Psychologist: How Mental Health Is Killing Us (With Dr. Richard Beck)
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Coming up on the Dr. John Deloney Show. That phrase, my truth, has just expounded and expounded because I always want to look at somebody and say, that's not a thing. Fundamentally, what we've done by trying to achieve mental health through self-regard is we've given them bad advice. Or as I describe it in the book, we're smoking cigarettes thinking we're going to cure cancer. What in the world is going on? I'm John, and this is the Dr. John Deloney Show. I'm so grateful that you have joined us today.

This is your first time with us on this show. We talk to hurting people all over the planet and we sit with them and we help figure out what's the next right move. And this is about relationships, your physical health, your emotional and spiritual health, whatever you got going on, your psychological health, whatever you got going on in your life for 20 years, I've been sitting with hurting people and I'll help you find the next right move. And occasionally,

A guest stops by the studio and we have an amazing conversation. And this is one I'm super thrilled to have with you guys because this is a man who, I mean, single-handedly changed my life and in many ways saved my life. And my guest today is a friend, a spiritual advisor, somebody that I go to with really hard, challenging conversations and questions. And one of two men that I...

really put out in front of me as kept kept the lights on the spiritual lights on and the psychological lights on when things got really dark for me when things continue to get dark for me in my life now i'm talking about the great and powerful dr richard beck he is a psychology professor he's an experimental psychology professor and he is a theologian and he's got a new book out called the shape of joy which he asked me i was honored to blurb it

Quick note, the first, what do you say, Kelly, three to five minutes?

We got super nerdy. And so just hang on. Hang on through the first few minutes because I forgot that on this show I speak Italian and I went to speaking my old nerd language. And so we get out of that really quick and I cannot wait for you to hear this conversation with me and my spiritual advisor, someone who I just hold dear, the great and powerful Dr. Richard Becker.

Beck, here we go. I haven't cheered through a book. And I say that cheesy. I think I texted you a few times as I was reading this. I cheered through it. Like, I would raise my hands alone and my, like, by myself.

One, because you have a good, you have an uncanny way of making me feel less crazy, you always have. And a way of going, yeah, that's what I was, that's what all these thoughts swirling around the toilet bowl, like this is where we are. So I usually don't do this, but I want to walk through a couple of like specific sentiments, if that's all right. So we're going to start out a little bit nerdy and then we'll get more practical. That's cool. Okay.

You write this, we are masters of self-deception, living quote unquote my truth is often living a lie. Modern ego is a novelty. It's an innovation. Over the last 20 years of working with students, that phrase my truth has just expounded and expounded and I've always felt insane.

Because I always want to look at somebody and say, that's not a thing. Yeah. Like you don't get to own it. You get to own your experiences and your feelings and your story, but you don't get to own truth. And in this book, you unpack, you reverse engineer, like here's where this started. Right. And I've always been both mystified and...

I hate to use this word, like exhilarated and really frustrated with Freud. Really annoyed by Descartes. And you took them both and were like, here we go. So unpack, how do we get to this place where we've landed in a world where there's no truth and we're all trying to just make our way? It's mapless, right? Well, Descartes kind of introduced radical skepticism and so kind of undermined just our perspective.

feeling that we are actually making contact with anything real. And so introduce a radical subjectivism to just the way we perceive reality. Freud is probably more well-known culturally, where he's throwing you back in upon yourself to

delve into the murky unconscious and discover your true self. And I think that has emerged into what you're describing with young people. Like if I can go in myself, find my truth, then somehow that'll be the secret of mental health. That'll be the key that will unlock joy and happiness in my life. By pulling us inside of ourselves, I think we've lost touch with

basic transcendent realities. I think we've lost touch with the empirical world. And I think we've lost touch with other people. And I think social media has exacerbated that. How so? Just because it's just more of a lens where I'm peering at myself through the gaze of other people. I'm still just, it's still very self-referential. I'm throwing myself out there and I'm seeing how others perceive me. And I'm still locked in a funhouse

room of mirrors. That's all you. Distorting effects. Yeah. I'm just saying, I'm just saying screens all the time and I can't ever ground or get a real clear, true, authentic vision, you know, of myself. What do you do with that? What do I do with that? Yeah, well, because, because I've got a eight-year-old. Yeah.

And she crossed the finish line in her first cross-country race. It was a mile, whatever. She did so good. She runs across, and it was amazing, and I was cheering. And the first thing, can I see the video? Yeah. And part of me thinks, cool. And part of me thinks, hey, up until 1960, 1980,

That had never happened in human history. So we can't have the neurological wiring to have this sort of feed, this immediate feedback loop. I did a thing. I want to see it. I did a thing. I want to see it. We don't, that's never existed. That can't be, I'll say healthy is probably a bad way to say it, but to just drop a whole generation of human into this and say, go forth.

