So much of the conversation around democracy focuses on the external: from elections and policy to protests and organizing. While getting active is important...what could happen if we ALSO turn inwards? When we shift our relationship with our insides—what we believe and feel and the unconscious patterns we act from—our world shifts with us. In the final episode of season four, Baratunde sits down with Source Code creator and former psychologist, Dr. Sam Rader, about how we can learn to citizen on a deeper level.
SHOW ACTIONS
Internally Reflect - Recognize dynamics
What are the dynamics within society that upset you the most? If you are really honest with yourself, how does this dynamic play out inside of you? To begin the journey of uncovering your unconscious defenses, you can take Dr. Sam’s free Discover Your Top Coping Style Quiz. After you watch the results video, journal on what might be possible for you and your world if this pattern could shift.
Become More Informed - Learn about Source Code
Read Dr. Sam’s forthcoming book, ‘Source Code’, one year ahead of publication, in her Return to Love Membership or sign up for her email to find out when the full book is released. Dr. Sam also suggests you check out Karen O’Brien’s book “You Matter More Than You Think.” Karen is a renowned expert on climate change, who introduces us to the fractal nature of reality, and how each of us is the front line of exponential and instant change.
Publicly Participate - Stand for love
When you next go out to run an errand in your community, attend a cultural event or school meeting, especially in situations that might feel dicey, decide for yourself what it means to you to “stand for love” in those places. Even just setting the intention and putting your attention on it will have a ripple effect.
SHOW NOTES
Check out our episode with Heather McGhee who explains why so many Americans have a zero-sum worldview.
Find How To Citizen on Instagram or visit howtocitizen.com to join our mailing list and find ways to citizen besides listening to this podcast!
Please show your support for the show by reviewing and rating. It makes a huge difference with the algorithmic overlords and helps others like you find the show!
How To Citizen is hosted by Baratunde Thurston. He’s also host and executive producer of the PBS series, America Outdoors as well as a founding partner and writer at Puck. You can find him all over the internet.
CREDITS
How To Citizen with Baratunde is a production of iHeartRadio Podcasts and Rowhome Productions. Our Executive Producers are Baratunde Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart. Allie Graham is our Lead Producer and Danya AbdelHameid is our Associate Producer. Alex Lewis is our Managing Producer. John Myers is our Executive Editor. Original Music by Andrew Eapen and Blue Dot Sessions. Our Audience Engagement Fellows are Jasmine Lewis and Gabby Rodriguez. Special thanks to Joelle Smith from iHeartRadio and Layla Bina.
Additional thanks to our live audience voices Cynthia LD., Aaron M., Meshach W., Elizabeth G., and Janine D.
It's a radical act of citizen ing to change our story, to change the narrative that we're living within and our relationship to ourselves and others in the world of like. I won't participate in the authorizing, the dehumanizing, the fighting, the oppression.
I won't.
I'm not going to do that to me. I'm not going to do that to you. I am going to stand for love. I will stand for love, and in that being, this change my world.
Welcome to How to Citizen with Baratunde, a podcast that reimagined citizen as a verb, not a legal status. This season is all about how we practice democracy, what can we get rid of, what can we invent, and how do we change the culture of democracy itself. We're leaving the theoretical clouds and hitting the ground with inspiring examples of people and institutions that are showing us new ways to govern ourselves. I can't believe this is the final episode of our fourth season of How to Citizen. I'm so glad you're here now. If you've been with us from the start, thank you, and I hope we've given you new perspectives, solutions and practices to get inspired by and to try. If you're new to the show, thank you as well. It is never too late to start citizen. We kicked off this season with Adrian Marie Brown. It was a beautiful, expansive conversation about the importance of getting into right relationship with each other and seeing democracy is something we create at the micro level at home and in our communities, not just at the macro level via the ballot box. Adrian shared this idea that I'm still playing with in my mind. The idea that the external systems were fighting so hard against also exists inside of us. The inequality, racism, extreme capitalism, all the isms don't just exist out there, they take root in here. So as much as we need to citizen externally to make our communities and our country better by participating, investing in relationships, understanding power, and valuing the collective, we also need to citizen internally. And that brings me to our second pillar, invest in relationships. We have mostly focused on using that as a way to connect to the people around us and to the planet, but the full line is invest in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet. And it's so important that we take that first piece that relationship with ourselves as equal to the relationship with others in the planet. Today, doctor Sam Raider is helping us go deeper so that we can understand what it takes to create a culture within ourselves that supports creating a culture of democracy for all of us. I was introduced to Sam through my wife Elizabeth, who you should know by now is executive producer of this show. And if I'm being honest, when I first met Sam, I thought she was a bit out there. She was always talking about alternative approaches to healing and what we could learn from quantum physics, and what we could learn from psychedelics and how to undo our internal wirings from childhood and blah blah blah. It was a lot okay, But over time, Sam and the way she sees the world, they started to click for me. In her eighteen years of practicing psychology, Sam couldn't ignore these patterns she saw her clients living through and realized she needed to step outside of that traditional practice and try something new. So she developed an approach called source Code, which she says focuses on the speed theirritual dimension of healing. Sam believes that our early childhood experiences write a code in our unconscious which then determines the way our story unfolds. And she's committed to helping people rewrite their code. And I want to be clear, this isn't talk therapy, and I'm not going to ask you to lay back on your couch, but it is deeply vulnerable. What Sam asks people to do is get honest about the role we cast for ourselves in our lives and the responses we think we're hardwired to have. If you have any exposure to the modern world of wellness or healing or Instagram spirituality, then you know it can feel completely divorced from and even in denial of reality. I have found that Sam has a foot in both worlds, the internal and external. She protests signed petitions, her money where her mouth is. I literally depend on her for my LA voting guide every time we have to vote, which feels like every other month. Sam is so dedicated to this inner work because she believes that our personal healing is what's going to help us create collective healing. After the break, Doctor Sam Raider on the source code running our lives and how turning inward can help us create a culture of democracy that supports a just and loving world. We are so excited to have you here to explore this belief that I've had for a while now, based some on my own experience, based some on your work about the importance of healing ourselves before we can heal the world, and how we can sit as in better. So that's the crux of why you're here, and I want to start with just asking you, how did you come to make this connection that our internal worlds directly link to our experience of the external one. Did it happen in a moment a series of moments with some of your discovery of this link.
