Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

“ I think these resources are good because it gives you the language and the tools to do something that doesn’t necessarily feel right,” says Stephanie Wittels Wachs, author of Last Day. Steph also hosts a podcast by the same name and is the cofounder and CEO of Lemonada Media (the podcast network I’ve been with for the last year or so). I’m so grateful to Steph for sharing a more nuanced and compassionate perspective on addiction, and for creating a vital guide for living with addiction, for connecting with loved ones who have this disease, for saving more lives—and for evolving our culture more broadly, which is so needed. Also for the warmth and humor with which Steph does this all!

I’ve covered addiction a lot on Pulling the Thread, so I’m compiling all the resources (including Steph’s book) in the show notes on my site: eliseloehnen.com.

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Chloe Redmond Warner is a very talented interior designer—and one of my closest childhood friends. To celebrate the launch of her special book This Must Be the Place, which is about how to design a home with personality, I got to interview Chloe at Godmothers bookstore. This episode is adapted from our live conversation, in which Chloe is her usual hilarious and brilliant self. She shares some of the fun house projects she’s done over the years, including one named Little Women on Acid. We talk about the value of aesthetic intelligence; Chloe’s process of making a house feel like a home; why she forced herself to finish her degree in architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; and her theory regarding the equalness of art, architecture, and decoration.

For the show notes, head to eliseloehnen.com.
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David Epstein is a journalist and the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Inside the Box (which we’re talking about today), Range, and The Sports Gene. He tells some fascinating stories that he uncovered during his research that challenge or complicate a lot of cultural perceptions about: freedom (often, sadly, the death knell of creativity!), originality and innovation (turns out there is an optimal level of newness), famous moments of insight and breakthrough (these surprised me), and the relationship between constraints and personal satisfaction (might surprise you).

For the show notes, head to eliseloehnen.com.
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Claude Steele is a social psychologist, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, and the author of Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It. Churn refers to the stress we often feel in diverse settings in everyday life; it’s the psychological reaction to being under identity threat—which is something we can all experience based on any myriad number of identity factors. Steele explains how churn can be an insidious and debilitating force in our personal lives, and he explains why the most effective way to approach churn is by building trust in a given situation. (While obviously Steele isn’t in support of prejudices of any kind, he doesn’t think the antidote here is to eliminate prejudice—and I think you’ll find his reasoning interesting.)

For the show notes, head to eliseloehnen.com.
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If you’ve been tuning into July’s special series of sorts, thank you, and I hope you’ve also been enjoying revisiting these conversations from the archives, or maybe you’re discovering them for the first time. Today, we have a big one with Jungian analyst James Hollis, PhD, who is the author of many, many books that are incredibly meaningful to me. And this conversation still lives up to how much I love his work. I actually cried at one point during our chat, which more or less revolves around how we go about finding our soul’s vocation.

For the show notes, head to eliseloehnen.com.
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