. Like the kind that they use in construction. 

Puder:

Yes. I was thinking about painting them really nicely for you, you know? Yep. It's right here. That's the exact one. Of course, I hadn't got into the chapter on when you bought a home yet, right?  A nice home.

Smith:

That's sweet.

Puder:

I didn't know if you would want them. 

Smith:

That's generous.

Puder:

Or if the feeling of the around your ears would become a new annoyance of sorts. But in the midst of that chapter, I felt so viscerally annoyed for you just by the neighbors pounding music, or all the awfulness of construction, and all these  different noises, that it reminded me, actually, I watched a YouTube recently on the data centers, AI data centers that are going up in towns. And the sound, and the hum, and the vibration, because there's so much noise coming out of those things, it is overwhelming to these people. And, you hear these stories of these people talking about what it's like to have a home where it's never quiet. Right? And so I'm reading that, and I'm feeling for you like, “Oh man, this is so unpleasant.” You know, your nervous system needs to live in the woods. It needs to live in a cabin of quiet, and nature. and solitude. I'm wanting that for you.. So when we got to this chapter on your home, and getting this home, I was just like, “Oh, thank God.” You know, this is great. I'm so happy for you.

Smith:

It helps. And, I often say to my wife that my nervous system is not built for the city. But her answer is always, “Maybe, but there, you'd always find something.”

Smith:

That chapter, the way I structured those chapters, sort of, and I think it's explicit in the book, is that there are different levels at which emotion operates. The annoyance chapter is about temperament. That which is, or seems hardwired into our nervous systems. The way our nervous system operates. Probably the way it operated since birth. So that if I moved to upstate New York, I might be driven up the wall by a bird song or the chittering of squirrels, or whatever it happens to be. Someone with a snowblower. I don't know. But I kind of suspect that she's right. I'm happier being here than I am living across from a  loading dock. But I still am prone to annoyance in a way that others I know are not to this degree. 

Puder:

I think that's a real thing. My son actually is higher in annoyance than my daughter, and I, and my wife. It’s just naturally higher disgust. Higher experiences of pickiness with food.

Smith:

Yes.

Puder:

Highly sensitive child type thing. You talk about Chess. Not the game, but Chess, the author who wrote about the kind of difficult child [Temperament: Theory And Practice (Chess & Thomas, 1996)].

Highly Sensitive Children, Stella Chess & Links to Borderline Traits (22:24)

Smith:

Yes. Stella Chess.

Puder:

10%. We talk about that a little bit in my episode on borderline personality disorder [see episodes 115, 224, and 234]. Which, I don't think they all become borderline personality disorder, but actually, some of the kids that are highly difficult, and this is right out of the womb, highly sensitive, harder to console. Right? 10% of kids, they end up with more disciplinary issues. Sometimes they end up with more aggression. But I think what you were pointing at is there are people that are just physiologically more sensitive to annoyance. Right? They're the more sensitive souls. They're hyperpermeable. Right?

Smith:

That's a good word for it. Yes.

Puder:

Hyperpermeable to affect.

Smith:

Yes.

Puder:

To emotional contagion. And you know what? A lot of them make really good therapists.

Smith:

I'm glad to hear it. I hope that's true. I mean, there's always two sides to the coin, but having a kind of very tenuous locus of control is, you know, it's a tough way to live. It may be that it also increases one's capacity for empathy. But when you were talking about Stella Chess and the and borderline, it does make me wonder. And this is also sort of an unformed thought, or an ill-formed thought. But about whether there's something about that high sensitivity, that kind of slipping of locus control that goes along with idealization and devaluation [see episodes 185, 215, 231, and 255]. Because I notice in myself, in my own therapy, in my own work of becoming a therapist and becoming more sort of self-reflective, how quickly I toggle, or I frequently toggle between an idealization of the self and a devaluation. And I wonder if that's at all tied, I wonder if that's all connected to a sense of my nervous system is now intact. Like I can control it. I feel safe now, but when it's not, when it feels permeable, then the devaluation comes in. Rushes in. “What's wrong with me?” And a sense of sort of a frantic sense.

Neuroticism, Big Five & Reducing the Second Arrow (Buddhist Concept Explained) (25:11)

Puder:

Yes. I think what I have thought is that different types of people were higher neuroticism in the Big Five [see episodes 92, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, and 203]. They tend to be. 

Smith:

You've seen my Big Five.

Puder:

I've seen your Big Five. I don't know if you'd feel comfortable. We could pull it up, if you want. 

Smith:

I'm high in neuroticism, let's just say that..

Puder:

But it's like the stress reactivity is higher. Right? Now, that could change. I've seen people decrease, with good psychotherapy, their neuroticism two standard deviations. I've also seen those same people probably go backwards at other points in their life. So stresses can-evoke a neuroticism in some people. It's not as permanent in all people. 

Smith:

It's about maintenance. Right? I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's about…. I mean, so much of this book for me was about a kind of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, avoiding what Buddhism calls “the second arrow”. Do you know this idea?

Puder:

Go ahead. Explain it to people listening.

Smith:

Well, let's see if I can get it right. The first arrow is the pains that life inflicts that you can't avoid.. I think the Buddha himself is talking about physical pain, but metaphorically, analogically, it covers all pain. Things happen. You know, you get into conflict with someone. You lose a job, someone dies, whatever. Your tire pops on your car. That's the first arrow. And you feel the emotion, you feel fear, you feel shame, you feel anger, you feel envy. The second arrow is feeling bad about feeling bad..

Puder:

Right. Okay.

Smith:

Yes. And that's the self-inflicted one. That's the arrow that you pull out of your own quiver. And the neuroticism, the sort of trait annoyance, the temperamental annoyance. This is me. Like I know this. And so I'm the instrument. If I know my instrument, like a musician, how do I tune it?

Smith:

You know, I read this long profile of Willie Nelson recently, and he has this guitar, this broken down guitar he has been playing for decades. And it has a hole in it, and it has a very particular sound and resonance. He knows what it needs in order to keep playing it and playing it. Well, he knows how to maintain it. He knows which luthier to bring it to fix it up. Like, what is your temperamental instrument? What do I need in order to continue to stay at a level of …equanimity or within that band of equanimity and disequilibrium that allows me to connect, allows me to do the work I want to do, to write, to not fall into states of hypersensitivity or shame or whatever it is that I know that I'm prone to after nearly five decades of life.

Puder:

Right. I think it's the first initial experience of the emotion is not necessarily the thing that we should feel shame about. Right? It's not bad or good. You have anger, you have shame, you have envy. It's okay. I found that if I can, my better states act curious, instead of judgmental. So it's the guilt, the added guilt, the guilt about the initial emotional experience is the second arrow. Right? It's the added thing. You know, I'm thinking that the thing that I probably would challenge you the most though with your understanding of emotion, is I think Ekman had some validity with the microexpression. And here would be my couple little pieces of how it actually fits better into your system that you've put here. I think that the microexpression, the flashes of emotion that occur on the face as someone starts to talk about something, and then the degree of their awareness of it, is sometimes there, sometimes it's not [see also episodes 15, 16, 17, 62, 118, and 153]. So what I'll see is the flashes and then I'll see the defenses come.

