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What would your life look like if you stopped trying to be “good” and finally allowed yourself to be whole?
If you’ve ever felt like you’re living life on someone else’s terms—constantly trying to be “good,” or palatable—this episode will change everything. I sat down with return guest Elise Loehnen, bestselling author of On Our Best Behavior and her new workbook Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, to talk about how to actually like your life, your body, and yourself. We dig into how cultural “good girl” conditioning and stories about money, envy, success, and our bodies hold us back, and how to start rewriting those scripts into ones that feel true to who you are. Elise shares powerful insights on fear, intuition, and envy—and how embracing wholeness over perfection can free us to live more authentic lives.
Key takeaways:
The trap of “goodness” vs. wholeness
Elise explains that women are conditioned to perform goodness for approval, while men are conditioned for power. This pressure to be “good” often silences what we actually want, leaving us disconnected from ourselves. Choosing wholeness instead means reclaiming agency and letting ourselves take up space, even when it risks judgment.
Envy is a compass, not a curse
Rather than dismissing envy as a negative trait, Elise reframes it as valuable information. If someone triggers you, it might be because they’re embodying something you secretly want. Instead of projecting judgment outward, use envy to guide you toward your own unspoken desires and goals.
Fear keeps us stuck in old narratives
Much of what keeps us small is rooted in three kinds of fear: loss of approval, loss of control, and loss of safety. These fears drive us to cling to outdated cultural stories—like needing to be disciplined with our bodies or silent about money—that no longer serve us. Recognizing fear for what it is is the first step to breaking free.
The importance of embodiment and intuition
Elise stresses that living disconnected from our bodies leads us to betray ourselves. By learning to check in with our physical energy—what she calls the “full body no”—we can make decisions that honor our truth instead of forcing logic to override our needs. Intuition may not always be logical, but it’s often the most accurate compass we have.
Rewriting inherited stories
Many of the limitations women face aren’t just personal—they’re inherited from mothers, grandmothers, and cultural expectations. Elise offers a practical exercise: imagine teaching a classroom of young women how to carry forward these limiting beliefs. Making those stories explicit often reveals just how absurd and harmful they are, giving us the power to finally reject them.
Sustaining wholeness despite backlash
Whether it’s losing followers, facing criticism, or enduring professional setbacks, living authentically doesn’t mean avoiding consequences. Elise emphasizes that part of the work is holding steady when challenged, seeing rejection as redirection, and recognizing that the discomfort of authenticity is still better than betraying yourself.
Notable quotes
“Women are conditioned to perform their goodness in the world. Men are conditioned for power. But because women are conditioned to perform their goodness, we’re incredibly susceptible to reputational harm.”
“Envy isn’t something to push away—it’s a signal. It’s your soul saying: pay attention, this person has something you want.”
“Can you actually say what you want? Most of us cannot. We have subjugated what we want to other people’s needs for our entire lives.”
Elise’s Links:
Website: https://www.eliseloehnen.com/
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Meet Elise
Elise Loehnen is a writer, editor, and podcast host who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Rob, and their two sons, Max and Sam. She is the host of Pulling the Thread, a podcast focused on pulling apart the stories we tell about who we are—and then putting those threads back together. Ultimately Elise is a seeker and synthesizer, braiding together wisdom traditions, cultural history, and a deep knowledge of healing modalities to unlock new ways to contextualize who we are and why we’re here. She’s also the author of the instant New York Times bestseller On Our Best Behavior (Dial Press/PRH)—and the co-author of the workbook follow-on, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming the Full Self. The book weaves together history, memoir, and cultural criticism to explore the ways patriarchy lands in the bodies of women and embeds itself in our consciousness—and what we then police in ourselves and in each other. With awareness, we can begin to recognize these patterns of self-restriction, break the story, and move ourselves and each other toward freedom and balance. Elise is a frequent contributor to Oprah, and has written for The New York Times, Elle Decor, Stylist, and
more.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Right now you are living your life by everybody else’s rules and it’s holding you back. In today’s episode, we are talking with previous guest, Elise Loehnen, about her new workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness.
Elise Loehnen:
Can you actually say what you want? Most of us cannot. We have subjugated what we want to other people’s needs for our entire lives, and that has what’s been modeled for us by our mothers and our grandmothers and our aunts and our friends.
Tori Dunlap:
This workbook, alongside her previous book, On Our Best Behavior, are life-changing. And I say that not in hyperbole. It’s so incredible.
Elise Loehnen:
I have learned how to bring my body into decision-making in a way that has kept me from betraying myself.
