Transcript- Dr Ross Ellenhorn

Ross Ellenhorn (02:40.152)

I'm a psychotherapist, but I'm trained, my PhD is in sociology. And so I have a strong interest in this kind of social experience and how much it influences psychological experience,  and that took me to own this pretty large program, which is this kind of hospital without walls in three different states, the United States, that's all about trying to keep people out of institutions who are having really kind of profound and serious psychiatric events. And so that sort of meshes my, you know, the fact that sort of cross-disciplinary training. And then the other part of it is, you know,

I was diagnosed as having a severe learning disability at a very young age. At a time when there wasn't a lot of sensitivity about that, there's a really good chance I'd be segregated off into a special school and stuff like that. And that label had a profound effect on my functioning when the thing didn't really have much to do with my function. I'm three books in and a PhD and I don't even know what it was I had, right? And so what. but being labeled it and not being held enough in my experience, not being cared for enough in that experience had a profound effect. I mean, that's influenced how I think and how I think about human behavior and especially within psychiatric communities. And then I've taken that and I have a psychedelic program too. So my psychedelic program is really trying to fight the movement in psychedelics towards medicalizing psychedelics.

Ross Ellenhorn (04:22.126)

We often say at the beginning of our talks, there's a massive anti-psychedelic movement going on in the United States, and it's called the psychedelic movement. Like our belief is like it's really in bad shape because it's becoming just another medicine, not playful, not oriented towards curiosity and things like that.

Jess Leondiou (04:40.446)

That's super interesting. So you're worried about the way that it's being framed at the moment. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? It's also a topic of interest of mine. I'd love to hear your lens on it.

Ross Ellenhorn (04:50.606)

Yeah, well, we've seen this movement, at least in the United States, psychiatry becoming much more oriented towards fixing people, not having people kind of contemplate their experience and then figure out what they're going to do with their lives autonomously, you know? And psychedelics have entered that field. It's always really, really serious, always about how do we cure your depression or do we cure this or cure that, when the beauty of psychedelics is how do I build a relationship with my suffering?

Which is really what all psychotherapy was. It's never been about how do we fix this thing, but how do we get you to see that you're in a relationship with it and what you want to do about it and how it plays in your life. It's always an individual story. And psychedelics have taken on that kind of mechanical view on some level. In the US, you go to ketamine clinics and nobody even attends to you. You walk in, they put a needle in your arm and you sit there for an hour and you go home. And there's hospitals in the US where there's sections of the hospital called the intervention department. And they have TMS machines. Those are those machines that are sort of like ECT. Then they got ECT machines. And then they got psychedelics. As if it's part of that form of psychiatry where you're intervening on the brain without a process going on. And so that's where our concerns lie.

Jess Leondiou (06:19.316)

makes so much sense and if it was up to you to direct and guide where this movement's going, how would you like to structure it?

Ross Ellenhorn (06:28.138)

but much more, much more viewing in the room realm of art, but what art does well, what is doing well and how psychotherapy real pure psychotherapy is kind of an art. It's an improvisational event between two people. It's definitely improvisational and it's oriented to give shape to experience.

And art is always about giving shape to experiences. Susan Langer, the famous philosopher said, that's what it is. It's providing a shape for an emotion. It's not expressing an emotion. Like, here's where the emotion begins and ends. And how do we kind of capture that? And so could we do something very normal and just return back to what that ethos is of psychotherapy? My partner who comes from the punk scene and from kind of hanging out with the beats in New York City, he's going to take the position very similar to mine, but he's going to talk about art, mostly performance and that sort of thing. But it's all about the curative force of those things, how they can bring us to a greater sense of a relationship with the world.

Jess Leondiou (07:32.032)

Why do you think it's being derailed in the way that it's being derailed?

Ross Ellenhorn (07:38.062)

There's two ways of thinking about it. They're both involved in power. One is there's a famous French philosopher named Michel Foucault who talked about this way in which power surges, especially through medical institutions, as the ability to decide who's normal and abnormal. And that there's tremendous power in that to be the arbiter of that.

The therapy professions have become really involved in that because what they do is they say to somebody, by the way, I'm the arbiter of who's normal and abnormal. So I get to decide if you're normal or not. I've decided you're abnormal. Now let me tell you, I can get you from abnormal to normal if you want, but you're going to have to come see me. That's really the most remarkable sales pitch ever invented by humankind. So why give that up?

Ross Ellenhorn (08:35.083)

As a profession, it's a pretty powerful thing to be able to do that. And then the other is money, just money, at least in the US has just entered into behavioral health. And so it's about, it's just easier to sell people they're broken and have a way to fix you than saying, I'm going to help you kind of contemplate your life.