Microexpressions Debate: Ekman vs. Lisa Feldman Barrett (30:13)

Puder:

So, the flashes are basic things like anger, fear, disgust, I add pain in, because there's some newer research to show what pain looks like on the face. It's one tenth of a second. Blind people have it. And so this is my contention against the arguments against Ekman, is that actually congenitally blind people flash the same microexpressions as normal people who have been enculturated to view other people's emotions throughout their life. So it's not like we're just mirroring people. So when I learned about this, I actually filmed a bunch of my friends watching YouTube videos, and they would flash microexpressions watching certain scenes. One thing I learned was that some people flash more than others. Some people flash different ones than others, different types of scenes. There was one guy, who's a friend of mine, who flashed very, very few emotions the whole time.

Puder:

And he has one of the most flattest demeanors. He's had a really hard time dating. He has a really hard time connecting with women. And he's very flat emotionally. We're talking about one expression of sadness and one expression of anger pretty much the whole time. Where my wife, who did it, is very empathic, highly permeable. She flashed all sorts of emotions. She also flashed dissociation. Because some of the things were actually scenes of child abuse. You're watching scenes that are really awful scenes that we found, that we wanted to evoke emotion. And so that would be one point of evidence. Point two, which makes me believe it's true, is Gottman's study where he filmed newly married couples for one hour, and then he followed them years later (Gottman et al., 2001).

Puder:

And the amount of different types of microexpressions predicted months of separation and somatic illness. And so there was a predictive validity that I think this study showed of microexpression. Just the amount of fake happiness expressed. Fake happiness is when you're smiling, but not with your eyes. It's just with your mouth. You know, it's like the eyes don't smile with it. Disgust predicted things. Wrinkling around the nose. So that was the predictive validity. And the third piece that convinces me is probably just my own experience of doing psychotherapy. Specifically with psychosomatic patients. So psychosomatic patients, you know, they're experiencing emotion in their body, like migraines. And there's actually studies that show psychosomatic patients are not as good at reading other people's  emotions. And they're also not as good at reading their own.

Puder:

Okay. So they have more alexathymia. So there's a whole research on alexathymia and microexpression, and they're not as good at reading emotions. But I think this fits into your paradigm, maybe a little bit different than you would imagine. Okay. Because, for example, annoyance you could say, “Oh, annoyance is anger.” So we'd always expect a microexpression of anger. You know, down and together. Quick, down and together of the eyebrows. But actually, I would say, “No.” Because annoyance is complex. Right? Annoyance is multilayered. And there is probably more. There's a multiplicity of microexpressions you would find in someone who is more easily annoyed. You would find more disgust. Right? When the waiter comes and brings you a cup and their hand is too high, it's like, “Oh, wait. I'm about to sip out of that cup.”

Puder:

That's very annoying for me, stirs up microexpressions of disgust. So you would have disgust, you would have microexpressions of anger, which is kind of like a little bit of tinges of frustration. Right? With different things. You would have microexpressions of fear. So you'd have a multiplicity of the microexpressions. You may…a lot of people, when they have these flashes, they don't know that they're having them. And a lot of people who are watching people, they don't know that the people they're watching are having them, but they mimic them. And so there's a whole science of mimicry as well. People are more likely to mimic the other person's microexpression if they're trying to focus on emotion. If they're focusing on what the person might be doing for a living or something external, they don't flash as much of the person’s, that they're watching, microexpressions.

Smith:

I'm not sure that our views on emotion are all that different. Because when you talk about microexpressions, you're talking about them in a highly contextual way. Right? Let me see if I can get this right. I mean, my objection with Ekman is with the theory that there are set sort of neurological programs for different emotions and emotions that across cultures will be universally recognized. Those are the two polls of basic emotion theory [universal emotion theory] as Ekman and his cohort laid them out, that I think that people like Lisa Feldman Barrett and people who have a theory based on the brain as a predictive organ, as a fundamentally predictive system, have done a good job of, of debunking. But…

Puder:

I would say debunking like…. Okay, let's go study by study. 

Smith:

Okay, let's go step by,... Yeah.

Puder:

Because I'm actually very critical of….  I've been working on a rebuttal episode to her theories for…

Smith:

To Barrett? Oh, is that right? Okay. Yeah.

Puder:

So it's something that I've thought a lot about. I feel like there's a loss of nuance. So, for example, okay, with Ekman, you said first, universally all cultures can potentially label certain pictures as emotions. Right? And I would say,  I see it a little bit differently. I see it as universally people across all cultures, and actually animals as well, flash one tenth of a second type of flashes of emotion probably pretty universally. Now, do they know how to describe them the same? Absolutely not. Is there a correct way to describe it? Probably not. Right? Are, universally, people good at recognizing this? I don't think so. I actually think it takes a lot of training and it's very unusual for me to find someone who's naturally very good at reading microexpression. So it's a little bit different. 

Smith:

Well, let me, if I can, just jump in there. I mean, I think what Barrett would say is that when animals show what we're calling expressions, and you are calling emotional expressions, are they in fact emotions? She would say that you need a conceptual act. You need a contextualized conceptual act in order to sort of make the thing an emotion that what you are recognizing are along the axis of pleasant or unpleasant, negative or positive when you're looking at human expressions. When you sit across from someone in therapy and you see a microexpression, well, you've already understood the context of it. You know this person's history, you know what's going on. You know what emotions they've been acculturated into. You know what they're prone to. You know what they're dealing with. So you are able, given the knowledge that you have–the very deep knowledge that you have of this person–to sort of approximate the label of what this person may be feeling and disavowing, or not articulating. But that doesn't mean that's disgust, anger, frustration. There might be a lot going on underneath that expression. That expression to you is a kind of, I don't know, an on-ramp to further elucidation of what's going on internally in that person. Correct?

Contextual Emotions, Predictive Validity & Clinical Use of Microexpressions (39:12)

Puder:

Okay. So I think you're talking about this one study of hers in which she changed the…, she gave a pre-story and it changed how people interpreted the emotions of the actors. Right? And so, what you know, in my mind, this is a study more of “bias exists.” If a judge is being a judge after he's eaten a large meal in the afternoon, he's more critical of the people he's judging. Right? If we're primed with a bunch of words, denoting old people, and you know, we walk out of the research room slower than we would otherwise. We're quite easily swayed. But I think what she would…what she's saying is therefore there's no objectivity with emotion and the expression of emotion. Like there's no one visual thing of a microexpression of anger, for example. This doesn't exist. 

Puder:

But then, I would come back to, so without context, the newly married couples who had more negative expressions, microexpressions predicted things in the future months of separation, physical issues. And people who are born blind, who never see other people's faces, who never learn what other people's emotions look like from other people's faces, they, themselves, have these flashes of emotion in the same way as a person not born blind. And so I think there are these building blocks. But what I also think, what we agree with is that the building blocks come together in a very idiosyncratic, unique way for an individual. Where the individual then is describing them. And so, what I've found, despite my ability to read someone's microexpressions very accurately– I built a whole training course on how to read them accurately [Emotion Connection Training for Microexpressions], which I need to have you go through. It might change your mind even further.

