podcast#9 Code Switch- Jan 9, 2018
This Racism is Killing Me Inside (Weathering 31:00)
The Racism is Killing Me Inside
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/576818478
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
So imagine you’re walking through a department store like our voice actor
here.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As store patron) Weekend sale.
DEMBY: You want to buy something to wear for this thing you have coming
up – a date, maybe it’s a job interview.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As store patron) I do need some new shoes.
DEMBY: Anyway, whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter. The point is you want
to look good. So you’re looking around and you’re shopping, when you notice
that one of the security guards is staring at you. Like, full-on gritting on you.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As store patron) Oh, my God.
DEMBY: And you get that knowing feeling in the pit of your stomach. You
can’t prove it, but you know what it is. He’s looking at you because he thinks
you’re stealing something or about to steal something, and he thinks you’re
stealing something because you seem like you don’t belong there, and you
seem like you don’t belong there because you’re black.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As store patron) OK. This is really ridiculous.
DEMBY: And you’re annoyed. You’re angry.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As store patron) Come on.
DEMBY: And you want to leave, but you also want to be like…
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As store patron) I can afford this shirt, and
those shoes.
DEMBY: But also, you’re like…
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As store patron) Even if I couldn’t afford this
shirt, I still get to be in the store without you clocking me.
DEMBY: So maybe you go buy the shirt. You cop that shirt and pointedly
eyeball the security guard on the way out. You showed him.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As store patron) Hashtag capitalism.
DEMBY: Or maybe you put that shirt down and walk out because why would
you want to patronize a store that would treat you like that?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As store patron) This is trash.
DEMBY: So that encounter is one of those little indignities that make up the
tapestry of American racism. Some folks call them microaggressions. I
personally hate that word so I don’t say it. But, you know, it’s not like mass
incarceration or forced displacement, and when you recount that story to
someone, maybe they say, you know, you should let it go, just get over it,
that’s just the other people’s ignorance. You might even say that to yourself.
But here’s the thing. When you were in that store and all that stuff was going
on, your body had a stress response. It’s evolutionary. Your heartbeat picked
up. Your body unleashed glycogen so you had energy to fight or to flee. You
might have felt anxious, you might’ve felt aggressive. We’re now learning that
the toll from this constant drumbeat could ruin your health. It might even cost
you your life.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: You are listening to CODE SWITCH. I’m Gene Demby. Shereen is out
this week. And on this episode, the high health costs of discrimination. We’re
going to hear from a researcher who was one of the first people to discover
just how discrimination erodes your health. But first we’re going to start with
a story about a woman named Shalon Irving. She was a black woman, a
Ph.D., she worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and she
was actually looking at this very question about the ways that racism affects
our health. We begin with a letter that Shalon wrote to her mother, Wanda.
LEAH DONNELLA, BYLINE: (Reading) I am sorry that I have left you. On the
particular day that I am writing this, I have no idea how that may have
occurred, but know that I would never choose to leave. I know it seems
impossible right now, but please do not let this break you. I want you to be
happy and smile. I want you to know that I am being watched after by my
brothers and Grandma and that we are all watching you. Please try not to cry.
Use your energy instead to feel my love through time and space. Nothing can
break the bond we have, and you will forever be my mommy, and I, your
baby girl.
DEMBY: That was the voice of Leah Donnella reading a letter that Shalon’s
mother found not long after her death. Shalon passed away last year, just a
few weeks after giving birth to her daughter. NPR’s Renee Montagne and
ProPublica’s Nina Martin learned about Shalon’s story while they were
investigating the high rates of maternal deaths in the United States. Within
that high rate, black women are three times more likely to die than white
women. Here’s Renee with a story that originally aired on All Things
Considered.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
RENEE MONTAGNE, BYLINE: By any measure, Shalon had accomplished a lot.
Highly educated and well-paid, she owned her own home and had access to
the finest health care. Yet none of that protected her from becoming part of
the shockingly high rate of black maternal mortality.
WANDA IRVING: Soleil? Can you say hi? Hi.
MONTAGNE: On a recent afternoon, we joined Shalon’s mother, Wanda
Irving, in her home outside of Atlanta. She was surrounded by photos and
mementos and caring for the baby Shalon left behind when she died from
complications of childbirth.
