Joy Unfiltered: Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald on Awe, Healing, and the Science of The Joy Reset
Every moment that you're spending leaning into joy and trying to kind of spread that message is a second that you are contributing to the collective calm instead of the collective chaos.
Speaker 2:When we raise our perspective to a high enough point that we can see the wholeness, there is less suffering. We're less fixated and identified with the undesirable experience that we may be having.
Speaker 1:If you just spent seven or ten seconds imprinting something joyful, you are setting up a new neural pathway in your brain, is going to counter a lot of the negative stuff that's kind of always rambling around in our brains.
Speaker 2:You're listening to Solving for Joy. I'm your host, Doctor. Chrissy Ott. Hello friends, and welcome to today's episode of the solving for joy podcast. I am so excited for this conversation with Doctor.
Speaker 2:Mary Catherine McDonald. Doctor. McDonald MC as we'll call her is a research professor and life coach who specializes in the psychology and philosophy of trauma. Since she began her doctorate in 02/2009, she's been researching, lecturing, and publishing on the neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience of trauma. Her work focuses on thinking critically about how we understand, define, and heal from traumatic experiences.
Speaker 2:And she is passionate about destigmatizing trauma, mental health issues in general, and reframing our understanding of trauma in order to better understand and treat it. After receiving her master's degree at the new school, cool, she researched traumatic loss and mourning. There from both philosophical and psychological. Perspectives. She went on to complete her PhD at BU and has published several research articles and book chapters as well as two books on trauma.
Speaker 2:Merlot Ponte and a phenomenology of PTSD, the hidden ghosts of traumatic memory in American and NATO veteran reintegration, the drama of social isolation and cultural chasms. I didn't get the spacing right in that sentence, but you guys get it. In addition to her academic work, she has a thriving life coach business. She has coached individual clients and corporate employees since 2010 and has created trauma based curriculum for nonprofits in New York, Virginia, and California that served previously incarcerated individuals and veteran. And the thing that brought her today is the recent publication of her book, the joy reset, which I I don't seldom start a podcast with a sentence like this, but I am.
Speaker 2:Go now and order this book, preferably from an independent bookseller, but get yourself this book. It's like if joy was a lot of colorful shards of glass, and then they got melded into this beautiful, secular, stained glass window. That is that is my visual interpretation. And, I didn't even realize it, but it kinda describes the cover of the book.
Speaker 1:It does. And also, you just hit on something so bonkers that I just have to share it, which is is that okay? Am I interrupting? Let's jump
Speaker 2:right in. Let's go.
Speaker 1:My so in Unbroken, which came out in 2023, I write a little bit about my dad. And he was kinda like my person, and he passed away really suddenly in 2005 on Christmas Day. And his hobby in life was stained glass. And so the fact that you I know. And in fact, I don't have them on my desk, but I have these little he used to take us to the same glass store on Saturday morning sometimes, and we would get to pick out these little glass beads.
Speaker 1:You know the beads that are sometimes in the bottom of, like, like, a fish tank or sometimes in a floral arrangement? Yeah. And so I always associated those with him and the and stained glass. And since he died, I find them in the weirdest places. I have this huge jar of these little glass beads that I found, like, in the middle of a hiking trail or in my my driveway.
Speaker 1:I know. Bonkers.
Speaker 2:I just have chills. That is those are no doubt little messages from your dad. And I'm remembering now the crack up at his funeral about the camel with lipstick. Yes. Which maybe that was planted in my subconscious, but literally that was just like the image of if joy was a
Speaker 1:bunch of
Speaker 2:possibly dangerous shards of glass, but turned into this colorful and beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:MC writes that this is a dark little book about joy, which I resonate wholeheartedly with. She brings the gritty enjoy. We're gonna get into so much goodness. The, if if there were a sub there's a subtitle. Right?
Speaker 2:The six thieves. The the yep. Six thieves of joy.
Speaker 1:The six six ways trauma, yeah, steals happiness and how to win it back. Yeah. Thank you for
Speaker 2:for that.
Speaker 1:I had to read it physically from the cover.
Speaker 2:So I loved that breakdown, and I have to share with you that independent before I actually read this book in the past week, I was on a coaching call with my coach, and we were talking about a situation that is, arisen for me lately. And I actually wrote down in this notebook, shame, like, is the thief of joy. Like, shame blocks joy. And so when I heard you basically saying that exact thing echoed back at me, I was like, oh, this is like the theory of multiple discovery. This is like confirmation of a true thought.
Speaker 2:You know? Like, I am actually paging through to see if I can find it because it was like yeah. It's hard to feel joy when we are immersed in shame. Shame is a joy killer. Those were the exact words I wrote.
Speaker 1:Woah. Shame is
Speaker 2:a joy killer. Also wrote, it's hard to feel joy when we feel trapped. Oh, yes. It is. Though, I can't wait to get into it.