Tori Dunlap:
In this conversation, we’re talking about how to stop believing the scripts that were handed to you by society, by your family, and instead start writing your own.
Elise Loehnen:
So many of us are conditioned to be like envy is gross and malicious and I don’t envy anything. In my experience, men are much more capable of being like I’m envy of that prick. But for women, it’s not conscious. We don’t let it come up so that we can even say, oh, I’m jealous.
Tori Dunlap:
Elise and I dig into how to good girl conditioning shapes our entire lives, but also the stories we tell ourselves about money, success, relationships, our bodies, and power, and how you can edit those narratives into something entirely yours.
Elise Loehnen:
Women are conditioned to perform their goodness in the world. Men are conditioned for power. But because women are conditioned to perform their goodness, we’re incredibly susceptible to reputational harm.
Tori Dunlap:
If you’ve been feeling stuck in a role that you never auditioned for, this conversation is for you. Let’s get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors. Elise, welcome back to the show. What does it look like when a woman embraces wholeness instead of goodness?
Elise Loehnen:
I think we would see women occupying more space in our culture, being themselves, not spending energy trying to regulate how they show up in the world. I think most of us spend a lot of our precious energy trying to perform to cultural standards unfortunately. So I think we would see, women are already amazing, I think we would see even more fully expressed amazing women in the world, and I think our culture would start to change really dramatically really quickly.
Tori Dunlap:
I am such an admirer of your work, you know this. Last time you came on the show, I literally told you and still believe I wish I had thought of that because it’s just so good. You talk about the seven deadly sins, envy, pride, gluttony, et cetera, actually get projected onto women to keep us small. While you were writing, was there one sin or story that you were personally dealing with or had the hardest time letting go of?
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think that as people have worked through the book, and this is feedback I hear all the time, they open a chapter and they’re like, ah, money or ah, sex, not really my thing, only to discover, oh yeah, it is my thing. And what I find as I do this work, because doing it right alongside all of the readers in an ongoing way throughout my life, to be honest, I am going deeper and deeper into the onion. So as I peel back the first layer of stories that I have about my body and food or money and is it based and unspiritual and bad to want more of it, et cetera, I come to even deeper and deeper stories.
So first I would say the fastest one for me to access was gluttony because I think that’s the one that’s most obvious and most pronounced in our culture. This will shock no one. A good body is a body that’s disciplined and as small as possible and conforming and all of those things. We know this. This is still to this day held out to us as a gesture of our value. And then I would say the one really that’s the most difficult for me to this day is greed. I just have so many stories about scarcity and having too much and not wanting to create any bit of inequity in my life ever that I’m still doing work on greed to this day.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re in the right place.
Elise Loehnen:
I know.
Tori Dunlap:
No, I was like-
Elise Loehnen:
Let’s just do a coaching session, Tori. Just fix me.
Tori Dunlap:
Amazing. No, but I feel the same way where even as a money expert, there are still hang-ups that I have around money, let alone all of the rest of them. I think something you just said sparked it for me, especially with gluttony, and again, one of the sins you talk about, of yeah, how do you have a disciplined relationship with your body? How do you have the flattest ass but also the flattest abs? And how do you make sure that you don’t indulge in anything? And the thing I wrote down as you were talking about that is shape-shifting. I think we sometimes get smart about these sins and their impact on our lives, like oh yeah, when I do ask for more money and they tell me to just be grateful, that’s stupid. Or okay, we’re going to be body positive or body neutral, but then there’s this thing that comes up. It’s like the GLP-1 thing. It always shape-shifts into something new. So can we talk briefly about what happens when we do get wise onto one of these sins? How is the patriarchy or white supremacism or whatever we’re talking about start shape-shifting to continue surviving?
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. I mean it just keeps occupying space in our minds, I think. So we abandon or we maybe grow out of one story and then we pick up another one. And I think that underneath all these stories… Because that’s a really good question. Why do we have these stories about what it is to be a good woman and why do we keep them going and keep giving them energy in our lives? And the reality is is that they cover up a lot of very understandable fear. And not only are we built for fear as humans biologically, this is one of the energies that has kept us alive, but in our current culture, our fear is just stoked all the time.
And it’s sort of these three buckets of fear. I’d say fear of loss of approval, which is a huge one for women. If you’re excommunicated, if you don’t belong, if you stand out from the crowd, you lose the protection of the people. It’s like again, biologically hardwired in us that exclusion equals death. So there’s fear of loss of approval. And I would say for women who are trying to move past this and put this stuff down and move on, it requires standing apart from other women often. And there is a strong instinct of pulling the crab back into the bucket when we see a woman who is like I’m not participating, I’m out of here. It’s like, how dare you?
