Satya Doyle Byock | The Quest for a Balance Between Meaning and Stability

Srini Rao: Satya, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative.

Satya Byock: Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Srini Rao: It is my pleasure to have you here. I found out about you and your work by way of William Dershowitz who mentioned your book Quarter Life in an interview I did with him recently.

And when I finished reading it, the first thought I had was where the hell was this when I started college, I got out of college. I thought this book was just so important and I felt that it was even more important, not just to young people, but to other people as well. Like I related to it so much, even though I'm in my forties.

But before we get into all of that, I wanted to start by asking you, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping what you ended up doing with your life and your career?

Satya Byock: Man, great question. And relevant. My, my mother was a psychotherapist for most of my life growing up. She is now an astrologer and I think was shifting into being an astrologer.

I don't remember how much I knew of that at the time, but but she was in private practice as a therapist. Yogi In, as it turns out, which became very relevant, I mentioned in the book. And my father was an ER physician growing up who then shifted into palliative medicine. Became an author and and moved more into teaching and kind of administrative work while also being a doctor, but has been a thought leader in the end of life movement, palliative care and hospice care.

So I have huge influence from both of my parents. Yeah,

Srini Rao: it sounds like it. This is something I'm always curious about when people are raised by therapists as parents. Were you immune to all the stuff that most of us go to therapy to fix that our parents screw up? Yeah.

Satya Byock: No, but I will also say I think my mother successfully avoided any kind of the psychoanalytic or pathologizing stuff that I've heard other people grow up with therapists and it's like they, they just feel like their parents are automatons sometimes with the therapizing.

And I'm grateful to say that I didn't get that. But I do, I am grateful that I think I have two pretty conscious parents and a pretty conscious stepparent as well. My, my parents divorced when I was about 12, 13 years old and and I'm lucky to have a great stepmother as well. I could just go on and on about my grad.

We have had our difficulties, but I feel grateful that my parents have participated in. In me coming of age and wrestling with them and we've had lots of big conversations and they've joined me in that. So I feel grateful for the kind of shared growth and I dedicated the book to all three of them for that reason.

Srini Rao: Yeah, I, for me, I kind of wonder if you're a, a parent who happens to be a therapist, like, where do you draw the line between being a therapist and being a parent because you have all this knowledge. And I think it was Srini Pillay, one of our podcast guests said he's worked with people who are child development specialists and they have the hardest time with their own children more than anybody else.

Satya Byock: I, yeah. And it must be so demoralizing, to struggle in that way. I do think people end up, I was just speaking with somebody who's an orthodontist and their dog was having terrible, endless tooth pain. And and I just so interesting the way that our issues find us sometimes. I will feel for child developmental psychologists who have difficult children.

Srini Rao: Speaking of which, do you have children?

Satya Byock: I do not. I have a stepson I or, part time stepson, my partner and I are not married, so I don't ever really know what to call this 12 year old who was with us halftime, but my partner's son doesn't feel quite right. So he's, he's my stepson now.

I have two nephews who I adore and but I'm, I was very clear I didn't want children myself and I'm glad that I stuck to that.

Srini Rao: The reason I asked is given your background, how do you draw that boundary between being therapist and step parent?

Satya Byock: That's not that difficult. I really am very focused developmentally on a different stage of life.

So we'll see when he gets into his twenties, how that works out. But as a 12 year old I'm perfectly happy to bow out of most of the parenting and let his parents do that work. So that's not been

Srini Rao: hard. Speaking of parenting, you have a mother is a therapist, a dad who's an ER physician.

I come from the Indian culture where there's no, more noble thing that you could do than become a doctor, which, my sister fortunately satisfied our family quota. But what was the narrative in your household about making your way

Satya Byock: in the world? My, my father wanted me to either be a doctor or a lawyer and I think probably lean towards lawyer.

It, he was not thrilled when I decided to become a psychotherapist and the pressure was never very strong from either of my parents. But I think my father felt that I was going to be wasting my talents on some level as a psychotherapist. And I say that cringing because I am sure that he would want to reach into this podcast and argue with me on some level around that.

