Episode 121 - Dark Moods with Mariana Alessandri

Transcript

David: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:16

The podcast where two philosophers show you that things that society often deems bad are actually maybe not so bad. Or at least more complicated. In this case, less bad.

David: 0:28

Sure, I am Dr. David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:31

Sure. David's looking at me like you went on way too long. And I am Ellie Anderson. I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. Hello. From a young age, the 20th century Chicana feminist philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa was a friend of the darkness. As a young girl growing up in the borderlands of Texas, Anzaldúa would walk around with books by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in her backpack. Honestly, so

David: 0:53

cute. Oh my god, she was the ideal student. The student that we all want to have.

Ellie: 0:57

Well, I'm not so sure about that, because she also described herself as an alien from another planet. Part of the reason that Anzaldúa was carrying Nietzsche and Kierkegaard around is because she was, from a young age, very interested in philosophy. No wonder then that she became an extremely prominent thinker, and I would say now still that you basically can't go to a philosophy conference or a feminist conference today without somebody mentioning Anzaldúa's work. But where I'm going with this is that she wasn't just carrying around those thinkers because she was a nerdy little budding philosopher. She was also carrying them around because from a young age she felt like she was an alien from another planet in the sense that she was a lot darker mood wise than her peers. Anzaldúa struggled a lot with depression and found, only in Kierkegaard, what she described as a despair equaling her own. When she became an adult, she pushed against the idea of seeing it as a disease, as designating something wrong with her, and saw it more as something to lean into when it emerged.

David: 2:00

And that makes perfect sense because the borderlands that she talks about in Borderlands/La Frontera are, of course, literal borderlands between countries, but also emotional borderlines. She talks a lot about the difference between the emotions that we recognize versus the emotions that we repress, between the conscious and the unconscious aspects of our personality. And so it would make sense that from an early age, age maybe she was intimately acquainted with borderlines on a personal, psychological, and emotional level, and that that is part of what led her to write this very influential work that, as you point out, has had a massive influence in philosophy departments, the Chicano Studies departments, and also in WGS, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies departments. You know, there is a very long history, of course, of philosophers who struggle with negative emotions, writing out of those emotions. So we have Anzaldúa also the people that she was carrying in her backpack. We know that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche themselves struggled with dark and depressive moods and feelings and emotions. And you also find this in other people like Schopenhauer and also William James. William James in particular is really interesting to me because he built his own experience with dark and depressive states of mind into his understanding of the psyche. In his 20s, William James went through a number of experiences tied to melancholy and depression, and he often described himself as somebody who had a pessimistic outlook on the world. And he used the term sick soul to refer to himself. And in his book on the varieties of religious experience, he actually thinks about the sick soul almost as a personality type, as a kind of religious believer that experiences mysticism through a particularly dark constitution. And so a lot of that book is written from the perspective of these two characters, a kind of happy go lucky kind of religious believer and a sick soul with whom he personally identified. So it's another example of a philosopher who uses their experience with darkness, with the night, the emotional night, as a springboard for doing philosophy and doing so in a way that is quite impactful.

Ellie: 4:24

That said, James's experience of this, if he's describing it as a sickness, would be pretty different from Anzaldúa's because Anzaldúa, as we mentioned, doesn't want to just think about this as a sickness. And the reason I think that's important to spell out is that the reason this whole episode is called Dark Moods rather than Bad Moods is because Mariana Alessandri, whom we will be speaking with, is a in a bit, really theorizes things like depression, anxiety, anger, and so forth as dark, but not as bad. And that has to do with a desire on her part to, you know, even as we're taking mental health very seriously, move away from a purely medicalized or sickness based model of some of these dark moods. And Alessandri herself sees in the work of Anzaldúa, as well as in the work of a lot of other women of color philosophers, a leaning into darkness, that you maybe don't see as much among philosophers who come from different social backgrounds. So that's really cool to know about William James. I hadn't known that. And this isn't to say that there aren't great resources in James and other like, dead white men for thinking about these dark moods. But Alessandri also points out that there are immense resources in the work of women of color philosophers, including Anzaldúa but also Maria Lugones, Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, and more, for thinking about what these dark moods offer. In part because due to their exclusion from academic philosophy for so long, or their existence at the margins of it, even when they got into the halls of academia, these women of color philosophers were particularly acquainted with these dark moods, in the way that people who felt maybe more automatically comfortable in those situations were not.

David: 6:05

Well, it makes perfect sense to me that people who would be on the margins of the profession would develop the acumen to think about precisely that which is marginal, not only in relation to philosophy, but in relation to our inner lives. One thing that I want to ask you about Ellie is that in the case of Mariana Alessandri, who is our guest today, she specifically works on what she calls dark moods rather than dark feelings or emotions. And so I'm wanting us to think a little bit together about what the difference is between a mood and maybe the language that we often find in philosophy and psychology, which is that of feeling and emotion. What differentiates a mood from a feeling?

Ellie: 6:50

Yeah, and here we'll speculate a bit. I think I'm going to say some things that aren't articulated explicitly so much in Alessandri's book, but what I was thinking about when I was reading this, which is that moods are more persistent. right? Feelings are rapidly passing, whereas moods simply last longer than feelings. That's, at least in the philosophy of emotion, one really standard way of distinguishing moods from feelings. For an existentialist, a difference between mood and feeling would be that moods orient our existence in a way that feelings don't necessarily. Like, feelings can be limited to certain situations that trigger them, and then they can pass away. But in addition to being more temporally localized, they're also perhaps a bit more localized kind of on the surface of our whereas moods go deeper. In existentialism, of course, The main mood that's focused on is anxiety, which is actually not something we're going to talk so much about today, but we do have an existential anxiety episode from very early in Overthink's history if you're interested in that. And anxiety really orients you towards your own freedom. And so I think moods are more closely connected to our own sense of self and to our own existence than feelings are, at least from an existential point of view, which is one that I agree with.

David: 8:06

Yeah, no, and I think this is what we can sometimes capture under the umbrella term of intentionality. That's language that, for example, the philosopher Eric Lurhmann uses to differentiate moods from feelings and emotions, which is that emotions and feelings have an intentional object, you know, you can be angry about a particular thing or anxious about a particular thing. But when we think about anger or anxiety as moods in that more persistent, pervasive way, they really aren't about any one thing. Often the language that is used to talk about this is that their object is the totality of existence. Right, like you're angry at the world, or you're anxious at existence itself rather than any particular thing. So that's another way of differentiating between moods and emotions that is not about temporality necessarily.

Ellie: 8:55

Of course, there are more ways to distinguish moods from feelings than the ones we've talked about here, but it's almost time for our interview with Alessandri David. And one thing that I wanted to just end with here is reflecting on how when we talk about people being moody, like we do talk about people being emotional, but when we talk about people being moody in particular, There's an implicit sense that they have a lot of bad moods. Like, you don't use moody to refer to somebody who's too joyful or like too ebullient. You use it to refer to somebody who often experiences anger or depression or things that we associate with being bad, although Alessandri will say they're not bad, they're just dark. So we do associate them with dark moods. And I feel like that says a lot about how our society devalues dark moods. Being moody is considered a bad thing and being moody means you experience a lot of dark moods.

David: 9:51

And beyond that, I would say that we also have this sense that people who are considered moody are people who have been dominated by dark experiences rather than dominating them and getting over them. And as we'll see from Alessandri, this is something that only complicates our relationship to our own darkness because not only are we expected not to feel it, but we're also sometimes socially pressured into not sharing our feelings of darkness with other people. Mariana Alessandri is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She is a specialist on existentialism, the philosophy of emotions, and Latina feminist philosophy. And she is the author of Night Vision, Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods.

Ellie: 10:58

Mariana, we are so happy to welcome you to Overthink!

Mariana: 11:02

Thank you for having me.

Ellie: 11:03

So your book is about dark moods. Not bad moods, but dark moods. And throughout the book, you use the metaphors of light and dark to talk about our emotional lives. And you argue that one of the reasons philosophy has ignored dark moods is because it sees itself as a discourse of light. You have Plato's cave, where, as you mentioned, your students sort of think that the goal of the cave is to, of the cave metaphor, is to encourage people to get out of it and go upward toward the light. We have the Enlightenment, of course, et cetera. I'd love to hear you explain a bit what you mean by this. Why you think the metaphors of light and dark, and especially the way that we tend to align the light with good, and the dark with bad. Hence, dark moods, but maybe not so much bad moods, is a problem for you. hmm.

Mariana: 11:53

I'll start with the present because I think the book is trying to deal with like the present obsession with the light and this is in everything you think of when you go to target. It's love and light, it's bring your own sunshine, it's no bad days, it's always be brilliant, it's a smile is the most beautiful thing a girl can wear. There's so much, even if the metaphors don't say light per se, like I'm thinking of hashtag no bad days. It's all of a piece with what is now called, thank God, it's called toxic positivity. And I don't know when that word started. I don't even know who coined it, but I'm very grateful to them because before that some of us were just quite uncomfortable with what we saw around us and felt like it was dangerous, but to everyone else, it looks amazing to everyone else it looks like what could be wrong with being optimistic. And you know, I had a lot of trouble sort of battling myself to write the book because it just seems like, well, of course the sun is good. Of course, positivity is good. Of course, this and that. But when I started to think like, where does this even come from? I started to think about the cave, and Plato, and how there's prisoners in the cave, and it's dark, but there's a fire in there. And then they believe things that aren't so, right? They believe shadows of things. And it takes someone being pulled out of the cave, and like thrown under the sun, for them to realize that what they were believing inside was real. Exactly true, right? It was like two steps removed from being true because they believed that shadows were the thing But the shadows were actually shadows of the puppet of the thing, right? So outside then they're like, okay, this is a tree and so yes, I think that in the history of philosophy It's not just our students who take it to be that way, right? I think it's a lot of philosophers who kind of think of the sun as truth or the sun is what allows for truth. And we have forgotten all about the puppeteers because remember in the cave, there's these people holding up these puppets that are then being projected onto the wall. And then that's why the people in the cave believed it, right? So there's more stuff going on than just dark and light in there. So I wanted to like unpack the story and figure out why did we, it was like a confluence of things, right? You mentioned the enlightenment, which doesn't go well for people with darker skin, right? That's the whole problem of the enlightenment is to say that light is good and dark is bad. Light is beautiful and wonderful and pure and holy, right? There's religious stuff. not undertones like blatant, right? Like religious creeds that, that just say light is good and dark is bad and sin is dark and dangerous and all these things. And so it's like in any pair, when you're going to get a light and dark, the dark is going to suffer. And especially when it comes to moods, which live inside of all of us, we have light moods and dark moods, but in a world that's just seeking the light, we are suffering because we sometimes wake up with a bad day. And then we have to question the whole thing and be like, what's wrong with me that I'm having a bad day? I'm in a dark mood. Everything I see around me says I'm not allowed to have that. So that's sort of where it came from and what the problem is today.

David: 15:14

And I have to say, I really enjoyed reading this book because you do a wonderful job of tracing that bias that we have in philosophy for the light and against the dark. And you use a term that stood out to me, which is nyctophobia, a fear of the dark, that we see in the history of Western philosophy, but also in the contemporary moment where we privilege sunny dispositions, right? The happy go lucky attitude of somebody who just exudes light and brilliance and a kind of levity of spirit. And much of your book is trying to get us to look at what happens in the dark, including the dark moods that shape our human life. Hence the title of your book, Night Vision, right? It's about learning to see in the dark. And you talk about a lot of affects and emotions and moods and try to get us to see the value that they add to our existence, despite being dark. And one of the ones that you talk about is sadness/depression. And you suggest that the recent focus on depression in our society, even though it comes from a good place of trying to address mental health concerns, has led us to ignore a lot of other emotions that express suffering, such as intense sadness and sorrow. And you think that the line between some of these emotions, such as sadness and pain is actually really blurry. And you use the Spanish term dolor to refer to this kind of broad spectrum of dark emotions that include physical pain, emotional suffering, maybe even existential angst of some sort. Because there is no term in English that does that good of a job at capturing that broad spectrum. You know, for example, in English, if you say pain, it usually means physical. If you mean suffering, it usually refers to exclusively emotional. And I want you to say a little bit more about what you mean by dolor, the Spanish term, and why you think it's so important to human flourishing.

Mariana: 17:27

Yeah. So dolor is like my favorite of the emotions that I write about. And I was trying to figure out what is the right word, and I tried pain, I tried hurt, suffering, right? But these, like, I think in English we have, we peg them to certain things, right? We peg them to, like you said, the physical or the emotional or the mental, and when I wrote a chapter and I called it sadness, Someone was like, but isn't that worry? And I was like, oh yeah, but worry is part of it. Like, you know how we don't always know what we're feeling. We just feel down. It's like the blues or just, I feel bad. I feel like I'm hurting and it could be a lot of things all in one. And so I wanted to use a word that's foreign to a lot of people, right? I'm writing the book in English. The word el dolor is in Spanish. So it's going to be foreign. It's going to accept more variety, it's going to accept like a kind of bigger vision of what I was trying to go for, which is like everything except depression, right? Like, so the book is about the five chapters are anger and then this dolor, and then grief and anxiety and depression, right? So I'm trying to separate it from depression, but it's like kind of the other stuff, right? The other stuff, when I feel terrible, that could include a little bit of anxiety, it could include these things, but isn't reducible to them. So for me, that word really captures what I was trying to get at, which is just general hurt that we all feel that we don't really pay a lot of attention to in part because we can't always define it and it doesn't have its own like diagnosis or and it's can be fleeting it can be an hour it can be two days like we don't always know like how long it's going to be there and sometimes it's caused and sometimes it's not caused etc. Yeah,

Ellie: 19:12

and I think one of the things that struck me in your book is that each of these five chapters also relates to what we might call a dark mood, but maybe it would be better just termed a dark emotion, which is shame. You talk about shame quite a bit in the sense that shame, when it's combined with any of these five moods, really worsens the deal. And so there's a sense in which if you're experiencing dolor, but then you feel shame about that because you live in this toxically positive society, then you are going to feel even worse. And so I'd love for you, I guess, to, say a little bit about how that works? Like, why is it that shame almost takes out the positive potential? Or maybe, can we say positive? I know we can't say bright potential, but like, one thing we'll get to a little bit later is how you see such value in dark moods. But I think it seems to me that sometimes when you're talking about the way that shame gets piled on to something like dolor or any of the other emotions that we're discussing, it's almost as though that shame removes the positive potential or the value of the emotions. How are you seeing shame in relation to these dark moods and especially dolor?