Speaker 2:So tell us about what called you to write this book. You have this enormous history of studying trauma and outcomes, this joy book. Yeah. What's the deal? Yes.
Speaker 2:So, okay.
Speaker 1:So many book projects come without you trying. Right? It's just like a compulsion. This thing arrives. So I think it is like this idea that you're called to it.
Speaker 1:Something makes you compelled. And so I was writing Unbroken in 2020, which was kind of like a culmination of all of my academic research, but written for, like, a trade audience. Right? So not an academic book anymore. And I was trying to really reframe and redefine trauma so that folks could understand it without stigma.
Speaker 1:And at the very end of that book, I kind of landed on joy as the epilogue. And I wanted folks to leave this book on trauma with this understanding that joy is a healing thing. Joy can heal trauma and that actually not all of the work that you do to heal has to be this kind of like hard rot, painful, yes, retraumatizing work, but that actually can be about engaging with joy. And so in the epilogue, I kind of ramble a little bit poetically about the fact that joy doesn't have to we have some misconceptions about joy. Number one, we think that if we have a really big bad thing, we need a really big good thing to counter it.
Speaker 1:And then the other thing is that joy is supposed to counter pain and kind of balance it out. And so that was just like, okay. Here's my nice way of wrapping up this book. And then it was like, oh, no. There's a lot more to say about joy.
Speaker 2:I must the the end of a
Speaker 1:thing is the beginning of a thing.
Speaker 2:I remember exactly where I was walking, when you wrapped up in this book about
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, how we expect joy to counter pain. Yep. How the root word of negativity is to negate and how it's supposed to balance it. So tell us a little bit about that. I mean, I'm I'm gonna be all over the place, but in a in the best way because I'm so excited about Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:This book.
Speaker 1:I love being all over the place. That's the way that's the way it unfolds. Yeah. So, yeah, I think, you know, we and it makes sense. We we try to do these neat, you know, calculus equations with the world sometimes.
Speaker 1:And we so we think it makes logical sense. Okay. Big bad thing. I need a big good thing to counter it. But the truth is that the way that neurobiology of joy works, if you just spend seven or ten seconds imprinting something joyful, you are setting up a new neural pathway in your brain, which is going to counter a lot of the negative stuff that's kind of always rambling around in our brains.
Speaker 1:But the kind of larger point of the book is that joy actually isn't about countering shame or darkness or guilt or any of these things that are dragging us down or are negative. It's about finding joy sitting right next to those things. Joy sits next to grief. Joy sits next to trauma. Joy sits next to pain.
Speaker 1:And when we can realize that, we start to see it. And when we see it, we are granted these tiny mercies in those dark moments. So going back to, like, the the camel on the altar at my father's funeral, that was a moment I didn't want joy. Right? Like, I'm at my father's funeral.
Speaker 1:I'm standing at the front of the nobody wants to be in the first pew at a funeral. Where what does that mean? And to be there and encountering this hilarious image was a little jarring, but it was also this tiny mercy that the sort of universe was offering up. And I was able to notice it probably more in hindsight than in the moment as kind of a pivotal point because it was proof. Right?
Speaker 1:Joy is right here. This is the darkest moment of your life so far. You're 24 years old, and there's joy. You know?
Speaker 2:Sprinkled in.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it's such a important point. It cannot be overemphasized that joy is not in contradiction to pain, grief, trauma, basically ways that the world does not, meet us in a preferred way.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:Joy is in addition to it. It is it is a nondual part of reality.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And when we raise our perspective to a high enough point that we can see the wholeness, there is less suffering.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? We're less fixated and identified with the undesirable experience that we may be having.
Speaker 1:Right? A 100%. And when we're overly fixated on it, we're wrong. Like, that's the thing that's key is that the negativity bias in the brain tells you is trying to trick you into thinking the only thing that exists is the trauma. The only thing that exists is the grief or the pain or the whatever, and that's not true.
Speaker 1:And so we're getting it more correct when we're in it when we're allowing joy to be in that space at the same time.
Speaker 2:I love that reminder. That is that is such a it's true, and it's satisfying.
Speaker 1:Yes. Because I think we get this idea that, like, the negative is more true than the than the good, You know? And that's just that's just false. It is just false. That's a that's a lie.
Speaker 2:One thing about the book, that readers will no doubt benefit from is that you sprinkle small doable exercises. Not big ones necessarily, but small ones. And I think, you know, free writing is a prescription for feeling better no matter what for me. Mhmm. Finding tiny little joys.
Speaker 2:So really, like, downscaling to and I was on a walk while I was listening to a large part of this book. Right? So I was literally, like, smelling roses, listening to you describe loves that. TLJs and, like, thinking about what what TLJs are around me on this walk
Speaker 1:right now.