Tori Dunlap:
Tall poppy.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah, tall poppy. How is she getting away with that? She’s too big for her britches. Why her and why not me? This is a big part of the chapter on envy. The other buckets of fear are fear of loss of control, and then of course fear of loss of safety and security, which is the biggest kahuna of them all. So we keep these stories going because we’re convinced that if we let them go, in some way, we will die. And that looks like not being lovable, not being valued, et cetera. So it sounds crazy, but once you dig deeper into them, you’re like, oh, that’s the fear. I do everything…
So in the sloth chapter, one of my stories is I’m the only one who can do it right, so I should do it all. This is a story a lot of women have. When I sit with that story and I say what’s the underlying fear, why do I do this, there’s huge payoffs for me, by the way, Tori, in my life and career. I’ve gotten really far being the only one who can do it right, so I should do it all. It’s also exhausting. I can’t keep going without accepting support.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s not sustainable.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah, not sustainable. But it’s gotten me really far, major payoffs. The underlying fear, which is so sad, is fear of loss of approval. Why would anyone want me to be around if I’m not making everything easy? Would my husband still love me if I didn’t make his life so nice and turnkey? He’s not suggesting this, by the way, but this is what I’ve been swimming in since birth like many of us. I have to be useful. I have to be in service. I have to take care of everything so that people want me to be around.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s all about control, right?
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
All roads lead back to control, both control of the unknown, but also the outside forces trying to control us.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Not a question. But that’s what it comes down to for me, of like something that I encountered every time I was doing research and writing my book, and every time we do this show is it’s like the reason society does not want women to have money is they become uncontrollable when they do. The reason society does not like women to like themselves and be okay in whatever body they’re in is control. All roads lead to control.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like the lash of this fear of loss of approval, this is like a lash that we’re hit with. I don’t know how many people are conscious of it. It’s just the patriarchy in action and we respond. The fear response gets triggered and we respond in kind. And yes, certainly women who don’t need the protection of men, definitely harder to control. Women who… I mean it’s so obvious, and yet I think so many of us get so mad at ourselves for participating in this. How can I be so stupid? Why am I doing this? Why is this in my head? There are very good reasons that these stories are in our head. And these stories in some ways have kept us safe and they don’t serve us anymore and it’s time to put them down.
Tori Dunlap:
You were mentioning fear. I think we talked about this last time as well. It’s something I have spent a lot of time thinking about and reading about, that so much of this fear is lizard brain stuff from the caveman days of if I leave my cave or eat berries from a bush that I haven’t already eaten, I literally could die. This literally is life or death. And now the fear is not the berry bush, it’s getting canceled on social media or having our parents or our friends disapprove of our work or I don’t know, insert thing here. And we were having this conversation very briefly off mic before we started, of even the tools that we use every day live and breathe on fear. Social media, YouTube, the algorithm lives on fear and on scarcity and on trying to protect yourself by ostracizing other people. So it’s not only we’re battling our own brains, we’re battling the larger systemic issues. But just I’m trying to scroll on TikTok to tune out, and yet I’m encountering 12 different things I have to worry about now. Can we chat about that for a little bit? How do we navigate that?
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. It’s so insidious. It’s funny because now I feel like I’m just actively trying to train my algorithm in the opposite direction. It’s like I just send people really wonderful pet adoption stories and funny marriage memes. I send them to my husband just to try and get more of that in my feed because I don’t want to be click baited.
Tori Dunlap:
Do you watch CBS This Morning? Do you ever watch this? Or not This Morning.
Elise Loehnen:
Sometimes.
Tori Dunlap:
Sunday Mornings. Do you ever watch this?
Elise Loehnen:
Sometimes, yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
So my parents love it. And I confess because I don’t have cable, I don’t watch it all that often. But they’ve been doing this for 40 years. And the last two minutes is silent nature.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Have you ever seen it?
