How to Stop Feeling Bad About Feeling Bad | Mariana Alessandri

Mariana Alessandri (0:00)

I literally don't think it's possible for a human being to be broken, because then you'd have to ask, well, what are you a broken version of them? If you're broken, what's the ideal? Like, what does it mean to be unbroken? Is to not have any dark moods or anything? Like, that seems to me creepier.

SPEAKER_2 (0:21)

Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, Garbage In, Garbage Out, or You Are What You Think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer (1:06)

There's a phrase Mariana Alessandri kept using in this conversation. And every time she said it, I wanted to stop and say, yes, that. It's to be on our own side. She spent years not being on hers. When she got angry at her kids, she called herself a monster. Being on her own side meant asking a different question, what's wrong instead of what's wrong with me.

And it turned out something was, she was overwhelmed. And overwhelmed is something we can do something about. Mariana is a philosopher and her book Night Vision is about dark moods and how to stop treating our own as evidence against us. You can't learn anything from a mood that you are ashamed of. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is The One You Feed.

Hi, Mariana. Welcome to the show.

Mariana Alessandri (1:59)

Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer (2:01)

I'm excited to discuss your latest book which is called Night Vision, Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods. And I'm pretty sure that plenty of listeners go through dark moods. I know I certainly have had more than my fair share of them in my life. And so I'm excited to talk with you about the value of dark moods in our lives. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable.

In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. They say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent, they say, well which one wins?

And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Mariana Alessandri (3:00)

Thank you. I love that you asked this question to everybody because you must have heard a thousand answers by now. A thousand different takes on it, right? So I used to really like this sort of idea that there's two different things inside of us and they're sort of vying for our attention, whether it's like the angel and the devil or in the Jewish tradition like Yetzir Haran, Yetzir HaTov. And I don't know if anyone has kind of talked about that, but I used to really like it. And it wasn't until I had kids that I had to really think about, well, how am I going to teach my kids about the feelings that we have inside of us and like remain one whole person rather than someone who feels constantly divided. And so, I've moved away from enjoying that parable in terms of thinking of us, both in terms of good and bad. So I don't like those words for us, or just that they're fighting. Like, there's something so violent about it. Like, there's two things fighting inside of me. And so when I was writing this book, I was actually thinking about that parable and thinking about, well, what does it mean to feed it? Like, the one you feed. So that means that there's something inside of us. There's these two things inside of us, one of which we feed and the other of which we starve, and hoping that the one we feed is going to completely demolish the other one.

And then I just think, oh, like, if that's inside of me, then that means that I'm going to be demolishing part of myself. I'm going to be hurting part of myself. I'm going to be rejecting part of myself and a really nasty death, a nasty death of starvation. And so I have kind of just taken that parable and thought of it more as like, wow, that sounds like a recipe for disaster, to feed a side of yourself instead of kind of talking to it, thinking about it, asking it what it's there for, why are we having these feelings? There's a few philosophers who are kind of working on rehabilitating these emotions like envy and anger and things like this. And so I'm more like I want to be nice to myself now. I feel like I grew up with a lot of sense of being like bad. And I feel like I don't want that for my kids. I want to give them this portrait of us like we feed both sides and like we love both sides. We love ourselves. The other thing that this made me think of is when you have kids, right? So when you have a kid and they start crying, like inevitably at some point in your life, someone says, well, they're just crying for attention.