Even though the research on why people go to psychotherapy, there's been really interesting consumer research on why people go to psychotherapy. They don't go to fix things. They go to be heard and to connect and to feel not judged. That's, that's, is, that is why they say they're going. They understand psychotherapy better than therapists in some ways, you know.

Jess Leondiou (09:19.486)

Yeah, that makes sense. Do you feel like there's any hope of us learning more skills to be able to better hold those containers for each other?

Ross Ellenhorn (09:28.959)

We've lost this thing we built to contain us, which is tradition and culture, an unquestioned sense of what a deity is. That really held us. It also created these hierarchies that were lousy. also had things like human sacrifice. It also wasn't always great for women. It wasn't always great to outsiders. There's all kinds of problems with old traditions. You weren't allowed to play in a spontaneous improvisational way in some ways.

But we did lose that container. Then we lost that container. And then people who want to make money took advantage of that loss and just sold us stuff as a way to be contained. And so our capacity to move forward means finding ways to hold each other that maybe aren't based on traditions or inventing our own traditions, but something or we're gone. I mean, we can't last without feeling held.

There's actually a brilliant way to make people feel held and not lonely. And it's happened in the United States. It's just, it fixes loneliness. It fixes not being held. And that's called authoritarianism. You can really fix those things if you want. But there might be other ways to do it than something as brutal as that. Right? So yeah, that's our challenge. That's the challenge of our times. How do we feel held?

Jess Leondiou (10:58.816)

Can you break that down for me? Like how does that work authoritarianism in terms of helping people feel held?

Ross Ellenhorn (11:15.914)

We all yearn on some different levels of degree for sameness and homogeneity. And one third of every population really leans towards that, that they believe that safety comes in being the same. And when things get kind of crazy, that one third rises up. And what they want is everything to look the same and be the same.

And so diversity starts to terrify them. Improvisation starts to terrify them. Because what they're looking for is this kind of strict container of predictability. And we don't live in a world of predictability anymore. So we have to find new ways to calm ourselves, to be in a community that's improvisational. And so there's ancestors, remarkable ancestors. The psychedelic community doesn't seem interested in it. Remarkable ancestors in the United States, I'm sure in every country that I've taught this is, know how it is that enslaved people, the first thing they invented that became an American event was jazz. How did that happen? That they thought the way to save our experience was both the kind of this devoutness to a kind of passionate version of Christianity, but also music that's completely teaching us that we can connect through improv, through listening, and through curiosity about what the other person's doing. The same year that Buddy Bolan, kind of considered like the guy that invented jazz, whether he's not is or not, kind of started playing jazz in Mississippi, Sigmund Freud came up with Free Association.

Ross Ellenhorn (13:08.749)

So there is this movement of thinking about how we kind of live in an improvisational way without going crazy, without feeling like uncertainty is going to destroy us. And can we create holding through that? So that's the challenge. I don't know if we'll meet it, but that's the challenge.

Jess Leondiou (13:25.61)

Yeah, that makes sense. And I guess that I want to share that kind of information or the idea was that the kind of Genesis for how Harold of the Purple Crayon? Or could you? Yeah. How did you come up with that? Why did you choose that idea? It's so, so beautiful. Can you tell me the story behind why?

Ross Ellenhorn (13:44.747)

Yeah, man, just something about that book grabbed me for a long period of time. I used it in my second book too, and  I think part of what grabbed it was probably because of my previous injuries, because I was a creative kid that got told I needed to be the same as everybody else when I was being told that I had a learning disability. So I think something about Harold attracted me that way. But when I started looking into it and thought about 1955 when it was written, it was a remarkable time. It was all about people being worried about this thing, this weird thing they were talking about called conformity. They were worried about conformity, if you can believe it or not.

Like this was a problem. Conformity was a problem, right? This is before Banana Republic or The Gap or any store that basically you go buy whatever, You know, one comedian at the time said that you don't need mirrors at the Brooks Brothers store. You just stand in front of another person who's wearing a Brooks Brother outfit. Right? So they were worried about this thing.

Ross Ellenhorn (14:50.445)

And there was this revolt and people were, and this book is part of that, I'm sure of it. And he was part of that scene. He used to write, he used to do the images for this Marxist anti-fascist magazine 20 years before he wrote Harold. So it's sort of this message from that time about what do we do about this thing that's happening where we're starting to just become outer directed, oriented towards what my neighbor has and how can I be like them? And so then when I started reading the book, I just felt like every chapter.

Jess Leondiou (15:26.868)

You can kind of feel that. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. It's very cool. What an honor too. I was thinking about him the other day, like if he could ever like to look down and see that you created this masterpiece, that's incredible.

Ross Ellenhorn (15:36.46)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he would love it. I think all these guys know Maurice Sendak, he was friends with Maurice Sendak with Wild Things Are. I Wild Things Are is also this, you know, profoundly important book about play and wildness. You know, these guys, these guys were just guys and women, I'm sorry, because there were some really remarkable children's book writers that were women too then. We're talking about important stuff, you know.

Jess Leondiou (16:11.774)

And so what do you think the roots of conformity are? So it's sort of like the collapse of some, actually, I won't put words into your mouth. You tell me why. Why do you think we're ending up in this space?

Ross Ellenhorn (16:27.789)

I think that we're this animal that has this really tough time, which is we've been given this blessing that's also a curse, which is the capacity to see that things are uncertain. I mean, that's just like, gives us so much to have fun with. Uncertainty, the ability to handle uncertainty, to walk into it. For you to have this podcast with me today, to walk in.

In a state of curiosity means that you walked in willing to be uncertain. Like you can't be curious and be certain. It's impossible. So all these beautiful things come out of uncertainty, but it also just terrifies us, you know? And so when we're most terrified, we move towards certainty, which is like homogeneity. Everything looks the same. I know what's going to happen tomorrow. All of that. Everybody looks, you know, every they were from the same culture, all those sorts of things.

And there is some freedom in Homogeneity too that we're attracted to. It wouldn't be bad to wake up in a neighborhood where everybody speaks the same language and shares the culture. There's problems with it, but it's also, there's something pretty good about feeling like you're part of a neighborhood where there's some similar point of view. And it hasn't been that long where we've been allowed to not conform. It's just that the new conformity isn't buying things.

Jess Leondiou (17:57.952)

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's interesting too, like I love how you thread the piece around connection and holding together too with, I don't know if it's the sense of conformity, but I noticed within myself, I had a very important relationship collapse at a certain point and it tanks my ability to create and to do and a lot of other things. And it was really interesting because you do have that kind of like desperate clawing to kind of grab back onto something that feels stable relationally.

Jess Leondiou (18:24.882)

And when you can't reach for it, it's really hard to reach inside of yourself and to use your word, like to hope that anything that you perform or do is going to be successful. Really, yeah, it's really interesting how dark of a space it can take you into when you don't have that holding container.

Ross Ellenhorn (18:41.781)

Yes, that's right. I mean, that's exactly right. That's kind of a way to get back to it. That's like the birth of authoritarianism, I can't handle this. All this disruption just for my own survival. I've got to grab hold of something that's like, sure, you know, and this leader seems like they're sure. So I'm going to follow them or this group, you know? Yeah, that's and so we all do it on some level, but you know, some people do it more than others. Some people are just crazy enough to not do it. You know, you and me, you know, like,

Okay, like, I'm starting to kind of get too certain here. I know where that leads. I'm not going to do it. You know, even though I'm stressed out, you know, we modulate it, you know, you know, yeah.

Jess Leondiou (19:22.57)

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting too, because I've thought a lot about COVID and how people have ended up since then. And I think, sometimes I wish that there was an obligation for everyone to get up and walk to church on a Sunday. Because otherwise, we're not forced to, we're not forced to converse, we're not forced to connect. And it does feel tricky sometimes, like it's pretty awkward going to dinner sometimes at the start. So I understand why people would rather not.

Ross Ellenhorn (19:48.278)

It's great. Yeah. And some of that's like, this is the hard stuff. This is the hard stuff. I am a person who fundamentally believes in a life where there's multicultural experience. I love being connected to other cultures and where diversity is really supported. But there's a loss in that. And we don't talk about that enough. You know, there's this beautiful book, I don't know, know, Bowling Alone. It was this really important book before anybody talked about loneliness. It's probably 40 years old now where you're studying. Why are people bowling alone now, not sort of the name for it was about no longer bowling clubs and all that kind of stuff. And liberal guy, but he kind of ended the book saying, you know, this is because people aren't living in neighborhoods where they can wake up and feel like the people around them are similar to them.

So there's also, I have to get better at this, psychically. We have to live with diversity, psychically, because we've lost that other thing.

Jess Leondiou (20:57.354)

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense too. It's tricky as well, because I know in Australia we've got a huge drinking culture and I keep asking myself, what can we do creatively and connectedly to replace sitting around and drinking? Because I get that sitting at a table and staring at each other and talking, that doesn't feel like it. But it's sort of, I feel like there's just such a gap at the moment where it's like if people catch up, there isn't a real shared sense of purpose. So I get that there's sort of nothing.