IRVING: There’s a picture of her and Soleil with the same outfits. That was
taken the day she collapsed, the morning of the day she collapsed. Soleil is
French for sun. She just lights up a room when she smiles. She’s the only
reason I have for getting out of bed every morning.
MICHAEL LU: The fact that in 2017 America a black woman is still three to
four times as likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth and that they are twice
as likely to suffer a life-threatening complication, I think that’s a national
disgrace.
MONTAGNE: Dr. Michael Lu spent years as head of the Maternal and Child
Health Bureau. That’s the main federal funder of programs for mothers and
infants. He and others have done studies showing that an important cause of
poor outcomes in childbirth for all black women is prolonged exposure to the
indignities and dangers of discrimination.
LU: We’re talking about African-American doctors and lawyers and business
executives, and they still have a higher maternal mortality rate than white
women who were high school drop-outs. It’s the experience of having to work
harder than anybody else just to get equal pay and equal respect. It’s being
followed around when you are shopping at a nice store, or being stopped by
the police when you’re driving in a nice neighborhood. Those types of
experiences create the kind of chronic stress that continues to gun the
engine, which over time create the wear and tear on your body’s systems.
MONTAGNE: There is a word researchers use for this accelerated
deterioration of the body. It’s called weathering. And some studies suggest it
can be measured at the level of chromosomes. One study looking at the
chromosomal markers for aging found that middle-aged African-American
women on average appear 7.5 older than their white counterparts. The lead
author was a pioneer in the study of weathering, Arline Geronimus, of the
University of Michigan School of Public Health.
ARLINE GERONIMUS: Long-term exposure to cascades of stress hormones
causes a lot of different health vulnerabilities, and it increases your
susceptibility to infection but also the early onset of chronic diseases, in
particular – hypertension, diabetes, morbid obesity.
MONTAGNE: Weathering and chromosomal indications of aging can occur in
anyone. One study, for example, showed similar weathering in white mothers
caring for autistic children. The core problem is lifelong, unrelenting stress.
And for African-American women, pregnancy becomes an even more
dangerous time.
LU: Pregnancy is a big stressor on the body, and a healthy body can adjust
and adapt to it, but a body that’s worn out will have a much harder time and
therefore putting the woman at greater risk.
MONTAGNE: Photos of Shalon Irving show a vibrant woman river-rafting with
friends, posing in a silky evening gown. And beneath Shalon’s broad smile and
healthy glow lurked many of the same issues that beset less-privileged black
women. Shalon had already lost both of her siblings, a baby brother in a car
accident, and then her beloved older brother, Sam, died slowly from MS. As a
primary caregiver, Shalon fretted over what she saw as sub par treatment
being offered to Sam because he was black and on Medicaid.
Then last year, Shalon got news she had long hoped for. She was pregnant,
but soon found herself single when her relationship with the baby’s father fell
apart. These traumatic life events do add to the risk of pregnancy. Along with
Shalon’s history of surgery for uterine fibroids, which meant she would have
to have a cesarean, she was overweight and taking medication to control a
blood clotting disease. Still, her mother says, Shalon managed to overcome all
these risk factors through to the very end of her pregnancy.
IRVING: It was a great birth. It was just a beautiful time. So the problem
didn’t come in until after the birth, and she didn’t have an afterbirth plan.
MONTAGNE: In fact, few new mothers do. Obstetrician Elizabeth Howell is
known for her work on racial disparities as a professor at Mount Sinai’s Icahn
School of Medicine in New York.
ELIZABETH HOWELL: We’ve had a longstanding history in this country of just
sort of sending moms out. You know, they’ve done the big thing. They’ve
delivered the baby. And now they’ll heal, they’ll be fine. And, you know, that’s
actually not true, right?
MONTAGNE: In fact, the CDC finds that more than half of America’s maternal
deaths occur postpartum. Fully a third of those happen at least a week or
more after giving birth. Monica McLemore is a nursing professor at the
University of California, San Francisco, now leading a major effort to reduce
premature births among black women. Her research involves scores of focus
groups with black mothers.
MONICA MCLEMORE: And so one of the things that has been very striking
from the focus groups that I’ve conducted is that people feel disrespected
during their care. They talk about not being believed. They talk about
reporting signs and symptoms of deterioration and not having any real action
that occurs.