That's unmooring, right? Right. Well, I think the modern self and the modern ego has become increasingly like self-referential, like the self staring back at itself. And in this case, staring into another screen or into another video of myself. And because of that self-referential nature,

the self is perpetually unsettled. And I think one of the things we do with that is we start giving younger generations better advice. For a generation, we have thought following Freud, if we could just throw young people back in their minds in a pursuit of self esteem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you can somehow...

see yourself as valuable and worthy. And so we're trying to achieve mental health through like self-regard. Yeah. But the trouble is self-regard is a very up and down experience. It's a bit of a rollercoaster ride and it fluctuates with successes and its failures. And so I think fundamentally what we've done by trying to achieve mental

mental health through self-regard is we've destabilized the mental health of a generation. Yeah. We've given them bad advice. Or as I describe in the book, we're smoking cigarettes thinking we're going to cure cancer. Okay, so in what I would say like in non-nerd parlance here, like between two guys,

We've told a generation, it goes back to the, you're healthy no matter what. You are beautiful no matter what. You are strong and wonderful no matter what. And my kid knows I just got 42nd in a race. I'm not. And when the parents rush and be like, you're the best, you crushed, here's a trophy, like,

They know innately that's not true. And then we launch them out and say, just keep looking in the mirror and telling yourself how whatever narrative you want to say, and that's how you'll achieve wellness. And it's not true. And it's this strange unraveling, right? And then the only thing they've got left to do is then go, in my experience, and you work with more students than I've experienced over my career, the only thing they can go do is get

a dollar amount or a certificate because they have to get some sort of external validation that I've got some value because I keep saying the right things in my head and it's not working. It's not working. Well, the other thing I describe in the book is what you're describing is what psychologist Ernest Becker called a hero game or a status game. And so it's not just mental health through self-regard, it's also through playing some sort of game where I'm winning some sort of blue ribbons.

And it could be athletic performance. It could be financial. For me, it could be a book sale, student evaluations. There's always some metric out there that I'm pursuing that will reflect back to me my inherent value or status. But like your daughter experience, but there's always going to be somebody that runs faster. You know, most corporate successes are governed by a hierarchy. At some point, those positions get split.

and I'm not gonna make it to the next level. Book sales can go up or down. Right. Views on Instagram can go down. And so again, you're destabilizing mental health because you're attaching significance to something that could be lost or that's something that could be diminished in a moment of social comparison. I'm doing great until I bump into somebody that's more successful than I am. Yeah. And so you're still stuck in a...

a game that's either inherently competitive. I'm always contrasting myself with somebody who's successful or I'm chasing some ring or I am feeling like a failure. So I'm experiencing shame or whatever. So again, your mental health is just registering how that game is going, winning or losing. And that's not a good place to be. That's not a place of tranquility or peace or calm. It just creates more anxiety. One of my students,

at texas tech okay um and everyone will know who he is um i've had him on the show before he's a very successful attorney one of the kindest guys i've met brilliant it's just 10 or 15 years younger than me went his car and started once a day i'm just gonna make an instagram video i think he's up to like seven million right followers just stumbling through like literally like just offering kind solid wisdom from his experience as a trial attorney

And I can't help but look over at one of my former students and be like, yeah, he played on the other day, though, and his tickets. You know what I mean? Yeah, right. What I can't figure out, I get comparison, I get the game, I get all that. It's not healthy, yada, yada. I don't understand the mechanism by which it continues to work because I know better is what I'm saying. I have every objective measure. I can't. It's the strangest thing that you keep looking over, right? And not going, ugh.

I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do with that because I know every study. I know every objective reality. And you're like, look over. You know what I mean? Right. And I don't have a map for it. Or maybe it's just straight up. I don't want to hear it, but maybe it's just straight up discipline. Stop. Yeah, it could be. It's almost like Bob Newhart. Like, just quit. Yeah. Stop. I mean, I also think, given what we know about the mind, it's one thing to know something, like rationally, propositionally, verbally. Yeah. It's another thing to have the emotional –

scripts for it. And you could probably verbalize the path to a good life. And a psychologist can point the way to mental health resiliency. But the deeper emotional logics, the way we've been formed by our upbringing, the things that we care about, those heart issues, those are more stubborn. And how to change those can take a lifetime. I was once at a...

play speaking and my host was just visiting with me about his life. We were just getting to know each other. And he said to me, and this haunts me to this day, he said, he's talking about his father and how that relationship wasn't very good. His father wasn't a kind person. And so there was a lot of pain in that relationship. He said, but late in life, there was this great grace where my father became kinder and I was blessed to have this

during the final years of his life where I felt like we really kind of got to see each other clearly. And then after he describes that journey, he says this, he goes, "Well, you know, it takes a lifetime to become a human being."