He has always been extremely supportive, but he kept saying that he wanted Need to make sure that I had a foot in the, in the doors or the rooms that would make sense, maybe from a policy perspective or from a social change perspective. And I think he didn't understand how that was going to happen as a psychotherapist on a broader scale, but I had a clear sense that the work I wanted to do societally was somehow going to make sense in this.

through this path, and I had to stick to my gut and my soul, the clarity of where I was headed, that it wasn't for me I don't think, I think, I don't want to say just being a private practice psychotherapist because I believe deeply in this work and think it has massive impact, but I think for my father, he couldn't quite understand how this other side of me that he knew was going to come into play there.

So he's delighted with me writing a book and all of that. I think that he feels like there's that things are making more sense to him now.

Srini Rao: How old were you when you figured out that this was what you wanted to do with your life?

Satya Byock: About two months before graduate school I did not know what I wanted to do.

And, that comes through in the book to a lot of my. My crisis in my 20s, a lot of my confusion and pain and uncertainty, having a liberal arts education that I loved and really wanting to make an impact on the world in some way, but feeling Very confused. I had done a lot of, not a lot, but I'd done humanitarian work volunteered places, gone abroad raised a lot of money, tried to make different inroads into working both at home and abroad on some kind of social impact, social change work, activism, and I was already getting pretty burned out from that, and also felt like there was a lot of spinning of wheels happening in those circles of feeling like it was just a whack a mole game of one terrible thing after another, and I needed a different narrative that wasn't disaster chasing, and so I was having a lot of overlapping existential crises and when I encountered Carl Jung's work I started to feel a real kinship and clarity and some sense of this is what I want to be doing.

I want to understand how the inner world and the outer world are in relationship and not just feel like I'm trying to patch up wounds that, that kind of have a different origin, you know? So finding the world of psychotherapy really Has always been about finding Carl Jung's work for me specifically and this deeper relationship to soul and psyche and being able to dive into that space and make sense of things from that point.

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Srini Rao: So you were just about to start graduate school when you have this existential crisis, and I feel like a lot of 20 somethings have an existential crisis, at least for me. That they're not even aware of it's as if they don't even know they're having an existential crisis. They just go on to the next thing on the list because I think that what became very clear to me in the dominant narrative, at least growing up in an Indian family and going to school at a place like Berkeley was you graduate and then you go and you get a job.

But there was no question about values, purpose, meaning all the things we talk about on the show. And I also think I would have thought it was all nonsense when I was 20 if I had heard a lot of this. And one, why do you think that is like, why is it that this question of, what's important to us in life outside of the checkboxes of society's life plan are never part of the conversation?

Satya Byock: I don't know. And that's certainly stuff I try to tackle in the book and just in my work in general is we should be talking about the fact that the whole planet is. Is well as mortal and that we are mortal and that those things are every single day seeming more and more in our face and that it is problematic to raise people in a world in which death, disaster, pain, suffering, confusion is everywhere and not have a space for deep dialogue around it.

I think. It used to be that religion, Hinduism, Buddhism old Christianity, Judaism, Islam, whatever, there's space in religion to really face suffering and pain and the reality of those things and mortality. But the vast majority of people coming of age today do not have religion in which those conversations, those existential conversations are really being hosted.

And I don't think they're happening in philosophy classrooms either. I think more, more and more they're trying to happen politically, but it's just a space for pain and conflict and finger pointing and stress. And so it's tragic that we don't have a clear place where we can be hosting conversations around meaning and purpose and really what we want to do with this life.

We don't necessarily need to be thinking about mortality to really honor. We are here for a finite period of time. And we want to make the most of our existence that just should be framed more and more instead of make as much money as you can on this planet as if. As if there is no inner life or there is no conclusion to all this, so it's so important to me that we bring those elements forward developmentally so we can be saying to people at the outset of creating the life that they're going to live.

What life do you want to live? What do you want to do with your time here? Seems so important. Yeah.

Srini Rao: There are two things that I wonder because I feel like when you go to college, you are being asked to make decisions about how you are going to spend the rest of your life when you've only lived a fraction of it.

Right? Which to me, is absolutely insane. People come in and they have this idea of what they want their entire life to look like. And I'll never forget somebody who once told me when I was an intern at Sun Microsystems, he is you have your whole life planned out. Let me tell you, nothing is gonna go according to planned.

And my God, was that guy right?