Smith:

I'm actually thinking that I wish that I had had the time to take that course before this. Because this is a complicated topic for me and this was the hardest part of the book to write. So,

Smith:

I'm still open to having my mind changed on this.

Puder:

I don't think it changes much of your points in the book and the thrust of your book at all. Because I still agree with the place where you arrive. Right? And this idea of how do I diminish the second arrow or  the impact of the second arrow. But I think it's value…, it's a valuable dialogue because I think that it allows for an understanding of ok there may be some starting points, starting blocks. Right? And there may be people who, for whatever reason, have less of microexpressions that will pop on their face at all, or maybe they're more prone to dissociation. So there's a whole spectrum of people out there based on their personality. Right? And, and then, if I were to tell someone in my office like, “Hey, you just flashed a microexpression of anger.”

Puder:

It doesn't go well. You know? And so, in my training, that's not what I train people to do. It's a piece of information. You know, just like  all other pieces of information we gather from someone, it's okay. So, for example, I had this 16-year-old in my office, and he's had this role in his family as a peacemaker, and he is flashing microexpressions of anger in regards to something. But he's not talking about anything/anger. And so I kind of had a curiosity like, “Well, let's slow down there. Tell me some more about that. It gave me a curiosity.” And what ended up being the case was he was telling me the first 20 minutes of the session more facade than reality. And once we got to the reality, he was really upset. But this upsetness was dormant as a protective mechanism as the peacekeeper of the family to subvert any upsetness. You know, it was disavowed. It was a disavowed anger and emotion. 

Smith:

I don't think Barrett would disagree. I mean, in a way, we don't need to get into the sort of Ekman rest in peace and Barrett fight so deeply. That's sort of their battle. But

Smith:

I think the objection that she really makes is ultimately, I don't speak for her, but neurological, the sort of idea of dedicated emotion circuits in the brain and the idea that there are sort of Inside Out, Pixar-like programs that we have internal experiences. That we have feelings, interoceptive experiences and mental representations, and that these flash on our face. That we have very highly intricate muscles in our face that show what we're feeling. I don't think she would dispute that. And we use it all the time as signs. I think her argument is more about how we actually produce emotions. And in a way, it's more of a philosophical point about what emotion even is, which is why it took me so many months to write that chapter because it gets pretty abstract. But, I think what you're saying is, it is indisputable that you have to pay close attention when looking at someone to what's going on on their face, to what's going on with their body, to what they're saying and not saying. And that if you pay close attention to what flashes on their face, that might give you a clue to what's not being said.

“Still Face” Experiment Revisited: Shame, Dissociation & Parental Hiddenness (45:53)

Puder:

Okay. So, you talk about the “Still Face” Experiment.

Puder:

Which I'm glad you did.

Smith:

One of your favorites.

Puder:

One of my favorites. And you talk about it in the context of shame.  And I actually had people watch the “Still Face” Experiment and recorded their microexpressions.

Smith:

Patients of yours?

Puder:

Friends. And they flash a lot. People flash a lot of distress watching the “Still Face” Experiment. Right? And a lot of happiness in the reunification. And there's  a common thread though, of is there a larger emotional experience, right? So there could be  these little microcosms of frustration and fear for the child and so on, so on, and so forth. Right? But shame, you know, sometimes people look down, sometimes people look sad, but it's also like there's a bodily experience of…. How do you describe it in the story? Of cowering, or curling up in a ball. Right? And this child, inevitably the body contorts. Right? In the midst of the mother having this still face, in the midst of the distress of the disconnection. 

Smith:

Yes, the baby twists.

Puder:

And the baby, it's like, “Oh, I have to move away.” And the baby goes through this kind of like playfully trying to reconnect and then angrily trying to reconnect. And then, finally it's more of this dissociated response.

Smith:

An implosion almost.

Puder:

An implosion. Yes. And that is the experience of shame that you kind of link to this experiment. Or is it the experience of maybe having a ‘still face’ growing up, internalized a deeper shame?

Smith:

Can you ask the question again? I want to  make sure I'm clear about it.

Puder:

Draw the connection for me again. What about the “Still Face” Experiment specifically elicited in you this evocative memory of shame?

Smith:

I mean, I think it's exactly what you say. Tronick has a very optimistic view about it. It's about the optimism of repair, “the power of discord,” I think he calls it. And yet, at the same time, that sense of being not met face on for what your needs are.

Smith:

For expressing your needs and having the person on the other side become the bad object and how that is productive of shame in a way that will continue to loop forward throughout your childhood, that not being recognized for what you're actually feeling. I mean, when I think of that experiment now, I feel shame as a parent for the ways in which I can recognize when my children have emotional needs, but because of what's ever going on for myself, I'm unable to meet them where they are. And that, as important as repair, is if you have that experience repeatedly, you might gain a sense of yourself as somewhat as your own needs as wrong. Your own needs, your own emotional needs as devalued, as sort of globally problematic. I'm not sure I'm putting this in exactly the right words.

Growing Up with a Mask of Shame & the Need for Authentic Parental Emotion (50:02)

Puder:

Going back to the story that I read, the inability to tell your father, due to you being a more highly sensitive child, and somehow that the needs were not something that were enthusiastically met, but rather, “Don't be a girly man, don't be a wussy man,” type of thing. That messaging is shame in and of itself. Right? It's like the very repetitive nature of that messaging. And then you internalize the sense of, “Something about me, this part of me is bad.” Right? “I am bad.”  That's that internalization.

Smith:

There's also a confusion that comes in, as in that anecdote, “Are my natural, instinctive needs going to be met with acceptance or is someone going to turn away?” And the inability to rely on that may create an internal confusion about the validity of those feelings. That's, in itself, productive of shame. I mean, there's no way around this really, because no parent is perfect.

Puder:

But there are some parents that, if they have postpartum depression, if they have…. Tronick showed this, they react differently, the child reacts differently in the “Still Face” Experiment if they've had a postpartum depressed mother. So I think every child probably goes through periods of micro moments of not perfectly being attuned to. Absolutely. There's no way that we can get around that. And if AI ever perfectly attunes to children, it will probably create a pathology that's a brand new pathology that we've never seen, you know?

Smith:

Absolutely. Let me put this another way that's maybe clearer when it comes to what I was thinking of in my book. I grew up with parents, who, for their own reasons, experienced a great deal of shame. And for whatever moments of attunement that they were able to provide, there was a kind of ambiance of shame in the household. And an ambiance of shame is an ambiance of hiding away. It could be, in some, rage sometimes. That's one way of hiding. There's a kind of shame-rage cycle that occurs. But in its quieter form, it's a kind of wall, a kind of shrinking away. And the child is so sensitive to that. What I saw in the “Still Face” Experiment was the way in which that transmits across generations. 

Smith:

The way that the parents’ chronic shame may produce in the child his or her own shame.

Smith:

Through a repeated blankness, a sort of a moving forward into this space that isn't able to take it in because that parent is feeling shame. And so, that shame then gets repeated in the child.

Smith:

I'm sure I put it more clearly in the book.

