Parole Hearings and Societal Change

What's a moment where you made a significant life change, but you couldn't fully describe why you were making it or you couldn't fully understand what provoked that change. You know, many people struggle around their sexual orientation for years and for me I realized I was gay in instant maybe about five seconds. I heard a voice. I had this moment of epiphany . This one important identity shifted from one moment to the next, and it was confusing, but it felt also right. Hm m mine's not as exciting as yours is. From about middle school onward I wasn't a good student and I mean that carried it over for middle school, high school colle, . I was kind of spotty at work. I was probably the worst employee. Like I would just do stuff like, I don't know, leave to say I needed to go buy pantyhose or something like that and then like not come back for ninety minutes, like going to date in the middle of the day was terrible. I started a podcast with a friend like over a decade ago and then I developed a work ethic that I did not have before . I mean, I've been like that now for for the past twelve years. I was literally not like that before. And did you feel like you had to sort of make a decision to become like that or did it just sort of happen? It kind of just happened. Looking back, it's really weird. I can't believe I've sustained the change for so long. Do you know what really happens when we turn and face the strange ? Chich changes happen to all of us throughout our lives, but do we really understand what makes them stick? Sometimes there isn't a clear answer, but today I'm talking with someone who really tried to find out what makes change happen . Benoit Denise Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College, and he is the author of You've Changed the Promise and price of self transformation. He's followed bullies who became Buddhists, gay atheists who became straight evangelicals, political party switchers, people in personality disorder therapy, and prisoners seeking parole to find out how change happens to us and how we understand personal transformation in our culture. Bedro, welcome to It's Bin Minute. Thanks for Brittany. It's great to be here. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luis, and you're listening to It's Bit Amin from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident . Okay, so you've written a whole book about personal change. The good, the bad, the strange , the transcendental. What compeled you to look into this? What often happens is I come up with a book idea and I sort of think about it from an intellectual journalistic perspective, and then I realize that I'm actually working on the book to sort of figure myself out . And that happened with my first book, which is about addiction. And back then I was really interested both in following other kinds of people struggling with addiction and then with my own . So initially focus was really about addiction and this question , you know, what explains why some of us get better and others don't . And then something very strange happened. A friend of mine who we had worked together at XY magazine, which was a magazine for young gay and bisexual men around the turn of this century . Michael had been the most well, at least it seemed that way , the most comfortable person with his sexual orientation . He was really anti religion. We battled a lot actually because he was much more of a black and white thinker than I was. But he was an incredibly inspiring person to so many young gay and bisexual men who were just coming out. Fast forward , about six or seven years later , he , to the shock of all of everyone who knew him, announced publicly that he was no longer gay and that in fact he was going to fight against everything that he had believed in and written at XY and he was now conservative and an evangelical Christian. And first I thought it was a joke and I'm like, No, it's not April Fools Day. I felt like he was like the last conceivable person. The last conceivable person to do that. And then I thought he was maybe going undercover like in the XK ministry. I'm like, Oh, maybe he's going undercover. And then he wrote another essay publicly saying awful things . And then I sort of believed it and pretty quickly went out to meet him at his Bible school in Wyoming and became interested both in his experience. So what happened? Like how does he understand these shifts to his identities and belief systems? I really wanted to understand how he understood that . And at the same time, I was fascinated by how me and the rest of us judge in this case his particular transformation as true or not true or real or not real or as a kind of grift . And his story to me really predicted the next ten or fifteen years up until today where we've seen this incredible amount of identity switching and claims of transformation, whether it's around politics, spirituality, gender , and how those claims of change are judged by the rest of us because we're judgers of other people's change and we don't always do it in the most thoughtful considered way. So really that became the focus for the last six years for me is like, what does it feel like to transform and to feel like a new person? Like what does that feel like? And then how do the rest of us judge it? You spent some time looking into whether change just happens to a person either through a live event or some kind of trauma in a negative sense or maybe some kind of epiphany or what some call a quantum change in a positive sense. Or if we can kind of make change happen to ourselves , but can we intentionally change who we are or what we believe ? Partially, yes . So the thing that I found so interesting is that