Satya Byock: I said that recently on a, in a, in an interview with somebody who had just finished college and I could feel the sort of devastation of that, what I was really communicating but it is so important to say everyone is expressing climb this ladder, do this, get this degree, join this consulting firm, work for this, whatever.

And it's. It's a ladder that ultimately crumbles because it is not hosting a sense of purpose and meaning. And that's what we classically think of as the midlife crisis, people climbing ladders based on what they're supposed to do and the social expectations and the external needs and discovering that there is nothing up at the top of that ladder and they have to climb down or fall down or the ladder collapses and then they face themselves and they face reality and mortality and existential questions and Hopefully find a way to pull those two things back together, and what I am talking about a lot in the book is how do we at the outset bring questions of stability and questions of meaning into relationship with each other so that they can be in dialogue straight away versus, versus deeply separated.

At the outset of

Srini Rao: life. So this is a bizarre question, but let's say that somebody said, Satya, we're gonna bring you into a place like Berkeley, particularly an elite institution. I feel like there is this sort of cross off the checkboxes of society's life plan narrative when it comes to careers. But let's say somebody hired you to come into Harvard, Yale, whatever, like one of these elite institutions where that is the default narrative and ask you to create a class.

What would you make that class about? That's a great

Satya Byock: question. I don't know. I, I don't know because inside of college people are nose down trying to stay alive, especially at elite institutions like that. I would probably have to bite my tongue on some level because I think a lot of people in that situation need to reconsider if they want the degree they're getting, if they want to be spending the amount of money they're spending on loans to be in those schools.

I will also say that there have been some very successful programs around happiness at colleges or around, life purpose. that I think are providing tremendous value to college students to really invite contemplation on things that are not. Exams and economics, and those classes at various institutions have been overflowing.

And so maybe I'd want to do my best to offer some self exploration and some tools for how do you identify really who you are and what you want when you're out of this place. Yeah. Yeah.

Srini Rao: I want to bring back a clip from a conversation with William, which was what prompted me to read your book and to reach out with you.

Take a listen. Thank Two drives are

Satya Byock: two fundamental needs. And one is the need for meaning

Srini Rao: and one is the need for stability.

Satya Byock: We need both of those things. And I would never negate the need for stability, which means getting a job and having a career path

Srini Rao: and all that stuff. The problem is

Satya Byock: that often one gets lost at the expense of the other.

Usually it's meaning is lost at the expense of stability. That's what we've been talking about. Sometimes it's the other way

Srini Rao: around, the sort of stereotypical searcher

Satya Byock: who doesn't know what to do with themselves and is

Srini Rao: always pursuing meaning, but never achieves stability and is miserable for that reason.

And finding that balance, finding a way

Satya Byock: to have meaning in life, but also have stability

Srini Rao: is hard. It's psychologically hard, it's practically hard, but I think it's the work that young adults need to do. And with that clip in mind, we were just talking about colleges and, we'll get into the book right after this, but I think particularly when you come out of that, a place like the ones you were talking about and you're riddled with debt, I don't think meaning is very high on people's list of priorities when they're thinking, how the hell am I going to pay this debt off?

And that's a, that's just, that's depressing to think about.

Satya Byock: It's extremely depressing to think about. I just want to say, because I'm a little distracted, just how

,

much I respect Bill DeRozowitz's work, and just want to name, it's beautiful to hear you two talking about this, and I'm really honored to hear the way this is weaving into his thinking, And into your conversation but, he lived directly and his book, Excellent Sheep is so much about this experience of young people being trained to go towards stability goals and then not being trained towards the humanities or a sense of.

The value of literature, the value of philosophy, of art, all these things that can bring the inner life forward and create a sense of meaning, but that increasingly, and he really points this out, increasingly, we have sent people, young people on a path that is About getting into the best economics program so you can get into the best consulting firm or work on Wall Street, whatever we're valorizing stability goals that bleed the life out of people that sort of train people towards sociopathy, towards narcissism, towards.

Bad behavior and towards massive existential crises or addictions or mental health issues because we are not holding space for who are you? What do you want? Who do you want to be an intimate partnership with? Which friends do you want to have? Is there a religion that speaks to you? Does art or dancing or play or poetry or literature bring you joy?

Do you want to play music in the morning? Just The most basic things about what bring us joy on a sensate level, on an, on a emotional level. It's very tricky then, once people are in these institutions, the way that society has crafted them and held them up is the pinnacle of achievement.