Ross Ellenhorn (21:30.987)

Drinking has always been a thing that pulled people together. On some level, it's good. And on some level, it's bad. But when you talk about people asking you to sustain from use, you're often asking to leave a community. You're often saying, you can't go to that bar anymore on Friday. Everybody else is going. You can't go. You're taking them. And we got nothing else to offer. Exactly.

Ross Ellenhorn (22:04.941)

Right, right, right. And that's kind of the beauty of what AA did on some level. AA's got its problems, but it was basically about a fellowship. It was like, come here, hang out here. You know, we'll all go out for dinner after the, you know, people, when you talk to people in AA, they say it's the meeting after the meeting that was the most important thing. We'll all jump in the car afterwards and we've all got this identity now that we share. So there's sort of a homogeneity here in a way. And we're going out to dinner afterwards and that's where all the magic happens, you know?

Jess Leondiou (22:34.208)

Yeah, that's huge. Because I know that community is so important to your work. What are some of the initiatives that you've tried to structure to plug that hole? How are you integrating the community into, I guess, the help systems that you're creating?

Ross Ellenhorn (22:48.843)

Well, now you got me on the spot. haven't done enough community stuff like, other than for my constituents. And my deal is like this...

Ross Ellenhorn (23:02.641)

If you had a mental health place and all the clients live there, and you brought it in one, every other day, you did yoga at the site. Why aren't you going to yoga class in the town where you're at? Why are you bringing someone in? Right. And so like all that stuff that we ended up secluding for people.

Ross Ellenhorn (23:29.069)

We're removing them from any chance to feel like they're connected to the world around them. That's why my programs are all about serving people in their homes. There are these community resources out there that are not perfect. We live in a world that's sort of fractured. But let's begin with you feeling like you're a member of the world. And so what are all the ways that we can go with you to the yoga class? This is what my team does. Why can't we go with you?. Anything that raises your value as a person, we think makes you feel like you can be a part of a community, like you're worth it to enter. Yeah, I mean, I think you're a little bit more on the side of how do I create community events, which I really appreciate. I'm just like about how do I make this person feel worthy enough to join a community event?

Jess Leondiou (24:20.98)

Yeah. No, but that makes perfect sense. I hadn't thought about it like that. So you're letting them keep their roots and their autonomy in their own space and so then they don't feel like there's a wall between them. They haven't been... Yeah, the other wall. They haven't there hasn't been a wall that's been put up.

Ross Ellenhorn (24:36.695)

Yeah, the same part of the brain that responds to pain, if you ostracize somebody just lightly, will show up in an fMRI machine. So being an outsider generates horrible pain. So how do we keep you inside and raise your sense of value so you feel like you're worthy to go to a community event?

Jess Leondiou (25:01.248)

That makes sense too. It's funny that you talk about the pain. I came across that during COVID because we were in Melbourne. So I got a little break. So I got lucky compared to some people, but I really noticed within myself that I was becoming more paranoid, more guarded. I just could feel it. And I'm like, whoa, something's really shifting within my whole psyche. And it's taken me ages to try and retrain myself afterwards to try and.

Jess Leondiou (25:29.908)

Yeah, reintegrate and rebuild that sense of connection. I don't know if we're discussing the mental fallout enough in terms of that and what the isolation would have done to people.

Ross Ellenhorn (25:40.045)

Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, sadly, we call it a mental health crisis. How can it be a mental health crisis? It was caused by social experience. So, right? So it's like, what do we call a social crisis? Why are we labeling all these diseases that are a result of it instead of saying, no, people got fucked up by being socially isolated? Let's look at how we think about that, you know? But yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ross Ellenhorn (26:07.521)

You're describing the symptoms of loneliness. Loneliness creates paranoia, which is really sad because then the person can't rejoin because they've got this paranoia. that really, know, and loneliness is this profound sense that you're just not needed. It's not about isolation. It's not needed. I'm not part of the world. I'm not valuable. That's what I think, you know?

Jess Leondiou (26:28.309)

No, that makes perfect sense, definitely, because you feel why I felt at least within myself that people didn't like me, they didn't want me around. And I've always been prone to that kind of a thought pattern. You know, that's a bit of my usual schtick, but I could notice the, yeah, the exaggeration of those thought patterns during that time. And, and I feel like I've noticed it within other people too, who haven't come back out and reintegrated. I feel like we still lost a lot of souls in their houses.