Speaker 2:Tell us about TLJs.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I this is I will tell you about the walk that saved my life. So in 2020, I was, you know, it was the very beginning, the peak of the pandemic. Everything was shut down. I had actually just moved.
Speaker 1:So I was in a new place thinking, oh, I'm gonna move to this new place, meet these new people, and then everything shut down. I was going through a divorce, really painful, awful life situations happening. And the world is dark, and all of my clients are facing unprecedented stuff, and then there's all this stuff on top of it. And there was just this one day where I left my little apartment, and I was like, I just can't keep going. I don't have anything to offer anybody.
Speaker 1:I don't have anything to offer myself. Like, I was just in a really dark, dark moment. And I said, okay. I have an hour before my next thing. I'm gonna go on a walk, and I'm going to give myself the job of finding the smallest flower that I can possibly find.
Speaker 1:I have no idea where this came from. It just popped into my head. And so I went on a hike, and there were these, you know, when you see wildflowers, you could picture these huge, amazing giant flowers. But there's also really, really, almost absurdly small flowers nestled in there. And they're kind of a miracle.
Speaker 1:Right? Because they're smaller than everything else, so how do they get the sun to grow and all of this stuff? But I became completely fixated on, okay, this is the smallest flower. And I started taking pictures, and
Speaker 2:I was like, no, actually, this is
Speaker 1:the smallest flower. Like, none of that countered any of the bad stuff that was going on in my life. It didn't change any of it at all. But it was such a huge reset that by the time I got home from that walk, I thought, okay, I can actually do it. And maybe this is part of the thing is finding these little things instead of trying to find this big, huge counter joy that's gonna erase the pandemic and my divorce and all of these failures and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1:And so at the time, I was also working with groups. And so I was like, let's try this. I know we're all in an unprecedentedly dark place. Let's try finding tiny little joys. And it started to work.
Speaker 1:We started each group with doing tiny little joys and I was doing them with clients and people were like, yeah, everything is bad. And I found this ridiculous flower on my walk or my dog just jumped off the couch and did something hilarious, and I laughed for five minutes. And so that was the beginning of Tiny Little Joys, and that was kind of the backbone of the joy reset is that very small practice.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. I really like how the exercise in the book also invites people to put their tiny little joys on, you know, one side of the paper or, you know, majority of paper. And often the corner, have this compost heap. It is so that you can actually see on the paper that, like, my my wins, my pleasure, my joy exists on the same page as Yes. My financial disruption, my relationship rupture, my, health scare
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:My, you know, like, difficult relationship at work, whatever the thing is that also very not so joyful right now for you.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. And I think that that came out of so when I started working with Joy, I was, you know, overly excited about it. And I tell this story very early in the book of a client that I tried to deploy Joy with at the absolute wrong moment, and she said, go fuck yourself and closed her computer.
Speaker 2:It was a powerful share. Like, that moment was so very, very well grounded. Like, everybody could feel Yeah. What that must have been like for both of you.
Speaker 1:Yes. Right. Right. And I kind of took that was another anchor or a kind of backbone of the book was like, okay. We are yes.
Speaker 1:Joy is healing. Yes. It is grounding. Anchor. Yes, it doesn't need to be as big as the bad thing in order to help you.
Speaker 1:But and a lot of us are resistant to it. And that resistance speaks a truth, and we need to listen to what that resistance is. That client of mine wasn't wrong. I was wrong. And taking her cue and figuring out like, okay, how do I make, you know, these tools that have this positive psychology framework on them work for people who are in the midst of trauma because I know they will offer healing, but we have to be able to figure out how to build a bridge.
Speaker 2:So We have to build the bridge. Yep. Or they might as well not exist.
Speaker 1:Right. Because it's like But they
Speaker 2:exist in the realm of dismissal. Right? We were talking
Speaker 1:I was
Speaker 2:talking about that with another physician on the call right before we met. One can provide incredible information, tools, connection. But if there is this barrier to joy, joy resistance as you call it
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, it's so difficult to connect them to the nourishment that, might help.
Speaker 1:Yep. Absolutely. And and it doesn't have to be that way. We just have to get more creative. So the compost pile was like, okay.
Speaker 1:If you come into this practice resistant and all you keep thinking about and focusing on is the negative stuff that's been happening, that's normal. Your brain has a negativity bias because it's trying to keep you alive. There's nothing that doesn't mean you're doing the exercise wrong, which is I think we get we get into this space in psychology often where it's like, well, we know this exercise works. And so if it's not working for you, then you're wrong. And that's just not true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's not you, and it's not the exercise, and we need some practices in between.
Speaker 1:Yes. Right. And we need help getting unstuck. There was an exercise. It's one of my favorite.
Speaker 1:I love doing it. It was, like, huge groups, that came from unbroken that's called a 100 other things. And it's like, okay. You take what what is your inner critic telling you about yourself right now? That you're a failure, that you're an idiot, that you have this and that diagnosis, all this other stuff?