Puder:

So it's hyperpermeable. You're absorbing. So I'm seeing that connection with how you even talk about your own kids. Right? You're afraid that your own issues will get kind of absorbed by them, or have been absorbed by them. Right? Rather than the reality, which is that your friends say you're a good father, you engage your kids. They notice that. Right?

Smith:

But  it will get absorbed into them.

Smith:

They will pick up on it. They will inevitably be formed by who I am. And there are some parents who wear that burden more lightly than others. And I think I'm a little highly attuned to that difficulty of being a parent, the fact that children have these incredibly sensitive antennae coupled with an inability to really introspect. And so their vulnerability is just enormous emotionally. And, you know, avoiding the second arrow, I think, is one way of improving one's parenting.

Smith:

I mean, we keep circling back to shame, and I wonder if that's the kind of master emotion in all of the work that I did on this book. Not simply naming the emotion and noticing it without collapsing into the self. I mean, what was happening with that woman in the “Still Face” Experiment when she goes blank, the ‘still face’ is the face of shame, as I see it. That's what happens with shame. You're sort of there, but not there.

Puder:

It's  a profound dissociative moment. You know?  And I think that's something that has made me resonate with that as well. My mother struggled a lot with dissociation and I think that that video evoked something in me pretty deep when I saw it. Which has kind of drawn me to it, you know?

Smith:

It's such a powerful experiment. I mean, there's a reason that it's resonated for so long.

Puder:

Yes. I think it's interesting. Ed Tronick, even his narrative on how this happens all the time, people repair. They've actually done studies where they bring a kid back to the room, where they did that experiment, and their cortisol goes up. 

Puder:

And so it's like, what if that was a hypomanic defense against the reality that this was actually a very unhealthy experience for these kids? I mean, it is possible that kids go through that on a regular basis when the parents are on their phone or blah, blah, blah, you know. But usually there's some…. It's very unusual for the kid to have a completely blank parent for an extended period of time when they're trying to reconnect.

Smith:

Yes. It's almost always more mixed than that. Unless you're dealing with a truly depressed parent.

Puder:

Truly. Or even a psychotically dissociative, you know, catatonic. But then, usually the catatonic is more chronically like that for long periods of time.

Smith:

I mean, I was writing about that experiment in the context of my father and his sort of, I don't know, his hiddenness.

Smith:

So, I mean, it's taken me a little while to get there in this interview. But when I was looking at that and contextualizing that experiment in that chapter, I was thinking about growing up with someone who was, according to everybody that met him, warm, loving, generous, kind, and yet for the highly sensitive child, also kind of the man who wasn't there. Right? There was also a sense of who is this person? What am I not seeing?

Puder:

To have a facade and to be a good liar of sorts. Right? The most popular kids are the best liars.

Smith:

Yes.

Puder:

In high school…. I'm not saying your dad was a liar, but we all lie. Right? We all can have a facade at times, and our real emotionality is underneath the surface. Right? He was very good at hiding it with people that didn't know him well.

Smith:

Yes. The Mask of Shame. There's a book by, I think, Leon Wurmser called The Mask of Shame (1981).

Smith:

That's what I was thinking of.

Puder:

And, that we all have, to some degree, different facades for different contexts. I'm not saying that's a bad thing necessarily, but with you, you were hyperpermeable to something else inside of him. Right? In psychotherapy, we talk about this kind of countertransference of what the person is saying. What words they're using, but then the countertransference of the objects, the unprocessed objects, of their past. So, maybe it's deep profound unspoken emotions that you could feel anger, shame…, you know, all these things that were hidden. Right?

Puder:

Underneath the surface. But you were feeling it, and I heard throughout your telling of this part, you really wanted to know, because if you don't know, it's a little bit crazy making.

Smith:

Right? It's a little bit crazy making and deeply confusing to be met with a mask or to have the sense that what you're being met with is a mask, even if it doesn't look rigid. But the sense that you're not getting some sort of authenticity, that person is holding back who they actually are. I mean, this happens in marriages all the time. When you see couples, it's often the complaint that people come in with; and it's hard for people to articulate, ”I'm not getting this person. I want more of them.” And the partner may be made crazy by that because they don't even know what that means or how to give it. My father, when he was dying of cancer, and I asked him… and this is in the book…, “Tell me what you're feeling.”

Smith:

He flashed out with rage, with anger at me because I don't think he knew how to provide that. And I think out of a sense of shame. So when I was looking at the “Still Face” Experiment, that's what I was thinking of. The parent's hiddenness. Right? Like maybe, the mitigating factor in all of this is trying to be a parent who is as fully human as possible, which is to say, “Yeah, I'm neurotic.” I feel shame. I feel this. I feel that to actually name the things, to be aware of them, even if you can't necessarily mitigate the emotion to cope, to sort of cop to who you are. And in some fundamental way, having a parent that can't cop to who they are. And I think he was getting there when he got sick, would've gotten there. That's the thing that, in a way, as I was trying to probe, is maybe productive of shame within families.

Puder:

The shame of hiding the voices. The shame of hiding what was underneath. Right? The shame…

Smith:

The shame of witnessing, in some way that doesn't yet have words, that it makes sense to hide away. That you're supposed to hide away, absorbing the lesson that you are only supposed to give a fraction of yourself. 

Writing as Confession: The Difficulty of Admitting Envy (01:02:47)

Puder:

And it's interesting that this book is kind of like a behavioral experiment of sorts, and reversing that putting out of yourself, putting out these parts of yourself that are, at times, kind of like a confessions of sorts. Like St. Augustine's Confessions (2025), probably the first book where someone actually wrote critically about themself. Right?

Puder:

You're continuing that genre to the next level here.

Smith:

It's not a comfortable feeling, David.

Puder:

But your wife kind of pointed out that you didn't really confess about envy.

Smith:

It's funny, if I was going to rewrite any chapter, I think that would probably be the one.

Puder:

What would you confess?

Smith:

The extent to which I feel envy. I mean, she says at the end, “You don't talk about your envy of these writers, of these people, of these careers. You've made this chapter all about me and you've avoided it.” I mean, envy is productive of shame. To confess envy is to say, “I feel inferior.” It's to say, “I have a deep sense and apprehension of my own inferiority relative to others.” Whether it's true or not. And so it's very hard to cop to that kind of vulnerability. And I think writing that chapter, I found myself hiding behind this other anecdote of someone else. And the best I can do to remedy that was to end it with her voice saying, “You blew it, man.” 

Smith:

God bless her.

Puder:

I guess that, in and of itself, is kind of the confession. Right? But it's a double confession. It's the confession of not being able to confess. Right?

Puder:

It's the confession of … it's interesting.

Smith:

I couldn't go there. I don't know why. Sorry, go ahead.

Puder:

When you share a success with a friend, and the friend flashes a microexpression of anger, for me, I'm always curious about that. Well, what did I say that was frustrating? Because in my mind, I'm happy. You know? And in some of my close friendships, it is envy. Or, that they feel maybe safe enough expressing that there is a bit of envy there. Right? But yeah, in my own experience, what I have found is that envy also is a truth-sayer of what I find important or what I worship, so to speak.