Mariana: 20:26

Oh it's beautiful, thank you. So in the book I'm describing shame as the feeling bad about feeling bad. So it's the extra feeling and my opinion and experience tells me that the first mood is really hard enough. Like, it's really hard to have anxiety. It's really hard to be grieving. And I can't do anything about that. So people sometimes ask me like, well, how do I stop feeling this? I'm like, I have no idea. Like, this is not something that we really, I mean, we have ways to minimize it, but like, this isn't what my book is trying to do. It's not trying to get rid of your anxiety. But what I think that I'm trying to do by pointing out the aspect of shame is I think I can reduce the amount of shame involved in feeling bad about feeling bad. And I think that the source of the shame is not ourselves. I think that the society that wants us to be happy all the time is the same society that if you tell someone, Oh, I'm not feeling well, don't say that. Oh, I'm not going to get this job. No. How can you say that? Well, with an attitude like that, you'll never get the job. Right? So the society actually shames us. Like it makes us feel bad because we're supposed to be grateful and we're supposed to always be positive and we're supposed to believe and succeed. Right? So anything less than that is like, well, then it's your fault, right? This is the absolute paradox of self help and of saying like, choose happy. Choose happy is really lovely when you're happy. It's beautiful. And you can be like, Oh, I did that. I changed my attitude. I felt great today. I decided that I was going to go and have a good day, no matter what. But when you feel bad, then it's like, well, that's on you. What, who else is to blame but you? Cause you could have felt better in your circumstances. You could have decided that you were going to change your attitude, change your narrative, change your outlook, all of the things that we hear in our society from different like vectors. So I just think that we can feel these things and not have to feel the shame. Like I would love to just let grievers grieve and not have to tell them, well, it's been two weeks. You got to go dancing. You really have to get out of bed, but it's been too long. Stop using that person's name, right? Like you should start washing the dishes. Like, we have these sort of like societal mandates on other people because we are nyctophobic. That's the word you brought up, David. Like, we're very ill trained. I would say like pretty illiterate in terms of how to sit in the dark or be with our dark moods or allow our dark moods, and especially when other people are feeling bad because we don't want them to feel bad. So we're just like, No, don't say that. You know? And instead of like embracing them and saying like, I'm here, no matter what you feel, we're like, we tell kids, like I've heard people tell kids, go into your room and come back when you're smiling. If they're angry or sad or whatever, it's like banished, right? The dark mood is banished and come back when you're smiling. Cause I don't want to see it. It makes me feel bad. It makes me feel angry, et cetera, et cetera. So I just want to create a world or I want to change our world so that we can we are less nyctophobic so that we can learn to see in the dark so we can take care of one another and take care of ourselves without shaming each other for doing it wrong and without shaming ourselves and without sort of like just getting the world to back off. I want to like fix this toxic positivity thing like back off world and like let me be because I'm a whole human being and that means that I throw up and I'm on the floor. And like, I get food poisoning, right? Like all of these things, like we are real, we bleed, and that doesn't make us any less human. So what I think is like worrisome about what's in jeopardy is like my feeling that I have dignity. I think that the shame makes me feel like well, what's wrong with me? I'm such a mess. I'm a hot mess. I'm breaking down. I'm falling apart. Like it threatens our dignity. And so what I want to restore is like, no, we each have dignity, even when you're throwing up and you're on the bathroom floor, you still have dignity. It's the world that's talking bad about you, but we can change the narrative, like, in a big way, right? The whole narrative, not just our personal individual narrative.

David: 24:31

Yeah, and I really like how you said that the shame doesn't come from the self, it comes from society. But you also make a very compelling case that the price we pay for that socially induced Shame is precisely our sense of self worth. So the individual is not the source of the shame, but it is the price that we pay. And that's what triggers what you call the brokenness story. That when we are shamed for having the dark moods that we have, we feel like there is something deeply broken with us as humans, rather than seeing those fissures as part of what it means to be human, right? A human that doesn't feel sadness, that doesn't feel anxiety, that doesn't feel grief. Most of us would recognize that that's not a human being at all. In fact, there would be something deeply unsettling about such a person. and I want you to talk about a particular character that you mention in the book that this just made me think about. And that's Jody. You talk about this woman who is sort of a pessimistic character and who in her sadness, her pessimism is in some ways seeking a connection or is reaching out for others to make contact with her. And you talk about how those around her fail to do so. And I thought it was a really good illustration of the kind of potential that dark moods can bring into our lives. So can you tell us a little bit about Jody's case?

Mariana: 26:01

Yes, I love Jody. She's like the hero

David: 26:04

yes.

Mariana: 26:04

Of this chapter on dolor. And she exhibits the way that dolor is multiple things. So Jody is an out of work housewife. She raised her kids. Now she wants to go back to work and she's worried because she doesn't think that anyone will hire her after 10 years off of the market. So she's talking to her husband and says, You know, she's expressing her dolor, like her worry, her sadness, her regret, her like so many things that are kind of like amorphous, right? This just pain and like I don't want to do this. I don't think I'm good at this. I don't think anyone will hire me. And she's a real person and this was a case made by like a very fancy famous psychologist. So he's using her case and showing us what she's doing wrong. Okay so, because she's doing it in front of her kid and that the book is called the optimistic child. And so it's like in expressing all these doubts, the husband goes, no, you're going to be great. What do you mean? You're wonderful. You're such a good mom. And then he's like a cheerleader cause he loves her. And he's been taught. to oppose someone else's bad mood with a good mood, right? And a lot of us want to do that in the name of balance. You're down. Let me cheer you up. Let me bring you up. And she's like, no, I really don't think, you know, I don't know. I don't really want to do that. I don't want to go back to, and he's like, no, you're wonderful. Let's look in the classifieds and make a list, right? He's like in there trying to fix it. And she's like, again, she tried one more time and she was like, no, I don't, I just don't think it's going to work out. And so the story confused me so much for years because I had a feeling that she was not wrong. But this fancy psychologist used her case and said, see, she's a brooding pessimist who has these negative thought patterns, and she's going to pass her pessimism onto her kids, and she's in the wrong, and she's irrational. And the husband, is the hero. He's rational. He has better thought patterns. He's optimistic. He's positive. You have to have a better attitude, blah, blah, blah. So I was like, I don't think this is right. So I started analyzing and analyzing and thinking and just really trying to get into her point of view. And I realized, no, what she was doing is she's trying to give them a way into her, right? Like when you're in a sad mood, you can like isolate, right? But if you're telling someone, you're giving them a way to come find you. Like, hey, this is worrying me. And instead of coming to find her where she is, and that would be to say, yes. Yes, Jody, like, tell me about it. Tell me about the sadness. Like, I want to hear from you. He was like, no, you shouldn't feel that way. You have to feel better because if you feel that way, you're never going to get a job. Right? So he's in fact blaming her for her future failure to get a job. Like it's like insane to me.

David: 28:56

And that's just her husband, right? You say it's also the psychologist who just like reflects the position of the husband. And so it's these two male figures just sort of delegitimizing the dark mood of this woman. And it stood out to me that you said the psychologist became the president of the APA, the American Psychological Association.

