Transcript:

Emma: Welcome to Positive Disintegration: A Path to Authenticity. In this episode, Chris and I talk with Richard Edelman about systems and disintegration. We talk about how we as individuals are connected and what disintegration means in the spaces between our relationships—as a broader society and as a species on this planet.

Richard helps us make the connections between our connections and the theory of positive disintegration. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

Hello, lovely listeners, and welcome to Positive Disintegration. I'm Emma Nicholson. And today we're having a guest on who works in a space of blending different things together, and we're going to learn how that relates to positive disintegration.

Chris: I can't wait to have this conversation.

Emma: For our listeners, our guest without further ado is Richard Edelman. Richard is the founder of Living Arts Wisdom, which is a synthesis of neurosciences, visionary insight, art, and evolutionary philosophy dedicated to nurturing luminous pathfinders in an age of unraveling and renewal. Richard weaves together wisdom from many sources: art, meditative theory, trauma-informed care, jazz improvisation, tai chi, interpersonal and cultural neurobiology, the extended evolutionary synthesis, and more. He synthesizes these into living practices that liberate the human spirit and regenerate culture from the inside out. He walks his talk, offering mentorship, courses, and immersive training for those ready to consciously co-create culture during challenging times.

Welcome to the podcast, Richard.

Richard: Thank you, Emma. Good to be here.

Chris: Welcome, Richard. It's great to have you with us. You are somebody who I have known would be an excellent guest, and no pressure, but I'm excited about this. We got to know each other in the Positive Disintegration study group when it existed, and your contributions to our discussions were always insightful and fascinating—they opened my mind to new dimensions with the theory. I'm excited to have you here.

Richard: I'm glad to be here.

Chris: As our listeners know, we always kick off with how guests came to the theory of positive disintegration. Please share with us your journey to discovering TPD.

Richard: I discovered it within the field of gifted study and practice, which is something that I had resisted for years for various reasons. When taking a second look at it, I fortunately discovered Dabrowski and the theory of positive disintegration, and it immediately rang a bell. It immediately spoke to me. I could relate it to a number of different passages in my own life.

I'm a person who loves theory, so I thought, “Wow, this theory resonates with me. It's really brilliant.” A number of aspects really resonated with me, especially its fresh take on emotion. That drew me to it.

Chris: One thing I'm hoping we can talk about in our conversation today is interpersonal neurobiology and relationships and positive disintegration, especially in terms of dynamisms. With that in mind, I'm going to open up to you the path we take with this.

Richard: I gather you're interested in interpersonal neurobiology, and I would think anybody interested in the theory of positive disintegration would be fascinated by it. To me, it's the leading edge in the field of human psychology and the most deep, comprehensive framework for understanding human life. It's grounded in many thought streams that came before and in well-founded scientific discoveries about the human mind and life.

It was organized and presented by Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist affiliated with UCLA, along with other contributors. There have been many contributors at this point—Bonnie Badenoch, Allan Schore, who has done amazing work integrating brain science and psychoanalysis/psychotherapy. It's a very comprehensive and integrative framework for understanding the human mind and life.

It basically has a model that connects the mind, the brain, and relationships. All of the theory is applicable to practical applications, so you can immediately grab hold of it and find practical applications—first and foremost in psychotherapy, but also in education and many other fields.

It's well organized as a framework into different domains, each of which can be applied to human development and growth. You can see from what I've said so far how it would integrate with the theory of positive disintegration.

One of the links is the centrality of integration in interpersonal neurobiology—which, of course, if you're talking about disintegration, it's good to know about integration. What is it that's disintegrating? A lot of that can be found in interpersonal neurobiology. It's beginning to be expanded in a concise way with cultural neurobiology linked up with it and with evolutionary theory, which I find very exciting.

Chris: Can you say a bit more about what integration is for our listeners who are totally unfamiliar with the term, and maybe also link it to positive disintegration?

Richard: Dan Siegel broke it down into eight or nine different domains. One of them is consciousness—states of consciousness. There are more states of consciousness than just waking and sleeping. Internal Family Systems, which a lot of people are familiar with, speaks to many different self-states that can occur. We go in and out of them all day long. Those can be disintegrated, as in dissociative identity disorder—an extreme case of lack of integration of those self-states.