Smith:

Say more. What do you mean?

Envy as a Signal of Values vs. Destructive Comparison (01:05:44)

Puder:

So the things that I'm envious about are maybe people who are further along, or who have had even faster success podcasting. Or,  intellectually. I don't think I've ever felt envy for someone having a Lamborghini, or a car. It's just not my personality. I'm more ideas. So if someone can convey ideas in a very articulate way, I may experience envy for that, more than houses, more than cars, more than, you know, things.

Smith:

I know what you mean. But, I guess, I have a less sunny view of what my own envy signals to me, because I could envy someone who I think has written better or more. And it’s certainly valuable to me to write. Well, I would like to be more productive. Or, to be in the cohort with you and experience envy because you've been doing it longer and know more. And I'm impatient to know more. And I want to feel more like an expert, more like I have a better grasp of the psychoanalytic principles or whatever it happens to be. But my experience of that, is that it always takes me away from the self that always decenters me and places me almost cognitively and emotionally into someone else's life, into their journey.

Smith:

It makes it much more difficult for me to have a sense of, “Alright, where am I? What are the reasons for where I am? How can I gain an appreciation of that?” I felt a lot of envy while writing this book, because I looked around at people who were lapping me in terms of publications. 

Smith:

At the same time, while writing this book, I got divorced, I got remarried, I had two kids, I had to deal with the chronic illness of my oldest child, I went to graduate school, I was living my life in a granular way. And envy is…, whenever I experienced envy, it almost weirdly made me ignorant in that moment when that emotion was existent of the particularities of my own life. And so, kind of a disturbing of contentment, in a way, that just made it harder to even achieve those goals. If that makes sense. Because, it's distracting. It's comparison. It's assuming that there is some correspondence between you and another person in the world when essentially there is not. It's when it makes you compete with others, as opposed to yourself, and what your own goals are, and what the truths are. Truth is of your own experience.

Smith:

You also were an athlete. So you have more of a competitive….

Puder:

I know my achievement-striving is high, but I also know that sometimes when there's a project that is very close to my particular passion, it's almost impossible to do it. 

Smith:

Can you say that again? 

Puder:

If  I have a project that's very close to my particular passion, my particular interest, it's almost harder to do it. And if it's only me, if I'm the one that's producing it. Because, and I don't know what that is, but if I would say that that's probably for me the dark side, it's very unproductive. It's envy in that context would be more like the shame shutdown, not moving forward. I think there's a more of an aspirational type of envy, which is like, “Okay, they're doing…Here, this is obtainable. This person's further ahead. It's obtainable.” 

Puder:

But I look up to this person. There's  a gentle, maybe, idealization, but it's not shutting me down. It's more aspirational. So I think, I think if it feels unobtainable. If it feels completely unobtainable then I think that's a little bit different. Then, I think, it may not inspire envy because that may just not even go there. But I think as well, when I've been reading about envy, the link between vulnerable narcissism and envy, it's very strong. Not grandiose narcissism, because I think the grandiose person is their defenses are around not feeling envy. Or so they're not gonna fill out. They're not going to proclaim envy in some survey.

Puder:

Right. It may be deeper. You may get to it psychodynamically, and therapy, over years. Right? But it's superficially not there. But someone who's narcissistic, with more of the vulnerable narcissism, they have a lot of envy and they're totally eaten up. I don't know if you've had a patient like this, but they could be. I mean, everything is envy from the watches that someone else is wearing and this and that. And they're constantly comparing themselves, and everything is competitive. I think that's more like Karen Horney, when she talks about someone who's very neurotic and living in the false self. There's all these “shoulds”. They're competitive. It's the neurotic ambition. So it's ambition not towards something that they're actually gifted at, like a unique gifting. But it's more of a general, “I have to win at everything.” You know? And there's a deep dissatisfaction that pervades because they can't necessarily ever arrive at satisfaction. Because they're always in this loop of dissatisfaction [see episodes 21, 148, 171, and 247]. So yeah, I think that there's no rest and there is no peace. 

Cultural & Capitalist Envy: Social Media, Consumerism & the Evil Eye (01:12:47)

Smith:

And that chapter of the book is sort of at the tail end of the different levels of emotional influence. So if annoyance was my way of writing about emotions at the level of temperament and shame was my way about writing about emotion at the level of the family and transmission of emotion within families. Intergenerationally, envy is my way of talking about the way that emotions are transmitted and stoked within cultures. So vulnerability, the sense of comparison of invidious comparison is, in many ways, the sort of defining feature of western capitalism, of commercial capitalism. So yes, if you're sitting across from the vulnerable narcissist, it's very, very clear. But I think that we all live increasingly in a world where that kind of envy is being stoked, that kind of aspirational….

Puder:

Envy sells, sex sells

Smith:

And sex sells probably by way of envy, you know. And envy is the instrument through which people try to get us to stay on social media platforms, to buy this, to buy that, to stay on the streaming services. Envy the sense that you can have the essence of what someone else has…

Smith:

Maybe by way of actual consumer goods, almost always by way of actual consumer goods or lifestyles. And since we all have a narcissistic wound, how do you protect against that? My oldest child is in college, and I've learned that more people have gone out for fraternities and sororities this year in colleges, I think, than in any other. Don't quote me on that. But that's anecdotally what I've heard, is that the numbers have just increased. And apparently, that's because they've so effectively marketed themselves on TikTok, that if you have this experience, there's something about it that if you could join in with this experience, you can be valued in the way you can have the social experience. That's the most highly valuable social experience in college. It's a casting outward into some, a sense of how you're supposed to be, how you're supposed  to live.

Puder:

Interesting.

Smith:

Yes. So, there's this work of anthropology, by a guy named George Foster, and he's talking about this village when they first got windows and they forgot windows facing the street. And this culture that he was studying was so highly attuned to envy and invidious comparison that they would block the windows that people couldn't look in because they knew they were highly attuned to the danger of envy. You know, every culture has some version of the evil eye, the invidious stare, the look that wants, the look that will grasp. And, of course we're constantly looking through windows now, all the time, every day.

Puder:

Yes. Social media has sped that process up quite a bit. Right? Where, and also I would say, we're also,  so what do I do with my kids? Sometimes I'll show my daughter videos on how photoshopped some of these models are. And so she is looking at, if she sees a beautiful woman in a picture, she'll say, “Oh, I could see that they brushed the skin and they did this and that.” You know, it's like she's kind of viewing the picture as not, this is not real. Right? I think that meta influencers do sell product. Oh, I don't know if you saw, but AG1, there was a brand new study on AG1 that just came out.

Smith:

What's AG1?

Puder:

AG1 is sold on a bunch of the top influencer podcasts.

Puder:

And this is a supplement that's supposed to, you know, help you and your health. So they did this study and it didn't do anything. But this thing's like $70 a month. And you know, people listening to some of the top podcasts that promote this, I don't even want to say their names, because I'm just going to put it out there. But some of the top podcasts. This thing doesn't do anything for your gut flora. Right? And I talked about this in my podcast a while ago with Drew Ramsey. We talked about how really if you want to change your biome, you need to eat fermented foods, because there's just so much more good healthy bacteria and fermented foods than you could ever take in a pill [see episode 131]. Right? 