Elise Loehnen:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
And every time I see it, I literally feel my shoulders shrink down on my back and my nervous system resets. And that’s what I feel like I need on TikTok is just like give me, I don’t know, bumblebee on a flower for two minutes.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes. Well, I think we all need to reprogram not only our algorithms, but our relationship to fear. Because I think the other thing that happens culturally, I just did an episode on this on my podcast too, is that we feel, particularly with everything that’s happening around us, which is truly terrifying, it feels like end of times and biblical and every day it’s like what new disaster is unfolding on the world stage that I need to pay attention to in this attention economy. And this is a different version of goodness, but I think that many of us think if I want to be a good citizen here, if I want to stand up for what’s right, I need to not only be paying attention to all of this, but I need to vibrate, I need to match the energy of the moment, and I need to have loyalty to the fear and anxiety that people who are being kidnapped off the street by ICE are feeling in order to be a good person. And that’s not right. That’s the story. I get it. It gets me too. But we have got, particularly at this moment in time when we are being hijacked left, right, and center, both energetically and physically, we have got to learn how to manage our fear and to not pay loyalty to the anxiety.
Because that’s the primary tactic of this administration, is how do I scare people? Masked ICE agents. It’s out of a playbook, literally. It’s like I’m going to go and terrorize people like on Halloween every single day. And we are playing into the hands of this administration by letting our nervous systems be taken over. And so part of it is like, okay, I do not have to be loyal to this moment. I’m going to go watch two minutes of nature on CBS Sunday Morning. I’m going to go outside, I’m going for a walk, I’m putting down my phone. And what I tell myself is the more present and embodied I can be, the more I can manage myself, the less I’m projecting my fear onto other people and the less I’m exacerbating the overall atmosphere and the more I can take on from other people by staying clear, stable, grounded.
And I think the other thing that happens quite frankly and why we get burned out is there’s this idea that awareness is enough right now, that we all just need to be hyper aware. Well, it’s just flipping out our hypervigilance truly, action over awareness. And so I think it’s incumbent on all of us, pick your thing, titrate your news. I love Jessica Yellin who does News Not Noise. And titrate it. Let her distill what’s important and that you need to pay attention to. Team up with friends even, like you take this, you take that, I’ll take this. Take some action. That’s sort of the only thing that we can do. Write a letter, et cetera. But the awareness that we’re all being spurred to offer is just burning us out and getting all of our fear stories going.
Tori Dunlap:
LOLs at me mentioning CBS and then us talking about Trump. So whoopsie on that one.
Elise Loehnen:
Sorry. Have you banned him from the show?
Tori Dunlap:
Trump? Well, yeah. No, CBS. I know when Survivor comes back on, I’m going to have an interesting moral conundrum. No, but I think we’ve all heard that. And I want everybody to go back five minutes and listen again because I do think it is so hardwired of I see horrible things happening in Gaza or ICE raids, and so it’s like I have to suffer along with them in order to feel better about the privilege I do have in my life. And I’m like, that doesn’t actually help. That doesn’t make anything better. It only makes you better. It centers you, when that’s not what we’re trying to accomplish. It makes you feel better about other people’s suffering because you feel like I have to play victim, I have to suffer.
Elise Loehnen:
Right. Yes. And there’s a very human need to also put ourselves in the middle of whatever is happening. And it’s like no. Actually imagine that you’re a washing machine. This is an image that I use that may resonate with people. Or people might be like you’re so weird, lady, stop talking. But I just think of it as how much can I launder? How much can I move though my body and move out and ground versus contributing to what’s already present? I don’t go and yell at people online. Don’t feed it. Turn it down as much as you can. Take the volume down because-
Tori Dunlap:
Don’t put tennis shoes in the washer.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. But fear is not our friend. And we’re scared even though we don’t really know how to recognize it most of the time. And it’s good to just know that. It’s okay I’m scared. This story serves me because I’m scared. It’s okay.
Tori Dunlap:
We’re talking about fear and also by extension we kind of get into power with that. You’ve said that you tried to blame men for the lack of women in power like for Hillary losing, for women being underrepresented in the media, for Kamala losing. And then you realize, oh God, part of this is me. How do we hold both things at once? Yes, system sucks, but am I playing a role in upholding that system? I’m so excited to have Elise back in the show. And gosh, does she pack a punch every time she’s here. When we come back, Elise answers my question about having awareness around facing our own complicity in an oppressive system and how we can recognize when we’re being driven by fear and envy. And the most important part, how to change the script to live more truthful and fulfilling lives. Stay tuned.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes. Okay. So before I get into that, I just want to offer this quote that’s not mine, it’s from this man, John O. Powell I want to say. He’s a professor who runs the division of othering. And it is that we need to become much better in our culture at being hard on systems and structures and soft on people. We’re really good at being hard on people and soft on structures and systems. So I just want to say that as sort of a general tent, because that was such an unlock for me. And I think typically the tendency is like, who can I beat up? Who is responsible and where can I find my certainty and land my punches?