And I think for your journey, my journey, I think we're all in some degree caught up in that process of becoming a human being. And it's going to take a very long time for us to unlearn a lot of that stuff. Culturally, we don't have the grace for each other to, you know what I mean? To be patient with each other and ourselves in that journey. It's almost like watching my daughter take her first steps on the track yesterday and expecting her to be an Olympian.

and just burning her to the ground. Yeah. You know what I mean? Well, I mean, our children become a part of those hero games. They do. Their metrics of success reflect back on us. They're our ribbons now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they can't carry that. And that's increasingly so in middle class, upper class America, where kids are now the proxies for competition. That's right. Getting into, I mean, it starts at kindergarten, getting into a good kindergarten, getting into a good school, getting into good internships. Yeah.

and in the portfolios of our children reflecting back upon our status. How good am I doing? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Why is a world led by everybody's feelings so dangerous? Well, like I said, I think because those feelings are, they're going to be knee-jerk reactions. They're going to be our hot takes. They're going to be our...

non-deliberative attitudes towards life. And a lot of those are going to reflect the wounding of our past as well. So they're going to come out kind of disordered or misdirected. What are feelings? Well, I mean, a psychologist would describe feelings as, you know, an affectively valenced reaction to a life event. Okay. Triggered by... So...

If I feel threat, I feel anxious. If I experienced loss, I feel depressed. If I see harm and cast blame, I'll feel anger.

That's emotions. That's just an emotional reaction to an event. Then there's like our moods, our emotional temperaments. And so some of us are wired more for hostility. Anger is going to be more in play. Some of us might be wired more for worry and anxiety. Some of us might be worried for more melancholy or depression. And so there's also kind of the backdrop of those emotions that bring certain affirmations.

affects into my life given what I'm feeling. And so that's all a little bit different too. But I mean, from a biological perspective, it's supposed to be information. Emotions are trying to tell us something important. So you should pay attention to those emotions. The trouble though is if they aren't tethered to reality or they've been distorted in some way by a hero game or some trauma I've experienced, then the information I'm getting about the world

isn't accurate. Like as you know, in your work on anxiety, I have an alarm bell going off in my head and that has some adaptive purpose, but if I'm misperceiving threat or over perceiving threat, then suddenly my engine is revving

in the driveway and I'm not going anywhere and I'm just burning myself out. But a similar thing happens with depression. People who get stuck in shame and guilt are getting information about their value that isn't accurate. Or people are struggling with chronic anger. They're seeing harms, even in a paranoid way, that aren't there as well. So that's the issue with feelings is the degree to which they really do correspond with reality because the felt intensity of an emotion

It's so overwhelming that they just got to be real and true and accurate. Right. And any sort of rational evidence giving. Like, have you ever tried to talk self-esteem into a child? Yeah. Those words are penetrating the frontal cortex and I'm processing the sentences, but at the deep emotional level, I don't.

feel very good about myself. That's right. In the same way, trying to talk somebody out of anxiety. I want to talk about self-esteem, self-affirmation, manifesting. And I guess I say this, you're the first person that I've read it outside of my own journal. So kudos to you. The mess we've made of trauma. And I'll just read what I wrote down.

We can't self-esteem ourselves out of a traumatic past. We can't say nice things to ourselves in the mirror to trauma things away. And we can't sit on a therapist's couch or in a pastor's office or scrolling for Instagram quips for years on end trying to solve our past. And here's my big, what I would call, quote, Huberman, anecdata. I haven't seen the randomized controlled study, but I just keep seeing it over and over and over. Right.

Trauma, over time, becomes an identity marker, becomes currency, becomes my entry and exit in and out of a room. And then feelings about truth become this weird arbiter of reality. And suddenly, we've lost all rational perspective of everything. And my calling card is, well, you've been hurt, check this out. And then it's check this out, and it's check this out.

And I have to back up as a guy who entered into the mental health world and say, we've harmed people. Like we have put people in the corner and said, you're the worst thing that ever happened. I'm going to pat you on the head. You just stay there. We'll take care of it for you. And I'll speak on that because I got a broader question about it. But what do we do with that? Yeah.

Well, I think there's two things. One is it's an illustration of what we were describing earlier, the Freudian turn. Because the Freudian turn was the way to heal from trauma is to go back into that trauma and revisit that trauma. And I think what we're seeing now in the scientific literature is that –

revisitation, rumination over trauma, the excessive introspection of a great deal of modern psychotherapy that goes back to Freud is actually not helping anymore. It's actually making people worse. It's a re-interest. Yeah. Right. And so I describe in the book a little bit about how with the rise of like cognitive behavioral and acceptance-based therapies, how there was a concern that revisiting trauma actually

was doing more harm than good and a need to step back a little bit more objectively toward that. And so there's that whole part that I think the mental health profession is beginning to be concerned about introspective ruminating, especially about trauma and beginning to question the Freudian assumption that that's always a good thing. That maybe mental health and resiliency is better achieved by

moving forward and cultivating resiliency. And to your point, not defining yourself by your trauma and not the perpetual victimization of oneself. I think the other thing is the politics of trauma. What you're describing, where if I show up in a space as a trauma victim, there is a kind of social or political power in speaking from that location of trauma.

