Elise Loehnen - On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins & the Price Women Pay To Be Good
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Monica: Welcome to the Revelation Project Podcast. I'm Monica Rogers, and this podcast is intended to disrupt the trance of unworthiness and to guide women to remember and reveal the truth of who we are. We say that life is a revelation project, and what gets revealed gets healed. Hello, dear listeners and I'm so So excited.

I have somebody who is certainly become very special to me in the past few weeks, as I have celebrated her work. So my guest today is Elise Loehnen. She's a writer, editor, and host of the podcast. Pulling the Thread. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Rob, and their sons, Max and Sam. She's co-written 12 books, including five New York Times bestsellers.

She's currently writing the first book under her own name for Dial Press and actually has gone ahead and published it. And it has become a national bestseller. Is that right?

Elise: Yes. Uh, yeah. New York Times bestseller. Yeah.

Monica: Oh my God, congrats. So previously she was the chief content officer of Goop, where she co-hosted the Goop podcast and the Goop lab on Netflix and led the brand's content strategy and programming, including the launch of a magazine with Condé Nast and a book in print.

For the podcast, she interviewed hundreds of thought leaders, doctors, and experts. And she went on to write this incredible book that I have just enjoyed reading with all my heart on our best behavior, the seven deadly sins and the price women pay to be good, which I thoroughly loved as you can see. And as most of my listeners know, at least I love celebrating unbecoming women who threaten the status quo.

And I've often shared that the revelation project is a personal journey of discovering that happens when we stop going outside of ourselves for a validation and approval and start going within and getting curious about what's wanting to be revealed to us. And within us as our own source of direction, guidance, and grace.

So I often say that dangerous women read, and that makes you doubly dangerous.

Elise: I love it.

Monica: And I love, I just also want to say that I assert that this book is a masterpiece because of all of the ways that you really surfaced what I often say is hiding in plain sight. So I found you using the same language and, uh, this.

This book spoke so much to my heart. I want to go directly to that place in the book where you are in your therapist's office with that first revelation that started leading you down this path.

Elise: Yeah, I opened the book in my therapist's office. In my second month of, I have an anxiety disorder that started in my twenties that I share with my mom and my aunt where I, uh, chronic hyperventilator and people listening, it's what's been sort of wild or the number of women upon reading the book or hearing me on someone's podcast talking about this who say, Oh my God, this is me.

I did not know it had a name and. Yeah. You know, I've never been diagnosed and so chronic hyperventilation is when there's a mix up between your brain and your body and your lungs are over saturated with oxygen. You have plenty of oxygen in your body, but you cannot. In fact, you have too much. And so it disrupts your breathing and you cannot take a deep breath.

And so you have the sensation That you are going to die. You sort of hit the top of your breath and you can't complete it unless you yawn, typically. And as you can imagine, it's terrifying, particularly when you don't know what's happening. And in my twenties, I went to the emergency room and they gave me some Xanax and sent me on my way.

Ironically, my dad's a pulmonologist, so he was like, well, you're chronically hyperventilating. And the thing about it is that for me, at least it can. Go on for days, weeks, and at this point in my life, months and at the time, and I had access to sort of every modality, Western medicine, pulmonologist. I had access to meditation teachers, breathwork experts, energy healers, and nothing really helped.

And it just kept me. presenting itself to me as this primary, this primary state that was incredibly debilitating and exhausting. And yes, I could manage my caffeine. I knew I needed to get sleep. I knew it was triggered by stress and sleep deprivation, et cetera. But beyond that, I could never get on the other side of it.

And so I was in my therapist office in tears, exhausted because the other thing, and I think a lot of people who have anxiety disorders Can relate to this. I do not. I'm not breathing rapidly into a paper bag. I don't seem panicked. And at this point, I know how to manage myself through the crisis. But you just appear to the world as very sleepy and sedate someone who is yawning.

Yeah. And inside you're just consumed by like, is this the time I get to take a full breath? Is this the time? It's, it's very. It's debilitating, but the world sees you as sort of narcoleptic

Monica: Or nonchalant,

Elise: Nonchalant. Yeah. So there's this dissonance that also shows up where your interior life is just not matching how you present.