Ross Ellenhorn (26:38.561)

There's this stuff that I'm sort of fixated around right now in my work called threat assessment theory. So threat assessment theory, and they study this physiologically. Threat assessment theory is that something challenging feels challenging if you have enough resources to meet it. It feels threatening if you don't have enough resources to meet it.

Very simple, right? Like you're walking with shorts and a t-shirt, when a snowstorm hits, it becomes a threat. You put on a jacket and pants, it becomes a challenge. Well, there are all these social resources that we have around us that we don't notice. Social support, sense that we're effective in the world, sense that we have purpose. Those are resources that if they're removing, if we remove from our lives, everything becomes threatening. The smallest challenge.

I feel like I don't have the resources to meet this. And then we don't leave the house or we get, you know, the normal paranoia we have with people about whether they like us or not becomes bigger because we don't have those resources behind us, you know? And I think that that's a big thing that happened in COVID is we lost important resources that you get from going to work and seeing people at work and all those sorts of things, you know? It made everything look threatening.

Jess Leondiou (28:24.193)

That makes sense. And do you feel like if people are in a state where they feel like their mental health declines, and then they do end up in say a space of therapy, do you feel like enough emphasis is put on their contextual existence? Or do you feel like my concern is that the thought, the problem with their mental health is then put back onto them rather than looking at that greater context. It's like the spotlight's being shined in the wrong place. What's your feeling around that? I know it's a gross generalization.

Ross Ellenhorn (28:59.853)

I still think it's good to focus on the individual but not focus on them being defined by their diagnosis. I don't think it's always that helpful to say, look what society is doing to you. think that that's too.

Jess Leondiou (29:12.937)

Like what about like, you need to fix the social connections. Cause that's the only thing that fixed me was when I got reconnected. And that's why I love your work too. Like I had to fix that, doing journaling and all of these things that I do, like all of the mental health tools and techniques I use, they got me so far. But then the thing that had to be solved was I had to have, actually my sister left for Europe for six months. So I kind of piggybacked off of her husband. So we became quite close then, but that was the best kind of equalizer.

Jess Leondiou (29:46.643)

I think I asked it really badly. Maybe here's a better way we can cut that bit. Maybe a better way of asking this is do you think enough emphasis is being put on connection in the spaces of therapy?

Ross Ellenhorn (29:59.239)

I think that it once was focused on that on some level. And it's become much more about, here is the treatment we use for this disorder. And it's become a way to kind of surgically remove a problem instead of being a place of recognition and connection.That's what worries me about therapy is that it's lost that what it originally was, which is how can I make you feel like someone recognizes what's happening for you? And how can I help you feel like you and I are connected in this and that you have a collaborator and what you want to do with your life? Those are really profoundly important things.

And the therapy allows others to see what's going on. You can be part of the world, you know? So I do think it's like a social event on some level, you know? And it doesn't focus on that enough. It does it, it focuses on empathy. Empathy is great, but it doesn't focus on our provision of feeling like you're in a tribe or a group, that you're part of the world. And it can do that. It should do that, you know?

Jess Leondiou (31:53.877)

makes sense too. How do you think people can improve the way they speak so that they can better create those containers for other people?

Ross Ellenhorn (32:14.687)

Speaking in the language of states, not traits, and thinking through states, not traits, you'd be in a much more humane place. So what I mean by that is, I mean that in two ways. One is my emotional states are based on wherever I'm screwed up in my head, but mostly it's based on what happened that week or that day.

So that's a state and we don't focus on that enough. We've always focused on what you bring to this? But it's also a state to have a psychiatric event. Because even though that's sort of something we can predict a bit, it's your relationship with it that matters. And if I can listen in that way to you and speak that kind of language, I'm in a much better place. In other words, if I'm not saying, okay, so you suffer from depression and I say, I'm curious.

What is your attitude towards this depression? How do you experience it? Have there been times when it's actually something you invited? Are there places where it's given you strength? Where have you had strength in response to it? How the hell did you get into my office today? You're so depressed, but you made it here. Let's go through the symptoms of your depression. I don't even know what that gets us. Does that make sense?

Jess Leondiou (33:50.197)

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Actually, on that note, could you explain a bit more about the book about changing yourself and how the questions are part of the catalyst because that's really useful as well.

Ross Ellenhorn (34:01.003)

Well, first of all, I have to tell you, I have to admit, a lot of what I'm describing to you is by this guy, Michael White, an important Australian person who kind of invented narrative therapy. So a lot of his stuff's about that. It's about how we have these conversations with a narrative about your relationship with the experience, right?

