Episode Details

Episode Highlights With Susan Cain

• What led her to write her book “Quiet” and why "Bittersweet" was an important follow up
• The importance of joy and sorrow together for the fullness of life
• Why the impermanence of life paradoxically leads to joy
• Connection of melancholy and love and why certain sad music can touch us so deeply
• What studies show about the relationship between a melancholic state of mind and creativity
• The wounded healer archetype and why a very high percentage of people we consider “the greats” in art or music had a huge loss, often of a parent, at an early age
• Strategies for learning to embrace the bittersweet
• Ways we can help our kids learn to accept the bittersweet as part of life and support them through this
• How we can inherit grief and trauma from past generations and how we can transform this into beauty and creativity

Resources We Mention

• Susan Cain - Her website
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
• Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain
• Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins M.D. Ph.D
• Spring and Fall Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Her Bittersweet playlist on Spotify
• 483: Mark Wolynn on Why It Didn’t Start With You, Inherited Trauma & How We Heal
• The Next Big Idea book club
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi