The Sweet Bitter with Susan Cain
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Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers. I'm Shadi Diaz. And I'm Kate Robards. And we are New York City stand-up comedians and best friends. And we love a good cheating and backstabbing story. So this is a series where our guests reveal their most shocking cheating stories. Join us as we learn how to avoid getting our hearts broken or our backs slashed. Listen to Cheaters and Backstabbers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.

wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the CINO Show. I'm your host, Cino McFarlane. I'm an addiction specialist. I'm a coach. I'm a translator. And I'm God's middleman. My job is to crack hearts and let the light in and help everyone shift the narrative. I want to help you wake up and I want to help you get free. Most importantly, I don't want you to feel alone. Listen to the CINO Show every Wednesday on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's something profound about sad music. We sort of feel it more than happy music. I think this is true in other places, too. You know, we can't have a movie about a hero without them facing some sort of challenge or some sort of bad guy. Even Walt Disney said you can tell the quality of a movie by how good the villain is.

And he's right. And it's not just these things are opposites or juxtapositions. It's that they are sort of metaphors for our lives. Our lives are filled with sweet and our lives are filled with bitter. And it's not about denying the bitter to appreciate the sweet. It's about learning to appreciate the bitter and the sweet.

which is why I sat down with Susan Cain. She wrote a book called Bittersweet, which is all about appreciating the darkness, not just seeing it as the opposite of light. So let's get into it. Let's enjoy the bittersweet. This is a bit of optimism.

Hey, Susan, good to see you. Thanks for joining me. I wanted to talk about the title of your podcast, A Bit of Optimism, because it's something I think about all the time. Like, I'm really not an optimist, but I'm not a pessimist either. I mean, you'll probably say I am a pessimist in saying this, but

I feel like I'm just a realist. Which is what every pessimist says about themselves. I know. I know that optimists always say that if you say that, you're actually a pessimist in disguise. But I'm not sure it's true. I actually don't think it's true either. I actually, believe it or not, consider myself a realist as well. And I think pessimists usually label optimists naive. And I think to call yourself a realist

does not necessarily mean that you are positive or negative, but rather you take the world as it comes. Yes. And I don't think the world is always good. And I don't think people always are good. And I'm not always happy. But I do believe that the future is bright. So you believe like we're trending upwards, basically? I believe if you wait long enough...

Stuff gets better. I guess I mostly think that. But I think what I really think... Go on. I think what I really think is that, I guess this is the whole reason I wrote my most recent book, that at all times I feel like there's just a mix of...

of joy and sorrow and all these disappointments, what human nature can sometimes look like. But then on the other hand, these glimpses of transcendence and that all of that is simultaneously coexisting constantly. And that to think anything else, I feel like it's just not looking at reality, but I don't know. I feel like looking at it that way,

is very uplifting because it's both telling the truth and the glimpses of transcendence are always at hand. I think that's right. Look, we've made many mistakes in trying to organize the world

with clear defined lines. And the reality is, and I don't even like saying that shades of gray, it's just, it's color. Exactly. And I think you're right. I mean, you can't have one without the other. You know, you can't have joy without sorrow or you can't have pleasure without pain. And for us to ignore one versus the other, I think that it's unhealthy and even a little dangerous. You wrote Bittersweet.

Did something happen that sort of made you want to write it? No, I think it's more like things have happened all my life, or I just feel like I'm just alive in the world. And I've always had this feeling about the world, about this simultaneous coexistence of these states of being. I have felt a kind of frustration that you're not allowed to talk about that. And the frustration comes

Partly just out of like wanting to tell the truth about what I perceive reality to be, but also because there's something about these bittersweet states of being where you're like aware of it all at once that I actually feel is one of the strongest gateways that exists to creativity and to people connecting with each other. And as I say, to that state of transcendence, you know, you asked me, did something happen?