Tori Dunlap:
Well, a system doesn’t have a customer service number.
Elise Loehnen:
No, it doesn’t.
Tori Dunlap:
Or an Instagram inbox. Patriarchy doesn’t have something I can yell at, but I can yell at this particular person who I have decided is the problem today.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes, yes. And so when I started working on this book and I was, like all of us, throwing around words like patriarchy, I was like, wait, hold on. What is the patriarchy? Where did it come from? When did it start? Is it a foregone conclusion? Isn’t it a foregone conclusion? Oh, no, it’s actually not that old. And then I went to, well, who’s responsible for the patriarchy? And is it Mitch McConnell? Is it Trump? Who’s running this thing? And I was like, oh, nobody is running this thing. It’s like Oz. But it is a system that was set in place that we, all of us continued to perpetuate and enforce and see as the way things are and therefore the way things will always be. So that was my first aha was, oh wait, we’ve imbibed this as fact, but it’s really a story. It’s really something that we’re maintaining with our own energy.
And I also was like, it’s fun to blame a bunch of men, and there are certainly a lot of men who have not only benefited from the patriarchy, but work really, really hard to uphold it. There are also a lot of women. And then there are a lot of women like you and like me who claim that we don’t like this system, and yet we’re also participating in maintaining it in the way that we treat ourselves and treat other women and treat men. So there’s a big responsibility taking that needs to happen of I don’t like this and I choose something else, and I am going to actively choose something else every single day. And we all know change is hard, it’s really hard. And everything, all the energy wants us to pull us back into a status quo. But it just takes this conscious, deliberate effort. Why am I shitting on this other woman? What is she doing that I want? Or what does she have that I want? The reason that I’m judging her, is that valid or is she just making me uncomfortable because she’s breaking code? You obviously experience this all the time, Tori. Right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yep.
Elise Loehnen:
All the time. So that’s the sort of self-inquiry that we all need to take on as our responsibility if we’re going to make something different happen.
Tori Dunlap:
Talk me through what that actually looks like in practice. Can I do a little case study thought to thought to thought? So we’re going to use me. Okay, we’re going to pick on me. My post comes up in your Instagram feed and I’m talking about being a multimillionaire and how I want to be rich. What happens in your brain and body in reaction to that that upholds the patriarchy? And what do I then have to do in my brain and body to work through that emotion without going to the comments and being like, ew, gross.
Elise Loehnen:
Ew, gross. So recognizing. So first of all, when that comes up, and I know you get this all the time, the energy that’s arising is ew, gross. Who does she think she is? How dare she? Why her and why not me? This isn’t all necessarily conscious. It’s just you’re doing something that’s making, I’ll say it’s me, making me deeply uncomfortable. I would never let myself do that. How are you getting away with that? Money is gross and base and you’re not supposed to want more of it. I mean, I have a million stories how like you’re supposed to take all of your wanting for more money and bury it under a desire to save the world. What are you doing? You’re violating all of my feelings about what a good woman says about money. And you’re talking about it, Tori. Gross. We don’t talk about money in polite society.
So that’s what’s happening. But what happens is when someone makes us feel bad, this is the classic projection. This is like Jungian shadow projection work. When someone is making us feel uncomfortable, our instinct isn’t to say what’s happening in me, what is being activated in me, it’s to say that person is bad, they need to go away. So that’s what you are experiencing in your comments. There’s something that you’re doing that the people who are responding to would never allow themselves to do and so they need you to go away because you are making them feel bad. And I write about this a lot in envy because I think because it’s envy really at its root, and so many of us are conditioned to be like envy is gross and malicious and I don’t envy anything, that we just, we’re not conscious. In my experience, men are much more capable of being like I’m envy of that prick. I want that. I’m going to get that. But for women, it’s not conscious. We don’t let it come up so that we can even say, oh, I’m jealous, I’m envious. I want that.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, because also feelings are very unbecoming for women, just having an emotion that isn’t happiness all the time. Yeah.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes. Anything that’s bad, that we code as bad, instead of what it is to be a good woman goes into the shadow trash bag for sure and then gets projected onto other people. She’s a slut. Why is she wearing that dress? I don’t want to see that. That’s all the same process. Why does she think we want to look at her body? It’s not a good body. That’s the same thing that we’re talking about.