And I think we're also having a debate about that as well, about the degree to which the politicization of trauma is playing out in modern discourse. Because it can be a form of control. Claiming trauma or being traumatized can make me control a space. It shuts down. Yeah. You become the king of the room. Yeah, exactly. And we're seeing those –

of trauma and mental health just creeping into everyday discourse. And even I use the word trigger. So a word that goes all the way back to Vietnam vets and post-traumatic stress disorder where it had an appropriate language, like certain stimuli would trigger a flashback from the jungle or something I witnessed. Now, anything I see is being given the,

a framework of a post-traumatic stress reaction. And so that's something we're currently navigating is about the overuse of mental health language in everyday discourse because it can't be a form of control. - And I guess my concern for, I would take ownership of my community is I have to be objective and look at the data. More people than ever before in human history are under the care of some sort of licensed professional.

more psychotropic medications being doled out than ever before. Like, all these things that we said will solve it, whatever it is. It's not, like, you gotta look at the data, it's not, right? Or it is contributing to...

It just feels like a mess. It feels like a mess. Well, it's a paradox, too, because in one sense, we've never had more attention and resources allocated to mental health care, as you said. Most people ever in therapy or on medication. And yet we're also lamenting at the very same time a skyrocketing mental health crisis. So whatever we're throwing at the problem is not solving the problem and may be exacerbating the problem. There you go. Yeah, yeah.

So what's the fine line here? I wrote this question down. What is the fine line between advocacy and disempowerment? How do I see a group who's been marginalized, hurt, or a person who has been through it and say, I see you and I love you and I'm on your team and I'll fight on your behalf where you can't. And it's a weird, and I don't know how to find that balance between helping and supporting and walking alongside and overdoing it.

Yeah, and it probably just depends on the scale of the problem. I mean, there's one thing, mental health discourse, so something like this conversation can help recalibrate that conversation. There's obviously policies, but some of this is just individual discernments about how I parent or perceive my own trauma. And so...

the solutions will depend on what scale we're looking at but i do think you're seeing the pendulum start swinging i think people are realizing now that um those capacities for resiliency um have it atrophied and thus we're gonna need to kind of go back to the drawing board a little bit on parenting education mental health practice and just discourse

to think about grit, perseverance, courage, and also how to just deal with pain. I think there's also a sense of America right now that suffering is just a bad and thus we lost the capacity, kind of a stoical capacity for suffering. And so we wanna medicate ourselves out of it or affirm our ways out of it.

because we assume it's a pathological condition. But you're seeing writers like Brene Brown and Kate Bowler talk about like, she talks about there's no cure for being human. Her point being that there aren't answers for some of these things. And sometimes we will just suffer, but a capacity to suffer well, to stay courageous, to stay hopeful, to stay joyful in the midst of suffering is, yeah, it's a lost capacity. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that

Because our frame on mental health is so therapeutic, therapeutic is always trying to alleviate suffering. And we've lost a religious perspective. And world religions have typically seen from Buddhism to Christianity as suffering is integral to the human condition and thus giving us capacities to carry suffering. It's a feature, not a bug. It's a feature, not a bug, right. But nowadays with a therapeutic culture, if there's pain, we treat it.

And that's from the medical perspective with the opioid crisis to therapy, where if you're in distress, well, your distress has to be addressed immediately. Yeah. And thus we lose the capacity to, A, deal with distress or even name appropriate levels of distress. Like the continuum from I'm just mildly uncomfortable. Mm-hmm.

to, no, this is abusive. We don't have any ability to weigh the continuum of suffering. And so we describe mild offenses or irritations as traumatizing or unsafe because we just think any pain is pathological.

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October is the season for wearing costumes. And if you haven't started planning your costume, seriously, get on it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go as Brad Pitt because we have the same upper body, but whatever. Look, it's costume season. And if we're being honest, a lot of us hide our true selves behind masks and costumes more often than we want to. We do this at work. We do this in social settings. We do this around our own families. We even do this with ourselves. I have been there multiple times in my life, and it's the worst thing.

If you feel like you're stuck hiding your true self behind costumes and masks, I want you to consider talking with a therapist. Therapy is a place where you can learn to accept all the parts of yourself, where you can be honest with yourself, and where you can take off the mask and the costumes and learn to live an honest, authentic life.

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Take off the costumes and take off the masks with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash Deloney to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Deloney. Walk us through searching and finding joy. Yeah. Right? Like, at some point, I'd say, okay, and this is a theme that I hit on a lot, that no matter what,

has happened to the person I'm sitting with, whatever pain they've gone through, treated differently, beat up, lost a child, whatever has happened, at some point we always land on the same question, what are we going to do now? What are you going to do now? And there's not any discourse about intentionally seeking