And so at this moment in my doctor's office and my therapist's office, it's 2019. I'm just so tired and exhausted and sort of. You know, lamenting, like, what is this? And when am I on the other side of this? When will my body stop doing this as a response to life? I have spent my whole life. Achieving, perfecting myself and, you know, to me, it felt like running a race of, you know, enoughness with the banner and me just out of sight.

That's offering me sort of like a finish line and safety and security and feelings that I had that I was enough, you know, good enough, then enough, a good enough mother, all of these things. Insistent voices in our heads that suggests that we're not and so in that office, I was like, what is it? Like, what is chasing me?

What is this? Because it's not my husband. It's not my parents as much as I want to sort of blame my performative nature on my childhood. And yes, my parents definitely sort of pushed me to perform in some ways, but like, I couldn't blame them. And I realized it was a bigger cultural voice and I sort of turned in that moment to be like, I need to understand what this is because clearly I'm at some sort of apex in my life and I don't feel like I'm on the top of the mountain.

I feel like I'm dying consistently, persistently, and I can't keep going like this. And so that's really where it started. This looking for inner relief, but recognizing what was alive in me was alive, most likely in many other women, if not all women, and that these voices that I was hearing, we sort of single them out in our culture and say, Oh, that's diet culture over here.

And this is sort of parenthood and childcare and sort of this, this, what happens to mothers over here, and I just knew they had to be part of some larger system. And I knew somehow within our patriarchal culture and like I'm sure like a lot of people listening. It's like I'd hear patriarchy and be like, I don't even know what that is.

What is that? Like, I don't, I can't find a structure with it. I can't find a person. Yes, I can. I can identify patriarchal people, certainly, but I cannot trace. Directly from that patriarchal man to me, how this is showing up in my life and how it's affecting me and like when I hear people talk about it, it's a lot of it.

They it's like patriarchy is such a like boogeyman and we want to understandably place blame on it, but like I couldn't even figure out what it was. And so that's also what I wanted to, I guess, undress or discover. I knew it was everywhere, but yet invisible. Yes. And I knew I wasn't actively subscribed to patriarchy and yet it was in me.

And that's what I really wanted to understand this, these ideas of goodness that were in me, this idea for all women that we have been programmed to pursue goodness. And sometimes you hear this as like program to pursue perfection, et cetera. I think they're all sort of of the same cloth, but for me, it's goodness that you reputational damage to a woman that she's a bad person, a bad mother, selfish, uncaring.

You can destroy a woman. You can cancel a woman. You can send her away through a reputational aspersion through your opinion. It's amazing, right? Meanwhile, men who are

programmed for power, it's like they can do reprehensible, horrible things that are illegal, that are horrible, that are unsustainable to our environment, and we still venerate them because they're still powerful. And I just, I really needed to understand why this is so sticky for us, why it has us really by the throat and terrified and terrified to be perceived as anything as other than good.

I wanted to understand where that came from.

Monica: I could relate to that moment so well when you were in that state of like, you know, again, revelation, right? It's like pissed off when you kind of like got to this, at least this first truth, which was like, Oh my God, you're trying to be good again. Like that had always kind of been the thing.

And then as you say, trying to figure out what is the association and how can you surface this boogeyman that's been hiding in plain sight? And this is where I come to my next question, which. You know, leads me to like, why the seven deadly sins? Yeah. Because as you took me through the journey in the book, it started occurring for me too as a really powerful lens.

Elise: Yeah. So. I and and it's funny because and we knew this was like a bit of a risk with the book that people would sort of think that it is a book about religion or anti religion, et cetera. And the point that I'm making and there's some sort of there's an opening chapter. The books densest about the formation of patriarchy, which was not an inevitability and and then specifically sort of the advent of Judeo Christianity and how that became the moralizing arm of patriarchy and sort of where this came from and how it's seated itself in our lives with the argument really being that this is our culture.

It doesn't this is our culture. This is where we come from. You don't have to subscribe to these beliefs for them to be in you and I Sort of arrived at them. I sort of vaguely knew what they were. I did not grow up in a religious household. I'm a very spiritual person, and I love Jesus, for example, as I was raised as a Jew, but I've come to really love Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

And I've been very interested in early Christianity because where we are and the way that A lot of organized religion presents itself in the world feels very far from what this itinerant. Man wandering in the desert with 12 people who loved Mary Magdalene more than all the other people What he was talking about.