we can set out to change things. Like I set out to become a better friend, a better husband to my husband, a better son to my parents. I wanted to change the way and have deeper relationships with the people that I cared about and through a whole host of reasons I was not very good at doing that . And so I set that as a goal about a decade ago . And I think I've through a lot of therapy and a lot of change workshops, I think I've gotten so much better at that and my friends and my parents sort of all agree. I had this awkward moment where I asked them, you know, if I had changed and at the same time , there are ways that I and others change without wanting to. So I have a whole chapter on these sort of what feel like these rapid transformations, epiphany, aha moments . Those are things often that we're not expecting. Those are things that can be incredibly confusing. They can feel destabilizing. And one last thing we also change in all kinds of mysterious ways. Our personalities do shift over the lifespan , you know, I've become my father without wanting to. Common experience many such cases. Like I didn't want that, I didn't plan that. So this mix of like what we can control and what we can't. I'm so interested in holding on to both of those things . I wonder even if we can change though, like how much can we change? There's a variety of testaments in your book that have different answers . I start early in this book with this question of how can we change to what extent can we change our personality, our core being? And so I hang out with an octagenarian on Cape Cod in Massachusetts who's really, really prickly and I was obsessed with her. Obsessed with her . And this has a really tough personality, right? She's very funny. Like so it makes her very good at parties and stuff, but she's it's really very difficult to be like her adult child or her friend. And so she wanted to like be better with other people . She really made this her full time job. I mean, the good thing about being your eighties, she's retired. She can devote a lot of time to it, yeah. Yeah Yeah. she did change , but she didn't transform , right? There's still the part of her that can be a little bit caustic, but it's like she just turned down the level on it a little bit and she learned to sort of look and see what her triggers are. Also I hang out with a terrible terrible bully who became a Buddhist and he leads a Buddhist center out in San Diego . And what I loved about him was that he didn't create this like clean narrative of, oh yes, I'm like this new person and I'm perfect now. He was like, I don't really know how I changed . My actions have changed . And that's a big thing when one's actions change. So with personality in particular , there's a whole sort of cottage industry now saying, Oh, you can transform your personality and become whoever you want to become. That's overblown. What we can do and what we've seen in data is that you can shift your personality a little bit. So if you want to perhaps be less neurotic, that's something that people often don't like and they want to be less neurotic . So if you like really work at it, you can like take it down a notch , but we don't totally transform it, even people who have powerful experiences where they wake up and like the next day they're like, I'm devoting my life to an entirely different idea or project . At their core, people who know them will often say, yeah, he's the same kind of guy he's always been. Now he's just got this new like interest or way of seeing the world. Now, but I don't want to downplay. Yeah, a way of seeing the world is hugely like that's a big change, but the core personality elements often stay the same through these experiences . And even with Michael Glatz, who I talked about earlier, my friend at XY magazine, black and white thinker , big transformation. Yeah , black and white thinker. So, you know, in a way , he hasn't changed all that much. We're gonna take a quick break, but first , you all know I really love hearing from you. And many of you keep leaving the kindest notes for me in the reviews and comments . One listener mentioned that this podcast is the only way to start their day. Forget coffee. Another wrote that if this show is talking about a topic that that story is worth paying attention to. Listen, I work hard to have my ears to the ground for you . And I am so grateful to all of you for always coming back four times a week. It would also mean so much to me if you could rate and review the show wherever you listen. It helps new listeners discover the show and allow this community we're building to keep growing. Join the IBAM team. Rate and review this show right now . Thank you so much . Coming up after the break. So many of these changes that we do come booby trapped with cultural war politics are little change that we think of as just very personal becomes this symbol of a larger debate that's going on. Stick around So like no personal change happens in a vacuum. Yeah. We're all around each other and noticing others' change or being frustrated when they stay the same. How do we understand change in a collective sense? Like what are some of the narratives around it. So there's people in our lives who we want them to change in certain ways. We don't want them to change fundamentally if we like them because that's the thing that we like about them. So change in other people can be really destabiliz for us. And so we see over the last ten years in particular as you know Trump and the breakdown of political coalitions over the last ten years, there's been a lot of very kind of strange political identity shifting that's happened and many of that's been quite public . And so the ways that both the friends of