I was a psychologist for eighteen years in private practice, starting with my practic and going through, you know, having my own business, and I started to see that there were these patterns that people were coming in and saying the same things to me, even across all different walks of life, all different socioeconomic status, race, gender, you know, it didn't really matter. There were these universal patterns. And when I started relating with the patterns instead of the specifics of what the person was bringing in, I noticed that there were these radical shifts not only in how the person showed up in the world, how they felt, how they behaved, but also how the world showed up for them in an almost mystical way. Things change in their external environment to now reflect their new internal environment. And it started happening so many times that I couldn't unsee it. And that's why I guess I walk this divine paradox, like, yes, I create the voter guide every vote.
I believe in.
Citizen ing deeply, and I believe it's all an illusion, kind of how the Hindus have been saying for thousands of years. It's all you know, everything we're experiencing is a part of ourselves.
The idea that everything we're experiencing is a part of ourselves links to some of my in field experience is making America outdoors and the idea that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature, and so we see ourselves in the external in these patterns that you were seeing in your patience, your clients in the psychology realm you described, you know, a shift in them that would then shift some of the world around them. What's an example of what you were noticing and what changed after you called attention to or intervened in some way.
Yeah, so I was thinking in preparation for this interview about this client of mine whose political beliefs were those that are sort of associated with oppression. And when we explored his internal landscape and the sort of symbols that run him, we found that he experienced his father as oppressive as a little one, and actually said sometimes when his father would get really angry, it felt like a silver back gorilla. And so we started talking about the silver back gorilla, this part that's so big and so scary and gets to have all the power, and that that part is paired with this other part that feels so powerless. So in his symbolic landscape, there was this big thing and this little thing and they went together in such a scary, disturbing way. And so if you're living in a universe where there's big guys and little guys and the little guys always lose, of course you're going to want to be a big guy.
Logical' that's just that.
So you know, I never spoke to him about his political beliefs, and all we did was work on the symbols that run him, this awful split in power, these symbols of bigness and smallness, and oppression, and we started to alchemize those symbols and replace them with new symbols of togetherness, connection, empowerment, equality, equity, and we started shifting things down, down, down at that symbolic layer. And then he comes in and says to me, you know, I've been thinking about the way that I vote. I think there's something off here, like I'm realizing it doesn't actually honor the human beings in the world. And then a few weeks later he comes in and says, it doesn't feel right anymore to have a gun yet a gun, and it's like, yeah, well, if we're living in the big guys and little guys paradigm of dominance, it makes a lot of sense to have a gun, right, Yeah. But this is someone who would find himself regularly these pickles in life. You know, people on the road would cut them off and they'd get in these battles or just odd problems would be coming into his life in various social settings where there was a lot of conflict and shows of dominance, and as he shifted his internal landscape, those things just didn't show up in his world anymore. He wasn't being beckoned into that fight because he wasn't organized around fight.
Thank you for the silverback gorilla tail. I've been on a tour over the past few years doing a lot of talking and connecting, and one of the stories I've been trying to shift with the audience I connect with is like, I'm not here to take anything from you. You know, there is so many of us wired to believe in what Heather McGee, another previous guest on our show, calls the zero sum game. If you get something, it's got to come at my expense. And it's like, that's a possible interpretation, or we could get more together, which.
Is how nature has worked for time immemorial. Everything springs up interdependent with one another.
You know.
It's just this ecosystem of life that supports itself and each other, and everyone wins and everything keeps each other in checks and balances and thriving. Something about the way we've started to organize ourselves in the last couple thousand years. We're getting away from that, but we can also return to that.
I keep thinking back to the first conversation this season with Adrian Marie Brown. We spent some time on fractals. We talked about how fractals you represent these patterns that replicate at the small medium at every scale. The implication being if we change something at the small scale, it will replicate, it will ripple to the larger scale. And I know you're a big fan of fractals, and even the story you shared has you know it hints at this. But where do fractals fit into your worldview when you think about the connection between shifting our internal world to shift the external world.
So, for those of you who don't know, a fractal is a pattern that keeps repeating at every scale. So if you zoom in, it's the same pattern. Zoom all the way out, same pattern. Turn to the left, same pattern, turn to the right, same pattern. It's infinite. Fractals are everywhere in our universe. The branching in our lungs mirrors the branching in nature in trees and so on and so forth. So there are certain patterns that keep repeating. Now, source code is based on the idea that in our first five years of life, our early experience encodes into us some patterning. What we learn explicitly by what we're taught and also implicitly from how we're treated in our environment, creates this deep patterning inside of us, and that pattern keeps repeating. So for that client, it was that pattern of dominance and oppression, and that pattern keeps repeating like a fractal. There's actually this really beautiful book called You Matter more Than You Think. It's written by Karen O'Brien who's a professor of human geography at OSLO in Norway, and she talks about that this is a fractal universe. You know, quantum physics and mathematics is bringing us closer to this, knowing that we really do live in this place where it's all just patterns that keep repeating. And for us at the societal scale, how we're citizening. It's the idea of paradigms. So the paradigm of dominance has become really big, but it's become really big because as children, there's a lot of children who experience that dominance thing in their family system, so then it's encoded into them, then they embody it, and then our collective embodiment creates these larger macrosystems that mirror like a fractal. So the cool part from that book You Matter More Than You Think, is she says, you know, every point is the center point in a fractal universe. So what each of us embody, how we show up up, what we believe, how we citizen is the beginning of a new world. Every moment can bur the new world of how we want to show up.
All right? So I literally got like slightly emotional slash chills because I don't think I speak just for myself when I say that the world can feel very frustrating, can feel very overwhelming. In terms of the challenges, I could list off a litany of isms and ologies, yes, which are impeding our growth and our evolution, and patterns and stories and systems that we were born into, sometimes literally in our families, sometimes more metaphorically as a society. And if I want to counter that, right, if I want to change that, I'm like, I got to join the right organization, I got to fund the right politician. Oh everything they said was a lie. And what I'm hearing in this you matter more than you think. And the center is actually everywhere, is that the front line is also in here. And so if I just start right the place, the space matters a little less than just the commencement. And maybe I could start with me and have that be my own front line.
Absolutely, Oh my god, I feel you know, tiriy I just hearing you talk about it. And in twenty sixteen, when Trump was elected, I wrote this cheeky article entitled why Trump's presidency might promise more hope and change than Obama's.
What Okay, hold on, I'm with you, I'm with you, But I mean that's the very clickbaity great clickbaby. My emotions are moving now because nobody speaks against my man, old I loved you. Would you talking about doctor Stale?