MONTAGNE: Numerous studies do support the existence of implicit bias in the
treatment of black patients. And in a survey recently released by NPR, the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health,
one-third of black women said they had been discriminated against because
of their race when going to a doctor or a health clinic. One in 5 avoided going
to a doctor or seeking health care out of concern that they would be racially
discriminated against. Monica McLemore has found that anticipation of bias
can also disrupt key communication between a mother and her provider.
MCLEMORE: One of the patients who was talking through her birth story was
going on and on and on about how she has no game face. And she says,
people who know me know that I have very emotional reactions, and as a
black woman I’ve learned to curtail that because I don’t want to appear to be
angry all of the time. But one of the things that was really difficult during her
birthing experience was she was working so hard to not appear to be angry or
to not appear to be in pain that every time she spoke to the nurses and
requested pain medicines, they didn’t believe her. And so she really was
trying to suppress what her natural facial expressions and responses were
because she didn’t want people to be buying into stereotypes about black
women, and particularly whether or not we’re angry.
MONTAGNE: Among the more than 200 stories ProPublica and NPR collected
about black mothers, inadequate care after birth was a constant theme. When
we reviewed Shalon Irving’s medical records we discovered a cascade of
complications after birth. Within days, the wound from her cesarean became
badly infected. It was treated, but a week later she had to be seen again. The
wound wasn’t healing well and so painful she couldn’t sleep. Reflecting
Shalon’s mounting distress, her medical records quote her, “it just doesn’t feel
right.” Her legs were swelling until one became bigger than the other, and
she was gaining weight, not losing. When a visiting nurse noticed Shalon’s
blood pressure suddenly spiking, she made another appointment.
IRVING: And she went in. It was just sort of, oh, that’s to be expected. You
just had a baby. Don’t worry about it.
MONTAGNE: She was tested for a blood clot – it was negative – and given a
new prescription, pills for high blood pressure. But when Wanda looks back
now, all she sees is a series of missed opportunities to save Shalon.
IRVING: Because there is something wrong with this lady. Why not check it
out instead of just sending her home? She’s got a swollen limb. She’s not
feeling well. She’s got high blood pressure. Why wouldn’t you put that person
in the hospital? She thought they were not paying attention. She did indicate
that, yeah, Mom, they never listen to us.
MONTAGNE: That night, after her fourth visit in the three weeks since she’d
given birth, Shalon collapsed.
IRVING: She just, you know, reached up one arm as if she was trying to grab
something, and she just made a – I don’t know – a gargling kind of sound like
she was trying to say something and passed out.
MONTAGNE: Paramedics found her without a pulse and not breathing. She
never regained consciousness. An autopsy later concluded Shalon Irving died
from complications of hypertension. We can’t know if Shalon would have
survived had she been white, but hers is a story that does fit into the larger
picture described by researcher Arline Geronimus of why black mothers too
often die after giving birth.
GERONIMUS: Weathering itself just leads to a greater health vulnerability. So
you could think of it as we’ll patch up this problem and we’ll patch up that
problem, but overall, you’re in a weakened physiological state. And so all sorts
of different manifestations in your health can show up, and some very
quickly.
MONTAGNE: In the 11 months since Shalon has been gone, Wanda’s sorrow
has never abated.
IRVING: I never really cry in front of Soleil.
MONTAGNE: Except once, recently, when she received a book put together by
Shalon’s friends and colleagues at the CDC, called, “Letters To Soleil,” telling
her how great her mother was.
IRVING: I was trying to read a couple of the letters to Soleil, and I just totally
lost it. And she just looked at me like, this puzzled look, cocked her head a
couple of times, and then she just put her head on my chest and started
patting me like I do for her when she’s crying. It was just the sweetest thing.
She’s just an amazing little girl. She understands so much.
MONTAGNE: Wanda Irving is in her 60s now, raising the daughter her own
daughter had so longed for. And Soleil, she will have her first birthday on
January 3. Renee Montagne, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: After the break, we dive deeper with Arline Geronimus, the
researcher who coined the term weathering. Stay with us.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: And we are back. We’re talking with Arline Geronimus. She’s a public
health researcher and professor at the University of Michigan’s Population
Studies Center. You heard her in Renee Montagne’s story just now. She’s one
of the people who first started this research. Thank you for coming on CODE
SWITCH, Arline.