Smith:

Kimchi is the only way, man.

Puder:

But I think my point is that…kimchi is fantastic. Sauerkraut. Right? Kefir.

Puder:

Good for you. And especially after, if you have ever had to take antibiotics, you should definitely get a lot of that stuff [fermented foods] in you. Okay. But my point is that this stuff sells, and it is because people are influenced by people that they imagine to be having the answers. Right?

Smith:

Yes. And how do you inoculate yourself against that? How do you stay alert to it enough that you're not so driven by it? I mean, talk about ambient. It's everywhere. Envy, in many ways, that the economy has developed by way of envy, by way of comparison. That's how consumer capitalism operates. And as you are describing, you sense as your children grow up, just how vulnerable they are to that and, and how it gets at a kind of very core mechanism within a human. Because we do naturally tend toward models. We need models. Right? It can be hard to discern between envy and aspiration, envy and admiration, you know? 

Admiration vs. Envy: Protecting Connection & Parenting in a Comparison Culture (01:20:21)

Smith:

I will admire a clinician who has a lot more experience and knowledge than I do, or a writer who I feel has a certain, I don't know, a facility or style, and that that admiration is a good thing. It's motivating, it feels sort of nourishing. It feels like even talking about it in this way, I can sense my nervous system settling. 

Smith:

Because maybe it remains about the self and the aspirations for the self, but that can very easily tip over into envy, which is wanting to be that other person wanting to sort of have, in some core essence, be who they are. And it can be a delicate operation to stay with admiration and not fall over into envy, which is, is larcenist in a kind of way. Right? I mean, Dante in the Purgatorio (1320/2009) punished the envious by sewing their eyelids shut with wires, so they couldn't see. There's something about seeing that is grasping. You know, if hearing brings things in, like with annoyance. Or if it's a passive receiver of things. Vision, in this sense, is a grasping. And how do you avoid it in a culture that wants you to grasp doing it? I don't have any answers. I find it to be a difficult thing. And something I think a lot about as a parent, and usually do things like you do, like teaching my children, or showing my teenager, talking to my teenager about how social media operates. How algorithms operate. What these companies and the executives in these companies say behind the scenes about what they're actually trying to do. And that helps, I hope. 

Puder:

I have an example of this. Because there are  therapy influencers. There's one that's selling a course. It's very expensive. And take this course, and you'll get better at this thing. Right? I went to their Instagram and they have 15,000 followers, or something like that. Right? And yet, I look at their posts and they have three likes and one comment on each  of their posts. So I know that they're fake followers.

Puder:

I know because I've had companies reach out and want to sell me on this. I'm like, “No, I'm good. I'll run my own social media.” You know, there's bots you can get that do fake comments. Hundreds, you know, per post or whatever. And so here you have kind of like this facade of like, “Here, I have something great to teach you that a lot of people are following me for,” but there's no real substance. What is the value acquisition? And I think this is where customers are getting smarter. Actually, I think a lot of the youth are a little bit more cognizant of kind of the house of cards. You know, that there's this kind of falseness to a lot of politics, that there's a lot of corruption. And I think there's a lot of skepticism. I just had a kid in my office yesterday who was like, “Yeah, I don't respect any authority,” kind of attitude. Right? “I'll listen to my friends. Those are the people I care about.” So there is kind of a push the other direction that I think is probably….

Smith:

I hope so, man. I mean, that sounds good to me. At the same time, I feel I can't help but feel a little skeptical or even cynical about it because consumer capitalism has always done a very good job of commodifying, even that kind of descent, that kind of internalizing descent. They're very good. It's like water, you know, it always finds its way. And so these companies hire very talented social scientists to find ways. Kids are becoming a little bit more skeptical, a little bit more anti-authoritarian, a little bit more wily. How do we use that?

Puder:

So it's like, who's the YouTuber that has that attitude that's captured their attention? And then how do we…

Smith:

Sell products that way?

Puder:

How do we get that YouTuber to sponsor our stuff? Did you hear about how in Japan they used to not drink coffee, but how they slowly changed them to drink coffee? They made coffee flavored candy.

Smith:

Oh my God. 

Puder:

So, for a decade, the kids were eating coffee flavored candy, and then they introduced the coffee. So when all those kids hit the age where they would probably actually go to a coffee shop. So I think capitalism is very intelligent and very, very, very intelligent at being able to woo the next generation. And it's tricky too, because it's not always that they're wooing them into things that are gonna be healthy. Right? Like vaping. And, you know, there's all these new marijuana-type products now, that are legal in states where cannabis is illegal. And all these types of things. It's wild.

Smith:

Yeah. I guess that's what worries me so much, is not envy as an interpersonal experience, but envy as a kind of systemic experience. And I just don't know. I don't know what can be done about that beyond continuing to raise awareness about how it operates.

Puder:

Maybe it is an increased reflectiveness. You know, maybe that is part of the answer here, because it's how do we properly reflect on what is going on that's leading us to be galvanized towards this specific thing? What are the influences influencing us? 

Smith:

Here's where I get a little confused, because part of the impetus for the book is a kind of trying to disempower the moralizing view of emotions. The idea that there are negative emotions and positive emotions. The valence is that language is new in that sense. It's taken from chemistry.  It's taken from the study of electricity– ions, charges, all that. And to say, “Well, no, there's no good emotion or bad emotion. There are just emotions. And what we need to do is see them in their fullness.” But with envy, as I write in this chapter, you could sort of see the moment at which the moral valence of envy shifts. Right?

Smith:

Like up to the turn of the 20th century, 1910s, 1920s, all the messages, all the cultural messages where envy is bad. You know, Cain killed Abel because of envy. We're fallen as human beings because of envy. Satan is the great envier. And to feel envy is bad. Now, part of me, a lot of me, the therapist in me, the human in me wants to be like, “Well, no. It's just an emotion. It's universal. We all feel it, and we have to get curious about it. But then there came a point when business leaders, moral leaders, governmental leaders, realize that actually envy can be used. If they change the moral valence of envy, then you could really unleash these animal spirits of the marketplace, and you could really move the economy along by way of consumerism, and voila. It worked like gangbusters. Right? The American century is in many ways a result of the unleashing of envy, and presenting it, as a moral good. Right?

Puder:

So this is where I'm kind of like, “Okay, are people conscious of their envy?” Or do they describe it some other way? Like, for example, someone who buys AG1 from their influencer who says, “Oh, this is gonna help you feel better and have more energy and be more productive.” They may not recognize how envy sold it to them. Right?

Smith:

Correct. Yes. That's right. 

Puder:

Is it envy that is bad, or unconscious envy? It’s the awareness of envy kind of what we're talking about, right? There's the first arrow where there's this thing that hits us, and I notice I'm envious. Right? And then I think what I was saying before, is sometimes it's helpful because it's like, Ooh that's what I value. Or that's what I may be overvaluing. I may be over worshiping this thing, and it may be actually starving me of my contentment with where I'm at. Right? Is it ever good enough, or can I be content with the influence and the impact and, you know, blah, blah, or just with playing with my kids? Because envy actually, like with some people, it's so strong, it keeps driving them, and they forget about their kids. They forget about their friendships even. Right? Envy can be all consuming. It may be completely unconscious for those people that are envious, that it's driving them forward into a sense of destruction. Right? 