There's discourse on retribution. There's discourse on going backwards. There's this choice in sitting. There's nothing about saying, okay, where do we go? And that's where this showed up. That's why I was literally reading this and throwing my hands up in the air. So talk us through what joy is. Talk us through this idea of going to get it. Yeah. Well,

kind of the flyover journey of the book is the first part is what we've been talking about how the modern pursuit of health has been to throw people back inside themselves through a status game through self-esteem and that's not gone well and it's just fragilizes us as we've described it so the next step i argue is to just step away from the self and this is why you're seeing the rise of things like mindfulness just to

minimally grounding oneself in the current moment in reality is helpful to just stop the inner drama. But also talk about research on humility. And humility is this huge factor capacity that social psychologists are looking at. And humility isn't denigrating oneself, but it's rather just not thinking about yourself a lot. It's a self forgetfulness that's grounded in a stable identity. Humble people are

or can be self-forgetful, can be focused on other people because they're not wrapped up in their own status game. I remember meeting the first time it was a famous UFC fighter. Yeah. And I remember being so caught off guard by his body energy because I expect he had a tattoo on his head, a mohawk, just a big bad dude. Yeah. And was so kind. Yeah. Weirdly so to where I was, it was unmooring. Yeah. It wasn't what I expected. And it wasn't until I was on the flight home that I was, I thought,

Oh, he can beat up everyone on planet Earth. He has nothing to prove. Exactly. He can just look you in the eye and say, how are you? I've got no, he's got no radars going off everywhere. Like where I stand, who am I, how much money do I, right. I just enter a space, right. And I remember being so, like, how do you get that? You know what I mean? Yeah. And monks have the same thing. Like it's being able to enter that space. It's, yeah, the symptom or the sign of humility is like this tranquility. Yeah.

Yeah. That there's a social tranquility that I'm not in any sort of competitive or rivalrous game of comparison with you. But you only get there because there's an inner tranquility.

Okay. And so that's the last part of the book, which is how the research is pointing us towards not inside of ourselves, but toward transcendent outside of ourselves. So that's the shape of joy, not being curved inward upon yourself, but being curved outward. And joy is an example of that. So psychologists debate joy. What is joy? And there's the psychologists that define joy as we've talked about an emotion. Good things happen and I feel joyful.

Okay, that's, the trouble with that is- It feels pretty thin, yeah, yeah. Well, it means that you're only gonna be as joyful as well as your life is going. So there's no resiliency there. But joy is a transcendent emotion, a joy that is durable in the missive ups and downs of life. That's the joy of kind of a transcendent joy, encountering a reality bigger than my own. And so the question about how to get there is,

and this goes back to meaning in life as well, is being able to tell a bigger story about yourself, to be able to connect your story and your life to a narrative that goes beyond or is grounded beyond realities that are independent of whether or not I can run my track meet in 40 seconds or whether or not I am making a certain dollar amount or whether or not I am winning some game of significance. And that...

makes sense to religiously inclined people who have typically grounded their worth in a transcendent story. Jesus says, "Lay up your treasures in heaven." Locate value in a transcendent source, in a sacred grounding.

That gives me some degree of resiliency. So the story I tell in the book, I'm a prison chaplain, and I tell this story about Mr. Kenneth, who's one of the inmates there, who just has this profound joy despite objectively miserable circumstances. And so his joy isn't a reaction to life, but it is something that carries him across the waves of misfortune. Is that a discipline thing?

I think it can be practiced because if it's not practiced, if it's not a capacity, like you said, or a muscle, then we're just... It just becomes something you stitch on a pillow, right? It either becomes that, it becomes trivial. It's like, you are worthy sticker, or you got this affirmation on Instagram, or we are trying to talk our way into it. And I really do think there is a kind of American conviction that we can somehow...

talk our way into mental health. But if you ever try to talk a child into a better view of themselves, like if you ever tried to like yell self-esteem into a child or talk self-esteem in your child, or you just realize those words just kind of bounce off us. So it's gotta be practiced. That's so counter to what we've been told. Right. That I have any agency. 'Cause at the end of the day, what you're saying is I make a choice to choose this path

or I make a choice to remain here. Right. And that is not what we're sold. We're sold, this happened to you, the world owes you. Right. And then the world's gonna come take care of you. Right. For me, one of the meta lessons, and both political parties participate in this, and there's a reality to this, and I know I'm dumbing it all down, but...

We are not designed just to sit at home and receive checks. People go crazy. You go crazy. We don't have purpose and value. Of course, there's – but it was just for me, oh, this utopia that I've got mapped out there, the human being is not designed for that. There's got to be another – there's got to be this choice narrative in there. And then you've got to break choices down into a series of, I don't know, thoughts and actions and relationships, right? This is very unsexy.

Well, yeah, because we used to have a name for it. So in the ancient world, it was called a virtue. And a virtue is something that is acquired. It's practiced. You have exemplars. It takes effort. It's developed over time. And we don't...

think about that anymore. We think virtue is just something holy people do rather than the art of living well. That's what virtues mean. Virtue means excellence. And so the art of living well, and so we don't train ourselves to live well. And some of the virtue, so think about what a virtue, the virtue of courage or the virtue of perseverance, right? Those are those virtues that help us carry suffering and pain that we were just talking about.