Then there's integration of left and right hemispheres of the brain. One of the people who has spoken most beautifully about that is Iain McGilchrist, in books like The Master and His Emissary, talking about the integration of the left and right hemispheres. Then vertical integration—linking the brainstem and limbic area to higher cortical regions. There can be disintegration there. There can be narrative disintegration where people's stories are jumbled and in a state of confusion. With IFS (Internal Family Systems), there are different identities that can be disintegrated and at odds, in conflict with one another.

There are different domains that, even at a cursory look at interpersonal neurobiology, show eight or nine different areas, all of which can be in a state of integration or disintegration. Integration is wholeness—the flow of energy and information as an emergent system, being the human mind, that is embodied not only in the brain but the entire body, and actually beyond that.

One of the foundations of interpersonal neurobiology is what's called 4E cognition. I don't want to get into the weeds too much, but 4E cognition is basically simple: we're embodied beings, so our entire body is involved in our cognition and mind; we're enacting reality—we're agents actively creating reality, not passive recipients of experience; and our minds are extended. If you've dipped into AI, for example, you can see that we've downloaded a lot of our thought processes into the cloud and can retrieve them. We're in a system of recursive feedback loops that go further and further into the universe, and our minds are thereby extended.

This is a whole—not 2.0, maybe 3.0 or 4.0—understanding of the mind that is applicable to the theory of positive disintegration and can be understood within this context in a mutually enriching way. The theory of positive disintegration can enrich all of these other things I'm talking about, and they certainly can enrich the theory. In science, it's called consilience, where the ideas themselves integrate and synergize with each other.

Chris: Thank you. Emma, what do you think? My mind is exploding right now, and I don't even know where to go.

Emma: Sometimes I want to synthesize big things down into small things, and sometimes I just pull out one little thread. This is one of those moments. There was something you said, Richard, about being the co-creators of reality. I think about that meme that's been going around about time travel—people like to think about time travel movies where you go back into the past, change one small thing, and the whole present shifts. Yet rarely do we stop to think that what we are doing now could radically alter the course of the future.

It's a weird paradox we have as people. We think of ourselves as the center of the universe—and this fits with positive disintegration when Dabrowski talks about empathy and subject-object, how we view other individuals as unique human beings. We think of ourselves as the center of the universe, but then we think we have absolutely no agency in the world we're creating.

Richard: It appears as if we do. Sidestepping even the issue of free will versus determinism, we surely have agency, and this is pretty demonstrable. The whole field of what's called enactivism, which Francisco Varela developed a number of decades ago, is pretty insightful and liberating. The more you understand it, the more light it sheds on our minds and our relationship to the web of life.

Chris: I'm so deep right now in working on a book using my story to bring the theory to life. One of the things you know about me, I'm sure, is when I was studying my life at the beginning of working on autoethnography, I wondered what aspects of myself made the difference for me in terms of coming back from my disintegrations and being a successful graduate student. I was a doctoral student at the time, and I thought, “How did I get here from where I was? I was this mental patient.”

I assumed there would be individual characteristics within me that made the difference—maybe my intelligence. But what I found in my research was that it was several people I had known along the way who made the biggest difference for me. People I considered trusted adults when I was young, who were safe, whose very presence was like medicine to me. When I was connected with them—talking on the phone or seeing them in person—those were moments of relief. Those were moments of clarity where I was connected with myself, with them, with having a future. Those relationships really made the difference for me.

When I discovered interpersonal neurobiology as a thing, it helped make sense of how important resonance is with other people. For somebody like me who has such strong emotional overexcitability, it was critical.

Richard: So important. For me, relationship is at the heart of things. It's very much a part of interpersonal neurobiology and other frameworks that can be brought into play.

In our culture, we've been enculturated into atomizing, siloing, compartmentalizing things—and this is very much true in the field of psychology too. It's focused on the individual, and that's just one way of looking at it, not necessarily the most fruitful one. What gets missed over and over again is relationality.

If you look at us biologically, we have different biological systems that we'd like to be in a state of homeostasis or balance. But what we now know is that there's a homeostasis 2.0 called allostasis, which is not only a steady state of balance like homeostasis, but actually geared up to meet challenges, which is what life is all about.

There's a lot of material out there—I can share some with you—about allostasis and the difference that understanding makes. Relational allostasis is what most of us want in our hearts. Because the theory of positive disintegration is a scientific theory, I'm bringing this up because the neurobiology of allostasis provides a foundation for the theory itself—how there can be disintegration, reintegration, growth, development, and transformation.