So if you go back to like what Jesus was talking about He was you know, like you hear about black Jesus For example that version of Jesus seems much more aligned with what he is talking about venerating the poor the sick the outcasts, the people who are on the margins and edges of society. And that's certainly not how it shows up in a lot of people's lives, or if you're outside of religion, the way that you typically perceive it.

So that was really interesting to me too. And I sort of started wondering where, okay, this is where patriarchy This was sort of the advent of patriarchy pre religion, Hammurabi's code, baked with misogyny, and there's fascinating history, and patriarchy obviously emerges in different points of time across the globe, but essentially it's Built on the subjugation of women and Children, the enslavement of women and Children.

This is sort of first. First slavery is this women is property, and this is very present in these early law codes not attached to morality. It's just, if a woman commits adultery, she will be stoned and drowned. If a man commits adultery, he will be fined 10. You know, it's just that, that version of misogyny.

Monica: Right. Just that. Yeah. Just subtle.

Elise: If a man kills a pregnant woman, his own daughter must die. Like stuff like that where you're like, okay, great, sweet. And then it's really only with Judeo Christianity that we start to see in the centuries after. Christianity became a religion wasn't Christ. Jesus was a Jew.

So it wasn't Christianity didn't exist until it wasn't canonized until 400 years after he lived and died. And so anyway, I wanted to understand what it was. Where these codes of goodness were in the Bible in the Gospels. Mm hmm. And that was sort of the other Fascinating thing is that it's not the seven deadly sins are not in the Bible No, they are not a set they didn't come out of Jesus's mouth They came from a desert monk in the fourth century Who wrote down eight demonic thoughts sort of things that distract you demonic meaning thing distractions from prayer and then they traveled around the desert this man of agrius ponticus is one of the early fathers of the enneagram fascinatingly and.

You know he was identifying very essential human impulses appetites desires like what it is that brings us in contact with life and then these traveled around the desert as a set and sadness being one and I included sadness in the book and then it was in five nine D. That Pope Gregory the first turned these thoughts into the cardinal vices and in the same homily, he assigned them all to Mary Magdalene, who he conflated with the woman who anoints Jesus's feet with her hair.

And not the same woman, but he makes them the same woman and turns her into a penitent prostitute. And there we go for millennia until, you know, effectively it was 2016. The Pope Francis said, Oh, Mary was actually the apostle to the apostles. She was really the first apostle because she was the one to whom he resurrected in the tomb.

He gave his first teaching to Mary Magdalene. She goes back to the other apostles. Peter's like, no way. I'm the first apostle effectively. And here we are. So that was a fascinating sort of twist and turn that I did not expect in the story of these sins. And just the last bit. I mean, I love Mary Magdalene and I love her gospel, which was cast out and deemed heretical and recovered.

In recent centuries, that's very beautiful about how goodness is baked into each of us. It's like a just a fact. It's part of our humanity and part of our divinity, and it cannot be adjudicated by an outside authority. So it's all very like full chill, full circle for me. And what's also interesting about Mary Magdalene is in She figures a little bit in the New Testament as it is canonized, and she is described as the one from whom Jesus cast seven demons.

And again, demon having a different dimension, but this idea of sort of this exorcism and the Early or other sort of theologians when they write about Mary Magdalene, some of them theorize that he was balancing her chakras and that whatever he was, that he was like clearing the seven powers that he encountered when he descended before he ascended to God, that she is thereby the most sanctified person in the Bible.

But yet, Presented to us as the most depraved. And so it's very like, I don't know. It's a wild history. I love the history as like as dark as it feels at times. I also am like a kind of wonder. Not to be fatalistic, but like, are these the nuggets that we're only ready to discover now and did we need sort of this descent into power and toxic masculinity and sort of its implications in order to right the ship?

Are we just sort of at a different era finding balance and only now are we kind of ready for taking the system that's been built? Within this patriarchal structure and then moving and transforming it into something that can sort of hold water for the next era.

Monica: Yeah, these are great questions.

Because I often say we're in a time of great revelation. And of course, there's that great word apocalypse, which to go back to the etymology of words. Yeah. Something, you know, that you point out over and over again in your book, these words have origin meanings and often we've taken them and made them into these sins, which means Miss the mark.