Mariana: 29:16

Super famous. And because they both think that in this world, you have to believe to succeed. And if you have these doubts about yourself, you're not going to succeed. So it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. And I just think What world do these people live in that is not sexist against and ageist against this Woman who's been out of the workforce for 10 years. I think she is actually right I think she has a better thought pattern than the husband does because he's just like blindly Optimistic not considering the actual physical conditions that she lives in and she's like no but in this world in the US, who wants to hire an older lady? And I'm like, Oh, I kind of think she's right. I think she's more realistic. And you know, there's studies about how pessimists are often more realistic than optimists, et cetera. But it just, it stopped me in my tracks because I said, Oh, I think I'm on the complete opposite side. Like I'm on the side with the people who are doubting, who are sad because they're trying to reach out. And I think that the husband missed an opportunity as we often do when we say no to someone's pain instead of yes. We're missing a chance to find them and to hold them and to be with them and to connect with them. So I'm using this philosopher called Miguel de Unamuno in this chapter he says that we connect better, our souls connect better in sadness. And you just have to see if that's true for you. Like, have you ever had an experience where you are sad and you find someone else? He also says we're better at seeing other sad people when we're sad. And you find someone and you can actually have like a super genuine, deep connection. He thinks that when we're happy we have like pretty fun, frivolous, physical connections with one another. But when we're sad, it's like, you get to a new level and we're missing a lot of it. Like, so every time we tell our friends, no, don't feel that way. Oh, you're beautiful. Stop thinking like that. Like we're actually saying no to them. And I want us to. to start saying yes because it's not so scary once you say yes, like I'm here for you. You can cry. I'm just gonna stay here. It's not my job to fix you. I'm not trying to make you feel better. Like I'm just trying to listen to you and like find you where you are even if that's in a dark cave. I'm going to come down with you instead of trying to bring you all this like you. Sun and the bright side and at least you don't have cancer and your life could be worse. Like, I feel like these are things that really just make people aggravated. And then what happens is you just stop talking to people. You're like, no one understands me. I can't tell anyone my real feelings. Cause they're going to be like, why are you sad? Well, you have the best life. You should be grateful. You're hashtag blessed. You know? So I feel like there's like so much pressure on us. And then we eventually just don't talk anymore because we're like, well, the world doesn't want to hear about my sad mood, but we're missing all kinds of like empathy and compassion with each other because we all feel it. So that guy, the husband probably had his own problems. And if she were to say hit hers, he might be like, Oh, me too. Right. I feel bad too. And then they could like connect in a more real way than just on the superficial level of whether she's going to get a job or not. That seems to be the most, the least relevant part at a certain point.

Ellie: 32:19

Yeah, yeah. And I think what you're saying too is a really interesting way of thinking about the loneliness epidemic today too. I mean, I'm gonna sketch a trajectory here that is like way too fast and loose. But what comes to mind is that the positive psychology movement, so the person that we've been talking about, psychologist Martin Seligman, is one of the main people associated with the positive psychology movement. That movement really, which emerged in like the 90s, early 2000s. is coming then before we have this major loneliness epidemic where it's like, yes, there has been a backlash to toxic positivity, but there also has been an entrenchment of it with things like manifestation rhetoric. And one of the things that I loved about your book, because I also love to think about how philosophy can help us understand and critique self help literature, is how many self help books you cite and do critique here. It's just like such a fun engagement. And again, yeah, I don't want to blame the positive psychology movement for the loneliness epidemic, but maybe it's not totally unrelated either. One thing I want to think a little bit about too is the temporality of some of these discourses because I grew up in a household where bad moods were only recognized in retrospect. You could never say, I'm feeling sad right now. You would always have to say, I've been sad, but I'm feeling better. And my mom is probably listening to this. She loves Overthink. She will be the first to admit this. Like this is a real struggle, I think in our family life, especially for me growing up. recognizing and sitting in the bad moods. They were only acceptable once you were sort of on the up and up. And I wonder how you think that relates to this because you talk about how moods are You know, they pertain to our affective life, but they're a bit more persistent than feelings. And it almost seems like what I'm describing happening in my family is also true on a social level. We can say, oh, I've been depressed as long as we're now coming out of the depression. We can't be like, yeah, you know what? I'm currently in it. I don't know how much longer it's going to last.

Mariana: 34:22

Oh my god, what a great example. That's so beautiful because I think that's super common. And it's very safe, right? Because then the people you're talking to don't have to worry about you. Because they're like, oh good, just tell me when it's over.

Ellie: 34:35

Oh yeah.