Tori Dunlap:
So that happens where somebody has those emotions. How do they work through them in a way that is helpful and healthy? What questions are they asking themselves? I think one is like, yeah, do I actually want this thing? Am I targeting this person because they’re showing me what I want and what is possible? What are other questions or things that we can help work through?
Elise Loehnen:
All right. So the minute that this starts happening in you, whether it’s about money or someone’s body, it could be in any sphere, someone being lazy, someone on vacation with their… Whatever it is, when you start having that feeling, I don’t like this, this is rubbing me the wrong way, you could call it feeling triggered, sometimes I just want to say you can always tell based on your reaction, it’s either informing you or it’s like activating you. If it’s informing you, it’s very… If I see a post from Marjorie Taylor Greene, I’m not envious of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Usually I’m like, that’s-
Tori Dunlap:
Right. I’m pissed off.
Elise Loehnen:
… that’s so mean. That’s so horrible. It’s easy to understand what that is. I’m not envious of Marjorie Taylor Greene. But if you’re having a reaction to Tori, for example, most likely it’s your envy. And then you catch yourself and you say… This is how, honestly, Tori, how I ended up leaving my job, starting my own podcast, starting to write my own books after ghostwriting for, I think I’d ghostwritten 12 books for other people, standing behind brands, was hearing myself. It’s shameful to admit it, but hearing myself being like I don’t like that book. Why is her podcast so successful? I don’t like her. Why do people think she’s so great? Okay. So this is my own example. And then arresting-
Tori Dunlap:
I have a million examples on my own as well. I know we’re using me as I guess a quasi victim in this, but I’ve done this to a million other women as well. This is so normalized.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. And you get it all the time, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I mean, I’m often on the receiving end, but I could give you two moments from two weeks ago that I have had these feelings about a woman presenting herself in a certain way. Yes.
Elise Loehnen:
Getting away with something, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Elise Loehnen:
When you recognize it and you’re like, then you can arrest it and say… It’s honestly, all it takes is knowing, looking for this. And watching your friends, do it with your friends. When they start doing it, being like, okay, wait, wait, wait, stop, stop, stop. What’s happening here? What is happening here? Because there’s really good information for you. There’s something here that you want for yourself or she’s doing something that you want to do. So you stop it and you say, okay, what’s happening? Then you say, oh, it’s because I want to write a bestselling book. I want to host my own podcast. This is my soul.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to wear a bikini.
Elise Loehnen:
I want to wear a bikini without feeling self-conscious. I want to have an easy relationship with money and make a lot more of it. I don’t want everything to feel so hard. I want that level of effortless wealth, or whatever it is. As you start interrogating it and investigating it, you say, oh, I understand. This is my soul saying pay attention. This person has something that I want. I need to use this to guide my life forward. It’s showing me what I want. And most women, I mean, I ask everyone listening to do this exercise, can you actually say what you want? Most of us cannot.
Tori Dunlap:
Most of us can’t. Yeah.
Elise Loehnen:
No. We have subjugated what we want to other people’s needs for our entire lives, and that has what’s been modeled for us by our mothers and our grandmothers and our aunts and our friends. And so when I do this exercise with women, what do you want? What do you really, really want? We start in one corner of the football field and end up, I don’t know how many yards are in a football field, but we end up a hundred yards down the line. We’re so far away from what they can first even say because they just don’t even, they won’t allow themselves to even know what they want.
Tori Dunlap:
It makes me teary when you talk about all of the women before us, because I mean, this has been going on since the dawn of time, but when you make it personal of what did our mothers want versus what did their life look like? What did our grandmothers want versus what their lives look like? And there’s hopefully listeners out there who have women in their lives who go unabashedly for the things that they want, even if that is not socially acceptable. I have some of that, but I don’t have all of that. And that’s the thing that breaks my heart is when I see it with another woman, especially related to me or close to me, and then that leads me to think about myself. If I can feel that way of hoping that women I care about actually figure out what they want, not what their parents want or their spouse wants or society wants for them, but what do they actually want, why wouldn’t you hope that for yourself too.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. Isn’t it? It’s so deep. And I have two thoughts. One, I think that what you’re naming is why, and hopefully there aren’t any #tradwives listening who will take offense, but that’s why-
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t think so.
Elise Loehnen:
That’s why this movement I think is so offensive. It’s like, yes, you can certainly live an off-grid life and garden and all of these things are beautiful, but to sort of want to roll back. I mean, I’m from my dad’s South African, my mom is from poor farmers in Iowa. I would not want, I don’t think that that’s what my great-grandmother wanted for me. Let me tell you.