It's quite liberating to apply this to your own life because we're all living in relational matrices. You can see this when you dip into attachment theory, which is one of the thought streams that informs interpersonal neurobiology. Attachment theory speaks directly to how we generate our relationality in early childhood—whether we're avoidant, whether we tend to co-create flourishing human connections, all of these different patterns.

When we're in our twenties, thirties, forties, we think, “This is just who we are,” but not necessarily. These may be patterns we absorbed as small children that don't serve us any longer and can disturb our relationships—the relationships that matter to us. By understanding this and the therapeutic applications of attachment theory, we can free ourselves of patterns that no longer serve us and certainly don't serve the people we care about. That's just one avenue through which these different thought streams can be applied to better human life.

One thing I'd like to speak to is something I've discovered for myself—the fractal nature of the theory of positive disintegration. It actually occurs at different levels of life. The multilevelness of the theory doesn't just apply to an individual, but it applies to human evolution as well, which is a much bigger picture than just an individual living in California or Australia or Wisconsin in the 21st century.

The nitty-gritty of it—we're all aware of climate change, climate chaos, and the possibility of climate collapse even. We're living right now in a polycrisis, and there's frankly a lot of trauma that many if not most of us are experiencing around this. There's now a Climate Psychology Alliance, a Climate Psychiatry Alliance. There's the work of Britt Wray with Generation Dread, who are very eloquent about climate anxiety, climate trauma, and all the harms flowing from the climate disasters we're living through and all the attendant disasters.

What we're essentially doing is destroying our biological niche. We've become an evolutionary mismatch. This is key to understanding the upleveling of the theory on a broader scale, bringing evolution into the picture. How can I put this without going into the weeds? We're in an evolutionary crisis.

I've developed a graphic that tracks the stages of disintegration, but species-wide. The task confronting us as a species right now in a very short period of time is that we need to transform our functional relationship with our biological niche. If we don't—well, it's already been disastrous. Before we started recording, we were talking about being refugees from climate fires and seeking a place to live that is, if there is such a thing, relatively climate-proof.

These are the same kind of disturbances that can propel a person from one level to another. We're so disturbed by our old ways that are not only not living up to our ideals, but they're not viable. They're potentially existentially disastrous. This is throwing so many aspects of human existence into confusion—epistemic confusion. People are confused about what is true and what isn't, what their values are, and who they should align with. It's pretty obvious when you look at the culture that it's disintegrating right now.

It's heavily conflicted—talk about ambitendencies, like in the theory of positive disintegration. There are culture-wide ambitendencies. It's possible to plot the principles of the different levels across the entire species. I realize I'm doing a lot of integration of different theoretical material, but it's important to consider what's called the extended evolutionary synthesis, which is not just genetic evolution but also cultural evolution.

The culture we're living in is what I call a deep neuroculture. It's very similar to a forest where you have mushroom caps on the forest floor, but beneath that is this whole mycelial network that keeps the forest alive. It's like a matrix, a neurocultural matrix—we're just the mushrooms on the surface as human beings. But this whole thing is going on, and it's what generates our biological niche.

That biological niche is itself disintegrating. It infuses our nervous systems. It lives in the spaces—the intersubjective relational spaces between us. Right now, as part of the climate disaster, it's all disintegrating. Our nervous systems are part of it. Our nervous systems created the culture that is toxifying the planet and threatening its survival through climate change with fossil fuels. We thought that up—we did that.

Now, at least for a lot of people, we're taking a look: What have we done? We're not the species we want to be—which is similar to a person at that level going, “I'm not the person I need to be. I'm not the person I want to be.”

Just like in biological organisms, you start with unicellular organisms and then multicellular organisms—that's a major evolutionary transition. There have been many major evolutionary transitions throughout the course of life on the planet. Once in a while, there's one that happens very fast—that's called punctuated equilibrium. That's something I believe we're in the midst of now: a species-wide disintegration.

We need to transform the functional relationship to our environment because we've been destroying it. If that's not dissatisfaction with oneself, I don't know what is. That itself speaks to a higher level, a greater scope of what Dabrowski was talking about with the levels of an individual going through different levels of disintegration.

The outcome is uncertain. We don't know if we're going to go back to just a state of permanent disintegration and a sad fate, or whether we're going to have a positive disintegration as a species. I'm doing what I can so that it's a positive disintegration in the end. That's where my theoretical and practical work comes together.