Mariana: 34:36

So I think it has a lot to do with making us feel bad that someone else that we love is hurting. And so I think whether or not that's explicit is, will depend on the family, but I think that that's actually quite true in many families. You can talk about something, but if you talk about it in the moment, it's really scary. And there's this anecdote that I keep, it keeps coming into my head as you're talking that I write about in the book about this mother and father are talking to their daughter and the daughter is a recent widow. And, She had lost her husband, so she's on the phone with them, and she starts crying. And the mother says, okay, I'm going to let you go, right? She wants to respect the daughter's privacy. She wants to be kind. I'm sure it's like hurting her to hear her daughter cry, right? This is like being a mother. It is really terrible. I think it's very hard to hear our own children sad because we have been instilled to believe that we're supposed to make them happy. And if they're not happy, it's our fault. So she's like, okay, I'll get off the phone with you. And the husband says, I'm going to stay right here. I'm not getting off the phone. You can go ahead and cry and I will be right here. And like, I love that because it just shows that both parents are well intentioned. They both love their daughter. The mom in that case is just too afraid of it, right? Like, where is this going to go? What can I do? I can't help. There's nothing I can do. Like, it's just really confronting the finitude of, of human possibility, right? And I think that the sooner we do that, I'm an existentialist, and for me that just means that, like, we just think life is really hard, and it's not the after, it's the during, it's the struggle, it's the bad, the dark mood, like, it's really just being in it. So if we could allow ourselves to be like, I'm gonna stay on the phone, like, you're not, I'm not gonna, Wait and demand that you get better and then come talk to me about it. Cause then I've missed the actual time of connection and I've left you alone. Like the loneliness epidemic that you're talking about. And like just the fact that people say, like I have students who say, well, I like to be sad in private. And I think, okay, that's your right. But try to figure out why. Think about your first experience of trying to share it. Most likely it went badly. Most likely the person didn't express sympathy or compassion or empathy. They probably were like, well, what's wrong with you? Why are you sad? You just, why are you tired? You just slept all night. Why are you hungry? You just ate something, right? Like we get a lot of shame for like just being honest. And so I think that like the loneliness has to do with there is no one who can hold me, right? There's no one who's going to stay on the phone with me because either people are going to try to fix me, make me feel better or shame me for feeling sad. And so, yes, I've become the kind of person who says I'm private or I don't want to, but inside it's got to hurt, right? Like, I just don't think that we want to be ghosted by our friends. I don't think we want people to like, leave us alone. I don't think we want people to like, Ew, I don't want to hear about your sadness. Like, tell me about it afterwards so that it's safe for me, you know.

David: 37:40

Yeah, and the example that you just gave of this woman talking to her mother and father is such a great example of what it means to bear witness to somebody's dark mood and just to be present for it, right? To sit with them through it, even if, as Ellie pointed out, you don't know if there is a door on the other side, or if there is light at the end of the tunnel. And that particular example brings us to the theme of grief, which you talk about in the book quite a bit. You have a chapter entitled Grieving Stubbornly, which makes the case that grieving is yet another of these dark moods that we turn away from, like that mother on the phone with her daughter. And interestingly, you do point out that grief is maybe one of the dark moods that we are socially speaking more nuanced about, because in general, we do tend to recognize that grief is not something that we can expect people to just make disappear in the same way that we do expect people to just not be sad anymore or not be depressed or not be anxious. With grief, we tend to recognize that people need to go through it, you need to work through the grief and experience it and maybe learn something from it. At the same time, you point out that there is this discrepancy between our socially nuanced understanding of grief and maybe a more stoic understanding of grief that tends to dominate the medical profession. Because a lot of doctors do see grief as a weakness or as something that we have to overcome during a kind of arbitrarily determined period of time. Otherwise, it gets pathologized, right? And there is a term in the medical literature for this, which is complicated grief, which refers to individuals who have not, quote unquote, resolved their grief on the timeline that medical experts set for them. And following the general line of reasoning in other parts of the book, you say that the goal should not be to get people to a point where they no longer grieve, but rather to get individuals who are grieving to a point where they can grieve with dignity. And so I want you to talk to us a little bit about what you think is the problem with this medical pathologization of grief and how you think about grief if it's not that.

Mariana: 40:06

Okay. So the pathologization of grief is understandable and it comes from a good place. In writing this book, I really had to understand where people were coming from, like Jody's husband or like these doctors, right? They're not bad people. They're not trying to like push people out of grief. What they're worried about is when grief looks like depression. So once it has the same symptoms and the same duration as depression, they're like, Hey, why can't these people get medication? Right? Because the problem is that you need a, or the fact is you need a diagnosis to get medication, right? So if people are acting like they're depressed, they should be allowed to have the same medication as the people who are depressed and how they tend to distinguish that is depression with a cause depression without a cause, right? Like grief is the ultimate depression with a cause. So it has gotten like, it's like the favored child, like, Oh, but leave them alone. They're the normal people because they have a reason to grieve or be sad or be, you know, exhibiting those signs of depression, whereas like depression then gets to be like the ugly one. It's like, I don't know, you're just lazy or weak or sinful, right? That has its own whole history, or broken. Right now you just have a broken brain or your chemicals don't work right or something like this. But, in terms of grief, there's also a kind of capitalism involved, I guess, where you're supposed to get back to work within two weeks. And if after two weeks, I think they have amended it actually in the last year, but it's like that two week number just sounded crazy to people. Right. It was like, what?