GERONIMUS: My pleasure.
DEMBY: So can you tell us a little bit about how you came to this research?
GERONIMUS: Yes. I actually started to come to this research when I was
college age and when I started to see real differences in the life experiences
and also the physical health of my college classmates who were from a more
privileged population and young women I got to know quite well when I
taught at a school for pregnant teenagers as a part-time job in Trenton, N.J.,
which was a more working class and largely minority population. I began to
wonder about why I was seeing those differences and what did they mean.
And that’s when I coined the term weathering as a metaphor to suggest that
what I was seeing was both weathering as in the idea of bodies being eroded
by their environment but also it also means people being able to withstand
that or survive it. And so I’ve always sought to be mindful of both aspects the structured experiences that can erode health and the strength employed
collectively by affected populations to sort of mitigate, resist or undo them.
Just yesterday, I heard in an interview with Emerald Snipes-Garner, who was
talking about her – the death of her beloved sister Erica. She used a metaphor
that I also think would be a great description of weathering. She talked about
the stresses that she felt led to Erica’s death at age 27 as being like – you
know, being stressed in a way like – if you’re playing the game Jenga, they
pull out one piece at a time at a time (laughter) another piece and another
piece until you sort of collapse. I’m paraphrasing her. But I thought the Jenga
metaphor was very apt because you start losing pieces of your health and
well-being, but you still try to go on as long as you can, even if you’re
disabled, even if you’re, you know, even if it’s hard, that you have a certain
tenacity and hope and sense of collective responsibility, whether that’s for
your family or community. But there’s a point where enough pieces have been
pulled out of you that you can no longer withstand and you collapse.
DEMBY: Can we get into the science of this a little bit?
GERONIMUS: People have thought that health – you know, I mean, there
have been folk notions and laypeople have thought that health differences
between populations, such as black versus white in the U.S., were somehow
related to differences in our DNA, that we were sort of molecularly
programmed to have this disease or that disease. And one of the great
advances I’d say of the last 10 or so years is the idea that differences that are
at the molecular level don’t have to be essential to you as a black person or a
white person or Latino. But that instead, social and environmental factors can
through what’s called DNA methylation – which occurs when a group – I don’t
know how technical you want to get, but that occurs when a group of
molecules attach methyl groups to specific areas of a gene’s promoter region
– either prevent the reading of certain genes or express certain forms of a
gene product and you have genetic expression of that gene.
DEMBY: OK.
GERONIMUS: That’s a pretty powerful idea, and it sort of refutes the kind of
more DNA centric that you are, you know, destined by the literal DNA you
have, by the genome rather than the epigenome to have certain diseases or
not. But what I’ve seen over the years of my research and lifetime is that the
stressors that impact people of color are chronic and repeated through their
whole life course, and that in fact may even be at their height in the youngadult through middle-adult ages rather than in early life, and so increases a
general health vulnerability, which is what weathering is. It’s not that you get
this disease or that disease. What’s really happening is you’re kind of worn
down or weathered both by the chronic and repeated exposures to stressors
and also by the high-effort coping with them, such as the vigilance in certain
circumstances.
DEMBY: When you coined the term weathering, what was the initial response
from the academic and medical community to that idea?
GERONIMUS: There have always been some people, you know, who found it
interesting and intriguing and even started to pursue it in their own research
programs. But initially, it was pretty well dismissed by a broader group of
people. And…
DEMBY: Who were those people?
GERONIMUS: Who were those people?
DEMBY: I mean, you don’t have to name names, but where was the locus of
sort of pushback?
GERONIMUS: Well, there were – there were actually several loci – you know,
pushback. One was there were – many in the medical community really
seemed to think that there were just essential or intrinsic genetic, you know,
black-white differences in health, that there must be some hypertension gene
or, if it wasn’t a literal gene back in Africa, there may be something about
how hard the Middle Passage was the people who survived it had this gene
for salt retention. And all of this has been debunked.
DEMBY: I remember hearing that growing up, that it – that hypertension and
that black people had high blood pressure because of salt retention in the
Middle Passage.