Well, when we go looking out there and absolutely keep citizen ing, keep contributing, keep funding, keep going, keep protesting, and when we're only looking out there, we forget that power that every point is the center point in the fractal. So the way I see Trump is that he's kind of a caricature of our collective wound in this nation of otherizing. So he does this big thing about let's build a wall, and these people are bad, and you know, I'm the greatest, and then we liberals say no, you're bad and we're good. It's just a mirror image. It's Malkovich Malkovich. So the dehumanizing that's festering at the core of our nation. He's coming forward as this big embodiment of that going do you see? Do you see who we are? And it's our opportunity and invitation to go inside and go Okay, where am I dehumanizing even them? Because if I had lived the sum total of their life experience, I would also believe and act the way that they are. And so it's like, there are no bad people, only hurt people, hurt people.
I've heard that line so many times, and you know, the people who are hurt in turn hurt others. I think, you know, Trump is a tricky caricature as a particular example, where yes, we hold the truth that hurt people hurt people, and we act to counter the harm and the hurt that's being created by this person. It's the both, at least for me, I don't even know if that's a question. It's more of a statement to get your response to, Oh, because I don't want to feel like so just have to vaguely love, you know, hurtful people and the world's going to fix itself.
Oh yes, I do think there are some people who, because of their coping styles and wounds, are living in a little bit of denial of reality and doing what I call spiritual bypass where they're like, everyone just needs to raise their level of consciousness. And I'm like, okay, you tell that to a slave in chains in a diamond mind right now, like, oh, just raise your level of consciousness. Like we have to hold both.
We have to hold.
Both that there are certain sticky spots in this universe where people don't have the flexibility like on Maslow's hierarchy of needs to be thinking about the quantum and my embodiment and what story am I telling? Sometimes things are just really real, and how can we hold both that our relationship to things matters, that are embodiment matters, that are being this matters, and that there are very real things going on in the world that need to be stopped, that need to be talked about, that need to be addressed and not swept under the rug.
Yes, and it's improv It all comes back to improv comedy. I want to back up on some terminology. We've got source code, We've got a coding session rather than a therapy session. We've got symbolic versus concrete or circumstances. I think you use that word can you give us a lay of this linguistic land that you're also creating. What is symbolic versus the traditional way we tend to approach kind of articulating our our problems are in our selves.
Yeah.
Sure.
So if we think about the client who had the dad that he associated with the silver Back guerrilla, the concrete circumstances in his life that week may have been that some dick cut him off on the road. He comes in and he wants to tell me about this specific situation that's so frustrating and so irritating, and what do I do about these people everywhere that are trying to cut me off?
Right?
And it's this very specific thing. But instead of going with the concrete specifics, we're going to dive deeper beneath to the symbols, the symbolic landscape or symbolic nexus that got encoded into him when he was little, that's running his life now. It's the algorithm of his matrix. It's what he notices, it's what he attracts, it's what he orients around. It's his favorite story to keep telling, no matter how awful and enraging it is. And so we go down, down, down, and we work with the symbols instead. Like we were talking earlier, there's this gorilla in the mouse, the big part in the little part. Those are archetypal symbols. And when we can resolve things down at that symbolic layer, poof his life shifts. He notices different things, he attracts different things, he creates different things, he embodies different things, he believes different things, he relates in a new way. And that's the work that I do.
Yeah, and I want to dive deeper into your source code world and your coping styles world. What have you found when you've gone inside? What are the wounds that you've been able to kind of categorize and label and give some structure to to help us make sense of that internal landscape so we could adjust how we show up in the external landscape.
So source Code has identified that there's twelve coping styles that we all share, and all of us have several. I had all twelve, which is sort of what allowed me to be the conduit for the work. But those coping styles are the defense mechanisms that we inherit in our early experience when we don't get the precise support need at each developmental stage. So all of us are walking around with these patterns or coping styles, or glitches in our matrix that make things hard, these tough patterns that keep repeating. But what's more interesting to me is that under them, as soon as we dissolve them, which is what source code does, under those defenses, each of us is the most exquisitely beautiful energy, the most loving, relational, curious, playful, magical, gentle spirit waiting dormant inside of each of us to awaken beyond those defenses. That's what I find inside when I assist someone in stepping out of a lifelong nightmare that they've been trapped inside of. You know, when you think about your life, you notice those patterns that keep repeating of like why am I always invisible? Why does no one hear me? You know? And it's like, because that's something that got encoded into you and now you keep reliving it. But it doesn't have to be. So this morning I received a DM from a student who was in a class with me last night, and she said, you know, I was feeling very upset and missed because in the first half of class, every time I wrote something in the chat, you missed it. You skipped over that and read everyone else's and I felt so invisible my whole life. And so during the break, I decided, let me stand taller and speak my truth and speak my needs. She came forward and was like, I won't be invisible, and then she got the love and the support she needed. So she saw that it was a pattern, a pattern from childhood that keeps repeating, and she shifted her energy, she shifted her embodiment, she shifted what she's willing to participate in. I'm not going to keep playing out that old story. And then she got to have a new experience.
So what flash into my mind just now was an image. It's a civil rights image from nineteen sixty eight. The Memphis sanitation workers are striking. They're all black. They're holding up signs that simply say I am a man right, just affirming and asserting a different story, a different ownership of self that's been denied, you know, and encoded right into laws and practices and cultures. Also children who created those laws and practices and cultures, and not being seen, not being humanized. But to humanize yourself first and demand you know that others humanize you as well, and so even in that image, for me, there is a bridge from this symbolic work and the things that are going on in any individual person right back to the way you even protest. The way you show up can affirm a truth that you find in your own, you know, kind of internal landscape.
Yes, Like it's a radical act of citizen ning to change our story, to change the narrative that we're living within and our relationship to ourselves and others in the world. Of Like, I won't participate in that old way of being, the authorizing me to you, humanizing, the fighting the oppression. Yeah, I won't. I'm not going to do that to me. I'm not going to do that to you. I am going to stand for love. I will stand for love, and in that being this change my world.
So standing for love it literally sounds and feels beautiful. You've mentioned, you know, this term coping styles. Can you describe one or two of them and how they relate to that early childhood development.
