**Transcription of audio can be found at the end of this post**
Florence Williams is a journalist, author, and podcaster. Her book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, totally had me at the title.
I have been a fan of Florence Williams since I read her book, The Nature Fix, a while back. BUT when I heard that she had been writing on my favorite topic ever I lost my mind. Her book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, is everything I could ever want in a book - deeply personal vulnerable stories alongside expert understandings of what is going on throughout the body. Florence herself was taken aback when her long-time partner left her. She found herself losing weight, not sleeping, and eventually developed type 1 diabetes. She learned a lot. She tried a lot. This book is a testament to the valid pain that we all feel when our heart breaks.
I was so excited to have the chance to sit down and speak with Florence about her book and her experiences with heartbreak. If you’ve heard about how your body and mind change when you fall in love, and have always wondered why it hurt so badly to have your heart broken, this book breaks it down biologically, while following along with Florence as she experiences it all. Not to mention, in the audio version of the book you get to actually hear from her rebound. And she even taped her therapy sessions so you get to hear her go through the process in real-time. Like a friend, holding your hand as you go through the pain together.
P.s. Florence shares one of the best secrets I have heard yet!
Thanks as always for being here with me, all my best xo
Transcript:
00:00:02 Carissa
Hey everybody, thanks so much for tuning in to Bad At Keeping Secrets. I'm Carissa, and I feel so unbelievably lucky to have Florence Williams here today. She's a scientist, journalist, and memoirist. She has three books, and she's all around I would say, a conceptual artist. But I can't say that I don't have a certain amount of bias in saying that.
00:00:29 Carissa
I think most of my Graduate School work and my work thereafter has been dealing with our understanding of heartbreak and relationships and sort of the spectrum of emotion, and I feel like Heartbreak, Florence's new book, a personal and scientific journey, does just that, she melds her own heartbreak and her own story with sort of cutting edge research on how pain and emotional pain and trauma affect the body. Kind of I would say, in your own search of sort of coping with what was going on and then sort of disruption of your identity.
00:01:06 Carissa
Can you talk a little bit, Florence, about kind of what events happened in your life that sort of spur this research?
00:01:16 Florence
Sure, and thank you for having me for this conversation, and thanks for saying I'm a conceptual artist, that's like, that's such a compliment.
00:01:27 Florence
So, you know, I often my own life is what drives my curiosity to the topics that I write about. And I tend to, you know, write everything a little bit in the first person, but it's usually a very subtle first person, but when I got heart broken, it became a much bigger first person. And so the book really does kind of veer into memoir because it is by necessity, an extremely personal kind of topic that requires baring one's emotions, and I think being really vulnerable on the page, which is kind of the whole point of getting through heartbreak, is kind of owning and inhabiting your vulnerability.
00:02:14 Florence
I met the man who would become my husband when I was eighteen. It's my first day of college and we were together for 32 years until he really fell in love with someone else and that was really hard, it was really hard. I was dealing with, you know, a sense of betrayal, a sense of abandonment, the loss of the life I knew, the loss of the future that I thought I had, and a lot to deal with in terms of, like, just my self-esteem and my identity and how I was going to survive.
00:02:56 Florence
And a lot of fear, a lot of fear.
00:02:59 Carissa
I think...Well, well, thank you for sharing, obviously, I mean this is a really hard, potentially, topic to talk about. And I wanted to kind of ask you about when that sort of happened, you had done some research in the book about the sort of ways that our brains change, and sort of the symptoms around or the correlations between having like a death heartbreak in some ways being worse than a death in terms of the brain, chemicals, or chemistry changing.
00:03:33 Florence
I don't, I don't really want to sort of order one as being worse than the other.
00:03:36 Carissa
That’s fair I shouldn't have done that.
00:03:37 Florence
I mean, I think grief is, it's such an idiosyncratic emotion. It's so different for everyone, and certainly there's a lot of fear of the unknown and fear of the future and people who've lost a life partner as well, but with this kind of heartbreak, there's layered in on top of that, the sense of abandonment and sense of, yeah, the rejection someone chose someone else over you or thinks they want someone else over you.
00:04:07 Florence
And as humans, we are not, we're not very happy about being compared to other people about changes in our status. You know, we're hyper aware of our sort of standing in a group or in a couple. We're very, very hypersensitive, and our brains are designed that way because that's how we survive best, is if we are liked. If we are loved. If we can get along with other people, that's how we succeed. It's how our offspring thrive, you know, we need other people.