David: 41:44

Two weeks to get over the death of a loved one. Yeah,

Mariana: 41:47

And to go back to work like that's incredible. Right. So this is the one that naturally resists. pathologization the most. So grieving stubbornly, I think is just the idea that you get to grieve however you want. And I have seen both sides of this. I've seen people who say, it helps me to do the dishes. It helps me to get on with my life. It helps me to throw myself into work, but they get people saying, well, no, you're not grieving enough. You're not sad enough. You're not actually grieving. You're not letting it in, blah, blah, blah. Right. So they get shamed. And then we have on the other side, people who are like, in their bed for six months. And some people are like, well, you're wallowing, you're using it as an excuse, you're not trying hard enough, right? So we have like a very narrow, in our society, we have a narrow window of like, what's okay? Like what's okay? Is it okay to talk about this person? It also depends on who died, right? Like if you think about a pet dying, that gets shamed. Oh, come on. It was just a cat. You can't believe that this person's sister died, and you're crying over a cat. And it's like, Why do we do this? Like, it just seems to me so bizarre. Like, what must be our fundamental philosophy that we think that you have to, like, legitimize your suffering? in order to get some compassion from people, right? I think that, I think we are operating on like a scarcity model of compassion. Like, I don't know, I don't know if you should get my compassion. How sick are you, right? Like, what's actually wrong with you? Who died and, and how long after is it, right? So we have these internalized kind of judgments from our society of who gets to feel bad, for how long, and when, and where. And that, of course, spills over into the medical field. But I can see both sides of that argument in the medical field that like, some people want the people to have access to medication if they're, you know, if they're being treated for it. exhibiting those signs, but then other people are like, now this is just wild, right? Like, how can we be, like, there is actually medication that's going to come out that's going to be like pills for grief, and that strikes some people as just over the top, right? But then if you're, so you can kind of, weigh it in your own mind and see how you feel about it. But those are at least the two arguments. And I think they're both understandable. I just want to like leave room for people to grieve however they want. And a lot of my ideas are coming from Megan Devine. She's an amazing writer who wrote, it's okay that you're not okay. Understand or like grieving in a world that doesn't understand. And so she's just saying, grief is not a problem. You're not broken. It doesn't mean you don't have dignity. Grieving is something to be carried and you carry it forever, right? And the more people you can get around you to understand, yes, I'm still going to talk about that person. And I would love it if you could talk about them, but there's so much more to grief. The grievers get ghosted more than I think, anybody else. Like, cause people say, I don't know what to say to them. I don't know what to say. So I just stopped calling. And I feel like this is adding insult to injury. I think grief is so painful, but then for people to like abandon you because they didn't, they felt awkward. Okay. That's like nyctophobia at its best, right? It's like, I didn't know what to do, so I ran away from you and left you even more alone than you already were. So people talk about like, I lost my person and then I lost my friends and like, that's sounds so tragic to me. So it's like, show up, just say, I don't know what to say, right? Like you don't have to say anything. There's nothing you can say that's going to make that person feel better. You can't bring their person back. So just show up and just sit there with them. And don't, you don't have to, don't worry about making them feel better. That's not your job.

Ellie: 45:20

Yeah, and I love how you point out that the Stoics are really some of the original bad guys here arguing that grief isn't something you should wallow in, but actually just like something very quickly to be overcome, and it seems like in general you're trying to move away from this idea that dark moods are bad, which is part of the legacy of people like the Stoics.

David: 45:42

Yeah, and I would describe your book as a treatise in anti-Stoicism, right, where we recognize that emotions and moods are volcanic in the sense that they erupt with tremendous natural force. They are not under our control, and it is not a sign of weakness or a character flaw for us to be overpowered by them, right? Even if that is for days, for weeks, for years, maybe for an entire lifetime. And so the question that emerges for me is what do we do with these negative emotions and moods. How do we relate to them? Because you mentioned that embracing dark moods doesn't necessarily mean that we have to see them as a gift. You say that a couple of times in the book. But after reading your book, I wasn't entirely sure why you say that they shouldn't be seen as a gift. Because you do mention, for example, When you talk about your father's illness, there are a lot of personal details in this book. You combine the personal with the philosophical in a really helpful and fruitful way. But when you talk about your father being ill, you mention that that was very difficult to live and to go through, but it did allow you to connect with your stoic father in a way that maybe you never could outside of the context of illness because that's the only setting in which he allowed himself or was forced to be vulnerable and make human to human touch with his daughter. And in that context, you say that you were grateful for your father's illness, which sounds dark and it sounds morbid, but you say it's because of that human connection that we never could have otherwise. And so my question to you is, why not say that some of these dark emotions are in fact a gift if they are something that we can be grateful for? So what are your concerns about the language of the gift in connection to dark feelings?

Mariana: 47:48

This is beautiful. Okay. So for me, gift language is really tricky. And I think that the most appropriate way to use it is in the first person. Same thing with lessons. When people say like, there's a lesson here. When I talk about my father's illness and say that I, benefited from it. It made us closer. I felt his vulnerability. I learned from him. Like, I feel like that's all legitimate ground for me to say it about my own experience. But if someone else, if my friend were to be like, Oh, you're so lucky that your father got sick and went through such hell, right? Like, then it's like, get off me. Right. It's like, when someone else talks about your mom, like, it's like, no, I can do that, but not you. Like, and, and what I was most afraid of in this book was to accidentally write the five gifts of your depression. And I kept writing a note, do not write the five gifts of, because I didn't want, that's so offensive, right? It adds insult to injury to a thing that is already so painful as dark moods, especially depression to be like, well, that's really your gift that you're so lucky you have it. Because without that, we get so much of that. That's part of toxic positivity is the consolations of these things. And I think that like, I've met enough people who do say for me, I am grateful that I had it and I wouldn't change it. But I've also met people who'll be like, I hate my depression still, right? Like, and I'm like, good for you. Like you, you get to do that. Every single individual gets to have whatever feelings they have about their anxiety, their anger, their depression. So what I was kind of battling between in this book was like, am I trying to rescue the dark moods or am I trying to rescue the person who feels the dark moods? And I think that in the end, although I do believe that some of these dark moods can be quite helpful. For example, dolor brings us connection. I think anger and anxiety also bring us good things if we listen to them and grief too shows us a lot about love, but depression, I have the hardest time saying there's like an upside or like, this is why you're depressed, or this is what's good about your depression. I don't need to say that. I just need to say, you know what? You are not broken. I am not broken because I have anxiety. Right? Like, people are not broken. So I want us to get away from this broken and beautiful metaphor, and I want to say dignity. Like, we have dignity because we are experiencing, and we're, what Gloria Anzaldúa says, we're excruciatingly alive to the world. And that really makes it tough for us to live in this world, especially makes it tough for us to live under the same that is like burning us all the time. So I'd like to get under the shade. I want to find a tree, a cave. I want to find somewhere where we can all, those of us who are excruciatingly alive to the world, where we can get respite from the sun. But within like an individual person, you can say, well, this, I'm grateful for this, or this has taught me that. I think that's legitimate. I just don't want to like push it on anybody.