Tori Dunlap:
Elise, I also get it though. Because we’re in this hyper consumption hustle, capitalistic culture, it feels good to be taken care of. It feels good to say, oh, I’m not going to participate. But as soon as you dig in further, you’re like, okay, but you’re handing over agency. You’re not being taken care of, you’re handing over total and complete agency to somebody else. And by the way, the only reason we know trad wives exist is they’re all on the internet making money. You’re saying I don’t have-
Elise Loehnen:
Great point.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m not managing my own money. I stay at home with my children, which again is fine. My mom is a stay at home mom. But you are making money talking about this lifestyle on the internet. You are making money selling your raw milk on the internet. So it doesn’t work. But I understand the idea of it, which is we’re all so deeply tired and burned out that we just want to be held and taken care of for just two seconds.
Elise Loehnen:
Trust me. Listen, I’m from Montana. I have my fantasies about moving home and having a simpler life. I don’t have any illusions about how hard it is to live in Montana during the winter. But yeah, so okay. But trad wives aside, with on our best behavior, and then there’s this workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, that’s coming out with the paperback, and one of the tools is exactly this. And I love this one because essentially once you’ve figured out what these stories are, let’s say we’re talking about money, you shouldn’t want more money, it’s base to want more money, whatever it is, whatever the opposite of what you are teaching in the world is, Tori, women shouldn’t talk about money, the tool, which I think anyone can do at any time, is to go into a woman’s college and to teach a class. And we actually ask you to do this in the workbook, to teach a class of 18 to 22-year-old women how to make sure that this story for them is also true.
So let’s say the story is, my story is like polite girls don’t talk about women. So I go and you create a little syllabus, we’ll guide you through creating this syllabus. And then you go and you take the story that you’re carrying around about women and money and you teach the next generation how to make sure that that story is true for them too. And as you do it, and it’s funny and you make it really big, but you just start to realize, it becomes more obvious like, oh, this is what we’re passing on to each other. This is the contagion that we’re spreading through nice girls don’t talk about money. Which when you’re teaching a class, it’s like, okay, make sure you marry a man who takes complete control of the finances. You want to be sure that you don’t know anything about mortgages or how to get one. You don’t want to really understand interest rates. While we’re at it, make sure you don’t-
Tori Dunlap:
You don’t manage your financial plan.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. You don’t have your accountant’s information. You have no idea how much money you have. That’s definitely how you want to live your life.
Tori Dunlap:
Make sure your credit card is not in your name.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, this is such an interesting. I’m like, what would I say? Yeah, make sure your credit card’s not in their name. Make sure that he gives you an allowance and you cannot overspend that allowance or you are punished in some way. Like wow, yeah.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. Definitely. That’s a good point. But I mean, you could do this all day. But when you do it and you’re like this is what I am living, this is what I’m holding as a story about my life, is this what you want to teach your niece and your daughter and your friend’s daughter? Is this what we want to be passing on? But that’s what we’re doing. And when you make it really obvious, it’s like, oh, shit. No, I refuse. I think for many women, it’s hard to do this work for ourselves because again, we’re trained to be selfless. But when you think about it in that context of this is what I’m teaching my kids and this is what I’m teaching other girls and other boys, it’s like, okay, not today. Now I feel emboldened to stop this.
Tori Dunlap:
And yeah, we are being a little dramatic or making it all about men’s control over women’s finances, which is a part of this. But it could also look like if you’re bad with money, it means you’re a bad person. Or if you’re bad with money, you have no hope in fixing it. Just like if you’re bad at French or playing the piano, you will never, ever get better. We know that’s not true. You have to practice. You have to practice playing piano. And it will be uncomfortable, but you will get better. It’s the same thing with money. But again, I think we talked about this last time as well, that we feel like if we failed, we’re a failure. It becomes part of the identity as opposed to just a neutral statement, which is I’m not good with money right now. Not I’m bad with money forever or I can never get better with this. It is a DNA trait inside. It’s just like, you know what? I’m not very good with money right now, but I can get better. I can learn.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes. It’s like the season of great divorce memoirs right now. Maybe it’s always that season. But Jen Hatmaker has Awake coming out this fall. There’s another book called Strangers coming out, this woman, Belle Burden, who wrote this viral modern love column over COVID about her husband just coming home and leaving and being like, “You take the kids.” But in all of these memoirs, one of the themes is, and Jen writes about it in a hilarious way, she had no idea, not a single iota of a clue about what was happening in her financial life. And it’s a good read. It’s a great, great book. But it’s just a good cautionary tale. To your point, obviously people who are engaging with you probably have taken the first step towards managing their money, but many of us are scared to, and until we get sort of that brutal wake-up call. And there are no spoilers here, but Jen was like, “Learning how to manage my money was the greatest thing for my 46th year of life.” But it’s common obviously, otherwise, I mean, you have a robust business because, man.