GERONIMUS: Right. Well, it’s been very well debunked both on
anthropological grounds but also on – if you compare hypertension rates, for
example, between American blacks and blacks in the Caribbean, the American
blacks have far higher rates of hypertension, yet they both went through the
Middle Passage. So – but some people just thought that was the truth and
they already had the answer and there was just something – you know, if
black skin was genetically determined, well maybe there’s some bundle of
genes that also include hypertension and diabetes, you know, sickle cell, et
cetera.
Others didn’t necessarily think in those terms, but they might think in a kind
of – economists were thinking more behaviorally and sociologists more sensed
(ph) there was a cultural – an essential pathological culture that led to bad
behaviors and weak families was that story. And that was a very strong
narrative in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. And even – I think it’s a narrative that still
exists, though more contested. So this idea of weathering in its metaphorical
aspects and, you know, it didn’t sound technical enough and it didn’t fit any of
those narratives ’cause it doesn’t fit any of those narratives.
DEMBY: What was that like for you when people were dismissing the – when
you coined this term?
GERONIMUS: Oh, it was so much fun.
(LAUGHTER)
GERONIMUS: It was very hard, especially because some of them dismissed it
very publicly, you know, in newspapers, in – another reason I think people
dismissed it is I first observed – in terms of scientifically observing it as
opposed to having this impression – in seeing that young black women were
more likely to have, you know, poor pregnancy outcomes if they were in their
mid-20s than if they were in their late teens. And this flew in the face of a lot
of advocacy organizations that were working very hard to prevent teen
childbearing and who thought that – you know, I think there was a Time
magazine cover at one point that said something like all social problems stem
from teen childbearing. There was certainly a whole narrative that teen
motherhood somehow caused perpetual poverty…
DEMBY: Right.
GERONIMUS: ..Lack of education, et cetera and poor birth outcomes. So even
though I was able to show – you know, the data spoke for themselves that
the risks were higher in black young women the later they waited to have
children. And that was not true for whites. Whites had the lowest risk around
the mid-20s and the highest risks in their teens.
DEMBY: And the rates were higher because the black women who waited
later were more weathered.
GERONIMUS: Exacty.
DEMBY: They had been basically in America for a longer time. America had
been happening to them for a longer period of time.
GERONIMUS: Exactly, and the impacts on their bodies had been happening
for a longer time.
DEMBY: Right. So when did the conversation start changing? I mean, was
that just a function of better scientific understanding of genomics or – when
did this idea of weathering start to gain more traction?
GERONIMUS: It’s been sort of two steps forward, one step back rather than
there being a time it gained traction. I think as we – first of all, it was a
hypothesis for me at first and then I started with colleagues doing studies to
test it. And as the years went by, we had more and more studies that seemed
to be consistent with it. So we had more real evidence. And people would you know, people would say, well, maybe it’s true for poor birth outcomes,
but the mothers will be poorer later. And then we showed that – we and other
people showed that was not really true or that had been at best way
overstated and exaggerated. And then they’d say, well, it’s bad for the wellbeing of the children, and then we did studies looking at the children and
found that wasn’t true. So we started to gain more and more momentum in
terms of actual scientific evidence, including done by other researchers not
working with me. So it did start to get a broader sense of support.
In addition, I think this idea of stress – and not just as, you know, the kind of
stress, you know, I feel so stressed but this broader sense of stress actually
being this physiological process that impacts your health or the strength of
your various body systems – that became better understood sort of in the ’90s
by a variety of neuroendocrinologists, so kind of lab scientists like Bruce
McEwen at Rockefeller University or Robert Sapolsky at Stanford. And so they
talked about these stress reactions, what they do to your body, how they
happen. And, you know, I don’t want to sound cynical, but because – you
know, instead of it being a metaphor called weathering and being about
minority populations and cultural oppression and discrimination, it was instead
just about physiological reactions in human beings discovered by, you know,
two men – or with many more men and it was women too. But the two people
who got I think the most credit – and deservedly – were men who were lab
scientists. And so I think that gave it a credibility in our society that talking
about weathering and lived experience and racism didn’t get.
DEMBY: Right. I want to go back to your Jenga metaphor really quickly. So
you said that weathering is like a game of Jenga in which, you know, you
routinely have these blocks removed from one level and moved up to a
different tier, and so everything becomes more and more unstable and a lot
more tenuous. To stay with this metaphor for a second, is there any way to
put the blocks back?