Ellie: 50:40

Beautiful.

David: 50:41

Mariana, thank you so much for being here. And to our listeners, we recommend Dr. Alessandri's book, Night Vision, Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods.

Mariana: 50:50

Well, thank you so much for having me and talking to me about this stuff.

Ellie: 50:53

Yeah, thank you so much. It's just been wonderful. Loved reading your book. I'm definitely going to recommend it to folks and I think I want to teach it in some future semesters as well. So thanks again.

Mariana: 51:08

Overthink is a self supporting, independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly Zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one time, tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website overthinkpodcast. com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistants a fair wage.

Ellie: 51:32

Wow, David, that was a lot more fun than I would have expected for a discussion about dark moods. Her answers were so good. I also loved how occasionally she would be like, such a great question. I was over here being like, Oh my God, thanks.

David: 51:48

You're bathing in the light of her validation, Ellie. But yes, I agree with you, I enjoyed the conversation a lot, and it's always really enriching to have discussions about difficult topics with people who have spent a lot more time than you thinking about them.

Ellie: 52:04

Yeah, one of the things that really blew me away in her answer when I was asking her about my own family's problem of not being able to recognize dark moods when they appear, but only retroactively, was her suggestion that that tendency might have come from a discomfort with being with other people through their dark moods. I mean that was worth the price of a therapy session and this was a free interview. I mean that was, I thought such an incredible insight and so right. Because really it is quite uncomfortable to witness somebody saying, oh yeah I'm going through it. I'm not out of it. I'm in it, you know, and just not to know what to do with that. I also feel like I'm, I have like, this is making me want to go and immediately text one of my friends who's going through a bout of depression right now and just be like, Oh, let's hang out. I'll sit with you through it.

David: 52:55

Mm hmm. Well, yeah, and what it means to sit through in this case is not working through as in resolving the issue. In fact, what we heard is that whenever people show up to these discussions and encounters with solutions and problem solving mentalities, that only adds to the problem. But I like the idea of sitting with somebody through the problem as a way of presencing oneself in front of them. Occupying space next to them and sitting in silence to their side, where it just is about providing company and holding somebody's hand without trying to make it better. And I think that's really, really difficult for many of us to do because, as you say, we want to flee from the negative emotion in the other person, but also the negative moods that their dark moods might bring up in us. And I think we need to be able to do both.

Ellie: 53:51

Yeah, because it makes me think that there are two ways of understanding the discomfort that we have with other people's moods. One is the fear that it's going to bring us down, and two is the awkwardness that might emerge from that. I'm reminded of our interview on awkwardness with Alexandra Plakias where part of her theory of awkwardness has to do with the fact that we feel awkward when we don't have established social scripts around certain things. We have established social scripts around celebrating a friend's new job, right? We might take them out to drinks or send them a text with like the confetti emoji, our factor feature, whatever it is. But when it comes to a friend's grief, let alone their depression or anxiety, right? Even with grief, even if a friend has a parent pass away, we sometimes feel awkward about what to say. My sister is a therapist and she always gets her friends asking, what should I say to a friend who's going through grief, right? And so I feel like there's also that added dimension, just like we don't know what to say and we end up feeling awkward.

David: 54:50

Yeah, and the point is that sometimes there is nothing to say because what the person undergoing that dark mood needs is somebody to just find them in the labyrinth in which they find themselves. And this is a spatial metaphor that Alessandra uses in her book, right, that in the depth of depression or in the pit of despair, we throw out a lifeline, hoping that somebody will just grab it. Not for them to pull us out, but for us to pull them to where we are so that we can have a human connection. And we flee away from that, of course, because we're afraid of getting pulled into the darkness, into the chaos. But I also think it's really important to keep in mind that most of us probably agree that some of our most meaningful human connections actually happen in those labyrinthine spaces When I think about the friendships that have really meant a lot to me, it's the friends that have either seen me in a dark moment or with whom I have sat. in their dark moments. So this is an important point that Alessandri points out, which is that the value of dark moods, it's not just that they give us a better vision of ourselves and they lead to self understanding, but they also cement bonds of human care, compassion, and love.

Ellie: 56:06

we do need to wrap up. I know you wanted to talk about gray moods following the work of Nietzsche and I want to talk about anger over in our Patreon bonus segment. So if you are one of our kind patrons, stay tuned for the rest of you. We hope you'll consider joining and if not, we are so grateful for your support, whether monetary or not. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our Overthink community on Patreon for bonus content, Zoom meetings, and more. And thanks to those of you who already do.

David: 56:31

To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one time tax deductible donations, please check out our website, overthinkpodcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel, as well as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter accounts at overthink_ pod.

Ellie: 56:47

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan. Our production assistants, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.