But in a therapeutic culture, you're not trying to acquire virtues, you're trying to alleviate a pain. And your point was that sometimes those pains are the very things that we have to endure downstream to get character strength. And I wouldn't wish them on anybody. No, you wouldn't. Yet they are. Yet they are. And I think that's the difficult thing we're narrating here is

we don't want to come off as unsympathetic to pain. No. And we don't want to look at a generation and go like, hey, kids today lack grit and resiliency. So I don't ever want to come off as like some sort of angry old man, like, you know, like they're on their phones too much. Like, I don't want it to sound like that at all. I mean, I'm Gen X, so we weren't known for our mental stability. We were killing it from a mental health perspective. So I really don't want to have a...

have a generational bias here. I want to practice a lot of generational generosity. So we want to name some things that are going wrong in our culture and call people to better ways of living, better ways of thinking about their mental health, equipping parents to not be so alarmed when their kids suffer and be able to sit with them in that.

without that being judgmental. This is supposed to be a helpful intervention. It just is. I don't want any criticism of our current state of distress as being uncharitable and sympathetic. And yet, call people to resiliency.

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You started going to church downtown just with a group of people who had all kind of cognitive impairments, the marginalized of the marginalized. You started going to prison every Monday night. How has that – what I've noticed from you in afar – and I ended up moving away, so some of this may be not true. But what I've witnessed from you from afar has been a coming together of theoretical propositions and let's run this in a laboratory approach.

to that's my friend and she can't see and she needs help like going to the grocery store or she can't eat right how has that been for you because what i feel like is happening the discourse is this idea of this is the way it should be this utopian and then this is just gritty this way this is the way it's always going to be yeah and there's no there's no coming together of you know we can want we can hope for something better

End traffic in reality is the way this is. And you've put your money where your mouth is, as few people actually do in the world. So I'd love for you to talk about that experience. Yeah, for me, it was really kind of a spiritual biography. I just found a college campus like an unhealthy place to be.

Some of that was professional because I was still caught up in the hero metrics of being successful, publishing. Teaching you how else publishing. Yeah, yeah, like climbing that. But to your point, I also found like just a disconnect between the things I was writing and the things I was saying about the life of faith.

and the practice of it, like I wasn't doing it. And I just felt I was in a very inauthentic space. And so I felt like I just needed to get out of my social location. All my friends had PhDs. I just needed to get to the kind of margins of my society. So I showed up at a little church worshiping on economic margins, spending time with people with disabilities and then starting work out at a prison. And I just really did that to save my own soul in many ways, searching for...

searching for something god i would say so again pause on that for sure just double click on it for the mom who's listening to this who's kind of got the home that she thought she wanted or the guy listening to this who's got the job he wanted there's this if we're quiet and we turn the phones off it's often you know when our whatever hybrid v8 whatever gets quiet at the stop right there's just that quiet nagging sense that

this isn't it yeah you know what i mean but we stopped we turned the radio back on and you didn't what what line what line were you leaning over that said i gotta go i gotta go do something yeah i'll tell you a story okay i was with my sons i was like a parental escort they were doing a mission trip down in houston and in one afternoon we were they were doing a worship service

with a community mental health center. So these are people who are like the wreckage of society. Just they've washed ashore because of cognitive disabilities or chronic mental health issues. And there I was, psychologist with a PhD, you know, worshiping with a lot of college disabled and mentally ill people. And I remember vividly in that moment, I looked across the room and there was a woman who raised her arm in the air. I say arm because she didn't have...

She had lost her limb. So it was just a stub. She raised a stub in the air. Yeah. Praising God. And I remember seeing her and I was so in my own head. I was so caught up in my own self-consciousness, so addicted to being perceived as successful. And I looked across the room at her and I just had this, it was like a really profound spiritual experience for me where I was like, I look from the exterior as whole. Yeah.

And she looks like she is not whole physically. But on the inside, she is found and I was lost. And I just felt like I just needed to figure out what was going on there. What was broken in me, even though like you're talking about a person listening in who has all the exterior successes but still has that –

spiritual hollowness. Yeah. That sent me on my quest to find kind of the spirituality of the margins. And one of the things you find out on the margins of society is a resiliency. And like I told the story about Kenneth out at the prison, you find this stubborn joy that was lacking in my life. And it was because I was addicted to some game of significance that I was playing.

constantly envious of the success of others, constantly worried about how I was perceived by others versus a man who was in objectively worse circumstances than I was, yet had a tranquility and a peace that was not in my own life. And it was because of his spiritual framework, the way he saw his life. And he had made this outward turn. And then I needed to kind of follow him on that journey. And so just, I mean...

Gosh, man. That, by the way, from afar, that has led me to where I'm at now, which is seeing like, no, you need to go look. And sometimes the people that have the answers, they end up, they're wrapped in skin in situations that you don't think so. They don't look like from the outside. So in reflection, looking back five, 10 years later, how is the...

the esteemed existential or experimental psychologist, head of the center, prolific author. How is your inside different than it was 10 years ago? - Well, I think I'm trying to cultivate that inner tranquility like your ultimate fighting guy by practicing a different kind of way of narrating my life. So I'm really excited to be on the show. I hope the book does well.