00:04:48 Florence
And so, when we sort of feel like we've been kicked out, it's terrifying and our bodies register that, our immune systems even, register that as being a threat to our very survival.
00:05:03 Carissa
You talked a little bit in the book about being, you had a, you were taking, I think you were having blood draws throughout the breakup in different durations. Can you talk a little bit about how the heartbreak actually affected your nervous system, immune system, and potentially genetic implications?
00:05:25 Florence
Yeah, I mean it's one of the things I often do in my sort of writing is that I find ways to kind of experiment, you know, on myself, to tell the story. And when I had heard that lonely people, of which there are many, many, many. That we know, and we've known for a long time, that people who identify as lonely have a 26% increased risk of early death, that they're much more likely to develop chronic diseases such as metabolic diseases like diabetes, such as cardiovascular diseases, metastatic cancer, even Alzheimer's and so I was interested in why, like, why was that?
00:06:15 Florence
Why does your immune system care if you're lonely? How does it know that you're lonely?
00:06:19 Carissa
Interesting to apply care to this this this system that we feel like it doesn't care, but actually does.
00:06:29 Florence
You can't really hide things from your immune system. Like somehow it knows everything. But why, like you know? And so I worked with this immunogenetics who's made it his life's work to find and identify the transcription factors, the actual different kinds of molecules that tell your immune system how to upregulate or downregulate certain types of immune cells to fight different kinds of diseases or threats.
00:07:01 Florence
And it turns out, when we're feeling lonely, our bodies pump out a lot more inflammation, and that's because we're sort of gearing up in some ways for a wound, for, for battle, for you know because our bodies and our brains feel like we've been abandoned, so now we're on our own suddenly. ‘Oh, we need a lot more. We need a lot more information.’
00:07:26 Florence
That's gonna help us in the short term if we're alone, you know, stumbling through the jungle, but it's not really gonna help us if we're A) living through a pandemic when we need not to be fighting wounds, but to be fighting viruses and you know if we're gonna face these kinds of social pains for a long time, like potentially months and months and years and years, and even decades for some people.
00:07:50 Carissa
Can you talk about how if you don't mind sharing kind of that, you thought that you knew that there was going to be emotional pain, but could you talk a little bit about the specific ways that this heartbreak affected your body?
00:08:05 Florence
Yeah, so I did. I knew it was gonna hurt emotionally. I didn't expect my body to start breaking down in the aftermath of heartbreak and.
00:08:15 Carissa
It's like a really inconvenient time.
00:08:18 Florence
It's like please can I just have my health?
00:08:23 Carissa
Yeah no.
00:08:24 Florence
No, yeah, so yeah, I mean, so again, our nervous systems get really hyper, sort of activated to prepare for threat and so things like, you know, sleeplessness like you're, you're hyper vigilant, you're looking over your shoulder waiting to be jumped, you know, by a predator.
00:08:46 Florence
So your digestion doesn't work well. You know you don't sleep well. I lost 20 pounds like right away that I did not want to lose, and I was diagnosed with diabetes. Adult onset Type 1 diabetes, which is pretty rare. Usually that's diagnosed in children. And it was part of my autoimmune system, you know, kind of responding probably to all this inflammation that my white blood cells were now putting out there.
00:09:18 Carissa
So I think I think that when I think about the sort of, not to overuse the word ‘journey,’ for feeling better, what do you think about sort of the language around heartbreak that might need a little bit of altering? Or I guess what I'm asking is, since you've tried all these different ways to kind of move through it, time being an important one, what do you think, what parts of the way that we talk about language aren't helpful or talk about heartbreak with language aren't helpful?
00:09:51 Florence
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I found so many of the metaphors actually really apt. You know, the pain metaphor is the broken heart. I mean, there actually is literally some heart break that people experience where their hearts stop pumping sometimes in the wake of this kind of grief. So the pain metaphors were very apt, I think.
00:10:11 Florence
What's a little more problematic, and this extends beyond heartbreak, is the way we talk about trauma. As being, you know, so devastating, and I think we don't spend enough time talking about how in, in some ways trauma is normal, like we're supposed to feel deeply upset when something has gone wrong. We're supposed to feel unsafe. Our bodies kind of protecting us by doing that, but on the other side of that trauma, very often there is growth.