It's hard to tell somebody who's worked their whole life to get into Harvard, who's then miserable as a junior in Harvard, to say, gosh, sorry, society kind of lied to you and your family's lied to you. And what's actually true is that this may not bring you the kind of joy and satisfaction in life that you were told it would that checking boxes may not in fact bring you nourishment and joy.

That, I feel for people who are 22, 21, whatever, in these situations it's hard to explain that actually on some level they've been sold a false bill of goods. Yeah. Speaking

Srini Rao: of which, what is it that prompted you to write this book? I know that this is your, these are the people that you treat primarily, right?

People you call quarter lifers.

Satya Byock: I, I I knew that there was a gap in understanding developmentally for this stage of life that went very deep. I knew it because when I looked for literature to help me make sense of being lost in my 20s, I couldn't find it. What I could find was either paternalistic or geared towards my parents or it was utterly out of touch with what what I was living or all of the above, what did end up resonating with me bit by bit was stuff around the midlife crisis and the midlife crisis in the Jungian space depth, psychological spaces is really about the fact that you have not lived your true life. The book titles can have things like, things like the midlife crisis, learning about your unlived life or something.

And so I kept wondering why am I supposed to not live my life and then have a midlife crisis and then go try to live my true self and my true life? So I was motivated and opening my practice for people in quarter life, which, which, by the way, I define as being the first stage of adulthood, which is between adolescence and midlife.

So it's the first stage of adulthood, 20 to 40, more or less, give or take. But then I opened a practice to work with people in this time of life and also wrote the book because it felt like there was a just massive gap in materials needed to serve this population and to make sense of. What was happening in this stage of life that wasn't just go climb ladders, go get the best degree you can go get into the best law firm you can get into something I could see it all around me.

Something was wrong with that direction.

Srini Rao: As I told you, I think that the thing that struck me most when I read this was the thought that where the hell was this book when I graduated. 20 plus years ago, I figured a lot of this out through trial and error. And one of the things you say in the opening of the book is that the prevailing impression is that adulthood arrives when you finally reach certain markers of economic and relational security, as if those achievements will magically pull you out of the lobby of your suffering and into the grand hall of real life.

And, I, Think that I still feel some of this to this day, because one of the reasons that I think I feel this I feel like. This book resonated with me because I'm one of those weirdos who graduated into two recessions. I graduated from Berkeley in December, 2000 and from Pepperdine in April, 2009.

And Dan Pink talks about this in his book when, and he says, unlucky graduates who'd begun their careers in a sluggish economy earned less straight out of school than the lucky ones like me, who'd graduated in robust times. And it often took them two decades to catch up. So I'm thinking to myself, geez, Dan, I'm like, so you're telling me I got another 10 years of this or another six years before I can.

Get it together much to the dismay of my Indian parents, I'm still single. But yeah, like to me I still feel that. And so I wonder if you've seen somebody who would identify with the notion of quarter life, even when they're not, by definition quarter lifers.

Satya Byock: For sure. Look, there, I think there's a lot of things I'd respond to and what you just expressed but a lot of what I am trying to do in this book is almost. Yank down the wisdom from midlife conversations. And again, for me, most of this is happening in the space of people who are doing more soul psychology than psychiatry or something.

People like James Hillman, James Hollis, a lot of other folks who work in trying to understand how is it that people who have done what they thought they were supposed to do did not end up feeling satisfied in their life or their marriages fell apart or they're still single, whatever. And what that's really then about is, again, We are trained towards economics and I call it acquisition culture.

We have this notion, if you just get all these things in your basket, you're going to be fine and you're going to, you're going to be happy. We train people towards goals of acquisition and not goals of intimacy and relationship and communication and comfort and empathy and sweetness and it turns out or relationship to nature, it turns out those are things that actually bring us a deep sense of satisfaction in life.

Having a certain amount of money in your bank account, having a house that you love, having a degree, all those things can. Be tremendously supportive and and bring people certain degrees of satisfaction. But if the person living in the house or the person that has that bank account is in the, in their own soul still deeply suffering or anguished, it doesn't ultimately make any difference.

