How Narrative, Ritual, and Purpose Help Us Heal with Suzan Song

**Guy Kawasaki** (0:00)
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This is Remarkable People.

**Suzan Song** (0:57)
We can take them out of our head. We want to examine with a microscope and then do all this changes in our mindset and cognitive reframing and all that stuff. Great. But in the rest of the world, people actually, they don't have therapists. They don't have all these positive affirmations and whatever. They heal in relationship. They heal when they are needed by someone, when they matter to someone, when they feel they belong in a community.
One reason why I'm really thankful, that in my work, I started my training as a psychiatrist in the US. At the same time, I had a parallel career doing policy in humanitarian settings. So I was working with child soldiers.
There was one early on that I met and she was a sex slave.

**Guy Kawasaki** (1:42)
Hello, everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast and we have found another remarkable person to inspire and inform you. Her name is Suzan, not Susan, Suzan Song, and she is a psychiatrist and anthropologist. If you think about it, that is an interesting combination.
She has written this very interesting book, Why We Suffer and How We Heal. She has seen a lot of suffering and a lot of healing. So welcome to the show, Suzan.

**Suzan Song** (2:21)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Guy Kawasaki** (2:23)
I would say it takes some focus and processing to understand your book. It is not like psychiatry or survival for dummies. This is a very, very sophisticated book. So let me just make sure I got the big picture right before we proceed.
So it seems to me the major messages is that adversity is more or less inevitable, and trying to cling to this concept of stability is rather futile, and that healing is really learning to live with instability, and it takes these three, what you call friends, called narrative, ritual and purpose, and those three things produce resilience. And resilience is not necessarily a return to an old and perfect self, but is transformative in which you deal with uncertainty itself. And I think one of the major cases you make is that this cannot be done in isolation. It has to be done in a community.

**Suzan Song** (3:28)
You've got it, that's brilliant.
Well done, synopsis. Yeah.

**Guy Kawasaki** (3:34)
Maybe we should end the interview right here.

**Suzan Song** (3:35)
Yeah, I know, right.

**Guy Kawasaki** (3:37)
Yeah, just everybody go out and buy this book. End of discussion. Yeah, you can turn off your podcast right now. Yeah. I hate to get dark so fast, but I got to ask you this question. I just read this article that, you know, Homeland Security and ICE, they have incarcerated something like 500 babies and toddlers.
And when I read that, I said, what is going to be the impact on those kids? And you've dealt with a lot of things like that. Can you just explain what happens now?

**Suzan Song** (4:10)
Yeah. So as a psychiatrist and anthropologist, I also do policy in humanitarian settings. So I work across the spectrum with survivors of torture, trafficking, forced displacement, also forced separation from the US. But then also the other side with a lot of founders, CEOs, these high-profile politicians, a lot of these overachievers. And what I find fascinating are those people who are able to thrive despite the odds. You meet someone who's been like a child who's been separated from their family or someone who's experienced trafficking or hostage. And you would assume that they would have these permanent lifelong scars. But there are so many people I've met and I've worked with that have the opposite. They have this sense of groundedness and mastery in life. And I find it so compelling. And so that's why this kind of framework came about.
And so when we talk about these kids who are separated, or right now there are a lot of kids also in wars and armed conflict. There are a lot of kids who are in current exploitation and human trafficking. There's no analogy. Those human rights violations really fracture any analogy. It's just it has to stop. The human rights violations have to stop because, of course, there is lifelong impact for some of those kids.