I always think the cosmic world must have an incredibly potent sense of humor because there's all these ways that I'm discovering things and noticing, like the synchronicity and the humor and the WTF ness of it all. Yeah. And I think about the book of Revelation, for example. Yeah. And the way many people think that that is also Jungian's interpretation anyway is about kind of that that's this ascension through just like you're talking about this, whether it's the chakras or whether it's kind of this.

inner unveiling these revelations that are happening. And again, depending on whose lens you're looking through, it can get really interesting, but is it's the questions, something that we are taught not to question in terms of our faith. Yeah. For those of us that did grow up in religion and while yes, the seven deadly sins, as you point out, we're not part of the religion they've seeped into, I don't even know what to call it.

Our cultural entrapment and for women, what I call the trans of unworthiness.

Elise: And so much of it, it's like, um, and I want to talk about sort of resurrection too, but this, the way this ascension myth that we are subscribed to currently, which is that the body, which is very attached to the feminine matter.

The etymology is mater, mother, sort of the chaos of the womb, whatever it is, the void that our ability to sort of magically alchemically create life, that this all needs to be ascended, that this where we are right now is bad, base, depraved, and that we need to sort of climb our way to heaven and God the Father and instead of understanding that this is an ascending and descending system, God is here, God is everywhere.

Divine universe, whatever these animating impulses and forces and that it is simultaneously ascending and descending. And it's interesting how even the resurrection, the way that it became translated, not based on anything that Jesus wasn't like, I'm cleansing your sins, I'm dying for all of your sins because you all are depraved, like this was all projected onto him.

And the whole original sin is like a Augustine creation from the fourth century as well as well as the attachment to sexuality and sexual lust. This is all sort of after but taken wholesale by us or passed on to us as as truth rather than sort of original source. But you think about also the resurrection and crucifixion and it's His journey, which is sort of the hero's journey or heroine's journey to ascend, you descend, you go down, you die, you die.

These all of these little parts of us must die in the same way that the planet is constantly dying and regenerating. And we see this all around us. And yet we can't accept it. It's so interesting or that that we refuse. We refuse. To descend we refuse to accept sort of the materiality is also being sacred and and that is the feminine honestly like that's that's the place that we hold and I mean we could go deep on to sort of like the dark goddess and our fear of her and the way that she shows up in time but like that's the space that women hold.

You know, it's very sacred and very powerful.

Monica: It is indeed. And I love too, that you bring up these powerful ways that we have suppressed, you know, all of these feminine aspects and what that is costing us inside of this framework within the seven deadly sins, which I also want to be clear, like you. It's not actually seven.

You added. Yeah. Wasn't there?

Elise: Well, so yeah, eight thought

Monica: Eight.

Elise: Yeah. And they're interesting. It's interesting how they're presented because sometimes pride is included as a sin, but then it's called the head sin and the one from which all the others spring. It's all very like you. You're sort of like It's discordant throughout history because it's a game of telephone, ultimately.

Monica: Right. And if it's okay, at least I just want to read something. Yeah, of course. For my listeners here, because it's important to go back to this missing the mark fact that being the etymology of the word sin. Yeah. And I loved how, you know, so she gives a brief history of patriarchy, but then she says sloth believing sloth to be sinful.

We deny ourselves rest. Envy believing envy to be sinful. We deny ourselves our own wanting pride, believing pride to be sinful. We deny our own talents, gluttony, believing gluttony to be sinful. We deny our own hunger, greed. We deny our own security, lust, we deny our own pleasure, anger, we deny our own needs and sadness, we deny our own feelings and then she goes into the conclusion and what she calls the realignment and what I love about this.

Going back to Mary Magdalene and the clearing of the chakras, she who is most, and it is, it's about coming back into alignment. And I always say, when we align, we are divine. I love it. And it's this idea that it's by becoming aligned in this way that we're then able to receive. And shift our beliefs and come into this place where it all gets to belong.

And as you mentioned at the ascension, the descent, that it's not this linear progressive, it's more of like this labyrinth experience or like pulling in these pieces, forgetting and remembering. Yes. It's this constant dance and I think that we get to these windows of revelation which pull it all together and give us, you know, like, like the God wank.