GERONIMUS: It’s hard to say, but I don’t think it’s sort of the complete done
deal. I certainly don’t believe there isn’t anything that can be done. One thing
that can be done and is done – and this, you know, benefits in particular
people who are weathered but in the middle class or more highly educated is access to health care. So you might be hypertensive from weathering, but if
you have good access to health care, you get it diagnosed early, you get it
treated, you know, you learn what you need to do with your diet to make it a
little less likely to turn into its most pernicious and life-threatening form.
So we’ve seen evidence, for instance, in some of our studies where we’ve
compared blacks in very high-poverty areas to blacks in more middle-class
neighborhoods and what we’ve seen is that those in the higher class
neighborhoods do have much longer life expectancy than those in the poor
neighborhoods, but they spend most of that extra life with chronic conditions
and possibly disabled or with a variety of morbidities than whites with the
same incomes and educations living in the same neighborhoods. So certainly
having the longer life expectancy and averting death and averting the worst
versions, you know, of hypertension or diabetes or their complications, you
know, avoiding amputations and strokes, et cetera, those are good things.
DEMBY: Right.
GERONIMUS: But without dealing with the kind of more structurally rooted
factors that lead to weathering across class, we’re not going to, you know,
end weathering.
DEMBY: Arline Geronimus is a public health researcher. She’s a member of
the National Academy of Medicine. She’s a professor at the University of
Michigan’s Population Studies Center in the School of Public Health. Thank
you so much, Arline. We appreciate you.
GERONIMUS: Thank you. Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: All right, y’all. That is our show for this week. We want to hear from
you. You can get at us on Twitter. We’re @NPRCodeSwitch and our email is
codeswitch@npr.org. Subscribe to the podcast wherever fine podcasts can be
found or streamed, and please give us a review on iTunes. It helps other
people find the show.
Leah Donnella and Sami Yenigun produced this episode. It was also edited by
Sami Yenigun. We had original music this week by Ramtin Arablouei. Special
thanks to Bob Little, Nicole Beemsterboer and the rest of the NPR
Investigations team and to ProPublica for bringing us Shalon’s story. Shoutout to the rest of the CODE SWITCH fam – Shereen Marisol Meraji, Karen
Grigsby Bates, Adrian Florido, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Walter Ray Watson, Kat
Chow and Steve Drummond. I’m Gene Demby. ‘Til next week, y’all, be easy.
Podcast Worksheet- Exposure
The Basics
Podcast Name: On Being with Krista Tippett – The Erotic Is an Antidote to Death
Air Date: July 8, 2021
Host(s): Krista Tippett
Guest(s): Esther Perel
Welcoming in New Information
What did you know about the topic, the podcast host/s, the podcast guest/s before you listened to the podcast?
• I had not heard of Esther Perel prior to listening, and did know anything about the topic
Language- Write down important vocabulary words pertinent to the podcast and key terms that were new to you
• Erotic Intelligence – “But we have an erotic mind. And that erotic mind, it is infinite. And eroticism
thrives on the ritual and the celebration and the infiniteness of our imagination — and on the
forbidden, for that matter, too.”
• Desire – Desire is to own the wanting
• Eroticism is a transgressive force. It is about breaking the rules. That is erotic because it takes you
outside of the borders of reality and the limitations of life.
Quotations- Write down any quotes that you found stunning or that you found interesting
• “We’re walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on
diversity on the other”
• “When you listen deeply, deeply to the experiences of others, you stand in front of your own mirror,
and you transcend that aloneness”
• “Fierce intimacy is when you see people who tell you, there are certain things about their partner that
drive them utterly crazy and always have and will never change.”
• “Play is when risk is fun. But you can’t play when you are in a situation of danger, anxiety, or
contraction. So you have to feel safe in order to play. But if you do not play, you won’t experience
the erotic.”
Ways Knowledge is Organized- (more quotable information)
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systematized, repetitive, rigorous, accurate, valid)
• No Statistical Information
Pertinent Expert Information (Interpretive Paradigm or Qualitative Data- information that is focused on
meaning making from “experts.” “Experts” have a focused knowledge on subjects, topics, phenomena, or self.)
• “It is the most fearsome of all intimacies because it is all-encompassing. It reaches the deepest places
in us and involves disclosing aspects of ourselves that are invariably bound up with shame and
guilt.”