Speaker 1:Cool. Write that down. Take two minutes. Write that down. Those are all true things maybe.
Speaker 1:Or they're at least true to you in the moment. They're true to your inner critic. Okay. Now write a 100 other things that you are. And then the visual of seeing it on the same page, like, yes, I have this diagnosis.
Speaker 1:Maybe I'm struggling with anxiety. I don't like my haircut, whatever. And I am someone who loves their friends, and I love to hike, and I wear glasses, and you just see them all next to each other, which helps it so helps make it so you don't reduce yourself to the negative.
Speaker 2:I love that. I'm putting a little, like, bookmark on that in my brain right now. You have to come back to. I would love to invite you to, I know that it's a whole book's worth of information, but the six thieves of joy. I would love for you to just have the opportunity to say a few introductory sentences about each one of them.
Speaker 2:They I saw myself and and people I love in each space here. Yeah. And I will give a, a little bit of a potential sensitivity or trigger warning. There there will be talk about suicide in this part of our conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yes. So I would I wanna tell you a secret about the book, which is, you know, the whole book, it's in the it's in the subtitle, six ways, and it's in the the preface. Here's the six joy thieves. They did not come into the book until after I had written it because and this is a kind of an interesting thing about book writing.
Speaker 1:Right? You write this whole thing, you get it out into the world, and nobody sees all the, like, editing things that happened in the background. But my editor was like, this doesn't feel like it hangs together. There's something missing. And these thieves started to sort of, like, appear out of the shadows.
Speaker 1:Because all the stories and all of the other content was there in the book, but there there wasn't that it was like the scaffolding was, like, back here, and we had to, like, bring it out into the forefront. And so the the reason that's interesting for our discussion is that these thieves are here whether we recognize them or not. They're hiding in the shadows and in our stories and in our behavior. And Yeah. That's, I think, really important because people there's a little bit of heartbreak to the book, which is that people read it and they resonate with it, and then they think, oh, no.
Speaker 1:I have thieves. You know? What do I do now?
Speaker 2:We all have them. Yes. It's like the saboteurs of,
Speaker 1:you know Exactly.
Speaker 2:Shirzad Shamim's positive intelligence. Yes. Like, we're all we're we got all of them.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. And that's okay.
Speaker 2:That's there's nothing wrong with us. We're gonna be inhuman.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. Right. So the six thieves really briefly are kind of organized or they organize themselves into three buckets, and the three buckets are joy resistance, joy fear, and joy guilt. So if you can think about that broadly, if you're a if you're a bigger picture thinker.
Speaker 1:And then they're broken down and there's two thieves in each category. And so under joy resistance, you have hypervigilance and emotional numbing. And hypervigilance is that state, that somatic or soul state, body and soul state, where you are on high alert for threat. And so it's you can picture yourself as like a sniper on watch. All you are doing with all of your waking hours and some of your sleeping hours is assessing for threat.
Speaker 1:So positive emotions like joy or hope, just by definition, lower that state of alertness, which can then lead to this sense of vulnerability that is not an option. And so the joy thief of hypervigilance essentially says, we are gonna resist and reject joy. It's not safe. And then emotional numbing, happens to all of us, right? We numb when we're overwhelmed.
Speaker 1:It's a brilliant adaptation to overwhelm, whether that's maybe from stress or trauma or grief or all of those things. So we have unprocessed trauma, we have pain, we have panic, we have intense sadness. And so we numb, we try to numb those feelings in order to survive. This protects us against that anxiety, but the sort of upshot of it is that we end up sort of not being able to feel into joy or hope either because we're not really good at compartmentalizing the way that we think we are. Though when we numb one, we numb them all.
Speaker 1:Collective numbing. Exactly. Right.
Speaker 2:When I have had episodes of feeling emotionally numb in various periods of my life, that is what it feels like. It's like I lost my connection to joy. I mean, thinking residency training. You know, there's a lot of survival happening. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of self protection. Like, I need to get through 18 traumas today. How am I gonna do that and then go home and feed my dog?
Speaker 1:Right. Right. So you become a little bit robotic. You have to. And, again, that's a that's a brilliant coping mechanism.
Speaker 1:But then there will be a moment where you're like, man, I just had this huge milestone birthday and it, like, didn't land or I got a promotion or I, you know, have this wonderful thing happen to my relationship. Why am I not feeling it? It feels untammy and distant.
Speaker 2:So it's needed.
Speaker 1:Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So that's the joy resistance. Joy fear is broken down into fear of loss and fear conditioning.
Speaker 1:Fear of loss, we all have losses in our life, big, small, medium, whatever, many. And one of the things that loss does, which is kind of beautiful, but also painful is that we get very attuned to the fragility of what we have and the fragility of happiness. And so we start, instead of letting the happiness in or the joy in, we start bracing against it because we're pre grieving. We're waiting for the loss of it.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. The other foot to drop. Yes. The other shoe to drop is the same.