Yeah. Or whatever you want to call it, but it's those moments of, I remember, and then we forget again. Yeah. This. Allowing embracing what is that I think is so simple yet so profound, but it begins with a fissure, which is where I want to go back because here you are in this therapist's office and you're basically meh.

At the beginning of what I would call a descent because you are revealing something that sends you on the heroine's journey, following this question that becomes these additional questions and eventually leads you to, oh, there's a framework here. So I want to know about the aha moment for like the seven deadly sins as the framework.

Like what was that moment?

Elise: Yeah. I mean, I really started with envy. Yeah. In part because I wanted to understand what is it in me? What is it? And and us us meaning women that is part participating in sort of the chasm of inequity in our society. And so what I would find is. You know, looking at and things like the pay gap are obviously extra complex overlapping Venn diagrams, including class and race.

It's not as simple as, you know, unmarried white women make as much as their male compatriots. It's much. It's much more complex than a nuance than. We would like it to be. But as I sort of surveyed the world and wanted to understand the 2016 election or all the social science that suggests that women are as hard on other women as men are, if not harder, and often sort of bury this under, well, I just expect more from women.

Which is painful. I really wanted to understand that. How was I participating in that? Because when I looked out, I could say I could see there are pernicious, patriarchal, terrible men roaming around our culture. And yes, there are some women who behave in a very toxically masculine way as well. But I couldn't believe it.

Figure out where this boogeyman was again. I was like, I know it exists, but I cannot. I've worked for a lot of men who have been wonderful. I am married to a feminist man. I am raising two Lovely, sweet boys. So what's this isn't as simple as like, it's the men and the men must go, et cetera. And I would hear sort of women saying like, well, we used to be a matriarchy and it's like, no, no, no, there were matrilineal cultures.

But I ultimately we came from a more affiliative partnership style society where we were doing life together. It was balanced. There was reciprocity, et cetera. There's never really been a, um, Matriarchy in the sense of patriarchy where it's predicated on a dominant oppressive Female led culture that hasn't happened, nor would we want that.

That's the other thing. It's sort of this, like, I resist this condemnation of just men wholesale. It's like, no, we need to be resistant to toxic masculinity and also how that presents in us as women. So we're looking for balance here, balance in every person. And so I really wanted to understand. What it was, what was participating in this chasm and what could I find in myself and what I really wanted to understand was why it was so acceptable for me and for other women to be so hard on other women.

So judgmental, critical, diminishing, nasty and and then the book, you know, it's like one of the great crimes. Which is understandable, but one of the crimes against women and men is the way that we take cultural ideas and use them to suggest that they are not nature, that this is who women are, that women are catty bitches, that we are territorial and competitive and naturally a lot like naturally inclined to gossip and And even the etymology of gossip is beautiful.

It comes from actually godparent, but that aside. So I wanted to understand this, like what was it in me that was ironically making me feel like a bad person, right? But so socially acceptable, so socially acceptable to sort of deprecate another woman. So it really started with envy and it came, it was a conversation that I had with Lori Gottlieb, psychotherapist who wrote maybe you should talk to someone and she said that she tells her clients to pay attention to their envy because it shows them what they want and there was something in that that was such a light bulb moment for me of whoa, is this, is this The underpinning of sort of women on women hate and is this just jealousy, which is a different word than envy anyway, but is this envy?

Is this what this is in me? That's making it so comfortable and socially acceptable for me to be critical and I don't know. I don't know. I really thought about that. I asked her about it. I asked her if it was gendered, and she said that women are just less comfortable with feelings that we perceive as bad.

And so I started to use that as a lens for looking at my own life and the lives of my friends. When we go after another woman and say things like, I just don't like her, whether it's Hillary Clinton or someone at school drop off, is that envy? And I realized that A big part of it is, and that when we see another woman who has something or is doing something that we want for ourselves, we don't even know how to code that information because we haven't ever been taught how to understand what we want because we're supposed to subjugate our wants to other people's needs.

So like most of us are completely disconnected from what our soul is wanting for us and what we're supposed to do in the world. And we don't there's so many mixed messages. It's not clear. And so I think it comes up. We see a woman and we're like, there's a soul recognition, a moment of tormenting where it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, that is information, but it's so uncomfortable.

It feels bad. We repress it. We stuff it into our shadow and it comes out as a projection against the woman. Who is.