Ross Ellenhorn (34:40.619)

So HarperCollins wouldn't let me title the book that I wanted to title it, which was Don't Go Changing. Because that captured more of what I was trying to say, which is like, what I was trying to say is that staying the same is really understandable. And that staying the same is kind of an act of self-love. It's a protective act. And if we can kind of understand

Ross Ellenhorn (35:09.089)

The beauty had stayed the same. We're probably more likely to get a change. And we're probably going to more likely take the other route. That comes out of narrative therapy, comes out of motivational interviewing, comes out of all these ways of thinking. But it's basically saying, let's stop making this a shameful thing that you're not changing. Let's try to look at what makes sense in that. Why is it, know? And then what's your relationship with change and all of that. That's what the book was about. And it's based also on this concept.

That I've been researching now is finally going to be in a scientific journal. So it's sort of legitimized called fear of hope, which is hope is this thing. Hope is the mindset that draws you through uncertainty. It's not optimism. It's not that things are going to be great. So hope, by the way, it's one of the fruits of our ability to handle uncertainty. Curiosity is imagination, hope.

Hope is the thing that also drives you to feelings of helplessness. Because you get excited about something, it drives you towards it, you get to it, then you realize you can't have the thing that you feel is really important. So if you've had a bunch of disappointments in your life, begin to, the thing you fear most is hope. When hope starts coming up, you get, my God, here it is again, it's gonna take me down the wrong path. And that gets in the way of change. Because you can't change without hope. Because you can't change without walking through uncertainty. You can't.

Jess Leondiou (36:49.729)

Yeah, and with the fear of hope, as I was reading that part, I was thinking about how people can hold each other's hands and how perhaps people don't realize how delicate hope is in terms of when they give feedback or when they give their opinions. How perhaps, perhaps hope is the thing that people need to better understand so that they get that it's a very delicate ecosystem, especially when someone's doing something creative. It's super vulnerable.

Ross Ellenhorn (37:16.587)

Yeah, Yes, it is. is very much so. Yeah. Well, there's a couple of things. One is I think that feeling witnessed by somebody is really important. If you think about this theory of threat assessment, what resources do you have to face hope? Remember?

Hope can be a threat or it can be a challenge. It's a threat if you don't have the right resources. Well, one resource is the sense of being witnessed. The witness means someone seeing your state, not your trait. I see what's going on for you. I'm here for you. I'm on your side. All that kind of stuff is really powerful in helping a person move forward. And the other is, I actually don't think you can change people's hopes. What you can change is their faith in themselves and others.

If this thing doesn't go right, I can handle it. So help people get better at things. Help people feel like they can have faith in you. Anything that makes them feel like if they fall, there'd be something there to protect them afterwards. It's kind of that sort of stuff that needs to happen, those kinds of resources.

Jess Leondiou (38:32.695)

What do you think that looks like if you're a parent? How should that play out?

Ross Ellenhorn (38:42.811)

What does it mean to be recognized before language?

It means that somebody's is also a communication that they see what's happening to you. It's a profound form of witnessing that I call caring recognition. That the care of the parent is all about, the infant is feeling unrecognized through everything my parent is doing for me. That's also called attunement. All those things give you a sense

At first, the world's holding me, not just physically, but holding me in their heads. I'm held by them. It's giving me the ability to hold yourself too. The more you can have of that, the more you kind of learn that I can actually be away from my parents and still feel they're holding. That's been proven in the research. There's research on social support that basically says social support is perceived social support. You don't need to be with the people in the room to feel supported by them. Right? So you carry that with you.

Ross Ellenhorn (40:01.387)

So that becomes this resource. When the kid gets older, it really is about maintaining a state of curiosity. The kid says they're upset, you're just saying, you're upset. You're saying, what happened? What's the experience? What was that like for you? When a kid comes home with an award from school, you want to applaud them, but you also want to say, how does that feel for you? What's it been like for you today that you got that award? As much curiosity towards the other creates this sense of being witnessed.

Ross Ellenhorn (40:42.174)

That's the wild part about it, isn't it? That it's right at our fingertips. We don't do it enough. But it's not so hard to do. It's just we got to practice at it. You know? But we have nobody leading us in that. We don't have any traditions about it. We don't have ways. We have to invent it ourselves. You know? How am I going to use my curiosity to help this person, you know?

Jess Leondiou (41:14.603)

It's funny too, because I thought about it in the context of what makes people do anything. And I was thinking about how meditation sort of took off because you can prove that it's good for the brain. Do you think that there's any kind of research that you could do that would prove that active listening was also cognitively beneficial? And would that then give people the motivation to do it?