I've come up with a term: toxic enculturation. When we're going through the different developmental stages or levels, we're not just the genes that come into existence when we're born—we're enculturated. But there's so much toxic enculturation where we mistreat each other, we mistreat ourselves. We're having to disintegrate all those patterns of toxic enculturation so we can emerge in a positive way.

One way this shows up is with parents who are cycle breakers. They don't want to pass on the abuse, oppression, and trauma that has persisted for millennia through multigenerational transmission of suffering. There are a lot of parents who are cycle breakers, and therapists who want to facilitate that, who are very aware of the idea of cycle breaking. Some educators too. I don't think this is a majority, but parenting, for example, has sensed what's going on.

This is one wonderful way it's shown up—parents who don't want to pass on the dysfunctional parenting they experienced. That itself, in an everyday way, is how we can liberate ourselves from toxic enculturation. It's a whole process I've identified of liberating from toxic enculturation, empowering the soul, empowering the agency that Emma was talking about. Then it's so much easier with that liberation and empowerment to really supercharge the healing process and enjoy being alive—even in the turmoil that is our life on earth, even in that turmoil, to enjoy the miracle of being alive.

Chris: That was all so beautifully said, Richard, and resonates so much. I hardly know where to start. Toward the end of what you just said, I want to say that I am a cycle breaker. That's definitely part of my work—and I mean that in multiple ways. I agree so heartily that one thing we can do as parents is break the cycles that have caused us harm.

Sometimes I think about how long it took to see it, to change it, to make the difference. What you said about how we need to get on the other side of this disintegration in a positive way—it's so hard to imagine that right now in multiple ways. You're talking about the polycrisis and the crises plural that we're in right now. Holy crap.

It's so hard to sit here in America right now while our government's being dismantled. I just read today that the FDA is going to stop doing food safety checks. We're really fucked here in America. But we can't let ourselves think that way. Every day I'm doubling down on making sure I'm doing the grounding things I need to do.

What we can do as individuals right now is be grounded in our nervous systems—not let what's happening around us destroy our mental health. But just doing that takes a certain amount of energy. I recognize the privilege I have to be able to do that. I'm not trying to work some full-time job right now too.

I just want to express my appreciation for you articulating all of that so beautifully, because this is where we are. Yes, disintegration isn't only at the individual level—it's fractal. It's affecting so much around us: nature, systems. Our government right now is disintegrating in a way that's going to cause unprecedented suffering in this nation and the entire world. Something has been set in motion that's going to bring great peril to so many. And what can we do? We just have to do the little things that we can.

Richard: The work I do has different facets. It's healing work, it's liberation work. It's a form of activism—social activism, climate activism in its way. It's an art form as well.

I look at what I'm calling the deep neuroculture as an aesthetic medium itself. Artistic creativity is important. There's been a blind spot about the human need for art and beauty—the art and beauty of everyday life, even in tragedy, even in suffering. I'm looking at the deep neuroculture—our collective nervous system as a species—as an artistic medium, not just a medium for activism.

It's healing, activism, and art all rolled into one. The deep neuroculture is our neurobiological home. You can compare the synapses in an individual nervous system to the relational spaces of the deep neuroculture. Those relational spaces are the synaptic network of our culture. It can be liberating and delightful to recognize that.

For example, right this moment in the space between you and me—that's like a synapse in the culture. Just like in an individual nervous system there are synaptic illnesses, there are synaptic illnesses in the deep neuroculture. We can begin to heal that in the relationships we have between us as individuals—in our families, with our colleagues. We can do it when we go to the store with a cashier at the checkout counter by bringing consciousness and agency to the interactions we have with strangers. It makes a difference.

When I go into a supermarket, a lot of times the people at the cash registers are treated like machines themselves. No one actually notices them as human beings. If you do—if you locate the person inside and contact them—you can tell because they'll light up or be a little flustered or confused. This kind of relationality doesn't have to be limited to psychotherapy, to a psychotherapeutic dyad in an office for a 50-minute hour. It can be a way of life. We can transform the culture from the ground up with this transformed, empowered, and liberated sense of relationality.

It's not just breaking the cycle—it's lifting it up to a whole other level. If this infuses the lives of people in the helping professions, if it infuses the lives of activists who are so often prone to heartache and burnout, and infuses the lives of artists…

I'm in Los Angeles, which is like the incubation space of much of the culture, for better and worse. If you look at the new Seth Rogen series The Studio, you get an inside look—it's pretty hilarious and insightful. There are a lot of people who came here to create things from their heart, and they're met with toxic enculturation. They hit the wall and run into situations with people who are creating toxic culture.