But I do a lot of inner work to not attach any sort of anxiety about the metrics of that success. And I've done that with just lots of different things about my life as well. Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean the neurotic head games aren't ever present. Sure. And...

I won't like watch this interview with a neurotic lens. How did I do? You know, like that performative aspect of my self-esteem or that image of a successful author or professor, I think is always going to be there. But I keep showing up in those spaces where that game is chastened. I keep

spending time with people that I would consider my teachers, unlikely teachers, to be educated by the incarcerated about the secret of joy is an unusual school room, but I find it a healthy place to be. And so I think I've achieved some progress in that, some greater virtue in humility and in inner peace, but it's a work in progress.

where i find great value in what you're saying is um there is a and i'm trying to think of a way to generalize the political landscape right now is there's a difference of talking about the incarcerated criminals immigrants name your category there's a there's a humanization no that's my friend kevin and there's there's a both i think a fear and also a humility and a peace with

uh my dad used to tell me this back when he was doing homicide work he'd say the hardest part of being a homicide detective in houston texas was not the gore and the bodies and all that so the hardest part was sitting across in a 12 by 12 room behind a card table talking to somebody and thinking

oh, but for like three circumstances, I'm that guy. Because like murder is in a neon sign. Yeah. But you sit down and have, y'all are sharing, you know, pouring water together and you're talking through what happened and he goes,

oh, I would have done the same thing, right? And there's a humanization of that's my friend Kevin. Or that's my friend that I worship with and she's missing an arm. I got this and this in a food line every Tuesday. That's my friend, right? And there's something powerful about getting behind these labels and talking at and being with that I just think is transcendent. Yeah, and that's where I get a lot of hope. I think because of social media and the political discourse and because we are very online people,

We lose contact with our like local neighborhoods in our communities. And when I try to give recommendations about how to find some peace and some health in a very fraught political context is just find some local work at a church or nonprofit and walk alongside your community. And I've discovered if you talk to those people in the local trenches,

That they're pretty hopeful. They get graces because it's face-to-face work, tangible acts of care and compassion. They are not reposting memes on social media to change the world that way. And I think conservatives and liberals also get caught up in that, like try to somehow use Facebook to change the world. Look somebody face-to-face in your community. I think you'll find stories of hope. And you'll find teachers too. You're going to hear heroic stories of hope.

of, you know, getting through miserable circumstances and still retaining a kind of a joy and a lightness of being that will give you hope. So that's what I tell students to do is like get offline, do something local. That's a sustainable work because you're skin on skin, face to face, eyeball to eyeball. And a lot of

political distinctions fall away in that local work. Like out at the prison, the chaplains have very different politics, but we're able to have a joyous relationship because we have this shared labor because we care about these men. And

But when you're online, the algorithms silo you. And again, that's a virtue that is lost. Like, you know, the virtue of civic friendliness is just evaporated. And we got to practice it. It goes back to just practice and I got to decide too. So talk to us about something that was, I remember when I finished my book a couple years ago, I remember sitting with this chapter and I didn't want to hit send. And I got to a point where I thought this is going to be

I will lack integrity if I don't hit send on this, which was this idea of I don't know how you can be non-anxious, untethered for something bigger than you. And I hadn't seen anyone talk about it, just this frustration I had because I wanted to be cool and hip and appeal to all areas.

And it's like, you just wouldn't be honest. All the psychological studies, and I love the way you frame this, bring you right up to the threshold of you have to be anchored into something bigger than you. We can just go through a study, we won't do that. But talk to the person who listens to this show, who has no use for faith, who's a kind, generous, in a loving marriage, a great parent, holy atheist.

who has no central belief system. With compassion, what do we say to that person? I mean, the first thing I would do is what I try to do in the book is just point out the obvious to what you're saying. All the research, gratitude, joy, hope, meaning in life, mattering, what's called cosmic significance, you matter no matter what, are all pointing towards transcendence. And so maybe just let the science speak

to unsettle your skepticism a little bit. I mean, if you're a scientific person, let the science unsettle you a little bit. Put at least a question mark next to your questions. Like, doubt your doubts a little bit. And I try to do it in the book. I think the second thing I'd say is, you know, if you can't make a, you know, I believe in God, then I do think

I think I've described in the book, the Dutch have a word called somethingism. I don't know what that is, but it's the ground of being, it's the higher power, it's something bigger than myself. It is whatever I consider true or beautiful or good. And maybe that's not a personal God, but maybe it can be depending on your religious outlook. Minimally though,

step back and just try to tell a big story about your life. And by big story, I mean, how are you going to judge a beautiful life? Psychologists will sometimes ask people to kind of literally write their eulogies as an intervention. Like, what do you want on there? What do you want on there? And I think when people do that, they too tend to grab for the true and the beautiful and the good. By the good, I mean, they're going to look back at that person's life, my life, your life, and say, you know what?