those people interpret those or more commonly the ways that the rest of us who don't particularly know the person but may just experience them explaining their transformation on social media in some way , we tend to react very strongly to that. And we, you know, when someone is changing in a direction that we agree with or that pleases us, it's a telltale sign of the person coming to their senses and really having done the homework and done the work and they've really looked at themselves and it's a positive thing and when someone changes in a direction that we dislike or that we interpret as a attack on our sense of ourselves or our identity , we tend to discount those as a kind of delusion or a grift. You know, over the last ten years in the age of social media , it's all done publicly. And so there's a kind of performative aspect to all of it in a way . And we're sitting here judging the performance. I want to talk about this a little more. I mean, as we're discussing, like sometimes we are suspicious when others change. We wonder if it's real or what they're trying to get out of it, right? Yeah. You wrote about this influencer, Ollie London, who in twenty twenty one claimed to be non binary and trans Korean , meaning they were a white person transitioning to become a Korean person . Whether that's possible or not, we can debate. But then London detransitioned, reidentified as white , found Jesus and got really into Israel . You wrote about this person, quote, You may be tempted to dismiss London as an attention seeking grifter and I won't try to dissuade you. But his story is a fun house mirror version of our contemporary identity crises. When selfhood is fluid, performative, and shaped by political power plays and algorithms thriving on attention and conflict, social media has allowed us to endlessly reimagine oursel ves while demanding rigid affiliations . The question isn't just whether selfhood is fluid, but how much of that fluidity is organic versus algorithmically reinforced? End quote. I mean, obviously Ollie London is kind of an extreme example, but yes . But how much do you think the internet has shifted how we understand change in ourselves or others? I mean, completely. I mean, I asked my students other day, I teach a class at Emerson College on identity change and transformation. And we were talking about the internet and I asked them how many of them had taken on alternate or fake identities at some point on the internet, you know, and a lot of them had. And I think many of us have experienced playing with our identity in some way on the internet . What interests me so much is how we formulate decisions on whose transformations are true. And you know, for most of human history we really only had to convince like our families, maybe the people in the town that some change was real. And for most of human history, I mean, up until about maybe broadly like a hundred years ago, the idea that we would change for ourselves , that we would change for some true identity that's sort of hidden in us and that we need to discover , that would have been ludicrous. Most human beings changed for family , for honor , for the life coach in the sky , you know, like changed for other people . And you know, it's really only been , you know , in the last hundred years broadly that, you know, identity is a con cept that we understand it now sort of appears in the nineteen forties . It's mixed in with American ideas of reinvention and you can become anything you want to become that connected with this idea of identity , with the kind of spiritual self help movement that comes in the seventies . After working on this for six years, like the thing that's so clear to me is how much of this, yes, change is deeply personal, and it's about what we want, but we're choosing based on what's available. And we are deeply embedded in our communities. And it's not always easy to fully know , to fully distinguish what we want, from what our families want, from what strangers on the internet want . And I just became more and more convinced that interchange is really complicated and it's done in community. And that's why I talk about the pol itics of change so much in the book because so many of these changes that we do come booby trapped with cultural war politics , our little change that we think of is just very personal becomes this symbol of a larger debate that's going on in society. So there's a way in which it's becomes so complicated and people are having to worry about like how the rest of the world is going to interpret it instead of just like working through all the doubt and the fear and people have so much doubt about change that they don't express because doubt can be weaponized by other people to say, oh, your change is not really real or it's only temporary. I was really fascinated by a chapter you wrote about parole hearings in California there's a very specific performance of change that people seeking parole have to do in order to get out. What do these hearings tell you about how we evaluate change in others . Yeah, so self transformation is a team sport . We need buy in from other people . But nowhere do we see that more critically than for people convicted of murder in California. So I focused on California's parole system . And you know, I read so many transcripts. I followed the stories of two men in particular, but then also other men looking at how do we do this. So they're physical freedom depends on proving to strangers on the parole board that they are different people, that they are transformed. It's this weird brew of things that you have to do. You have to show that you understand your childhood trauma and how it affected you, but you can't blame your childhood