These are all challenges people are encountering with the ambitendencies of the deep neuroculture—the dynamisms or lack of dynamisms of the deep neuroculture. By engaging these larger currents, it can empower us as individuals as we ourselves go through positive disintegration. There's a recursive flow between the process of disintegration species-wide and us as individuals. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we'll be better off as individuals—third factor individuals in particular—engaging the third factor of the deep neuroculture we're immersed in. That makes all the difference in our lives.

This is the heart of my work. I work with people in the helping professions, with activists, with artists, and not only that but parents and elders. Grandparents have an enormous role to play in the upleveling of the process of positive disintegration species-wide, doing everything they can. A lot of them already are—not understanding it from a theoretical perspective, but doing what they can from their heart to see that there's a positive outcome.

Emma: I want to take a pause to draw out the links with the theory. When you're talking about enculturation, we're really talking about a form of socialization. When we're reading the theory, we've got two different things going on insofar as we've got competing interests around the environment. That's where we come into the space of ambivalence and ambitendencies. While one part of society might be acting toward positive climate change, there's obviously a commercial interest maybe working toward the negative.

If we think about humanity as a whole and envision that as a person, that's where we can draw the connections with theory. In a way, us as individuals become the expression of dissatisfaction. We actually act like the dynamisms within a society because it starts with our values and our behaviors in our relationships, but then we become the expression of dissatisfaction. We become the expression of guilt and of shame. We give voice to those things in a social context.

When you were talking about creative people coming to LA, what I thought of was that a lot of people are coming with the intent to be authentically expressive in their creativity. Yet you fall into almost a codification machine, which then makes a lot of people who are in movies or doing whatever they're doing become superconscious of their appearance and present themselves in a certain way, which maybe isn't authentic.

That all comes back to theory—looking at our values and our behaviors and saying: Is what we're actually doing really aligned with what we truly believe? Then letting that flow out. To throw clichés out: think globally, act locally. You're acting within self and then trying to permeate that change out. Or “be the change you want to see.”

We at some level know these things about theory, but it starts within—looking at our behaviors and asking: Does this actually align with my values and what I want out of life? Am I spreading that out into my immediate relationships? How does this fit into a global context? It's helpful for people when we're talking about all of this to think of us as one mushroom connected to humanity as a whole, and then think about how we behave within that context.

Richard: Oh Emma, I so appreciate you putting it in those terms. That's really clarifying. I didn't know if I was just in the weeds with a jumble of different theories, but you made it sound so clear.

Emma: That's my job here. This is part of the change I want to see in the world. I really believe in this theory, and I believe in a lot of the things you've been talking about, particularly around climate. I live under the ozone hole, and we either flood or burn every single year here. That's quite important to me.

When we talk about the synapse between two people, part of that is communication. Part of my hope in my behavior is to make that communication so clear that hopefully a message is sent that perhaps pushes or passes on that essence of change. I think that's why I do it, which is all related to what we've been talking about today.

Richard: The more liberated we become from the toxic enculturation we've absorbed, the more we can seize the opportunity of the relational space between us and recognize what a great opportunity it is as an art form—and approach it as artists.

Regardless of what else we do in life—whether we're a parent, a gas station attendant, it doesn't matter—we can all do this. The deep neuroculture is the home we live in, whether we recognize it or not. It lives in the spaces between us, and those spaces are aesthetic mediums. They're playgrounds where we can join together and co-create beauty.

We can co-create—especially with what you were talking about, Chris—resonant attunement, which interpersonal neurobiology provides such a rich understanding of. We can engage resonant attunement to transform the spaces between us into places of beauty where our entire somatic experience—not just our eyes but our entire sensorium—is vibrating with the beauty we release and create from the back and forth of the flow of energy between us that creates this vibrating field.

That's our birthright—our spiritual birthright as human beings. But we have been missing the opportunity for so long. So many of us have closed the door on that possibility. But it's there right now, every moment, 24/7.

Chris: I feel so inspired at this point. I had to make some notes to myself just so I wouldn't lose these threads. One way to look at what we're going through globally is that when we're living through this kind of intense disintegration, it has the potential to activate dynamisms at the individual and beyond level, because it wakes people up to their own hierarchy of values. They say, “Wow, I don't want to contribute to this. I want to change.” Right there, that is someone who has discovered this hierarchy of values.