Speaker 2:Yes. That my sweet father-in-law, who's no longer with us, would never let his children have a pet growing up because he lost a very precious pet in his childhood. And I you know, limited limited emotional care skills in the family led to not processing that well. It was just kind of an open wound for the rest of his life, and he could not face his own children facing that horrible loss and so prevented them from the love and joy of an animal companion. It's so and that's such
Speaker 1:a beautiful sad. Right? Like, there's so much in the the protection, the deep grief that we grieve.
Speaker 2:Misguided. Yeah. Like, it was an example of misguided solving for joy. He was trying to
Speaker 1:Right. Right.
Speaker 2:You know, he was having joy fear.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. And and so much so that it was like I pictured, like, a root system on right? Like, it's, like, taken over so that this thing, this opening into connection or love is impossible.
Speaker 2:Yes. And then fear conditioning.
Speaker 1:So fear conditioning, this is similar, but very often, especially with folks who are dealing with lots of big sads in their childhood, The big sad.
Speaker 2:What a great phrase.
Speaker 1:The big sads. The big sad thing happens sometimes in the middle of the good thing. And so you think like, oh, you know, it's my graduation day and then something tragic happens or this my you know, I'm having a wonderful time with my friends and then something kind of veers into it and takes it away.
Speaker 2:It looks your dad on Christmas day. Yes. Right. There you go.
Speaker 1:Yes. Right. Or you're having this, like, party with your sixth grade friends, and then your mom breaks into psychosis and ruins the party, and you're horrified and not old enough to yeah. So basically, fear conditioning happens whenever the positive gets or the neutral gets tied to the bad thing in your head. So in your head, experientially, you're like, oh, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:I can't have this feeling because the thing that comes after this feeling is the bad thing. And so I'm going to similar to fear of loss, I'm gonna brace myself against that and not ever let it in because, again, it's a genius adaptation, maladaptive adaptation to avoiding the thing that you couldn't avoid in the first place. It's a way of getting a little more control or feeling of more control.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a real bless our hearts moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And when you see it in someone else or like in hindsight or, you know, in your case, like with your father-in-law, like, it's like you see these things and you're like, oh, that's so sad. But in the moment, it's so embedded in your system that, again, it's like that thief is hiding in the darkness. You don't even see that it's there operating behind the scenes.
Speaker 2:Yep. But he sure did love loving on our Oh. Animals. Good. He loved That's good.
Speaker 2:That's really sweet. Yeah. And, this is a a little, you know, tangent, but there was a time after his death where we happened to be in a place where my wife could have a reading with, an adium. And the first thing that happened was, you know, this male entity who was definitely her dad, came through and was really excited to say, you were right. You were right.
Speaker 2:They don't judge us. They don't judge us. He was Catholic. And, he was like the then he was like, he's also accompanied by this little dog.
Speaker 1:Oh, gosh.
Speaker 2:I know. And and that's like, Sue just, like, lost it. There were just tears because this was, like, a legend. His heart legend was this dog. And he gets to be with this precious being in the afterlife according to this, you know, interpretive reading.
Speaker 1:Yep. That makes me wanna line before and sob, like, the good way. I love that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sweet. Yeah. Big breath.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Love that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And joy guilt.
Speaker 1:Joy guilt. This is funny too because when I was writing the book, I thought joy guilt and joy shame were probably gonna be the least, noticeable. I was like hypervigilance. Feel like everybody understands because even if that's not your default setting, you've been in that space. But joy guilt has come up more in 2025 than I could have anticipated because the joy guilt happens when you get tricked into thinking that because of something else or someone else's circumstances, you're supposed to only feel bad forever.
Speaker 1:You're not allowed to feel joy. So this happens a lot in clients who are grieving when they encounter a moment of joy, and it feels like a betrayal. Right? Because the person that they just lost isn't here to feel it with them. And how can I possibly be feeling okay?
Speaker 1:This loss just happened. But what I've been seeing in 2025 is folks saying, how can I how can you be talking about joy right now when what what's going on in Gaza is going on in Gaza? How can you be talking about joy right now when the economy is falling apart and when we are at this political state of horror and danger that we've never been in before? Right? We feel
Speaker 2:When beautiful 17 year old boys are being picked up by ICE for deportation.
Speaker 1:Right. Because they have tattoos. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is it is the conundrum of all or nothing thinking. It is so tempting to think, distortedly that we're supposed to only attend to the horrors. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But the truth is there are
Speaker 2:more horrors than one brain could actually attend to, and it's probably always been true. Yeah. But the rapidity of communication, makes them, you know, more knowable, and then there's more than we can actually possess.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yep. And I think Thomas Hubel helped me with this. Leaning into joy is if we're if we take this really seriously as a healing modality, which it is, every moment that you're spending leaning into joy and trying to kind of spread that message is a second that you are contributing to the collective calm instead of the collective chaos.