Puder:

Maybe that would be where I would put the moral valence piece. If it was not serving the person, and taking them away from what they would really value. Right? But maybe, they would consciously not be able to know that it was driving them. Maybe though, with some therapy and some exploration, and maybe if it was driving them in the wrong way, they eventually would have some symptomatology or pain points. Right? Like, “Oh, I have a marriage that's falling apart, or I have kids that hate me, or I have this or that.” Right? And maybe the pain points lead them to therapy, where then, the exploration and the unfolding.

Therapy as Countercultural: Prioritizing Connection Over Acquisition (01:32:17)

Smith:

Or a sense of emptiness, a sense of, “My needs, my behaviors, kind of feel somewhat….” I've experienced this with patients. They feel somewhat alienated from me. Like I'm being driven by these aspirations. That this is too strong a word but they were sort of implanted in me. Like, “I keep aspiring and aspiring, aspiring or acquiring, acquiring, acquiring. But I don't really know why I'm doing it. I don't really have a sense of meaning in my life.” I think that happens a lot with sort of highly successful, highly functioning clients.

Puder:

Highly externally functioning.

Smith:

Exactly. Exactly. Yes. That's right. Thank you for the correction. I appreciate that. Very important. Very important.

Puder:

Because, I think Nancy McWilliams talks about there's a deep profound emptiness in someone with that, or narcissism with more higher narcissism traits [see episode 171]. Right? There is a deep, and I think Karen Horney and I would say, that the true self is like this kind of wilting flower inside of them, so to speak. And, you know, they've watered this facade and this projected image of themself, which sometimes stirs up envy, and others sometimes to just try to prove to themself or to avoid the feelings of shame. And it has a bunch of “shoulds” that surround it. Moral “shoulds”,  “If I should be this and I should be that.” But there's a vapidness. There's this, you know, a valuelessness. Right?

Smith:

Right. And I mean, this is a part I struggle with therapeutically when I'm thinking about it, because how do you think about and introduce into the work? These larger forces, these cultural and economic forces, that are no doubt influencing the person and their views of what they want, what they need, that might be contributing to the sense of emptiness, or a paucity of meaning, and yet, are so large, so powerful. So many things that you, as the clinician, can't influence. How do you incorporate that into the work itself? Because, I have no doubt that it's there when we're talking about these kinds of patients, you know, the really highly driven, highly successful, often very inquisitive patients, who then come in with almost an inarticulate sense of longing.

Smith:

How do you make sense of that in that room? It's something  I think about, and think about a lot, and thought about a lot when I was writing this chapter on envy, because that's not the level at which the therapist works. I mean, I think there are psychiatrists who write critically and try to think counter culturally and in terms of what's going on in the broader culture and how that's showing up. But keeping that level in mind, in the room, is something that I wonder about, and I'm still trying to make some sense of.

Puder:

I think it would come down to you would almost have to catch someone in some sort of individual obsession. And then try to distill the why. And in the why question there would be a low reflective answer,

Puder:

“Well, I don't know. You tell me why, Doc.” And if you told them, that would probably not allow them to enter into that sort of curiosity. So, yeah, maybe it would be a Socratic questioning. You wouldn't know necessarily where you would end up, but I think what you're pointing at is that likely there is a lot of the culture that has biased people to have certain drives towards consumption, which may inevitably not be in alignment with their values, but more of like, values that they've absorbed.

Smith:

Yes. Or, in a more even complicated way, might have become their values

Puder:

Become their values. But this is where, for most people, it's probably not their meta values. Right? You know, it's not like…. I used to go into the prison, the prisons in medical school. And I would talk to a group of  15 guys, and I would say, “Okay, so you guys, what do you wanna do when you get out?” “Oh, I want to get a good car and I want this, and I want a house.” And I'm like, “Okay, so imagine you are 75 years old and you have the best cars all in your garage. You have a huge house, and you're all alone. You're a hundred percent alone, and you haven't seen anyone in your large house, in all of your cars  for the last year.” And they're like, “No, No.” I'm like, “Oh. Tell me, what do you want?” “Well, I have to have my friends there. I have to have some family. I have to….” Okay. Okay. “Well, tell me about that.” So then, inevitably the values that they project are like, “This is what I really want superficially from capitalistic, sort of, you know, from the movies they watch from everything, it kind of falls short if, if that's all they have.

Smith:

Absolutely. And this is the way in which I think therapy is inherently countercultural or at least a certain kind of psychotherapy, because it does in fact have its own values. It isn't valueless. It does, in fact, value connection and openness and reflectiveness, in a way that absolutely runs perpendicular to a lot of the culture as it exists right now. And when I feel any dipping of faith about what psychotherapy is, or can do, I often find myself returning to that. That therapy, as a necessary countercultural force, a place that really can center exactly those kinds of values that you're talking about. And finding myself trying to get more comfortable with the fact that therapy, is in fact, value laden that way. In that broader way, that's becoming more and more important to me. And as we talk about envy, it becomes more clear to me as well.

Puder:

Yes. I like that there's this value of connection, the value of what is therapy, but two people trying to connect. Right? So at the core is connection. I would say, also the value of family. Of friends. The value of connections outside of meaningful connections outside of the office, when it's done well, at least. And I tend to think that most mental illness leads to isolation.

Puder:

Perceived isolation or actual isolation. And so it's like we're trying to get people to move into more connection.

Smith:

Absolutely.

Puder:

I can see how envy and shame can kind of make that difficult at times, and it can be a hindrance towards that.

Smith:

And envy is, in a way, that maybe connects to what I was saying about its relationship to admiration, a kind of severance of connection. Because of its inherent inquisitiveness, its desire to sort of grab, maybe like shame inherently disconnecting.

Smith:

Maybe that's too absolute a statement. I'm not sure. But that's my intuition.

Puder:

Yes. No, I think that envy would lead to…. I have seen people who are very envious, and it's very hard for them to have… highly competent males, with high envy, have a hard time with friendships.

Smith:

When I was working on this book, and really in the heart of it, and struggling terribly for all sorts of external reasons, as well as just the difficulty of writing the book, and would talk to a friend, a really beloved old friend who was flourishing in his literary career and was proud of it, and wanted to share something with me, and I would feel envious. I experienced it as a severance of connection. I experienced it as a failure of intimacy because I could not join him there because it became about me. It kind of sort of bounced back against me and made me lose my intimate connection. Which creates all sorts of other things, sadness and shame. But if you're not careful, that's….

Puder:

But you'd be. I think the first step is, okay, that is the first arrow. Right? What is the first arrow? What is the second arrow of envy?

The Second Arrow of Envy: From Feeling It to Acting on Disconnection (01:42:20)

Smith:

The second arrow is, the second step is always just to name and notice, “I feel envy because I'm struggling and I'm going through a hard time, and I'm lost.” And its reflectiveness is the next step. What you're asking is what is the second arrow?