Those things don't, can't transform the soul. They can create stability for the body and the life, but they can't do the deeper work. And so we just fundamentally need to be having more cultural conversations around. What maybe was once represented by certain religious traditions or was once represented by certain philosophical traditions, but really has been eradicated and replaced by economics, by politics, by, by capitalism, by white supremacy and patriarchy, they've been gobbled up and we need to be, we need to be coming back to deeper roots.

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Srini Rao: The fundamental distinction you make in this book is between two types meaning types and stability types. And you say that where meaning types are stereotypically the artists, philosophers, and musicians, stability types are the lawyers, people in finance and business, and people consciously seeking marriage.

These quarterlifers may prioritize good grades, strong performance, and extracurriculars, long term planning, saving money, maintaining a steady job. Pursuing career advancement and building a family, all the goals of security once seen as adulthood. And you say stability types often present as more anxiously inclined and guarded than meaning types and on the extreme end can have narcissistic or sociopathic defenses.

Stability types often function by controlling their lives and others. And so a couple of questions come from that. What role Do parents play in whether these people become meaning and stability types? And what role does culture play? Because it's funny when I'm looking at this, I'm like, you just described me and my sister.

In a nutshell, my sister is, she graduated from Berkeley with a 3. 97 finished med school was the chief anesthesiology resident at Yale. Got a felt finished a fellowship at UCLA. She just had a baby, and he's really cute and I'm just sitting, but there are days when I think to myself, wow, am I going to get to do all of this with my parents, are they even going to be around by the time I get to experience any of this?

And, like literally I was just like, oh, wow, I'm the meaning type. I'm the weird artist. I always say God made a sorting error when he gave me to my family. And my sister is the stability type. So it just made me wonder what role parents and culture play in how, these people turn into one or the other.

Satya Byock: Gosh, there's so much in here. Certainly. There are meaning type families, right? There are families of artists or philosophers or hippies or there's families with chaos. You could, this could also be I could go on and on, but there's different ways that we understand families in which people grow up thinking, God, I need more stability than my family gave me.

I am determined to find more stability than my family gave me. And they are the black sheep of the family. There's the lawyer in the family of artists, let's say, or. But the opposite is more common because our society is more geared, our society is really more geared towards stability goals, right?

We have a very patriarchal society that says, climb these ladders, head towards these goals. Achieve, right? Achievement is highly respected in modern Western culture. And this is the true, as you say, in India, it's, you were raised in the United States, it sounds but in India, it's the same basic thing of doctors are great, right?

Achieve, engineers whatever the expectation is of your parents, the notion is still, it's good to have money and stability and a stable family. So society has a tremendous amount to do with this. And I think by and large what I'm trying to focus on is the fact that we are not hosting conversations of meaning.

And so what happens is there are people who do everything they're supposed to do and then reach the top and say, but why did I do all that? And that's the classic midlife crisis, which has been going on for a long time. Or there are people who say, I don't know how to climb those ladders and I feel foolish.

I feel like an idiot. I feel like God made a sorting error when he put me in this family. Meeting types tend to think there's something wrong with them. They tend to think that they were born into the wrong family or they just need to get their shit together. They're often depressed and anxious and filled with self doubt and shame because they are not.

Supposedly, they're not doing what society thinks they're supposed to be doing. They're not achieving the way they're supposed to be achieving. What I try to emphasize in the book is that meaning types are probably almost certainly offering something to their family that nobody can really quite name, which is, and I talk in the book about Mira, who's an Indian American lawyer who has a little brother, who's a meaning type little brother, who She's always seen as being somewhat chaotic and, can't quite get his shit together.

But when Mira starts to have her own existential crisis, she looks to her brother and realizes he's been trying to follow his heart. He's been trying to sniff something out this whole time. And he actually might have more understanding of how to follow his heart and his soul and his creative passions.

And so the meeting type sibling very often then is holding a certain anchor for values or suffering even that has not otherwise found space in the family through the achievement goals and, the climbing and expectations.

Let's talk about the

Srini Rao: opposite. I want money and I want stability. I want to have, some of the things that my sister does. Like those are important to me, despite the fact that I'm a meaning type. And it's funny because even on this ladder of achievement goal, I got to write two books with a publisher and how long that made me feel any sense of accomplishment or fulfillment for about the six months after I signed the contract, that's about it.