00:10:48 Carissa
I think you talked a little bit about this in the IG Live about kind of how heartbreak in some ways has made you a better human. Could you talk a little bit about what you've learned, or how you've grown from this experience?
00:11:06 Florence
Yeah, I mean I used to be someone, I think, who was really focused on my career, focused on my kids. Even though my marriage wasn't always so fulfilling and connected, you know, after 32 years, I didn't pay a lot of attention to my heart and to ways in which maybe I was feeling like sort of hurt or sort of sad or not connected. I wasn't spending a lot of time with my emotions. It was kind of easier not to, and when you're so knocked over by something like this, you have no choice but to confront your emotions, like they are just gonna clobber you.
00:11:53 Florence
And the best thing you can do at that point is to sort of, pay attention. Like what are these emotions telling you and when I surrendered to that those deep, kind of the deep pain, and the deep suffering, I also weirdly and unexpectedly found myself being open to other emotions like to love - of my kids, or love of my friends. Like the being vulnerable made it possible for me to sort of relate and move through the world in a different way. That was weirdly fantastic and rewarding.
00:12:32 Carissa
Can you talk a little bit - I'm sorry, I'm sorry if I interrupted you a little bit - about how, in some ways it cultivates or the ability to empathize with other humans and be compassionate.
00:12:48 Florence
Well, when you've experienced your own suffering, I think it's it's easier to see it in other people and to empathize with other people going through it.
00:12:58 Carissa
I wanted to talk two more things. I want you to talk a little bit about the role of finding awe and beauty because I feel like that is a theme throughout the book. But I also wanted to, if you could talk a little bit about the sort of extras on the audio version of the book that I think are really fascinating.
00:13:19 Florence
Yeah, thank you for asking about that. As someone who's done several podcasts and has also been interested in audio work, I taped all the interviews throughout the reporting for this book, including, I kept an audio journal. I taped my therapist, I taped my best friends. I taped the sound of crows on the river you know, and the wind and the rain. And so I ended up with 200 audio files that we decided to actually layer in to the audio book. So the audio book is this kind of hybrid between a classic audio book and almost like, podcast.
00:14:02 Carissa
I think that this is this is again where I kind of feel like the conceptual artist comes in. Are you familiar with Sophie Calle’s work?
00:14:09 Florence
No, who's that?
00:14:10 Speaker 1
She's a French conceptual artist who's done a lot of work on documenting her own heartbreak. I think the piece that comes to mind was she videotaped, she decided that she was going to take a road trip with a man and this is like in the 1970s across the United States and make him fall in love with her by the end of the trip and document the whole thing. I mean I won't spoil it, but.
00:14:32 Florence
How do you spell her last name?
00:14:34 Carissa
So C-A-L-L-E, she's represented France at the Venice Biennale several times, but there's, I mean there's so many different people working in this vein, but she came to mind. But I think like the idea that the immersive nature of having these like actual reality, the sounds, I almost feel like maybe I need to have whatever you were drinking at the same time while I'm listening to it and have this like immersive experience which I feel like is really important right now when everything is virtual.
00:15:08 Florence
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think there's something about sound that creates a real intimacy with the listener or the reader. You know the emotions are so raw and, you know, in some places and they're just easy to access.
00:15:22 Carissa
Can you talk about how you actually, I mean, this takes a lot of guts, Florence to like interview your rebound.
00:15:33 Florence
It probably took more guts on his part.
00:15:37 Carissa
Pretty mutually gut involved I guess, but how was that like going back through, kind of combing through your experience and connecting these people, did you find that there was an alignment with how they experienced the events with how you remember it?
00:15:56 Florence
No, I don't think that at all. I think, you know, that's the thing about life is that you know we all are sort of governed by our own egos and our own perspectives. And as, as anyone who's written a memoir knows, or who has read a memoir written by a family member knows, you know, they're definitely different experiences by different people, even of the same events so.
00:16:22 Carissa
Yeah, it's crazy in my own life how we remember things so differently.
00:16:27 Florence
Everyone has their own story, everyone has their own story to tell.
00:16:31 Carissa
Yeah, and they're all really exciting. Florence, do you have a secret at all? Did you think at all about that question that you'd like to share? Even though this book is like the most intimate vulnerable secret that anyone could ever share.