One of the things we're developing as children in our first five years of life is our sense of will. What do I have control over? What can I impact? What's my scope of influence? And we need to be able to feel that we can control things and not everything. It's got to be that optimal frustration like ooh, I don't get to control absolutely everything, and also the optimal indulgence of but I do get to decide what I wear to school, but not a hero costume, not a superhero costume. But you know, I can wear any of my shorts or any of my tops. Right, So that we need to feel that we have some say, some voice, some choice, some agency, agency power, but not despotic agency, not control over absolutely everything, where our tantrums can control our entire families. So as we're developing our will, which really happens between ten months of age and four years of age, during that process, things can go wrong in one of two ways or both ways, which is we can be over indulged or we can be overly frustrated, and those create the indulged coping style and the frustrated coping style, and you can actually have both. But when we're overly frustrated, it's like everything is in no, we're constantly blocked and thwarted. Our will doesn't matter, our voice doesn't matter, our needs don't matter. And so the cool thing about the human spirit is that it can never be broken. The will does not disappear, but it goes underground, and it turns against the self and against the world, and we become self sabotaging, and as frustrated people feeling bad starts to feel good. Somehow, we couldn't win by winning, so we learn how to win by losing and making everyone else lose. And we feel a lot of stuckness, a lot of resistance, a lot of warlike energy.
Life is hard.
That's our mantra, and we're literally frustrated. And the antidote of frustrated is to get in flow, to say no to what we don't want directly, instead of kicking under the table, say yes to what we do want. Want what we want, get what we want, feel clear, feel direct. So one of the ways that the frustrated coping style can play out in terms of citizen ing is if we feel like there's no way to win and my will doesn't matter and I won't be heard, why the f would we show up to vote? I don't matter, No one listens to me anyway. You know, f the man, and we don't realize we are the man.
I am the man.
I am one of we the people who get to decide what goes on here. But if we didn't feel empowered as children to be able to make decisions, then as adults we also don't feel we have the power to make decisions. So the indulged coping style is sort of equal and opposite. It's when during the time of socialization, no one sort of showed us how we impacted others. So either we were deeply indulged by our parents or neglected by our parents, and in either of those situations, our will ruled the roost. Whatever we wanted, we got.
That's what I'm feeling. I'm feeling like I don't know who coined it, but you know, to the person born into the benefits of a system of oppression, other people's freedom feels like their oppression because waits, you got something you wanted, Well, that was mine. I was supposed to get that, And so like we've indulged at scale. You know, some groups of people men have been indulged, you know, relative to women in the world. The backlash to feminism by people like and Andrew Tate, who's a caricature as well, well, there's something indulgent about that, right. The lack of patience, perspective, respect that someone else's will also matters.
Yes, And really the indulged experience is an unawareness that anyone else is even real or exists or matters. It's like I want what I want at any cost, and I'm going to get it. It's kind of like the Stanford marshmallow experiment, like I can't even think about later. I never really fully developed my frontal I.
Think you're talking about an experiment involving torturing children with access to marshmallows.
It's like, if you don't eat this one now, you can have two later, okay, And to it's developing their capacity to wait.
That's what a PhD would say. Yeah, from the outside, I'm just like, give the kid the marshmallow. Come on, man, Like they're a child. They can't like rationalize this right.
Well, that's you know, that's that critical period in development when they start to be able to either wait or not wait. And if we can't wait, we have that indulged coping style. So how looks as a citizen is why would I vote? It doesn't affect me, doesn't affect me. Yeah, yeah, it's all me, me, me, me me, It's not anything against anyone else. It's like, I don't want to mess with anyone else, but don't tread on me. Don't take away my freedom. Don't take away right exactly, don't take away my capacity to always have exactly what I want in every moment, because I'm used to that indulgence.
So with these styles you've mentioned, you know the word antidote. As far as what we do with them, what does that mean? What are we trying to do with these styles beyond get over them or process them? Right? What's the goal?
I like to say that we go from being possessed by them to possessing them. I have this coping style, but I'm not unconsciously ruled by it. So each of the styles has an antidote, which is the healed position. So for indulge, the healed position is actually intervening, which is a term coined by the late Buddhist monk tik not Han. He coined that term to talk about how within every single being is every other being. So in a piece of paper, you've got to know about the tree that made that paper, and the birds and the squirrels that lived inside of that tree, and the water in the sunshine that nourished the tree, and the logger that cut the tree, and the mill worker who made the paper, and the mothers of the humans who were involved with making this book who fed them from the land, you know, and the big bang that created all of this divine unfoldment forever ago. So starting to know about we're all nodes in a web of being. I'm not the only node. And really the wound inside of the indulged wound is that we didn't grow up in a village. And it's this deep emptiness that causes this consumer and this need for more and more and me and me, because we don't have a sense of belonging, and so we're in this sort of solitary confinement of the myth of separation that it's me against you and we're competing for finite resources dominating a land instead of being of the land, of the animals, of one another and belonging. If we had that sense of togetherness and rootedness and belonging, we wouldn't be me. MEI me, gimme, gimme.
You just described something Elizabeth and I talk about a lot, like why the suburbs is responsible for gentrification in the hood, right, It's like people who didn't grow up with a village out there in the Bonies, coming into the city because it's cool, don't know how to be around other people. See some black kids on the Stuplan music, don't know how to inter be so they call the police instead and say, like, this is disturbing my existence, right, this noise is foreign to me. Therefore I have to squash it and mute it and silence it and push it away. And that's lack of practice at inter being at some larger but still I think parallel level. That's my translation. When I'm hearing things that have to do with early childhood development and what we inherit, I think of generational healing, right, these inter connections between generations. What does that term mean to you? And do you see any connection between that and our ability to create better circumstances to have a healthier democracy, to create a healthier culture of democracy through generational healing.
Absolutely, So we're talking about the fractal nature of reality and how our outsides reflect our insides, and how our insides get encoded in our first five years of life. So we are born into a long lineage of unconscious generational pain handed down through the millennia. But for some incredible reason, we're alive right now at the time where we actually have the capacity to become aware of the paradigms and dynamics and patterns and say the buck stops with me. I won't unconsciously pass this down to my children. I'm going to see these things and I'm going to shift them. When I would do it as a psychologist, it would take me a long time, and it was pretty laborious because I was working with the mind, which can play tricks and go around in circles. But the thing about energy is it can shift in the now. I did a coding session on.
That's what we call them coding sessions in source code.
Okay, yes, because we just work with the symbolic code. We don't work with any of the circumstances going on in your life. But I was coding someone who essentially realized and named I was born into this metal chamber of fear around me. My father had one kind of fear, my mother had another kind of fear, and both made me feel so trapped and so scared and like I can't trust myself. And so we started to know about that started to know about the metal chamber, started to feel how impossible it was, how it wasn't, can't, can't, And we started to dissolve and resolve that so that he could energetically feel this shift of that outside thing oppressing him. Ah release, and he was like, I trust myself, I trust my instincts, I trust my energy. I've never felt like this in my body before. I've never felt this much good energy circulating in my body. And I said, you know, there's always some fear when we outgrow our parents' paradigm, that we're going to have to split off from them, or that this means we don't love them. But no, we invite them in.