I love that you're giving us an opportunity to bring these concepts to life. I'm thinking about positive maladjustment. This is a time for us to stand up for what's right when we live in a society where values have become so horizontal. We have to do something. We have to stand up for what's right in whatever ways we can.

I've had this realization that when we first started this podcast, I don't think I could have realized how important it was for people to hear our voice—that the resonance comes through in our voice, not only the conversations we're having and the topics we're discussing, but us as people broadcasting, transmitting out not only this message but more than that. It's really this special thing that I didn't know when we first started doing this.

That's part of why I want to do more podcasting—because I get that one of the contributions I can make personally is to have this kind of discussion and bring something into the world. It's an act of creation that we're doing together right now. There are so many layers to all of this that it's kind of endless and deep.

Richard: Absolutely. I remember when you first started the podcast mentioning to you the aesthetic quality of your own voice. Your voice has an aesthetic quality, and that's the poetry of everyday life. If we can resonate with it, if we notice it, there it is. Sometimes, in terms of positive disintegration, we have to awaken to that in ways we might have been numb to before.

Another thing I want to speak to has to do with the third factor itself as a concept relating to other frameworks outside Dabrowski. What we can discover by doing a deeper dive into what the heck is the third factor—how is that possible? How can there be one? How can we even understand how it came to be?

Part of the answer comes from an understanding of chaos theory. In chaos theory, there's a phenomenon called an attractor that draws something to it. One of the metaphors used is if you take a marble and put it in a bowl, it'll spin crazily around the bowl in an unpredictable, chaotic way, but it always ends up where it's going to end up. With weather patterns, you really can't predict the weather so well. Chaos is part of the weather pattern, but it's always going to tend toward certain equilibrium and end up in a certain direction. So you have climate.

In any kind of natural phenomena, you have an element of chaos but also an element of order and attractors that draw things. In a human life, you have this third factor that propels the person into positive disintegration. The third factor person themselves is a kind of attractor, and the field of third factor—the network of third factor people, even if they don't know they're third factor people or know they're part of an unconscious network of such people—can be understood as evolutionary avatars.

If you plug the theory of positive disintegration into the extended evolutionary synthesis, you can see this. That makes the third factor even more exciting than it was before because it can be understood taking it out of just the individual, putting it into the relationality of the relationships that third factor people are immersed in, and then even upleveling it from that into the neural ecology of which we're all a part—that deep neuroculture.

Third factor people can be understood as a kind of harbinger or avatar of consciousness evolution—and not just consciousness but relational evolution. The evolution of how we relate to one another and how we co-create the ecology of which we're a part, into this new emergent thing that has to happen if we're going to survive as a species. It's not like there's a choice—it has to happen.

This to me makes it exciting and opens the box of the third factor, like a magic box, into all kinds of wonderful things we can discover inside this closed box of the third factor. What really is it?

Chris: I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a resource I put on the Dabrowski Center website about the third factor for people who want to read about how Dabrowski conceived of it. But I want to say briefly, Richard: How do we identify these people? They're the people who have strong developmental potential in the Dabrowskian sense. They have strong overexcitabilities, and they also have evidence of dynamisms, even if it's only the nuclei of multilevelness in a child—it's still there. Learning to identify these people and support their development is what Dabrowski and mental hygiene is all about. I agree with you so much that the evolutionary potential demands it at this point.

Emma: Can I jump in for a moment with my light bulb? It's been picking at me since what you said, Chris, about resonance with other people and the podcast speaking to people, and then also what we were just talking about with the third factor.

It strikes me—this is a thing that comes up for me at work a lot where I'm lucky to work in a project space where “that's just the way things are” is a dirty phrase. We don't just accept the status quo. We always look for improvement opportunities. But that's a unique environment.

Most of the time when we're out walking around in the world, there's a lot of shit we just accept. “Oh, this is the way things are, it won't change.” That's an enculturation/socialization thing. The way to wake up that third factor within people—because a lot of people will have repressed it so hard because they want to connect with other people—we've got that perpetual problem of people trying to fit in just so they can have some form of connection.

But the way we tear all of that open and actually make our connections more authentic and genuine, and then see change in the world, is by going out there and questioning the whole “this is the way things are.” Go do something scary. Go do something brave. Go voice this opinion that's unpopular and show other people that maybe it doesn't have to be this way just because it's always been this way. It's like that whole parenting/breaking the cycle thing.