Speaker 1:And so it isn't just that like, oh, it's okay to lean into joy, but it's also actually maybe an obligation because if we want to be able to make things better, this is one way to actually do that. Isn't that wild?
Speaker 2:MC, we are like soul sisters. I love this. I have a budding TEDx talk. I haven't said out loud, I don't think to anybody except maybe my wife, but the title is joy is a moral obligation. And that is the, that's the point now.
Speaker 1:Yes. Do it now.
Speaker 2:The point is that we must study ourselves to be of service to what is being done and undone Yep. In this world at this time. My my teacher says we cannot be in service to that which we are undone by.
Speaker 1:Oh my god. We cannot be in service. I have to write that down. Sorry.
Speaker 2:It is a profound truth. And and so our self care is care for the collective. And yes. And joy is part of our self care. Our joy diet, like our sensory diet, it is if you cannot keep yourself fed, you will not be able to serve the village Right.
Speaker 2:When the raiders come.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. Right. Oh, I love that. That gave me goosebumps.
Speaker 1:I'm so excited for your tennis. This
Speaker 2:is gonna be such inspiration.
Speaker 1:Now you have to do it
Speaker 2:right now. Right now. On this game. Right now. Let's go.
Speaker 2:And then the final
Speaker 1:the final boss, the joy, guilt, final boss is shame. And I call shame, guilt metastasized.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's such an incredibly powerful phrase. I yeah. I wanted to, like, grasp at all of these these beautiful concepts. They were just right.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. Yeah. The and there's something really grotesque about it as well, which I actually like. Like, I think there's a I have a respect for that, the way that something can grow in that way, you know? And when you soak yourself in enough guilt, you start to this would be you know, these things start to become core beliefs.
Speaker 1:And so instead of, I can't how can I possibly feel joy right now because of what's going on in the world? It becomes, I am not worthy of joy, period, ever.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's a that's a kind of a desperate base to be in.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm struck also by kind of this inversion of joy guilt,
Speaker 1:which
Speaker 2:is, like, I I have received privilege. Therefore, I am sentenced to feel only joy or fake joy. I am sentenced to actually only be in this side of the spectrum of experience. It is it is related. Like, who am I to suffer?
Speaker 2:And I think, you know, a lot of our listeners are in medicine. Certainly, you know, not all of them, but many are are physicians or in are clinicians. And our suffering is never the loudest in the room, and so we kind of forget to acknowledge that it exists. And then it goes underground and comes out in unhealthy, maladaptive ways.
Speaker 1:Yep. Catastrophic sometimes.
Speaker 2:Catastrophic at times. Yeah. But that thought that errant thought of, I have privilege different than this other privilege or I have experienced less pain than this other individual. Therefore, my obligation is to live only in this right side of
Speaker 1:the spectrum. Right. Which is, you know, again, that's you see the rational there's there's a there's a logic to that that is easy to subscribe to and kind of cosign. But if you pause and think about, like, what would that mean? Let's say we we take it into a bodied realm instead.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, if you're dealing with the emergency room, everyone in there has a different malady that they've come in for. Right? And it wouldn't make any sense to say, you're not entitled to appendicitis because this guy is having a heart attack. They're both just true.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And it might it might alter the order of operations. Right? Obviously, there's an order of operations, but it's never the case that the thing that is appearing is not to be addressed.
Speaker 2:It's so interesting because you're bringing up basically a triage Yeah. Concept. Right? And, and if we have mass casualty events and your matter is not of the highest order, it's possible that you might not ever get gotten to. And that kinda what happens sometimes with caregiver suffering.
Speaker 2:Yes. And I will not just say, you know, clinicians at that point. We're also talking about moms and dads and, you know Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Caregivers of all types because you're all in a triage mindset. Well, triage is really meant for the battlefield, and it just, you know, kind of the metastasis of battlefield mindset.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Every
Speaker 1:Right. Right. Right. And that that that I also like to kind of lean into the we can we can argue about this all we want, but our nervous system actually decides our level of overwhelm. -Right.
Speaker 1:-Our level
Speaker 2:of intellectual. Intellectual Right.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. So you can try and I think Right. And I think we sometimes get this false association that like, Oh, no, I actually am in charge of this because we can shove things down sometimes.
Speaker 2:Another cute control fallacy of the human brain.
Speaker 1:Right. Oh, sweetie.
Speaker 2:Cute control fallacy. I loved your use of, with signing this truth. Oh my gosh. That was another one of those phrases. I was like, oh, I love that.
Speaker 2:I have a sense of that. Like, when you're looking for someone to cosign your your theory Yes.