We go. Come with us.
There's a new world where we're not ruled by this metal chamber of fear. Come with me. I love you, Let me contain you in a new way. Let me show you. This is evolution. And he felt it. He was like, I want to invite them into this new world. I don't want to keep living as a captive to my parents' childhood wounding.
It seems like if we break or shift, you know, our paradigms, if we rewrite some of our code, that can also shift the relationships around us. If we outgrow our parents, right, we're also shifting and maybe they're not ready for that shift. You know, maybe we are losing people. We are erecting a new boundary and they don't fit on the new inside of us. Can you speak more to the consequences, especially relationship wise, of shifting our internal landscape.
Yeah.
I think that sometimes people have such calcified coping styles, and we're so tormented as little ones that they show up in a way now as adults that really is legitimately unsafe. That no matter how relational we try to be, no matter how safe we are as we show up, no matter how much love and understanding and forgiveness, which is just understanding that we give, they're still abusive and cruel and frightening and disturbed.
You know.
If that is the case, I do understand erecting that boundary of you know, until you can be kind, I'm not available for contact. And you know, another one of my students a couple of days ago, had an experience with her father where he has really not shown up for the family. And my student's sister is quite sick, and she said, hey, dad, this is what's going on with my sister's condition right now in the ICU. And he said, I didn't need to know that. And she used the technique that I just taught them, which is, if you want to go deeper, just go slower. And she said, you didn't need to know that. She just mirrored that back to him slowly, and he said, it's hard to hear that, and he started showing up. He went to the hospital for the first time when she wasn't planning on doing. He reached out to his other children, which he wasn't planning on doing. So her courage in that moment to not be victimized to his pattern that she'd experienced her entire life and instead lovingly reflect it back to him patiently, slowly. He shifted because within each of us is that essence. I was talking about an innate healing function that wants to express and receive love. And she gave him the opportunity to be freed from that lifelong defense of avoiding.
With a person like the father you shared with us. I almost want to say being forced, but even that language doesn't feel adequate. Being given the opportunity to see themselves, A lot of folks don't get that right. And it was done slowly, just gently in this particular example. And there's power in just you know, holding up that mirror with love but still holding it right. You're not accepting it, You're just saying like, here you go, you like what you see, without saying all those words either yes.
And that is the essence of source code. That's all we do is we hold him loving mirror up to the code we've with precise aim and accuracy, reflect the code back to itself and it starts to shift.
I keep finding these other historic sort of external world concrete world examples. I'm a huge fan of Frederick Douglas. I think he was just like Savage with his language, and this brother held up mirror lovingly to a country that in so many ways refused to see itself. Honestly, but he found words, He found language, He found jokes, you know, he found rhetoric, He found panash and style to help dress up what was ultimately a mirror. Is this your fourth of July, America? Is this what you're celebrating? In one of his most epic and famous pieces, which is posed as a question, what to the slave is the fourth of July? So the power of the mirror, fractally with a father figure or with a founding father figure.
Absolutely, because when we mirror something back to itself and it starts to alchemize and dissolve and shift, that person is now the center point of a fractal universe, in a new reality, a reality that can connect instead of disconnect. And the ripple effect of every minute change is unspeakable. I literally went to a yoga class a couple of days ago and it was so good that I was like, what is going on here? She was having us talk to our neighbor, touch our neighbor, look at eye contact. When we walked out, she sprayed each of our faces with rose. Missed all fifty of us from the class, and I said, Alex, what is happening? And she goes, I read your chapter and I was like, what she said, I was inspired by your book and it shifted me. Now her shift from reading my book shifted that class. Those fifty people are walking out into the world now from a place of deeper connection oneness, inter being, love, safety, joy, pleasure, beauty whoa Every ripple effect is so so strong and so meaningful.
And what I took is spray myself in the face with rose water. So see, we all have our stories, right, that's my coding, that's my After the break, Sam shares how we can recode ourselves without abandoning our responsibilities to our communities. How do we stay present to the process of recoding ourselves while still being present to our responsibilities to others, to our families, to our communities. Do you have any advice on how to practice the both here? Yeah? I mean that.
Actually that question speaks to one of the other coping styles called the premature style. And I won't go too deep into it, but it's basically this idea that my only way to know about love is to give. That receiving is not okay, So all my energy goes out. I give, I do, I volunteer, I caretake. But we don't know about feeding, receiving, needing. It just feels wrong. It's a feeding injury from toddlerhood. But when we're premature, it really feels like a split, like either or, and you know that split around giving. I can either give or receive. It's a misunderstanding because if we just give and give and give, we're pouring from an empty cup and eventually we burn out. But when it's that beautiful loop of nourishment, of taking and tasting the love, receiving, receiving, receiving support, receiving care, receiving guidance, and feeling so nourished and so full that it's like my cup runneth over. Of course, I'm here to share and show up for you. I mean, it's as simple as put your own oxygen mask on first. It's a give and take that's much more sustainable and pleasurable for everyone.
Much of your work centers on this belief that what we experience in our families, our early childhood, shapes our lives as adults in major ways. And in talking about dissolving these childhood wounds, these coping styles, we pick up, you've also mentioned the importance of growing up. Right when we do this work, we're growing up from this adolescent stage and stepping into more fully formed adulthood, becoming elders, not necessarily an age, but in kind of self knowledge. What does that shift look like to you? And can you give any other examples of how someone can begin to think about moving past that hurt child into more full adulthood or elderhood.
So my sense is that we've been living in what I call the age of the wounded child, where that generational pain has been passed down through the millennium.
Hello, hello, Elon. Sorry, I just again, Well, that's right.
It's not just us that are wounded children, but it's also you know, our leaders that are wounded children, and so our infrastructure and our laws, and you know, the systems that are holding us are created by wounded children, and they perpetuate wounds. And so it is my heart's greatest wish and my intuitive prediction that we are now exiting the age of the wounded child, and what that means to me is becoming true elders. In indigenous communities, they know about the importance of that right of passage into elderhood, and adolescents go through vision quests and other rituals to have an initiation into elderhood. And we don't have any of that. We're still running around as wounded children, creating democracy, as wounded, stinking.
Children in our adult bodysuits.