I guess what's happened again and again and again is that I listened to supposedly sad music and feel something close to ecstasy and could never understand how those two things could be true at the same time. And so I set out to answer that question. Give me an example of listening to sad music and feeling ecstasy. So I love Leonard Cohen. I love him with a crazy passion. And you listen to him and you feel this great tidal wave of love that he's able to

transform painful experiences and turn them into something beautiful. And then I'll give you maybe a less obvious version, which is Beethoven's Ode to Joy, which by its name, it's a piece about joy. But it's actually really not only about joy. He wrote that while he was slowly losing his hearing.

When it was first performed in this concert hall, his hearing was completely gone by then. And he was standing with his back to the audience trying to conduct the orchestra as they played it. And then they were finally done playing and he didn't even know because he couldn't hear anything. Somebody turns him around to face the audience to find them all, you know, like tears streaming down their face and like cheering wildly. But the reason they're so moved and the reason we're all so moved when we hear it is it's that tribute to joy and it's laced with sorrow and you can feel it.

all of it, all of our aliveness and our humanness. I feel ecstasy when I listen to sad music because I love the minor key. Exactly, exactly. Just love the minor key. I would rather listen to minor key than major key. Me too. For those who don't know what we're talking about, I think we need to take a little aside what the difference between major key and minor key is before we go too far down this rabbit hole. And we can edit in

some examples when this episode comes out. So for example, major key music tends to feel light and happy like this. Minor key music tends to be a little darker, sometimes even sad like this. Okay. Now we can get back to going down, down the rabbit hole.

And the reason I love the minor key is because it hits me in the soul. Yes. It forces me to feel. I totally get it. And I think that what you or we are seduced by is that music is expressing the gap between the perfect and beautiful world that we all long for and

and the one that we inhabit. There's actually this term called like holy tears. And those are the tears that people shed when they can kind of see the garden of Eden and they can glimpse it, but they can't quite get there. There's something about that state. I think it's our best selves.

And that music carries us there. This kind of music. I'll tell you the good things and the less good things this bittersweet state of mind is associated with. It's associated with a state called absorption, which predisposes you to creativity. People who are bittersweet tend to get into states of wonder and awe and also spirituality. And there is a minor correlation with anxiety and depression, which is not really surprising if you think about it, because...

If you're more of this bittersweet, minor key, music-loving type of person, you're that much more, you could say, turned in that direction. And I think if you're turned in that direction to a certain degree...

You experience it as a kind of happy melancholia. And then I think there's, well, this is what I hear from people, like a fear of like, if I lean into this too much, it's like I'm going to fall into the well and not be able to come out again. Trying to undo and think through why I like minor key music, because, you know, I love it. I don't think about it.

And this sounds so corny, but happy is boring. Like I can enjoy it. There's some major key music that I really enjoy. But to me, minor key makes me feel. And it's why I like the romantics as well. The whole point of the romantic movement was write what you're feeling.

Don't write for the occasion. Don't write pretty ballet music because you're writing a ballet. Don't write for the coronation because it's a coronation or the funeral march because it's a funeral. Write how you're feeling. I find that to be very human. Yeah. I think one of the reasons sorrow, dark, minor get a bad rap is because they're harder to talk about.

And I don't mean in the sense of embarrassment or shame. I don't mean that. I mean, let's go back to a relationship. If I want to tell somebody how grateful I am for their friendship or how much I love them, those things, even if I stumble over my words and I'm unclear, the message comes across loud and clear. People can discern that I'm paying you compliment and expressing gratitude and feel good. We...

are not good at communicating hardship, difficulty, tension, disappointment in how someone treated us. And too often it comes across as accusation by accident, or it is received as accusation because we're touching on someone's insecurities or desires to be a good person. And perhaps these themes get a bad rap, not because they're inherently quote unquote bad, but because we're crap at talking about them.