Speaker 1:Your truth. And you
Speaker 2:can easily get people to sign off on errant thinking because it we know because we shared the the same cognitive distortion. That was a very Yep. Yeah. Satisfying concept to me. So we, there there's conversation in the book about, you know, loved ones being suicidal or having lost their life to suicide, and you have this beautiful conversation about existentialism and the question, whether to exist.
Speaker 2:I even I even looked up Albert Camus' picture that you alluded to in the book. Oh, isn't he? Yes. Was devilish. Devilishly dashing as described.
Speaker 2:And, you know, I have lost loved ones and close loved ones to suicide. It has been you know, it is a it's a painful and confusing thing to confront for anyone who is a survivor of a close one's suicide, which goes without saying, of course. But there is a particular kind of bereftness of joy that can follow that confusion. And so I just invite, you know, response about that or maybe, like, a a little dip into what you shared about existentialist theory and and the question of whether or not to go on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, Camu, we can start with the the intellectualizing it because I think it feels a little bit safer. Suicide is really hard to talk about, and I think that makes it really critical that we find a way, but it's really scary. And I recognize that that we'll go into the the headspace a little bit because that sometimes feels safer. According to the existentialists, you know, Camus wrote this so the existentialists are this this you can think about these French guys in berets, you know, kind of sleeping with everybody, having these really deep philosophical thoughts and
Speaker 2:Smoking lots of French cigarettes.
Speaker 1:Smoking yeah. With the that picture go long filter, and everything is sort of, like, super dramatic and and kind of wonderful and delicious. And Camus starts this essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, saying, you know, the only true philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide. And that is I mean, what the you know, what a hell of a beginning. Right?
Speaker 1:I am in. What do you mean? What are you talking about? The only
Speaker 2:like, there's a hook, dude.
Speaker 1:Right? There's a lot in those words. And existentialism is incredibly misunderstood, unfortunately, because it's actually really, really hopeful. But I think because of the fact that they're in the, you know, these berets and talking about dark things, it gets sort of cast in in an incorrect light, actually, partially because of the Catholic church, but that's a whole separate thing. And what Camus goes on to say is like, look, there are many things in our lives that we have no control over and that make us feel rightfully trapped.
Speaker 1:And at the same time, we can always choose to end the whole thing, which means that you always have agency, even in your most trapped and awful of spaces and circumstances. And that is a that is a dark thing to say, but I think it's important to understand that the meaning was not, okay, then according to the existentialists, you should die by suicide. Right? That's not at all the thing. What they're saying is like, look at this freedom.
Speaker 1:It follows you everywhere in your most trapped of circumstances, in your darkest of moments. You still always have freedom. Radical, wild freedom. Freedom where that's so big, we're scared to look at it. That is cool.
Speaker 1:And that should make you say, okay. No. I, you know, I I I'm not gonna choose that. I'm going to recognize and respect that that's option. And in light of that, I'm gonna take radical responsibility for my life and make it whatever I can make it, not let anybody else dictate the terms or tell me what or how I should be.
Speaker 1:Right? It's supposed to be this, like, incredibly hopeful thing that starts in some of the darkest darks. And the reason I think that's so important is because if we don't look at what's in the darkest of darks, we don't see that. There's hope there. And so when we talk about suicide, we just get freaked out and we start to put our hands up.
Speaker 1:I can't take that. We can't talk about this. It's contagious. We're gonna do this. Instead of being like, well, hold on.
Speaker 1:Maybe there is a message in there that's actually hopeful. What if the impulse to die by suicide is like a call from the soul to be free instead of this huge, damning, awful, unavoidable thing.
Speaker 2:When I hear that, this echo occurs in my mind of, like it's kind of a generalized understanding that says, well, if someone has died by suicide, they felt like there was no other way forward. They felt like there was no other choice, which might actually have been experienced as being trapped. And, of course, this is this is one way out of the trap that you see, and we are, like, far from condoning that. There's always always other choices, but the existence of that as a choice and looking at it, in in the lens of existentialism and the fact that there's actually hope and richness to take away from it is, it's quite a brain exercise.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's again, like, I I it is so hard to talk about because as soon as you say something, it's like, well, with them, what about this angle? Right? You look at it from this other side and, you know, folks who do there's we kind of almost have to bracket off people who are feeling like that option is in their head and maybe they're having suicidal ideation and then people who died by suicide. And it's almost that's two different things.
Speaker 1:Right? When we encounter the thought, I think we could be less scared of it when we say, oh, this might be an indication I'm actually feeling really trapped right now. What could I do that would help me feel more in control, more like an agent in this circumstance? But when we're grieving folks who have died by suicide, it's a different thing because we try to apply that logic and we all we wanna do is hit rewind and say there were other options. Right?