Monica: Who has the thing that you actually want. Yes.

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Monica: I love this between envy and jealousy, almost like jealousy is more palatable. But there's, ooh, envious. It feels it's got some other

Elise: Malicious, gross.

Monica: And then I loved this and I made a note here. Women struggle to acknowledge what we want. We've been conditioned to believe we don't have wants. Yes. And wants feel dangerous to us, but our longing is a lighthouse for our heart's desire.

Yeah. And there was a time, Elise. After I had gone through my own dark night of the soul, and I realized in the same way, I hadn't been breathing for multiple years that I also, I have forgotten how to dream. Like the words dare to dream actually started to really stir within me. I had even lost my capacity for imagination.

And again, as I was reading, this is why there were so many ahas because you had done this deeper excavating.

Elise: Mm hmm. Yeah. And to understand to understand it as a part of a system. And I think it just requires some bravery on the part of some women to start interrupting these cycles and supporting each other to be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Because what you'll find with the way that envy shows up in our lives is that it's not the people that you and I would be sort of triggered by or tormented by Richard Schwartz calls them our tormentors. They're here to teach us are very different. And so when you're with friends, you can sort of push and be like, Whoa, wait, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.

And you'll get to these sort of like pretty stunning revelations about where we feel. We haven't quite shown up or delivered on what we're supposed to do here and, you know, in the course of talking about the book, it's been really interesting to have these conversations with women, like with other podcasters, one was saying, you know, I was saying, like, I don't have any envy of Taylor Swift, like musician.

Nope, nothing. There's no musician that has ever sort of sparked. Judgment or condemnation and me, I'm much harder or used to be really, I haven't, I'm not quote unquote perfect about this, but like about women, other people in their books or their podcast where I'd be like, I didn't think it was so good.

You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which at the time felt. And again, it's not, it's okay to have feelings about people's work, but you'll notice when, when it has a certain weight where you're like, I'm just sort of picking on this person or picking this thing apart, because it means something to me.

It's like, what else is going on? What's happening below the surface. And so, you know, talking to another podcaster, for example. She was like, well, wait, I do have envy of Taylor Swift. And I was like, are you a performer? And she was like, no, but like, I think I want to be in a stadium talking to like, that's who I want to be like in the stadium with people looking at me.

And I'm like, okay, so what does that mean in the context of your work? Yeah. And she's like, well, I think I'm actually really envious of like Jay Shetty and I want to be, that's what I want, what? And I'm like, well, that's an amazing. Revelation for you to go and figure out how to do. Meanwhile, I'm like doing what Jay Shetty does and traveling around the globe, speaking to stadiums is my worst nightmare.

That is not something I want for myself, which is also really essential information, because I think we also get into these sort of entrained ideas of what it. Success or the end of the road. We start wanting what other people think we don't even want it. We just start abiding by what other people think that we should want or what feels like the next natural step in our progression without saying running it through our bodies and saying, is this what I want?

I don't think I actually want that. I don't really want to leave my bedroom.

Monica: Well, you're also pointing to something that's super helpful in the beginning. I think as we begin this unbecoming process, yeah. We start knowing what we want by what we know we don't want. Yeah. So it's sometimes that's easier as we unravel and untangle all of this stuff.

I have this theory that women have disassociated. Yeah. And that the remedy is to become embodied and to stay when we feel uncomfortable, because there's information there that it's actually tuning in and listening in that we begin to uncover or unmask or stop performing because what's there in the discomfort is really valuable information.

Okay. We're clear on that. And it's being able to. Befriend this foreign thing that is our own home, our own body that became emotionally uninhabitable at some point in our lives. And usually that happens in maidenhood because we're becoming the very thing that we've seen society project upon. Yeah. So it's really interesting because then we really miss the mark because we're not even home inside of ourselves.

Elise: Right. No, I think it's much easier. I mean, it depends on, I think it depends on the person, but for me, I'd much rather like live in the mental model than actually be in my body. And, but I, it's hard to, you know, and life is traumatizing for a lot of people. So there are lots of reasons to leave.

Monica: For sure.

There's so many great reasons to leave. And in fact, I was recently speaking with Selene Lilly and she wrote a book called. Uh, the rape of Eve and she talks about this dissociation and it's actually an ancient story that she interpreted and translated of another, an interpretation of what really happened in the Garden of Eden.