And then it was just like, yeah, another, You know, it was literally just another checkbox. It gets stopped like I've been on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and like people interview me sometimes and introduced me as the Wall Street Journal bestselling author. I'm like, Oh, yeah, I am like, it just doesn't, it's and part of it, I think, is because in the culture that I'm in.

That doesn't equate to something extraordinary in the way that, say, becoming a doctor would.

Satya Byock: And yet you may feel exactly the same if you were, in fact, a doctor and your parents praised you for that. Yeah, that's interesting. I never

Srini Rao: thought about

Satya Byock: that. There's a reason you didn't go to medical school, right?

Yeah,

Srini Rao: Because the only reason I wanted to become a doctor was so I could drive a Mercedes.

Satya Byock: Good choice, right? So you, so there's something here, you're, you're avoiding intentionally. If the only reason you wanted to become a doctor was to satisfy your parents, I imagine, and to drive a Mercedes you're not supposed to be a doctor.

That's not right. It may be that your sister is more innately inclined on some level towards that, but. I would be curious for you. I don't know how deep you want to go with this, but if achievement isn't, if you have gotten many of these accolades, and I know you have there's a deeper question here of what is going to bring me satisfaction and joy and what is the self work then or the life work?

That I need to do to move in that direction. That's the work I do with clients, right? Is if there is a persistent nagging or persistent longing that is hanging around, I really interrogate that kind of like a detective, a loving detective, but let's take this seriously. What is this absence you're feeling?

What is this longing you're feeling? Let's be present with it. Get curious about it and say what do you really want? What do you really need? Down below, down in there, what's going on and what would support you to feel better?

Srini Rao: One other thing that I wondered about when it comes to siblings in particular is the role that birth order plays in stability and meaning types. I, because there are two things I noticed and I usually, they're often, I thought about asking you, that question to start with. I've asked a lot of people what birth order they were and.

And I don't know if any of the birth order studies are validated with real, empirical studies, but I'm always curious because there are a couple of things when you look at my sister and I, when it comes to birth order that were very different in the way that we experienced by parents, we're five years apart.

While I was going through my formative period in life, up until ninth grade, I shared a bedroom with my sister. Because my dad was a postdoc and he got his first teaching position when I

,

was a senior in high school or a sophomore in high school. And by the time my sister got into high school he was tenured, they had more money.

She got to do a lot of the things I didn't do. And so I always wonder, one, what's the role that age gap plays? Because the age gap that my sister and I have definitely played a role in both our narratives about money and the experience we had with our parents.

Satya Byock: That's interesting. Yeah.

The truth is, this is not an area of expertise of mine at all. I know there are studies around this and I think very anecdotally that I talk in the book about how frequent it is that one, one sibling is a stability type and one sibling is a meaning type and they split, whether developmentally or, by birth, they divide some of the goals and values and play off of each other over time. More commonly, I see that as the older sibling is the stability type and the younger sibling is the meaning type. But I think you've just layered in a lot of other information around the economic place that your family was in, depending, when you were born versus when your sister was born and maybe the five years versus two years.

So I'm interested in everything you're expressing. It's not really an area that I know that much about.

Srini Rao: Fair enough. Let's talk about separation from parents, because I think that this is something that you talk about in the book, and this one struck me in particular as somebody who lived at home.

Way longer than I ever thought I was going to even well after graduate school, I was home on and off for probably the better part of seven years. So you say a healthy separation often involves setting new boundaries, improving the capacity for communication and sorting through all of the subtle and overt ways in one ways in which one's parents and siblings and countless others affect one's self perception.

The goal is self knowledge, self reliance, self love and self trust and improved intimacy with others. And I think the thing that, struck me most when I think about stability, the biggest thing about stability for me is self reliance. Like I just, I've had to ask my parents for money a few times over the course of the pandemic I did because, my speaking career more or less dried up and I like hated every minute of that.

It's just God, how do I never do this again?

Satya Byock: And what was, can I ask what were you emotionally how did taking the money change your feelings of guilt, shame? Appreciation, like how did you feel emotionally tied to your parents as a result of taking the money?

Srini Rao: Okay. So the shame was definitely one thing where I'm just like, this is pathetic.

I can't get it together. And my sister's just, killing it. Granted, the joke during COVID my sister said is for the first time in history, Indian parents are glad their children didn't become doctors. Cause she actually worked in a COVID ICU. So we were really worried about her every day.