It's actually a problem of communication rather than feeling. I think there's two different categories, though, in what you just said, because there's category number one, like what you were just talking about is difficult conversations between two people in some kind of relationship with each other, whether it's a working relationship or a love relationship or whatever. But then there's another category of talking about sorrow, which is like you're

having dinner with your best friend and talking about how you feel about the fact that your parent just died or that you, you know, your relationship just ended or whatever. Um,

And those kinds of conversations, I would say, are quite easy to have and bring people closer by the act of sharing. I think sharing sorrows is actually one of the great bonding mechanisms that human beings have developed. I think there might be a gender component to this as well. I agree. I think women, in my experience, tend to be better at holding space for those kinds of things.

It's not a universal, but in general. And in general, again, not universal, men tend to want to fix things. So I agree with your premise of sharing sorrow or loss. But in some experiences I've had, someone wants to mend or help me in that space rather than just hold the space.

My sister and I did a podcast about this subject, about loss and sorrow. And my sister lost her fiance in a tragic accident two weeks before her wedding. Oh my gosh. Many years ago. And during COVID, she said to me, can we have a conversation about it on your podcast? Because I think I have an experience that will help people who are losing family members to COVID. It was basically one take. There's no introduction. It just goes.

I remember distinctly as we were going through that as a family, that people didn't know always how to react to her or to us because it's such an uncomfortable story. People didn't know what to do. And we constantly would say, there's no rule book for this. Whatever feels right in the moment is right. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about what's right, wrong, what you're supposed to do, what you're not supposed to do. Just if it feels right to you, then that's correct.

And I think what negative emotions do is they produce discomfort for the person who's listening as much as the person who's talking because they don't know what to do with that. They don't know what the quote unquote right thing to say is. And one of the greatest skills that's missing in our society is how to hold space, how to just be present with someone and allow them to express what they need to express without any kind of need to fix or mend or improve anything.

Or even help. Yeah. I think the best way to do it in those situations is one version or another of tell me more. Tell me more. I feel like you really learn this directly as a parent because when your kids are little, they come to you with things that seem to us very insignificant. You know, things that have happened that they're upset about or angry about or whatever. And I really became aware at the beginning of how much my instinct was to tell

point out to them, oh, well, this isn't something you need to be upset about for X, Y, Z reason, or look how easy it would be to fix this situation. You just have to do, you know, ABC. And then I quickly realized that that was not what they wanted at all. All they really wanted to do was just be able to talk about it with somebody who is sympathetically listening and asking for more information. That's it. And then they would like walk away happy as a clam. You know, and that's what's like the most insignificant of childhood troubles is

But I think writ large, that's just what we want. You're one of the most thoughtful, philosophical people I know. From you and your work, I've learned more about myself. So back, way back, when Quiet came out and you and I first met,

It is your definition of introversion and extroversion that helped me understand, because I always had discomfort. I just thought I was a socially awkward extrovert because everybody kept telling me that I was extroverted and I have a big personality, which is mistaken for extroversion. And it was your definition of energy. The extrovert wakes up every morning with no coins in every social interaction. They get a coin at the end of the day, they feel rich.

And the introvert wakes up with five coins and every social interaction they have, they spend a coin. At the end of the day, they feel depleted. Can we just stop for one second? I'm sorry to interrupt you to just say that like,

You are so amazing at being able to characterize things. Like I've never thought of putting it with a coin analogy before. And that just rolls off your tongue. And I remember this exact thing happening when one of the first times we met. And I remember you just like rattling off a definition of introversion. I remember thinking, how did he do that? I have to write that down.

So sorry for the digression. Well, thank you. Thank you. That's very nice of you. But that helped me understand that it was my energy. And especially when I speak, I speak on stage and people say things to me, how can you be an introvert? You speak on a stage and A, being an introvert helps me on a stage because I connect with one person at a time. I don't quote unquote hold court. But when I walk off the stage, I am absolutely shattered.

as if I went for an hour-long run. I'm very grateful to you for helping me have that understanding about myself because it's helped me manage that energy and also helped me set expectations within my relationship so that people better understand me. And as we're talking about bittersweet, little things are firing off in my head that are helping me understand myself better. And I think

Of course, you couldn't name a book this because people wouldn't know what you meant. But as I'm hearing you, I'm realizing bittersweet is actually an unfair term. It's actually sweet bitter. That's really interesting. And there's some famous poet, was it Sappho or somebody who called it sweet bitter? You're in good company there. One of the nice things about bittersweet or sweet bitter, which is the compound word, it has to be both. Whichever the order, it's not one or, it's one and. Yeah, it's and. This is one of the things I learned during COVID.