They did more good than harm, right? They went gently through the world. Life –

was easier because they were my parents. Life was easier because they were my boss. Life was easier because they were my friend. They helped carry the pain of the world. Like who doesn't want that to be, you know? And we also want to look back at a beautiful life that people look back and go, there was just something about that person that, I don't know, stirred me, motivated me, called me to action. And we all have heroes in our life where we exemplar is,

close at home in our families or world history where we kind of say, that's a hero and I want to emulate that. And then something truthful, right? That they were honest about life and the human condition. That kind of brings us like full circle. They saw clearly, you know, and I think that gets you into, if not a God conversation, a really God adjacent story where at least you're being pulled out

out of kind of the metrics of what we call the American dream. Get a house, a retirement plan, a little cash in the bank. Just fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But that can be thin and shallow. There's a bigger story. Exactly. Yeah. All right. I want to wrap with this. I put this interaction –

Probably in the top five like besides getting married having kids probably top five most important interactions of my life was with you I don't know if you remember I came and saw you one day and there was something that happened with a student and I wasn't cool with it and I explained it all to you and I know enough about Emotionally emotionally charged memories that they're not always super accurate, but this is how it is ahead that

In some shape, form, or fashion, I was submitting myself to you as a spiritual mentor. I said, I don't know what to do, man. And I remember you said, hey, what's happening to this student? Not right. And you're free to go. Like, if you can't be here, if you need to go get another job, if you need to move your family, you're good. And then you said something I remember cursing you so bad. You said, but I want you to remember, when you leave, when you walk out that door, that student will still be here. And the rest of them will still be here. And if everybody leaves...

And I remember being haunted by that. And yet that has shaped every professional interaction and many of my personal interactions since where I've almost pathologically tried to find places where this is going to be hard, but this is going to be like if everybody leaves, everybody runs, everyone hides.

What do you tell a person who is thinking that everything's going to be simpler and easier or I'll show you by cutting these people off or I'll show you by I'm not talking to them anymore? I remember that conversation. Oh, do you? Yeah, I do remember that conversation. Can I talk about Jesus' parables? You can talk about whatever you want to, man. Like two parables of his that haunt me was like the parable of the wheat and the tares, how the weeds and the wheat kind of grow side by side, and the parable of the leaven.

And I think that's like just really good descriptions of like where the kingdom of God shows up. It's ambiguous. I think some of us want to achieve a kind of a pure place. And then we find ourselves in these complicit institutions or we find ourselves in a corporate situation that seems morally ambiguous. And nowadays we know what our bosses, bosses, boss, how they vote, right? And so it's like, I can't, I can't. Yeah. And so we're always looking for like a pure place.

place to stand. And so we extract and remove and try to find that. But I think it's going to be ambiguous. It's always going to be wheat and tares. It's always going to be leavening. And if you did, if you sucked out all the kindness and all the compassion from an institution or the world, then what sort of hell is left behind? And so I think that idea of being a leavening presence wherever you're

you're at that this we all have power and we all have influence from a parent over a child from co-workers in a hierarchy to people have social capital influence and and the question is like do you make the space do you love in the space around you is it more is it more humane is it more compassionate is it more kind is it more gentle jan and i think she got this from oprah or instagram and it could have been both but but same but

It's a phrase we say to each other a lot, which is, you know, who flourishes because you have power. You can't extract yourself from complicit systems, but you can say, given that system that I'm in, given what levers I can pull, like you were a dean of students, given what levers I can pull, can I make this place more humane, more gentle, less harmful, you know?

And so I kind of just see life is constantly about gardening. You're just always kind of gardening plot of ground that you currently have. Now, that's not to say for prophetic reasons or justice reasons, if you look at a system that is so corrupt that you just got to... I got to get out. There are moments like that. Yeah, sure. And...

And you were kind of deciding that at the time. Well, dude, thanks for coming. Thanks for being my friend all these years. And like being the, when things got real, real dark for being like a pin light for me out there, I appreciate that. Oh, it's been a blessing, man. Our friendship has been a blessing for me as well. So happy to be with you. You're awesome, man. So are you. Hey, it's Deloney here. And I'm going to tell you about Merrick Health, the premier health optimization platform that exists in the universe. Their

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All right. That was my conversation with the great Dr. Richard Beck. I've got his book, The Shape of Joy, the book Unclean, and his other works linked in the show notes. Please go check them out. I cannot recommend enough The Shape of Joy. Go buy it, go buy it, go buy it. And if you love his work, go down the Dr. Beck rabbit hole and read his work, all of his books. He's been blogging for a decade now. Stay on that stuff. He's on Substack now. We'll link to that in the show notes also.

Find somebody in your life that will hold the light down the road a little bit from you, like Dr. Beck has done for me for over a decade now. Find somebody that you can submit to, that you trust, that you can ask hard questions to, that will walk with you a little bit ahead of you holding that light to remind you that hope is out there, that joy is out there, and helps keep your eyes up on the path forward. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you soon right here on the Dr. John Deloney Show. Be nice to each other, but...