Puder:

The second arrow is a bad…

Smith:

The second arrow is, “I should not be feeling envy of this person. That it's wrong. It's a violence to feel envy of this person. It's wrong to feel envy.”.

Puder:

Or  maybe the second arrow would be that which then leads to the disconnection. Right? Whatever that is. So I would say that, and it's okay if you see this differently, but the way I was thinking about it was the second arrow would be putting the book down, your friend's book. Not rejoicing. Right? It consumes you to the point that you can't rejoice with your friend. So what if the envy is unconscious and then you put the book down and you don't rejoice, that leads to the disconnection. But then the awareness of the envy… this is the… maybe…. I'm just thinking out loud here… how I would see it. It's almost like information…the capacity then to pause and to say, “Oh, I envy because I actually value what this person has accomplished, and I aspire towards that as well.” I would want to celebrate with him out of not a reaction formation, which would be doing the, you know, opposite action, but actually somehow then finding an ability to move through the envy into more of the other person's experience. Right?

Smith:

It's mentalizing [see episode 206]. Right? In a way. It's seeing that person, slowing down and seeing that friend in his fullness in his own narrative. Remembering what his aspirations are, what his struggles have been, what his emotions are. As opposed to sort of tethering your experience to his or his to yours. It really is keeping his mind and his existence in mind. Loving the other. There's a writer, Annie Dillard, who I just absolutely adore, who once said something like, “The only real prayer is, Love them. Love them. Love them.” And in this context, I think of that. I think of when I'm feeling envy, it is, and I don't mean this in a second arrow way, but in a descriptive way, a kind of failure of love. It is making this person's experience reflective of my own, as opposed to granting them autonomy of their own life and loving them for who they are and what they need at the moment of envy. There's a kind of, at least at that moment, a severance of that. And it feels disconnecting. It feels bad. It feels lonely.

Smith:

Because the fact of the matter is that in no way do I actually want what that person wants, especially in this context. Right? If I don't want to write the book that that person wrote, I want to write the book…The whole point is to be original and to find your own voice. When you listen to someone who's a successful podcaster, you don't want that podcast. You want your podcast. You want your podcast to be a reflection of you and what you find interesting and your own explanation/explorations. So the envy in itself is always, on the level of authenticity, false, I think.

Closing: Envy as Information & Surpassing Yourself (01:46:21)

Puder:

Yes. I'm hoping that you felt in this time together, that I was able to see the world from your perspective, and not just try to see it through my own perspective. Because I realize I have challenged a couple points where I'm looking at it through my perspective, you know. But I've also enjoyed…you invited me to your book thing. I haven't traveled for a long time. I'm tempted. I'm very tempted to come celebrate with you, and I would hope that you would feel like I have seen you in the midst of this. I'm conscious now of maybe I am enacting this in a poor way? You know?

Smith:

How so? I really appreciate the way you've come at it. And I've probably been too focused on my own sort of shame in the moment when I haven't been able to articulate points well, or I've forgotten points of my own book. That's a funny feeling. It's like, I wrote this thing, but I finished it over a year ago. And there's so much in there. Did I describe what I wanted to say about the “Still Face” Experiment, the way I wanted to? As I said, this is the first interview I've done. But I don't know what you are worrying about. I'm probably over here worrying about my own thing.

Puder:

And maybe that's probably that internal reflectiveness that makes you a good writer. 

Smith:

I'm grateful to have had the chance to have a long conversation about this book. It means a lot to me. And it's scary to put a book out as a therapist, that's this autobiographical. 

Puder:

You're like the next Yalom. 

Smith:

Well, that's there….

Puder:

You're the next Yalom. The next one will be Envy's Executioner [joke, based off Yalom’s book Love’s Executioner].

Smith:

Yeah, exactly. But I don't want to envy Yalom. I want to be myself. 

Puder:

You'll surpass Yalom. All of them. 

Smith:

I have to surpass myself.

Puder:

You'll surpass it. I'm stoking the flame of envy. I'm marketing envy to you. I'm…

Smith:

The idealization of others. 

Puder:

Trying to subvert. 

Smith:

I don't want anybody else's essence, or at least I try not to. I'm really grateful to you, David. I appreciate it.

Puder:

That's fun. No, we're playing some gymnastics here, now.

Smith:

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. 

Puder:

I think that there is… I'm conscious of some envy of how you write. Because I will never write like that because I have dyslexia. Right? I will always probably be a better podcaster than I will be a writer. That's just the truth. But I'm also happy. I'm also enthusiastic that there are people like you that can write the way that you do. You know? So I'm aware, I think at this point, if I write something, it will probably be Sisyphus.

Smith:

Well, there's a quote by Thomas Mann that I love; and I'm going to mangle this too, but it's something like, “A writer is a person who has a harder time writing than other people.” So, it's always Sisyphean. And I was feeling envy this morning for your industry. Your voracious speed. So I have to try to quiet down and remember what I do, is what I do. Like I got to work my side of the street, you know.

Puder:

My speed. What's my speed? 

Smith:

How often you produce podcasts and get things out and write long articles on the website accompanying that. The way that you can research things. You know, that horrible tragedy occurs near your house, of a therapist getting murdered and you very quickly get into action and produce a spreadsheet of the ways this has happened. And how this has happened in other ways and in other parts of the country and different times. And I'm gonna say not envious, but deeply admiring of, in a way, envious that you have that ability. I've always wanted that for myself, but that's just not the way I operate.

Puder:

I  think part of that is teamwork. I'm  pretty good at…

Smith:

You're good at collaborating.

Puder:

I'm good at getting highly motivated medical students. So if you're listening to this and you're about to apply to medical school, reach out to me. I got some projects

Puder:

But yeah, I think we should probably wrap it up right now. Okay. I think this is good. Mutual enjoyment of each other's successes. Yes. And just enough envy to aspire towards our own hard work. Right?

Smith:

The point to what we admire in the other.

Puder:

Yeah. That's it. Okay. All right. We'll leave it there today. Okay.

Smith:

All right. Take care.

References

Alighieri, D. (2009). Purgatorio (J. Ciardi, Trans.). Signet Classics. (Original work published ca. 1320). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304813/the-purgatorio-by-dante-alighieri/ 

Augustine, S. (2025). Confessions (T. Williams, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009036597 

Chess, S., & Thomas, A. (1996). Temperament: Theory and practice. Brunner/Mazel. https://www.routledge.com/Temperament-Theory-And-Practice/Chess/p/book/9780876308356 

Gottman, J. M., Levenson, R. W., & Woodin, E. (2001). Facial expressions during marital conflict. Journal of Family Communication, 1(1), 37–57. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327698JFC0101_06 

Smith, D. B. (2007). Muses, madmen, and prophets: Hearing voices and the borders of sanity. Penguin Publishing Group

Smith, D. B. (2012). Monkey mind: A memoir of anxiety. Simon & Schuster.

Smith, D. B. (2026). Hard feelings: Finding the wisdom in our darkest emotions. Simon & Schuster. (Note: This book is scheduled for publication in March 2026)

Wurmser, L. (1981). The mask of shame. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://archive.org/details/maskofshame0000wurm