trauma or your circumstances for what you ended up doing for the crime. You have to show the right amount of insight about your criminality, who you are. So there's a deep kind of psychological work that happens for many of these men . You also have to show obviously regret for what you did, but you cannot be racked with shame . Like we have this assumption, I think that the more shame that's on their face , the better, right? Like o,h man, they really feel sorry for what they did. When in reality and there's research that shows this , too much shame is actually really, really bad. So the parole board, they want to see just the right amount of guil t and your ability to throw your previous self under the bus . And how do we show this? Well, we show it through the work that you did, but it's also a performance, the way I speak, the way I hold myself, whether I'm crying, am I crying too much? Am I crying in the right way? There's so much stuff that goes in to this . You again have to keep the focus on yourself. And many of the men that I talked to did not , it was like it was a combination. They're like, Well, I changed because my family thought that I could and I would not have changed without them. But that's not a story you really want to tell to the parole officers because they want to believe that you changed because you deeply wanted to. And then there's the politics of it all, right? So you know, the parole board can be like, yep, you look really transformed to us and then the governor of California can say otherwise, especially if they've killed someone who's famous. It's much harder to get out. I mean also, something that you noted in the book is that like demonstrating this kind of change it doesn't work equally for all of the prisoners . Yeah, there's evidence that there are racial disparities. The California Paro Board system would say that they've actually made some changes since I did my reporting. But as an exercise, this exercise of like how do we convince people that we have transformed , I found a lot from that experience that I was able to sort of see in smaller ways outside of the prison system . One of the things you wrestle with in the book is the idea of spending time trying to change yourself for the better versus spending time on trying to change the world for the better. And you went into this history of activists from the sixties and seventies who stopped agitating outwardly and started becoming like new age spiritual believers and you know thought that if everyone just became more enlightened, we wouldn't have to deal with all the isms in the world anymore . And like, you know , that's certainly a tape. But going back to the idea of changing the self versus changing the world, there's no easy answer . I mean, it can really be maddening, right? To try to improve your own life while viewing all the suffering in the world in your country, in your city , you know, the nightmare of our politics, the threat of global warming, etc , et cetera. Like focusing on yourself can feel more doable and it's hard to feel invested in everything else if you don't feel invested in your own life . But shutting everything else out doesn't seem like the right thing either. I mean, at least not to me. I don't know, where do you land on this tension? I land on it's complicated, and I think we need to as much as we can do . We've been having this argument really since the seventies about what's selfish , what's a sign of privilege the question of how much do we focus on ourselves and transforming ourselves and how much do we focus on sort of an outer look on transforming the world and institutions ? I do think when the world becomes as it is right now unpredictable , unstable looking inward and trying to control ourselves essentially becomes one of the few things that we think we can like author and control. So I think it's quite tempting , frankly, when I talk to my students , so many of them feel powerless to change the world in a way that young people didn't ten , fifteen years ago . And so this becomes a really scary proposition, right? Like if you feel like you can't really affect the world , what do you do with that . And so I mean, people have felt that throughout history. I'm not saying that this is like a new thing, but it's a more common feeling now, I think. Our brains were not designed to take in the heartbreak and the madness of the entire world twenty four seven the way that we do . And so I think a lot of people are starting to try to figure out how can I take in and in what doses the madness the madness of the world while still being able to show up by not getting so depressed that I can still show up in my communities and show up in my families and my friendships and be the change there and do really good work there and be present for people. I think a lot of young people are doing that right now. A lot of my students said they're trying to be the change in their friend group or they're trying to be the change in their town or among people that they feel they're in relationship with and can affect. Benoit, it was a real pleasure to read your book and I'm so glad we got to have this conversation today. Thanks for having me. That was Benoit Denise Lewis, Associate Professor Emers aton College and author of the book You've Changed The Promise and Price of Self Transformation which is Out Now . This episode of Its Vitamin was produced by Liam McDaine. This episode was edited by Nina Patuk. Our supervising producer is Sheriff Vincent . Our executive producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VPA programming is Yolanda Sangueni. All right, that's all for this episode of It's Bitter Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Lewis. Talk soon