Ross Ellenhorn (41:37.556)

I think there is, I don't know the research, but I bet there is. Yeah. What we do know, it's a little bit off the subject, but it's sort of the same thing. What we do know is that disclosure, telling your story in a unique way about you has a profound effect on us physically and mentally. It's unbelievable what a nutrient is to write down your experience. And you can do that and not even show anybody.

And the research shows it has this really profound effect on our psyche. And from our psyche, it has an effect on our health and our ability to be healthy and all those sorts of things. So in that, you're kind of being witnessed by the world without anybody reading it here. The writing of it is a kind of witnessing, you know?

Ross Ellenhorn (42:33.002)

Yeah, Religion had the same trick that psychiatry has, right? It said, we get to decide who's sinful or not. And by the way, if you want to become not sinful, you got to come see us. It was the same power mode as psychiatry does now, which is you're sick and if you want to get unsick, you got to see me. It's the same, the same trick, same power move.

Jess Leondiou (42:57.963)

Makes sense. And I don't know if this links back to... I've forgotten the term that you gave me about the threading. What was the piece that you just said about the threading? The thing that you're doing research on now? Thread assessment, yeah. How do you feel? Does art fit in the space of thread assessment as well? Or I guess I'm wondering how.

Jess Leondiou (43:30.249)

I guess my actually a probably a probably a silly question, I guess. So you're saying thread assessment has to do with maybe you can explain that term again. I'll jumble this question, but I'll just say I'm looking at it. But I guess I'm thinking about the thread assessment piece because you're talking about that as a mechanism that creates security. And then from that space of security, you can better step into originality and art. And then those two things feed backwards and forwards on each other. Is that right?

Ross Ellenhorn (43:55.853)

That's correct. I didn't think of it that way, but that's great. Yeah, I mean, art takes significant courage because you're doing two things at the same time. The two things you have to do when you change too, which is you have to trust in yourself and you have to face uncertainty that the thing that you create will mean anything. So art captures basically the basic thing at the base of human experience on some level.

I'm in this world, I could contribute something, I'm terrified of doing it because it may be no good and it may lead nowhere. And by the way, that's what hope is too. It's like art takes a lot of hope because it's like, I'm just gonna step into this and some part of me feels like if I keep going, something worthwhile is gonna come out of it. When we think that hope is two things, hope is the ability to see a barrier and work around it, that's art.

Making art always involves that. And faith in oneself in the middle of it. Those are the two elements of hope. When you study hope, that's what you're studying. Those are what's required with art. We need a world where art, in my mind, art becomes kind of the ethos on some level. I think art teaches us a tremendous amount about connection and the feeling of a whole and the feeling of being part of something.

Jess Leondiou (45:25.409)

And if someone's sitting here and they can see within themselves that they don't really have enough hope, what small, simple instructions might you give them to edge toward it?

Ross Ellenhorn (45:38.048)

Okay, so what our research shows is that of all our subjects, the ones that have the hardest time are the ones that have high fear of hope and high hope.

Right? Because they're like somebody who's afraid of heights on the edge of a cliff. Right? So I'd ask that person the question why they're so concerned about hope. If they're so concerned about hope, I'm going to kind of wonder, maybe you're a hopeful person, and you're terrified of it.

A person who's given up on hope isn't going to talk to you about it. They're in despair. They're just giving up. So I'd want them to say, I'd want to say, like, you might be a hopeful person, but you're in that understandable space where it's terrifying you. And you're running from it. And that's understandable. There's a real grace to not changing, which is I'm not going to hope again because I'm protecting my hope.

I'm protecting my hope from another disappointment. There's beauty in that. And so to help a person kind of see that that's what's going on, I think is helpful. You're doing something decent here. You're trying not to hope here. Hope's really horrible in some ways. It's really a tough thing.

Jess Leondiou (46:59.649)

Yeah, it makes sense too. Trying to think as well, like in terms of encouraging people to do art, I guess there's the grandiosity that I guess people, I don't know if it's grandiosity, what people have been swept up with in terms of expectations from social media and all of these other things that are telling us we should be bigger, better, brighter.

Jess Leondiou (47:24.311)

How should we reframe all of this in a way that's inspiring but isn't attached to these external metrics?

Ross Ellenhorn (47:41.291)

We were in the Seaport in Boston, which is this really overdeveloped place. It's all one these places where they tore everything down and put up a bunch of work, live spaces. I don't know, just a commercial. And our kids came to visit us at this hotel. kids are in their 30s and 20s. And we had that experience of just lostness. We're in the middle of this commercial place.

What do we do with our day? We had an open day. It's such a sad feeling when you're with your family and you don't feel like anybody's connecting because there's nothing to connect around. And my brother, my brother, my son brought these cards, playing cards. And we have this game that my mom taught me that her parents taught her called Hell. And my son plays it now and his friends want to play it. They call him up, say, hey, Friday, can we play Hell? I'd go out and do drugs.

And so we sat on this bench and this table and we played O'Hell for two and a half hours while the tourists were walking by. And it's one of my favorite days of the year. And all it took was him taking out those cards. some of these answers are just really simple, but we're pulled into this vortex of externality, know, you know, just solve this for me. It doesn't work that way, you know?

Ross Ellenhorn (49:16.734)

I mean, every act of comfort requires an us in it. It cannot be provided from the outside. It never works. It's an intersubjective experience. When you get comforted, because I'm doing part of the work. Am I going off too far? I don't know.

Ross Ellenhorn (50:01.068)

The one thing I did, which I wish I did more of, I created this thing called Art Church, or Art Temple, Art Temple. And it was going to be this thing, we just never got it off the ground, but it was going to be this thing where every Saturday or Sunday you came and we did this process where we built an altar. But the altar was just this mess. It was like this weird, brutalist sculpture. It didn't have any, like, something, you couldn't bow down to it. It was too weird.

Ross Ellenhorn (50:30.548)

You know, but it's just like this group event where everybody can bring their kids and this group event of let's make art together. And then let's let the altar be an altar to connectedness because that's what this was. That's what art is. Art is about, know, you know, you're painting that picture when you look at a picture in a museum. You're doing an artistic process. You can't enjoy that piece without being artistic. You're definitely writing a novel when you read a novel.

And so how do we create those experiences of what's called intersubjectivity? I'm holding you in my head, you're holding me in yours. This neocortex of ours is built for that. That's what it's really built for, is how do I imagine your world and you imagine mine? So art, group art events are about that. And then how do we kind of give praise to that at the end? So then we have the altar in the middle, we give praise to it.

Jess Leondiou (51:24.191)

Yeah, that's a really important point too actually for someone, know, even just to observe art, yeah, is an act of participation in itself. We probably don't look at it like that.

Ross Ellenhorn (51:36.363)

No, we don't. To heal everything. Everything is about metabolizing and producing because we're living things and living things do. That is what play is. Play is a metabolizing, producing event. Play is this profoundly important event in our lives because it does that most directly. To play is to put yourself into the thing you're playing with and to then take something from the outer world and have it affect you. It is the most profound event on some level. So how do I get people into a state of play so then they can recognize this is the thing I want in my life. This is the experience, you know.

Jess Leondiou (52:13.035)

Yeah, it's so nice what you're saying because it really gives me the feeling that just by stepping up to just by stepping up to try and do anything, you can be proud of that act in and of itself, which takes the pressure off the outcome. puts the pride in stepping up in and of itself. And you can hold that part of your narrative, which is a beautiful message, because I don't know if anyone else is really sharing it in the way that you do.

Ross Ellenhorn (52:35.788)

I'm not big, this must be a drag on a podcast. I'm not a big advice giver. I'm more interested in helping people get insight and then making their own minds up about what they want to do about it. Plus I'm just not good at it. I can't figure out the answers. I don't know the answers, you know, but one answer that I don't live by at all, period, is invent your own customs. know, invent your own customs.

Ross Ellenhorn (53:06.358)

Thursday night, the family gets together. We have a moment of quiet before we eat, and everybody has to come. And we'll call Thursday nights some names, you know? You know? I'm partly Jewish. Shabbat's this remarkable thing. We turn off our phones, turn off electricity, turn off everything. And then Friday nights, we're going to do this, you know? Those sorts of things are really good. Yeah, go ahead.

Jess Leondiou (53:30.603)

Yes, I dated a partner. Sorry, I didn't want to be scared. And it was so cool, the tradition of the dinner. And it made me think, damn, he's so well threaded in terms of the network, the community, all of these people that are in his ecosystem. I thought a lot about that dinner when I was reading your book and the concept of holding. I really did, because I was like, that is really missing.

Ross Ellenhorn (53:52.512)

I just was at this conference near Mexico City. I don't want to over romanticize another culture, but we went into this village right before Day of the Dead, which is this big, big celebration there. It was just so thick with culture. Like you're just walking into an art piece to be in this town. All the foods, all the colors.

You automatically, and I'm from another country, I don't even speak the language, felt held. This whole thing is holding me. Just because I'm not from another culture doesn't mean I'm not human. This human event of creating art and living within art and tasting art and smelling it, all those things are just, don't happen in the United States like they do in other countries on some level.