Yes, and I'm always inspired by psychotherapist and soul activist Francis Weller, and he talks about how moving from adolescence to elderhood is about going from looking for places of connection, seeking for places of connection to building them. So I want to talk about when you talked about Grace Lely Bogs and Adrian Marie Brown's reference to that in that interview, the first interview of this season, she was talking about Grace Lely Bogs being accused of a politician of being a naysayer you don't like the way we're running this country, and she said, yeah, I'm not just a naysayer. I can create. And she went out and created many places of belonging and places of social change. So one way to citizen and to become an elder is to literally go out and create places of belonging. And also, if we think about source code and the fractal nature of the universe and that our inside world creates our outside world, simply our being this when we stand for love, is inviting people into the new world. Instead of saying, gosh, darn it, I'm living in a world that I don't like, that doesn't resonate, that doesn't feel like a fit, that doesn't feel safe, that's not organized the way that I want it, and focusing on what we don't want. Instead we embody and live into exactly what we do want. You know, the yoga teacher brought a little more love to the room and everybody lit up. So when we bring more love into everything we do, that's how we citizen. That's true elderhood.
Yeah, what does that true elderhood look like for you in your life?
Oh?
My cry. I was talking to a friend who's known me since I was fifteen, and she was looking at the source Code community and she said, my god, Sam, you created the love you always knew as possible. Like the way we relate with each other in my dy networks and our membership and all courses, all the groups is radical transparency, unconditional love, safety, unconditional welcoming, and the boundary that you know, cruelty is not okay, Meanness is not okay, Hiding is not okay, Lying not okay. There are pillars of boundaries protecting this space. But within that everything else is just met with love and understanding and support and care and fun.
It's really fun.
I think fun is a big part of the new world. I think we've been taking things really seriously.
Yes, you're like a quantum time traveler, and so your report back from the future world being more fun is welcome news. Thank you Paul Revere from the symbolic world to tell us that fun is on the horizon, not just threat. Well, congratulations on your own transition into elderhood and breaking that cycle, and thank you for sharing that with us. I think you know that's also a demonstration, and I think a lot of us expect stoicness and stiffness and hardness and coldness and softness is also very powerful. So yeah, thanks for practicing and not just preaching. There's a sequencing in terms of I guess it's a statement I'll make and then see how you respond, Okay, because I'm putting some of these pieces together that you've shared already that even if we embrace a fight mentality, we have a fight lens. We have a fight writer in our internal writer's room that sees and projects everything into the world as a fight. So I'm a fire. That's my identity. I'm just going to do that all day, every day, real hard, and that's how I'm going to citizen, right, I'm going to citizen as a fight. We have us them, right, it's us versus them, and I'm going a citizen in this binary of you versus me as opposed to you and me, And so people who've done no internal searching whatsoever are citizening every day. Right, But it seems like while we're doing some of that external stuff, if we rewind a little bit, if we dive inward, citizen inward, then the effect of what we're doing externally is going to be healthier, more sustained, last longer. And so is it a prerequid it is it preferable to try to work on and heal some of those wounds before we engage fully in all the dreaming together. Otherwise we might corrupt our own dreams and envision something that's not as whole or as healed as we really want the world to be.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I noticed this when my students try to, you know, dream about what they want for their personal lives or the life at large, and their dreams are tainted by their coping styles. I don't even realize it. Like I had a student who just really wanted to win his court cases so that the judge would believe him, and that was an enactment of his childhood when he was judged and wouldn't be believed and it's like, what do you really want beyond the wounding? So yeah, but I don't think it's that binary. First you have to do this and then you have to do this. It's always like a you know, it's all happening simultaneously.
Because the center point is everywhere. I'm taking up what you're putting down.
But I feel like I want to share this story because this idea of dreaming together can sound a little woo woo. But there was this troop of wild baboons in Kenya that was studied by a man named Robert Sopolski, and he wrote a book called a Primate's Memoir. But what happened was that this was well, let me back up. So primates are one of the only animal species with a lot of learned behavior. Most animals are just guided by instinct, but we actually teach our young how to do things like use tools or what the social rules are. And in this particular troop of baboons, like all baboons, there were alpha males who were really violent and rowdy, and there was a lot of oppression in the group. So the female baboons were taunted and new males coming in from other troops which is what the adolescents do. They have to leave home and find a new troupe so that there's no inbreeding. They would taunt the new males and haze them, and they would prevent the females from grooming them in order to assert their dominance.
Sounds like a college fraternity, Yes, exactly.
So these males we're going and eating food from a nearby tourist attraction place from the dumpster, but only the alpha males were allowed to go eat that special food. Well, they contracted tuberculosis through the food, and they died. All the alpha males in the troop died. And it was mostly female baboons and their instinct and their sensibility was to groom everyone and to touch everyone and to include everyone, and so new males that would come into the circle would be immediately met with touch, welcoming connection, and it became a peaceful maybe the first peaceful troop of baboons. There was no conflict, there was no fighting, there was no hierarchy, there was no alpha. It was a new culture. Now, new baboons are coming in all the time into this and so he didn't know what would happen. But the researcher seven years later came back and it was still peaceful, Which is why I say things can shift now. If every human laid down their arms literally and metaphorically.
That would be that. Are you saying we have to kill all the alpha males.
Doctor saf No, we have to love them and set boundaries with them.
There again, that's my inner child.
Yes, so there are ways to be powerful. They just don't know how else to be powerful. They're scared.
You know, I get it, there are other ways to be powerful.
I know in the moments when I when I get intense and dominant, it's because I'm scared. It's because I'm scared. And when I feel held and supported and safe and attuned to and believed and I calm down, I stop dominating. So I'm just like them.
We all are, and and that is that's really powerful. I'm just like them. Can be very hard to say about people We judge harshly because we want to believe that we're nothing like them. My sister Belinda is nine years older, thirty years wiser. She is a Yogi. She's a Buddhist. She is a teacher and very spiritual leader in Lansing, Michigan. That's I don't know if she called herself a spiritual leader, that's baby bro looking up to assist. But I remember during some of the deep intensity of the Trump era in her yoga classes, she was encouraging people to feel compassion toward Donald Trump, and a lot of her students were like, that's where Jordan line b. We're not doing that, Like he's nothing, I am nothing, like she's like, there is a part of us represented there. It's not the part we want to amplify. We don't want to turn it up to eleven the way he's caricaturistically display but we got to recognize the self and the other. Our very first guest, Valerie Corps, shared that lesson with us. There is no stranger. The stranger is a part of myself. I do not yet know who do not yet acknowledge. So thank you for sharing those words. In that perspective that we are in everything. We are in everything. We ask all of our guests one final question. Because we have a definition here of citizen as a verb. We have some principles associated with that interpretation. But given your life story, given your work, given your source code and the coping styles and everything you've been journeying through. What does it mean to you the word citizen if we interpret it as a verb.