00:16:48 Florence
All of my secrets are laid bare. I mean, you know, I, I guess, just to be even more intimate or more obvious to take one thread a little bit further. I don't talk as much, as I felt, that sex was like a very healing kind of experience for me, coming out of a long marriage, like rediscovering that part of my identity was super profound and I just hint at it in the book. But that could be a whole other conversation sometime.
00:17:23 Carissa
Recently I was interviewing someone who talked about this data behind couples. How many couples say that they're actually having sex and how much sex they're actually having through, uh, analyzing Google searches and it turns out we like lie about it, a lot. And that no one's having sex.
But I think like when I was in undergrad and when the last time I broke up, I've been in a long term relationship for 12 years now, but the I think one of the most soothing or like coping skills that really worked for me was getting back out there and was that distraction, and I think that your book is really validating because I'd never heard that that was an OK strategy. It was always just like a shitty strategy, that I was careless with other people's emotions, but actually I mean like if you're just really honest about it, and both people are consenting, I feel like it can be a really positive experience.
00:18:25 Florence
I think, you know, it's tricky, right? Because you have to feel safe. I mean, that's part of the whole point of getting over your, or getting through, you know never gonna get totally over, you know, your griefs and your losses, but you need to come to a place of safety and so if you can engage in sex in a way that feels really emotionally safe, it can be, it for me, it was really.
00:18:54 Carissa
I think the sort of cool thing to imagine is what it would feel like to be desired.
00:19:00 Florence
Yeah, that was amazing. I mean everything about it just blew my mind wide open.
00:19:06 Carissa
Well, Florence, that secret I think that's great. Can I ask you one more question? I'll make it really fast.
00:19:15 Carissa
This is in regards to sort of my own interest, but when you're writing about other people, especially sort of reflecting on other people's actions and your ex, how do you sort of marry how you talk about being authentic with your experience and your story - sorry to use the term marry.
00:19:35 Florence
[laughing] Don't use them, PTSD.
00:19:38 Carissa
Well just I think a lot of my work, it's tricky because I know that my actions affect other people and I don't want to harm them, but I also like this is how I generate the, or the content that I'm interested is the content from our lives. And do you have any sort of, how did you go about doing that, or are there any sort of? Did you have to? How did your ex feel about this?
00:20:01 Florence
Well, I, very early on let him read an early draft, and he made comments on it and requested some changes and I accommodated those. I feel like I worked really hard actually to protect him, because of my kids largely, and I feel good about that.
00:20:25 Carissa
Recently, I did some writing on that we had to terminate a pregnancy for medical reasons and It was like a really big. Like there were some people in my family that were really upset that I had written about it and felt like it was really inappropriate. But for me it reminds me of this sort of, I think Jericho Brown told me once that you can't limit your experience in pursuit of creativity and your understanding of it, because it's all we have. And I think that, I think that you do a really good job of being really sort of neutral and non-judgmental through intense pain.
00:21:10 Florence
Thank you, thank you, I've heard that when I was also when I was getting my Fine Arts degree, my -
[phone ringing]
00:21:19 Carissa
Sorry, it's funny, so I have an editor who always thinks it's funny how my mother calls during these. Every one. And I don't know how to turn it off, anyway, she’s calling now. But you were telling about your arts degree.
00:21:35 Florence
Yeah, I mean I had a teacher once who said it's OK to write about other people. But you have to be fair.
00:21:42 Carissa
I like that
00:21:43 Florence
And if you don't tell your story, if you feel like you're being censored, that's also bad for your health. So self-expression, vulnerability, showing up, all of that stuff is kind of what we need in order to be healthy and to be happy too.
00:22:03 Carissa
Yeah, well thank you so much Florence for making time to do this with me again. Everyone, I will put in the e-mail a link to get Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey. Also check out Florence's website. There will be links for the audio files that we were talking about that are really exciting and immersive, and I really appreciate this. Florence it was a really, like, page-turner. It was a novel - it was a not a novel - it read like a novel. But it actually had like, really honest deep understanding of the pain and trauma that we go through when we go through heartbreak.
00:22:43 Carissa
So thank you so much for everything that you do.
00:22:44 Florence
You're so welcome. Thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. Appreciate it.
How to actually get through heartbreak