Someone's got to go out there and do it and show other people that it's okay to not like the way my parents parented me. It's okay to go out in spaces and express my queerness. It's okay to go out in spaces and push back on aspects of society. The more people do that, the more it opens gates for other people to say, “You know what? Shit, I'm sitting in this space where I actually don't like the environment I'm in, but I feel so much pressure to conform just so I can have those relationships.” I've never been brave enough to do that. The first step is some of us have to go out there, like those avatars you were talking about, Richard, and throw ourselves completely out there to give license to other people to share stories, make change, be different, open up to new possibilities.

Richard: Absolutely. There's one thing you said that can ignite so much, and that's the word “bravery.” The two of you have actually been quite brave in doing what you've done and embodied courage. I know from your life story that you've shared, Chris, there's a vein of courage that runs through it.

So many third factor people, just by what they run up against, can lose heart. I think most of us probably have at a certain point lost heart, even if only momentarily. The root word of courage is the same thing as heart—cor in Latin. Heart and courage, being disheartened and having courage, are very much related.

I think it's very important in dealing with third factor people and the third factor process—and the culture at large—to revive the human heart, this heart of courage. Third factor courage. It's not an easy thing to do in our own lives if you've ever contended with this—to be in a state of courage, to live in courage, to restore yourself from a state of being disheartened. But we need to do it for each other, and we can do it all the time in the seemingly most prosaic situations where we can give heart to other people.

The US Surgeon General has spoken about the loneliness epidemic and the health consequences of loneliness, which is also something that interpersonal neurobiology speaks to. But if you flip that loneliness epidemic on its head, it's an epidemic of people not proactively taking heart and upleveling their relationality with the people closest to them. This is something we all have the opportunity to do—to demonstrate as best we can (because we're all limited) the bravery that Emma was speaking to.

That's an important thing—courage has got to be part of the third factor, as well as a kind of audacity. The rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel talked about spiritual audacity, and I think that's an important part of living the life of the third factor, especially if it's tempered with humility. Courage, humility, audacity—these are virtues that will serve us well.

Emma: If you're feeling a little bit scared, think about the “what ought to be,” the “what could be,” the “what's possible.” Think also of the detriment of stagnating, of being stuck in one spot, of not being your authentic self and having all these relationships around you built on false pretenses. You don't know whether or not people actually love you for who you are, and you're going to be forever lonely.

Think about what happens if we don't do something about the climate. Think about what happens if we don't be kind to other people. Think about what happens if you go to LA and get sucked into the commodification machine and never get to express that creative idea you had in the first place. What sort of miserable, fucked-up life are you going to end up with if you don't take the brave step and make a change? And what wonderful, awesome things are possible if you just put yourself out there, take that leap, and have a braver heart?

Richard: Preach, Emma. True words.

Chris: I just wanted to name, with toxic enculturation, one aspect I feel is related: overcoming internalized ableism. That's one of the ways this theory has been so helpful to me personally—moving away from pathologizing these aspects of myself.

Right now in our society, we're hearing messaging from people in the federal government talking about being autistic as if it's a disease. What we're going through right now as a society means we have to work extra hard to embrace neurodiversity-affirming ways of being. That's just another liberation.

Richard: Absolutely.

Chris: I feel like this has been an amazing, perfect conversation. I knew you would be a great guest. This zoomed-out perspective is exactly what we've desperately needed, and I just don't know how to thank you, Richard.

Richard: Well, thank you, Chris. Thank you, Emma. I do have a website—livingartswisdom.com—and people can contact me at Richard@livingartswisdom.com.

Emma: Thank you so much. That was a great conversation. It's good to zoom out on theory, not just so we can have additional context to reapply to our own transformation, but also to see the broader applicability of how this theory works. This applies to everybody, as long as we've got the courage to do that. So thank you so much.

Richard: Thank you for having me.

Emma: Thank you, Chris. Always a pleasure. And thank you, listeners. We always appreciate you. We appreciate you as part of our interconnected system. Continue your path to authenticity through the links in the show notes. Subscribe to our Substack newsletter for stacks of cool things delivered straight to your inbox. Explore the Dabrowski Center, email us, or join us on social media. And don't forget to show your love by liking, subscribing, grabbing some Positive Disintegration merch, or leaving us a rating or review on your podcast platform.