Disassociation would be our way to survive. Mm hmm. In through patriarchy, and I think back to your point, we are coming into a time where certain events are available or are surfacing things that we now need to look at. I do think that we're in this time where the bird of humanity is really wanting to have some balance.

Yeah. And it's a powerful time. But I also think that losing our way is. Sometimes the most powerful thing that can happen, and if we can trust that process, whatever it looks like for us, however messy it needs to be. Yeah. And I think there's a lot to be revealed in each of those journeys. So. I'm also curious, Elise, what, as you continue to go through this story, I go to your pulling the thread, the podcast, and I think about what are the threads that you want women to now, after reading this, Pull through their lives.

Do you have, uh, an invitation or a request around this?

Elise: Mm. That's a great question.

Monica: And men, maybe men too.

Elise: Yeah. I mean, I would love men to read the book because I think it's sort of, there's such a distinction between sort of, for example, with motherhood, the practicalities of motherhood and inequity between sort of the load of care and the load of housework, et cetera.

But then there's also the book is really about the psychology. And those internal cattle prods that drive us across these sins to conform and behave and adhere to these codes of goodness. And we don't really need our partners or our parents to tell us what those are. They're so insistently and persistently in.

Society, right? What a good mother looks like, what a good conforming body is, what desirable but not desiring woman behaves like, etc. What a, what a woman who has no needs, no anger, no outbursts shows up like, right? So I think the threads are really to sort of for us to recognize I One that these voices in our heads are not ours and to sort of start pulling on them for veracity and source and to begin to question again, like where, where this comes from.

And how do I unhook? How do I untether myself? Because the more that we can free ourselves, we can start to free each other just by modeling a resistance To the expectations of goodness that are placed on women and the more that we can say, uh, I'm not gonna over program my children because I need to sort of fulfill some idea of being a good mother who's involved and setting her child up for success.

And, you know, the breathlessness that's part of modern day motherhood right now particular. Yeah, the more we can say. I do not abide and I will not participate and my kids will not be scheduled in this way. And we're going to see what happens. The more we can sort of. Model for others like it's okay if you step back to because it's interesting.

This is it's like deeply personal work and I've been alone with this book for years writing it and editing it and working on it. And now to see it sort of live in the world. It's very relieving because this work is much faster, much more expedient. As collective work and the more that we can talk to each other and circle on these ideas and help each other identify it and say, like, well, where did that come from?

And why do you believe that? And what happens if you say no? I think the faster we start to move it out of our bodies. And there's work here for men to do as well, because yeah. It's interesting. Women are amazing. We have learned to survive and often thrive in this culture. I think we're exhausted, understandably, and pissed, and yet durable.

Meanwhile, and again, like, they're not the subject of my book, and there's so much You know, to Kate's quote, Kate, man, empathy, which is so problematic, so not to sort of participate in empathy. But when we look at sort of the real victims of patriarchy, it is often boys and men. Yes, they hold an inordinate amount of power, particularly white ones.

But the deaths of despair, the rates of suicide. Are the the cultural chaos that's being created the war on the planet like this is happening at the hands of men and they are devastated. Even if they can't quite admit it because to admit it requires like owning their weakness or their feelings of powerlessness, which again is like kryptonite in the same way.

Goodness is kryptonite for women, but they are in trouble. And so I hope that they can start to unplug. And I think that and they need to let their feminine come up. I think women are very comfortable being in their masculine and their feminine. Most of us are like balanced between those two energies all day.

But men, yeah. Do not have models for like letting their feminine come up and we need that they need that desperately.

Monica: Yeah, you say the seven deadly sins and our attempt to avoid them corrals women and diminishes the potential fullness of our lives.

Elise: Yeah,

Monica: You know, I'm also hearing in that that the way to unravel and untangle it is to look at those and And at the end of each chapter, you invert it, you turn it around, and it's actually about embracing it, that return that you get that, and I'll call it a return on relationship because it's the turning toward ourselves in our needs or in our desires, in our, in our Wanting of security, any of these things, right.

But it's by actually acknowledging them and then seeking to understand like that Chinese finger trap where you go further in, in order to get yourself free. I loved how it all culminated in coming back to transforming society, beginning with. Each of us, this is where I always say, do your own revelation project.