I suppose it's the functional side of knowing about inter being, that we're a part of something larger, that each of us matters, that what we do affects everyone else and what they do affects us, and that it's worth giving that some time and attention and care.
We have a transition now to a live audience Q and a yes. All right, so yes, say your name, where you're at and your question. Cynthia lloyd Hurst.
I'm in Palm Springs, California.
Today, we I think a whole hell of a lot of people we are working to be more self aware and I'm loving your way into it.
I think it's fantastic. What I keep noticing time and time again, and you've mentioned it just a little bit today, is that sense of I'm growing in my goodness and awareness and if they would just stop, everything will be okay. Those jerks need to leave for my world to be wonderful. And I'm just wondering if there's just one other thought you might give us around our own work there.
So what I do with source code is I look for the symbolic realm. So everything we're experiencing is a reenactment of our early experience in our coding. So if our sense of self is I feel okay in here, and if they out there would just stop, everything would be o okay. That person is telling us about what it felt like to be a very young child. If they would just stop, everything could be okay. And that echo and that haunting of that feeling as a little one becomes how we see the world and how we make sense of the world and how we talk about the world. So if I was doing a coding session with that person, I would say, we need to know about this thing outside that's doing something that feels like it just wishes something could stop this, and inside feels okay, but outside doesn't feel okay. And we just work that symbolically, and as we did, something would shift inside, and because we're fractal, something would shift outside.
How much time we talk in five minutes, five weeks, five months, Like, what's the lag time? What's the Doppler effect on the internal shift to the external shift? And I'm sure there was no formula, but I am curious about measuring the rip I guess, and when we see signs that something has actually changed.
I think again, it's the yes, and like it changes everything right now, and there's also incremental change over time.
Thank you, Aaron Mast from the good old little state of Delaware, not the city on Ohio. First of all, Sam, thank you so much for everything it was for your insight. I am very aware of my short temper and ease of frustration sometimes with my kids. Been working on it. I'm much better where I am now than one it used to be about two years ago, probably so. I have a son who's turning five. Pretty sure with my short temper and frustration I've already imprinted on him a little bit at least. I just want to know do I need to work on myself. Is it better to change my code first before I start working with him? Or can we do this together? Aaron?
I just want to celebrate you coming forward as a man and owning your impact on your child and owning your coping styles with such grace and dignity. I find that when we change, our children change without much effort, sort of instantaneously, especially if they're younger. But I want to speak to this part of you that I think is the omnipotent coping style, which is one of my core wounds, which is how we didn't feel safe as infants. This is pre six month stuff, and so when everything is not ordered in the way we think it needs to be, we feel very threatened and frightened, like life or death kind of feeling, and we explode. And so I would encourage you to be with your five month old, six month old little Aaron and hold him and just let him know he's safe, because the antidote to omnipotent is safe. We didn't feel safe. Things don't feel safe, and that haunting comes with us into adulthood. Things have to feel very controlled or else they don't feel safe, and so we just want to that little baby you in so much love that didn't feel safe and that wasn't helped through feeling difficult feelings and knowing that it's all okay. It's like okay to not feel okay. Sometimes we didn't get that support, and so feeling not okay feels really not okay, and it becomes a very FASTI ear to sixty reaction. So notice what might shift for you if you can hold this part of you with even more care the way that a very young infant needs to be attuned to, instead of judging this self, which I didn't really hear you doing. But I just want to even encourage more, more love and more understanding for this very young part that still doesn't feel safe yet. Just help him feel safe, little by little and come join us in the source code community.
We can help. Thank you so much for that question, Aaron. I think you've captured and represented many people beyond yourself. So you've done You've done a bit of citizen ing right there all right. Next in the queue is Mishaq Weber. Go ahead with your question.
I'm calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota. We Shack Weber. So what I find creates a lot of change is kind of simple recipes, And I was just wondering if there's just a few, like everyday things that come to mind that we can do to help create a stronger sense of interveing ourselves or others the belonging that you talked about, or any of these other kind of healing methodologies. I was just kind of curious if you had kind of everyday practices that people might have in mind.
I think what's beautiful about the process of healing is it's often a lot more gentle and a lot more pleasurable than we thought. So one way to activate a sense of intervening is to just connect with ourselves first, because again, deep in our hearts, deep in our bones, deep in our beings, deep in our bodies is all the truth we would ever need to know, and this deep connection with all things. So simply slowing down, having a cozy cup of tea, journaling, getting a massage, which Bear Tunda and I are huge proponents of.
Massages for freedom. That's my new movement.
You know, baths, snuggles. It's really that simple. It's just softening, becoming more embodied, connected to that deep wisdom that lives inside of all of us and our connection with.
All that is. When you say embodied, Sam, what does that mean? I think the way that I.
Use it just there was different than I sometimes use it. But when I just said embodied, I meant living more from the energy in our body than the little ticker tape in our minds. And also when I talk about embodiment in terms of emerging from a coping style and entering its antidote, when we are stuck in a coping style, we are stuck in a certain embodiment. It makes us tense, it makes us feel a certain way in our tummies, in our viscera, in our emotions, in our energy field. And if we shift that embodiment and we start to soften and loosen, That's why I say the shift can happen in the now with energy is like, Oh, I'm not close anymore. I'm open. And that shift and embodiment to walk through the world open, receptive, warm, heart centered creates those ripple effects. It's not just a concept that we think about in the mind. It's an actual embodied way of being and living.
Thank you for that, and thank you miss Shack. We have a question from Elizabeth Gratch that our producer Ali will voice for us, which means you all get to meet Ali. Hello.
This is Ali coming in from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and I'm voicing Elizabeth Gratch's questions. So this is for veritunde. Have you always been able to nurture your confidence and was there someone or someone's in your life who helped set that beautiful self possession, focus and drive in motion?
And how yo not expecting a question from me? Thank you, Ali Slash Elizabeth Ah. I had a complex and diverse array of early coding by my mother and by my hood, and it was filled with a lot of love and the confidence that you are perceiving. First, thank you for nice words, self possession, focus, drive, and like, I'll put this on the LinkedIn. But I remember that my friends often dreamed of being things that their parents wanted them to be, and I noticed that because my mom was so different. She was just like, you could do this, or you could do that. You could be an actor if you want, or you could be like a gardener or as you tell me now, a garbage man. I really wanted to be a garbage man for a long time because you get to ride on trucks yay, and you get free stuff double yay. Like it's a win win situation. That built an early habit of me of confident exploration of possibility because there was not so much weight attached to the specific path that I would walk, just encourage to find and walk the path. So I just give like a thousand pounds of credit to my mom for encouraging that and embedding that piece in me. She embedded some other stuff too that wasn't always sustainably useful. But in answer to that question, that's Mom's work. So thank you. Rest in peace, Anita, Lorraine Thurston, and whatever you're perceiving there, Elizabeth is a piece of her shining through.