• Passion is like the moon. It has intermittent eclipse. Passion will wax and wane and can also be
resurrected.
• Unconditional love does not exist. Love is conditional.
Pertinent Critical Information (Critical Paradigm or Critical Scholarship- hidden narratives, power, equity,
agency, exploitation, oppression, asymmetrical power relationships, false consciousness, distorted
communication, and push for social change)
• “And what happens is that the people who talk about freedom don’t talk about accountability
enough, and the people who talk about accountability don’t talk about freedom.”
• “And if you cannot do it with each other, you’ll go do it somewhere else. But you need to do it,
because if not, you die, if you don’t change to continue to stay alive.”
• And when people do it, there’s a sense of purpose, there’s a sense of aliveness, there’s a sense of joy,
there’s a sense of transmission — there’s no age. There is no age in the chronological sense because
you are in touch with life.
Processing the New Information
The podcast made me think• About the importance of intimacy in relationships
• About Erotic Intelligence
The podcast made me feel- (Profoundly not interested in if you liked it, this isn’t yelp, what did you feel?)
• More aware about the reality of maintaining and creating strong relationships
• More analytical when thinking about hidden narratives we have but have yet to realize
Active Action Steps-Have you sought out to additional information? Yes or No Can you apply to other classes?
Yes or No
Reflection Summary
I found this podcast super interesting and eye-opening. I honestly do not think I’ve ever listened to
anything that could compare to this, and the information that Esther Perel touched on. Perel touching on why
eroticism is more than sexuality, was something that I had never thought about nor made the connection. Prior
to listening to this podcast, I always thought of the term erotic as a word that was always used in a sexual
context. Starting from the beginning, I thought the lessons she shared about her two parents who survived the
holocaust and the key differences between living and surviving were super interesting. Her concept of living
and surviving played a big role in her message to the audience. She put this same concept in relation to
relationships and being in a dying or autopilot like relationship. Another thing she learned from her parents was
that luck always came first. Perel really stressed that in the end, everything comes down to an individual’s
imagination. We are in control of so much of our live when we change our perceptions and open our eyes to
living with a different narrative. She connects this back to her parents saying that her parents had the sheer
determination and imagined that they would hopefully see their family members again. Perel, also shared many
observations and lessons from her history of observing and exploring relationships. She named that there were
two kinds of growing apart, and that you could have either too much or too little of the thing that leads people to
grow apart. Perel shared that in order to be secure in a relationship, you must be able to anchor yourself, feel
rooted, and then also be able to get up to leave and go play without having to worry. An important aspect of a
relationship is having security that when one person leaves, they trust the other person enough to let go and
comeback. Overall, a theme within this podcast was the topic of eroticism. In this podcast we learned that the
word is more than a sexual context but is about the quality of experience and pleasure.
Podcast Worksheet- Exposure
The Basics
Podcast Name ___________________________ Air Date_____________
Host(s) ____________________________
___________________________
Guest(s) ____________________________
___________________________
____________________________
___________________________
Welcoming in New Information
What did you know about the topic, the podcast host/s, the podcast guest/s before you listened to the podcast?
Language- Write down important vocabulary words pertinent to the podcast and key terms that were new to you
•
•
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Quotations- Write down any quotes that you found stunning or that you found interesting
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•
Ways Knowledge is Organized- (more quotable information)
Pertinent Statistical Information (Discovery Paradigm or Quantitative Data- information that is measurable,
systematized, repetitive, rigorous, accurate, valid)
•
•
•
Pertinent Expert Information (Interpretive Paradigm or Qualitative Data- information that is focused on meaning
making from “experts.” “Experts” have a focused knowledge on subjects, topics, phenomena, or self.)
•
•
•
Pertinent Critical Information (Critical Paradigm or Critical Scholarship- hidden narratives, power, equity, agency,
exploitation, oppression, asymmetrical power relationships, false consciousness, distorted communication, and push for social change)
•
•
•
Processing the New Information
The podcast made me think•
•
•
The podcast made me feel- (Profoundly not interested in if you liked it, this isn’t yelp, what did you feel?)
•
•
•
Active Action Steps-Have you sought out to additional information? Yes or No Can you apply to other classes? Yes or No
Reflection Summary- In a full one-page reflection tell me about the experience of listening to this podcast. What did you learn?
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Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