And I have gratitude to COVID, by the way. There was darkness and there was definitely, we all went through our depression moments in some way, shape or form. But to this conversation, there was a lot of good that came out of it as well in terms of self-learning. And I remember-

Having to learn the lesson during COVID that I can actually have two opposite feelings simultaneously. I can be excited by the creative chaos that I was sitting in and having to reinvent a business while simultaneously being absolutely sad at the loss of life and afraid by not knowing, especially at the beginning.

And it was okay to have all of those what seemed to be competing feelings simultaneously. There was nothing wrong with that. And I didn't have to pick one. Exactly. And the thing is that it has always been true. It's just we haven't thought it was supposed to be true. You see it, especially in our wisdom traditions, all these reminders to make it true, like Jewish wedding ceremony, right? Happy, joyful day. And then at the moment of the greatest joy, just when you're pronouncing

husband and wife, that's when you stamp on the glass to remember sufferings in the world. So there are all these, that's just one example, but there are all these different ways that our wisdom traditions are like constantly reminding us that both these things are true all the time.

I'll tell you about a technique that I came across while I was researching this book, which is going to sound to American ears like a kind of dark and morbid technique, but it's really not. This one comes from many different wisdom traditions, but you can look to the Stoics and it's called memento mori. And it basically means, you know, the remembrance of death, the constant holding in your awareness that you might be gone tomorrow. Your loved ones might be gone tomorrow. We've no idea. And it's,

That sounds at first blush like, oh, you know, who would want to live that way? But I had a very distinct experience with this, which is

I went through this stage and it was when my kids were quite little and we had this really beautiful bedtime ritual that we would do every night. And that's always the time that kids will open up to you the most about whatever they're experiencing. And I happened to be like super busy at work during that time. And so it was like really hard for me, even during this amazing ritual that I love dearly. It was very hard for me not to be sneaking glances.

at my phone to see what email had just come in. And then I started doing this practice. Again, not in a super freighted way, but I would just like matter-of-factly say to myself, you know, we have no idea whether they'll be here tomorrow or I will be. We don't know. And it was like the phone...

had no more resonance for me once I focused in that way. The temptation was gone. And it's an incredibly evocative way of living. I mean, look, it happens after tragedy, right? Whether there's the loss of a loved one, a natural disaster, a car accident, a cancer that we hear about. And we all say life is short.

And for those moments after we hear those stories or experience those experiences, we are better at sort of keeping things in context. Life is short. But then, of course, we forget and we return back to normal. There's this song, Diamonds and Rust by Joan Baez. And it was all about her love affair with Bob Dylan.

which didn't last, but it was like one of these moments when you fly to the moon during your lifetime. And there's this line in the song where she's talking about how wonderful it was. And then she says, speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there. And I think we all know what she's talking about when she says that. You have these moments that come now and again during your life where it's so perfect. It's so transcendent. It's so much the realization of

all human potential that you feel like if this were it, it would be enough. And those moments, they don't last. But the fact that you can even have them for a moment in time,

you slightly. A lot of your work touches upon this, that life is yin and yang, and we've sort of over-indexed on yang, so let me talk about yin for a little bit. Yes. That's such a great way of putting it. I never thought of it that way, but yeah, that's exactly it. Life is balanced, and I'm going to show you the thing that makes it balanced, an appreciation for the other. You're like the patron saint of the other. Of

Of the yin. Of the yin. It's like, hey, extroverts, there are also these things called introverts, super valuable, not more valuable, also valuable. Exactly. And hey, sweet, there's also this thing called bitter, not more valuable, as valuable. I understand why you label yourself a realist and why others may label you a pessimist.