But that was one component of it. And it was a sense of why can't I get my shit together we were talking about ultimately what it came down to was this sense that why do I, I feel like anytime I take something, even though they say it's not true, there are always going to be strings attached.

Yeah,

Satya Byock: so that then becomes the much trickier part of. Of the work of separation it's so easy to move out of I will say this. It's often not easy to move out of your parents house, but one would think that moving out of your parents house, whether it's to college or finally, moving out into your own apartment or even buying a house, you'd think, okay that's that I've separated from my parents.

But in countless ways, and money is often a huge component of it, people remain somehow psychologically tied to their parents in very insidious, sneaky ways. And so I explore in the book and I do this with clients day after day is it's like cutting the tiny umbilical cords or little invisible strings that we have.

And shame is a huge one. When people feel shame as regards to their parents, whether about their parents or in front of their parents, it can be very hard to to feel free and to feel self respect and to feel self love and to get into intimate partnership because it's almost like. There's these fishing lines wrapped around your ankle that go towards your parents house or your parents lives, right?

So this is a huge component of really healthy developmental work that is also something I don't think we really focus on enough. Is the subtle ways that we can still be tied To our parents, it might also be to our siblings, or often to the church we grew up in, or, a football coach that had a huge effect on us whatever these early relationships are, there's very subtle work that needs to be done to say I get to live how I need to live, and it's okay for me to live how I need to live.

And that if you need to ask your folks for money and their game to support you, that comes with as little shame, guilt or self hatred as conceivably possible. Because the goal is that you live your life as fully as possible and not constantly feel like. The loser of the family, that's a tragic thing to carry on your back.

Srini Rao: The funny thing is, I think that I'm the one who feels it more than they do. They're, they, I believe it's actually not them as much as it is me.

Satya Byock: Yeah. I believe it, which means you have to let yourself off the hook because by not doing it and in whatever ways this dogs you, you're the one with your foot on your back.

Yeah. And looking to them for forgiveness or for love or for appreciation doesn't get that foot off your back. And so you're not going to live as tall and as clearly and joyfully as you want to live.

Srini Rao: One other thing that you talk about is this idea of inequality. You say one of the great difficulties of being a therapist is regularly encountering the effects of social inequality and injustice in my office without the scope or power to alter things economically or otherwise for my clients or for the clients who never make it through my door.

And, I wrote this article titled advice for freshmen based on a conversation I had with one of my cousin's friend's sons who was starting college here at UC Riverside. One of the things I said in it was, if your college offers free therapy, take advantage of it and don't just use it, abuse it because it's going to be a lot more expensive in the real world.

So that raises two questions, like one, I grew up in a culture where mental health was highly stigmatized. Until our parents grew up and started seeing, all their kids getting divorced or having problems and, we saw their own, people losing kids and just horrible things happening where finally people started to accept the fact that this is important.

But I can tell you growing up therapy was for crazy people. Yeah, it's

Satya Byock: too

Srini Rao: bad. Yeah. Oh, I think about how much money and time, I would have saved if I had gone to therapy. Like I remember when I was 36, the, I saw a therapist for the first time. I thought, why the hell did I wait so long to do this?

Satya Byock: Absolutely. Here I am I very deeply wish that we had therapy available, good therapy non pathologizing therapy available for everyone in quarter life so that they could. really face these difficulties of psychologically freeing oneself up and living one's own existence and tackling everything from intimate relationship to parenting, to, to difficulties at work.

If we had a more psychological understanding of existence, we would be living in a healthier culture, we need to be talking more about. Oh, how hard human relationship is and how hard coming of age is certainly so unfortunately, I have to say that the other tragedy here is that college counseling centers and I'm, I'm sorry to name this, but are often staffed by students in the psychology programs at the universities.

They are often seeing underserved, under experienced clinicians and often clinicians who are more likely to prescribe than listen and they're often understaffed. And so even free therapy at college campuses can be very disorienting for people. So it's not just go to therapy, it's also find someone who you really feel safe and good working with because.

Because it is still the outset of your life and you need to be getting the best guidance you can get.

Srini Rao: Yeah. I, one of my friends told me, he's you lucked out. A lot of people don't have, a good experience with their first therapist. Mine was amazing. Yeah. I was really lucky.

Satya Byock: I'm so glad to hear it. It's true.