It's that moment that I stopped going out there, whether it was to fix somebody else or to go out there to validate my own worthiness. Well, what if I were to actually. Go within and approve of myself right now, right here in this tangled, messy, envious place. But I was also really paying attention to what you were saying about how.

We like look at society and we're like, this has to change, but it has to change here first. And then you kind of pointed to these other places where we need to re sacralize the feminine, which I loved because it's, it is by all of us. Beginning to look at the feminine in our own lives, energetically, as well as the values of the feminine that we haven't seen as values.

We've been programmed to think of them as weaknesses, and that's the same for men. Men also suppress the feminine within themselves. It's interesting that we know the seven deadly sins so well, but we don't necessarily know the universal laws that govern the universe. And so I think it's really interesting that we've referred to like God, but what about God's other half?

If there's a masculine and feminine to everything, then. Why does the goddess show up only in the realm of like unicorns and rainbows? Is she not as substantial in terms of that feminine face of the divine? I will never forget coming to this realization. I am the daughter of a former nun and grew up in the Catholic church.

I always. I had this deep inner bodily response to so many of the teachings that happened through the church. And but it had never really occurred to me until it did that God would have a feminine was looking at my own indoctrination. My own programming was so thick and recognizing like that when I started to ask questions, I also was Beginning to invite more revelation.

I think questions, if we're willing to go there, actually engage us in what I call the revelation project, because that's the key that begins allowing the mystery to kind of meet you wherever you are. And so I heard that in what you were saying between. The goddess and mother earth. And I wanted you to say more about that.

Elise: Yeah. I mean, I think it's, there's a reason that we've sort of anthropomorphized the planet and turned her into the feminine and. Turned God, the father and the sun and the sky into the masculine again. It goes to this sort of Ascension myth that we hold to so dearly. And I think women are highly identified with nature.

And the planet we cycle with the moon. Many of us are dislocated from that idea that knowing that fecundity of nature and the shedding and the restart and refreshing. Um, but we live that in our bodies. You know, our wombs are sort of mini. Planets many, many earths and that connection is quite intense, but it gives you a sense to have when we go into this ascension rather than the dissension, how skewed we get towards the masculine and towards.

Sort of prioritizing spirit over matter and the two are both parts of our divinity It's our humanity and our divinity and our wholeness and so letting all those Letting that mixture that alchemical combination of elements is like what it is to be alive, half human, half divine, and so much of the sins is about what it is to be alive and interestingly, men are better at this.

They don't police themselves in the same way around their appetites. But for women, the denial of everything that we've come to see is bad. All these human stirrings, desires, longings, pleasure, full engagement with ourselves. It's like by spending all this energy suppressing these instincts, we're denying ourselves wholeness.

We're denying ourselves a fuller, Existence. And yeah, it's not the book is not sort of a stunty take. Like, let's be lustful and greedy and gluttonous. It's not about that. It's about balance, reconciliation, realignment and letting ourselves experience ourselves as whole.

Monica: It's about remembering and it's about reclamation and all of those great rewards.

And I often say all of the places that we've been taught not to go just pleasure. For example, how taboo and yet recognizing it as a source of power as a source of liberation and freedom as a. a wayfinding device. We're missing the point if we're not living this life. Yeah. And I think that's the most beautiful part of your book is this encouragement and invitation to women to come back to life by getting curious about how these seven sins have eroded our and separated us from our birthright of being in this body in this life.

So thank you so much. This has been such an incredible opportunity and I'm so grateful. I'm grateful for your work in the world and I'm. So happy that my friend, Nick Frick told me about you and your book. I've enjoyed also learning about you through Lynn twist. Cause I also do some work with Lynn.

Elise: I love Lynn. She's amazing.

Monica: She's amazing. So thank you so much, Elise. It was just an absolute pleasure to have you.

Elise: Thank you for having me.

Monica: And for my listeners, I'll be sure to put all of Elise's links in the show notes. And until next time, more to be revealed. We hope you enjoyed this episode. For more information, please visit us at jointherevelation. com and be sure to download our free gift, subscribe to our mailing list, or leave us a review on iTunes. We thank you for your generous listening and as always, more to be revealed.