Speaker 1:To that part, I think it's important to understand that we don't all make it and that's a heartbreaking truth, but it's when we accept when it comes to physical illnesses and we need to understand how we need to think about how to accept it when it comes to mental illnesses as well. Because we extend grace to folks who have terminal illnesses and, you know, quote unquote lose their battles, right, which I hate that whole framing.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's a terminal illness of a different system when that happens. Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which doesn't make it easy. Right? Heck no. It doesn't.
Speaker 1:It right.
Speaker 2:It does not. Thank you for sharing all of that, and sharing it in the book. I think, you know, it's just, like, so many new frames to think about, how we can approach joy. I love the juxtaposition of, you know, these challenges to joy and the practices to enhance our connection to joy. I mean, the culmination of the book is really an invitation to actively engage the neuro hardware and rewire the brain, which is the ultimate goal of therapy, positive psychology, and coaching.
Speaker 2:And I am cosigning that for the rest of my life. Yes. Right? Because it is possible. It is possible, and it may be an obligation.
Speaker 2:It may be the thing that matters the most no matter where you are working and doing in the world.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yep. Yeah. I've been doing this this thing with I've been doing a couple workshops on this on this work and this book. And one of the things I do with with people as an opening is kind of a joy timeline.
Speaker 1:And right before we get into that, we say I say, like, okay. What, you know, what are the things that stress you out the most? What would you identify as your triggers, right, your trauma triggers and and your pathologies and your diagnoses kinda depends on what kind of group I'm working with. And they it's right at the surface. I'm struggling with this and here's my trigger and this is the trauma and
Speaker 2:blah blah blah blah. And then it's like,
Speaker 1:okay, let's put that aside for a second. This is another way we always like right. Right. Meet the resistance. And then let's put this aside and then it's like, okay, what you know, can you remember, like, ages five to eight?
Speaker 1:What gave you the most, like, unbridled joy between five and eight? And people are like and they're stopped in their tracks for a second because that stuff is not at the ready the way that the negative stuff is. And then we see immediately that, like, yes, the negativity bias is gonna tell you the negative is all there air, that all that's there, but there's also all this other stuff. What did joy look like through the arc of your life? How did it change?
Speaker 2:Amazing. I love that. I would love to have that exercise some way that we could maybe even link to in the show notes about the joy timeline. I just I think that's such a worthy worthy endeavor. I am going to follow you forever, MC.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. Thank you. And I know that people listening would also love to know where to find and follow you and your work. So please share.
Speaker 1:Where am I? So I am on Instagram and TikTok at the same handle, which is just m c dot p h d. And we are doing tiny little joys every single day of 2025 on there, and it is cute. It's amazing. The community around it is lovely.
Speaker 1:You get to read everybody else's tiny little joys every day, which is so fun.
Speaker 2:Multiplies. It multiplies them.
Speaker 1:It does multiply. Yeah. It totally does. And then my website is alchemycoaching.life.
Speaker 2:Alchemycoaching.life. Yes. Yeah. I love the
Speaker 1:name. Thank you. Just
Speaker 2:so happy to to get to know you now. I need to. Yay. I hope we get to hang out again. Where are you actually physically located?
Speaker 1:In the Bay Area in California.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 1:How about you?
Speaker 2:Portland, Oregon. Oh, nice. Oh, good. Okay. That's not too far.
Speaker 2:Timeline. Thank you, my new friend, one for just being in the world, holding space for resolving and healing trauma and speaking so beautifully about joy and its grittiness and disillusioning some of the, you know, rainbows and unicorns that sometimes we confuse with being the only experience of joy. Nothing against rainbows or unicorns, by the way.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 2:No rainbows or unicorns were harmed in the recording of this episode.
Speaker 1:Yes. Thank you so much for having me. This has been so lovely, and I'm so glad to meet you, and it's been so fun.
Speaker 2:Thank you once again to Doctor. MC McDonald for this expansive and generous conversation. The way she weaves science, soul, and storytelling is really something rare. I'm still sitting with her reminder that joy isn't the opposite of trauma. It's part of how we heal.
Speaker 2:That tiny little joys matter and that we don't have to be all better to begin again. Next week, I'll be joined by Doctor. Sunny Miles, integrative palliative care physician and unapologetic truth teller who brings deep wisdom and heart to conversations around identity and the complexity of joy. I can't wait to share that one with you. And if you're looking for space where community, creativity, and connection aren't just buzzwords but real vibes, the Physician Coaching Summit is just that kind of space and it might be where you find your people.
Speaker 2:I'd love to see you there this fall. The physiciancoachingsummit.com. If you're curious about what coaching could open up for you, visit joypointsolutions.com. We're here when you're ready. Solving for Joy is produced by Kelsey Vaughn with editing by Alyssa Wilkes, music by Dennis Kish Cook, and cover photography by Shelby Bracken.
Speaker 2:Love always to Sue. And to you, thanks for listening, for showing up, and for letting solving for joy be part of your story. We'll see you next time.