Srini Rao: It's funny. This is something you wrote at the beginning of the book, but I thought that this would be a really good way to bring us a whole circle and ask you about, when this actually starts to happen or what is the thing that allows us to happen?

You say the ultimate goal is an experience of wholeness, a life that no longer feels like one thing on the inside and another on the outside. And, people talk about imposter syndrome. I have, people here all the time, even some of the most popular guests. I remember Seth Godin in one of his books writes every day.

I feel like an imposter. It's wait a minute. Really? You've written 17 bestselling books and you feel like an imposter. So obviously I think particularly for creatives, this is, like a notorious, just, it's an occupational hazard of being a creative person that you're going to feel imposter syndrome every day, no matter what you accomplish.

But when you have the merger of stability and meaning, what happens, what do you see happen in people's lives as a byproduct? 'cause I know you write about some of this in the book as well.

Satya Byock: What I'm hoping for is for people to, this is complicated. It's very what? It's very individual.

But I would want people not to have imposter syndrome, really. If somebody was feeling plagued with imposter syndrome, who had written 17 bestselling books in my office, we would be, sitting with the nugget of pain inside of them and trying to understand what, again what is this part of them trying to say?

In other words, I wouldn't just take it as fact. That they're going to live with that forever. What I'm looking for with my clients is a kind of both taking themselves seriously and taking themselves playfully, right? So we really witnessed the remarkably specific creative urges that are inside of them and try to take those things seriously.

And so people create just beautiful lives, right? That work comes with grieving. It comes with grieving parents who have died. It comes with healing trauma that they've experienced. It can take years and years. This is not like new age, snap your fingers, magical thinking kind of stuff.

It's deep self work. But it also goes against a lot of what society says, which is again, just check those boxes, do those things, get those things and you'll be fine, write 17 books and you'll be satisfied. We know life is more complicated than that so it's taking a more psychological approach to things, but I've seen clients over and over and I do this with myself all the time just finding what is, what kind of like a chiropractic adjustment, What's hurting what's not in alignment and how do we bring those things into alignment again?

So it's subtle self work all the time and the result is that hopefully we can all be modeling for each other not feeling like imposters, but feeling joyful and satisfied on a planet that needs more. More joy, this is always in the context of a planet that is suffering and in a society that is suffering but trying to not block that out and just live climbing ladders and buying things, it's trying to get deep into our souls and our bodies and say what is this life about?

These are big questions you're asking. I'm doing my best here. I've been

Srini Rao: known to do that to people. No, like I said I really appreciate that you said that this is hard work. It's not new age, formula snap your fingers, because I think that there is this sense that there's some sort of quick fix to fix these deeper issues.

In fact, somebody wrote a book called the quick fix about this exact issue when people often turn to self help and and I think the other thing I appreciate is the fact that this is not work that's ever done is what I'm beginning to see. I think there's this sort of notion in self help and psych, psychology literature.

It's okay, I'm going to fix all these things that are broken and everything will be perfect and I'll be done. And I can tell you, I realized at a certain point, it was like, okay, I've gotten answers to my questions for 10 years and I'm still asking questions.

Satya Byock: And you should be. Again, I had life is not easy and life in this moment in history is not easy, no matter what.

And so if you're not asking questions all the time, that might be a problem. If you aren't experienced suffering even periodically, that's probably an issue. Is the irony, right? You're probably blocking something out, which is going to show up at some point. So absolutely this work is never done.

It's we're here, we're alive, we're mortal. This is again what all world religions used to talk about. And what philosophy, theology, this is what humans used to ponder. It's only recently that we've just pretended like. I feel like I'm a broken record now, but really, if you just acquire the right things that you don't need to suffer, it's not true.

And we can't continue to offload that onto other people or the planet and think we're going to get through this.

Srini Rao: I think that makes a beautiful place to wrap up our conversation. I have one last question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Satya Byock: Living deep from their truest self without apology. Amazing.

Srini Rao: I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you your work, the book and everything else that you're up to?

Satya Byock: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor and a joy to have this conversation. My website is satyabyok. com, S A T Y A B Y O C K dot com. The book is Quarter Life, The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. You can buy it anywhere. There's an audiobook. There is an e book, I think. Yeah, and I do, I teach online and I'm around you can find me.

Srini Rao: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.