is because what you're always doing is demonstrating equilibrium and balance. And when someone's on a high, to say, hey, hold on a second, it sounds like, hey, you're harshing on my mellow, you know? And it's not. And I don't think you can appreciate either side without the other. To know what good feels like, you have to know what hard feels like. And to appreciate hard, you have to know that it's not all good. And this is why we love the minor key, because it's

in comparison to the major key. It's the delta. It's the difference. We're all making our cases for this side, that side, up, down, left, right, minor, major, happy, sad, pessimist, optimist. And the reality is, it's the difference that makes those things beautiful. Or it's the all of it. Or it's the all of it, yes. It's the fact that they both exist all the time. It's like my niece and nephew, when they're going at it, when they're screaming and yelling at each other, and I turn to one and say, what happened?

And I turn to the other and I say, what happened? And I know the truth is always in the middle. Or the truth is both. You listen to each person's story. Yeah. And both of them contain a whole truth in there. This is something I used to feel in law school all the time. We were trained to...

like here's the case and you have to make the argument on side one and then you have to make the argument on side two or listen to both. And I always felt like I could never ever be a judge because side one always felt just as right to me as side two and vice versa. They all contain truth. What's the Joan Baez line? Speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there. It's the first half of that that I find is the most operative part, which is can you imagine if every opinion that someone expressed

political or otherwise, started with speaking strictly for me. How disarming that is, but also how open-minded that is. But it also recognizes that I can only speak from my own experience. Bob Dylan might think completely differently. He might think, yeah, that was fun, on to the next. Yeah, and I think she was implying that. I think that love affair did feel much lesser for him than it did for her. You know, the other thing I would say that goes along with speaking strictly for me when it comes to politics is I keep feeling like

if there were some kind of way for people to tell their true stories and their true fears and all of it across tribal lines, you know, not connected to any kind of policy prescription or like political debate or anything, but just, you know, some kind of forum for people, you know, from red and blue to like come together and just,

share their stories and share their fears. I don't know if it's a social media platform or what, but there needs to be some way of doing that to rehumanize each other. What it does is it goes right back to what we were saying before. It allows a conversation of bitterness, sadness, hardness. It allows those conversations to be received as they are intended and not accusations and not judgments.

It's actually like a different way of, you know, the difference between I statements and you statements that relationship counselors talk about. If you say, I feel this way, it's heard in a much better way than you always do this. And speaking strictly for me, I think is another version or another language of an I statement. What I love about it is...

When we have a difficult conversation with somebody where we need them to hold space, there's an expectation that they have to have the skill set on how to hold space. When I say speaking strictly for me, I'm giving them instructions and clues on how to hold space, which is you can relax.

and you don't have to fix anything or say anything or do anything. Speaking strictly for me, you can just hear what I have to say. And I think what you're talking about also is letting the other person off the hook, making them feel less pressured. It's like their shoulders relax as soon as they hear that phrase. Nothing exactly is required of me right now. All I have to do is listen. Well, speaking strictly for me, anytime I get to talk to you, you challenge a perspective that I have.

And speaking strictly for me, my day will be very different as I go appreciating the sweet bitter of the life that I'm living and the life around me. Well, thank you so much, Simon. I always love talking to you. Thank you so, so much. I really appreciate this.

If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsynic.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other. Bye.

Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers. I'm Shadi Diaz. And I'm Kate Robards. And we are New York City stand-up comedians and best friends. And we love a good cheating and backstabbing story. So this is a series where our guests reveal their most shocking cheating stories. Join us as we learn how to avoid getting our hearts broken or our backs slashed. Listen to Cheaters and Backstabbers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.

wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the CINO Show. I'm your host, Cino McFarlane. I'm an addiction specialist. I'm a coach. I'm a translator. And I'm God's middleman. My job is to crack hearts and let the light in and help everyone shift the narrative. I want to help you wake up and I want to help you get free. Most importantly, I don't want you to feel alone. Listen to the CINO Show every Wednesday on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.