I just want to acknowledge that a lot of what we inherited from our parents was really good and beautiful and useful. So much of our coding works. It's just these twelve glitchy things that are in our way. But all of us got good stuff too.
Thank you for that.
You know.
The way you describe these styles is I think healthily judgment neutral. Right, you talk about finding antidotes, not destroying, erasing, shaming. These are not like diseases to be eradicated. They are pieces to be integrated, not being possessed by, but possessing. And so if we can own those parts, then we can own our full selves. And I always skip to the macro metaphor with a society, a city, a nation, a species, and it's like, let's own the glitches. You know, they are features, not bugs, and they give us an opportunity to walk a different and better path. They give us an opportunity to learn, They give us an oh yay me I get a chance to recode myself. I get a chance to refound myself. I get a chance to reconstitute you know, myself and a nation at the same time. All right, last up, we've got Janine the novig one of our most frequent contributors.
Thank you, Philadelphia. Here's my question. It comes from my location as both a parent and a daughter. This has been so resonant for me in this way. I think other people too. I'm looking at Aaron and other folks in the chat where we were kind of resonating about how we raise our kids and then how do we raise up the little us that was hurt? So my question is, like in that silver back example, right, we're all very seduced into being the silver back, Like we all have a version of a scenario where being the silver back is adaptive. It's safe, it has worked for in my case, forty some odd years. It satisfies my ego, it matches the world around as opposed to being soft. You know. So I'm in this work all the time, and I'm wondering if you have daily practices for interrupting that seduction to be the silver back of you know, your own life.
Thank you so much, Janine, and that question really helps me clarify that to me, it's not that the alternative our silverback or soft that's still that old paradigm of dominance. But to me, standing for love is very firm, very firm. Do not touch that stove because I love you. I love you. It's different. So it's beautiful that you're firm with your children. They need that. Where's it coming from If it's coming from love?
Yeay.
I want to formally thank you again Sam for being a part of this with us. Welcome to how to citizen community, and thank you for showing us how to citizen within so that we can citizen better out there.
Thank you. I have truly loved being here. I've been listening to your podcast from the beginning and it is an honor in my life to be your dear friend and to learn from you. You are quite a force of love and goodness in this world.
In the face of all this work we've collectively got to do, it's easy to feel like the last thing we have time for is ourselves. But I want us to really take in what Sam said. It's a radical act of citizen ing to change our story, to change the narrative that we're living within, and our relationship to ourselves and others in the world. She reminds us. She reminds me these issues, especially the current culture, the things that we don't like about the way the world works, they all came from us too. We are at the end of our fourth season and I'm so glad that Sam helped us close it out. After this interview, we let Sam drop off the zoom and I stayed on to have a conversation with a few of the live audience members, and I got a question that felt heavy. Aaron mass from Delaware asked, what direction do you see the country headed in? Do you have hope for our future, for my kid's future. Whoo, Aaron put his kids on me. All that was a lot. That was a lot, And I want to share with you a version of what I shared with Arin. I see the United States of America getting harder to live in. You can sense it in the weather, and that's not a metaphor literally the weather. You see it on the ground in our behavior. There's something really sad about a nation that requires this many firearms. It's an explicit indicator of the lack of inter being the lack of trust that we're all building walled cities around our two car garages and trying to recreate entire societies within that as opposed to joining and participating in the societies were already a part of. And so what I'm observing is this large slide in that direction, and it feels like it's picking up. I don't think the climate migrants knocking on our southern border are inspiring evolved levels of political response from our federal or many of our state governments. I don't think that the human beings who are recognizing the inter being within themselves in terms of gender identity and giving a voice and new names to that, I don't think they're being met with the most mature, evolved, healed response from the prevailing establishment of rule makers and gatekeepers. And I don't think most of us are afforded enough time, space and security to truly meet this moment we find ourselves in. So yeah, I think it's gonna get harder, it's gonna get hurt, and I have great hopes for us and for our children because this culture's unsustainability is so readily obvious to so many of us, Because our ability to indulge in and digest the lie that more and more and more and mine and mine and mine will get me everything I need is on full display to be a lie. And I think that underneath all that froth and that noise, there's this stillness, there's this deeper truth. There's people like Sam and Adrian, Marie Brown and Ruhab Benjamin and John Alexander and Claudia Holitz and Steve Kerr and Priya Park for all our guests, and they're all coming from different experiences, saying essentially the same things, trying to take us to this same place, a place of completeness, of peace, of belonging, of membership, of citizen ing. And I'm willing to keep hoping and fighting for that place for them, that journey to that place, no matter how hard it is to keep envisioning it. What's keeping me citizening is holding both these feelings. I'm exhausted and I'm excited. I'm pessimistic and optimistic. I mourn what we've lost and celebrate what we can still create. And we can still create a lot of good as long as there's enough of us working towards creating a culture based in love. One where we try to live together better. Then I'm in for more ways to connect to doctor Sam's work. Head to her website Doctor Samraider dot com. There you're going to find a free quiz to discover your coping styles, as well as ways to access the forthcoming source codebook through her Return to Love membership program. As always, check the show notes for links to all this as well as the books referenced in this episode. If you take any of these actions, please brag about it online and use the hashtag how to Citizen. Also tag our Instagram how to Citizen. I am always online and I really do see your messages, so send them. You can also visit our website howdocitizen dot com, which has all of our shows, full transcripts, actions, and more. And I want to thank you one last time for joining us this season. Please stay connected. Follow how to Citizen on Instagram, Visit howtocitizen dot com to join our email list, explore all of our episodes, and engage with our massive library of actions that you can take together. Let's keep citizen it. I look forward to seeing you again. How to Citizen with Baritunday is a production of iHeartRadio Podcasts and Row Home Productions. Our executive producers are me Baritunde Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart. Our lead producer is Ali Graham, Our associate producer is Donya abdel Hamid. Alex Lewis is our managing producer, and John Myers is our executive editor. Our mixed engineer is Justin Berger. Original music by Andrew Eapen with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and our audience Engagement Fellows are Jasmine Lewis and Gabby Rodriguez. Special thanks to Joelle Smith from iHeartRadio and Leila Bina Row Home Productions