Tori Dunlap:
I hope someday I don’t. I would love to be out of a job at some point. Also, we need to have Jen on the show. That’s incredible. I didn’t know if she said that. Can we talk about… We’re talking about money. I think the gluttony is a, and gluttony and envy I think are two easy ones to kind of pinpoint, which is again, skinny at all costs. And then if I don’t like this person, it’s probably because I’m envious. How does this show up in other things like pride I’m thinking of?
Elise Loehnen:
Pride.
Tori Dunlap:
Pride is, yeah, probably the big one.
Elise Loehnen:
Pride.
Tori Dunlap:
So maybe let’s talk about that for a second.
Elise Loehnen:
Let’s talk about pride because it’s somewhat in a Venn diagram with envy and scarcity, which is… And I know some people make this connection, but not enough of us make the connection between what happens to highly visible women in our culture and the way that we celebrate their invariable, inevitable takedown. I really worked hard to find examples for the book, Tori, of women who have endured without being, quote, unquote, put back in their place. But most-
Tori Dunlap:
Can you name one? Did you get to… I was trying-
Elise Loehnen:
The only person is Meryl Streep. I mean, not the only one, but she’s an example of someone who sort of goes away and then she comes out and launches her book or next movie and then she goes away. And because she doesn’t chase any relevancy, she’s not visible, I don’t even know if she’s on social media, she has managed to keep herself safe from what I can tell.
Tori Dunlap:
I might be able to debunk that one. I’m sorry.
Elise Loehnen:
Oh, there you go. See?
Tori Dunlap:
I think she’s a very good, she’s the closest I could have gotten. But she tells a story about early in her career, she was basically told she was not pretty enough to be an actor. Because she has kind of a longer nose, that she would have to basically change her face in order to be successful. And it didn’t matter how good of an actor she was, she had to be more palatable. She had to be more conventionally attractive. But again, early, I think in her early 20s. I think that’s part of it too, is just I think we all have an older woman we admire who just doesn’t give a goddamn fuck. And so that’s what we’re talking about here. But how do we start it when we’re 25? How do we start it when we’re 40, not when we’re 65 and wearing whatever we want?
Honestly, it’s a really fascinating exercise to try and think about a powerful woman and try to find one that didn’t get knocked down a peg. A little humbling to think about. When we come back, we’re talking about the stories we tell ourselves and how those narratives are keeping us from living our fullest lives. We’ll see you after the break.
Elise Loehnen:
Well, I think in the context of pride, which is the way that we come for women with pitchforks. And women come for women too. Let me be clear, this isn’t about men shooting them out of the sky. This is often women on women hate. It’s like, again, being conscious of it and being like what’s happening here? Why am I so excited that Billie Eilish I just saw got in trouble for talking about being Irish or something? I don’t know. It’s like the latest cultural shenanigans of just like she’s had enough goodness, let’s put her down. But it doesn’t just happen to famous women. It happens to all of us in our lives all the time. There’s sort of a cap on what women can achieve, how much they can be seen and celebrated before we decide we’re done, they’re annoying. And I think that we all need to be super conscious of this pattern in order to break it. We do not do this to men. They do not run out their relevancy curves in the same way at all. There are a few men obviously, but they generally have to do something legitimately bad, whereas women aren’t doing… What’s the crime?
Tori Dunlap:
Being there. Taylor Swift on a jumbotron is somehow the worst thing in the entire world versus pick a male celebrity who has been courtside, Timothy Chalamet. I know because I follow him obsessively. He was like courtside at fucking every single Knicks game in the playoffs. Did people get sick of him? No. They were like, what a Knicks fan he is. Yay, go him.
Elise Loehnen:
Yay for Timothy. Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
He loves his home team. Versus Taylor Swift supporting her boyfriend, ew, gross.
Elise Loehnen:
Oh, gross. Go away, Taylor Swift. So part of it is just being conscious of what’s happening here, which is that women are not allowed. Again, it goes to the very beginning of our conversation, standing apart is dangerous, excelling. Yeah, tall poppy in the poppy field, bad. So the more we… And that is in us, we’re very conscious, rightly so. I need to be very careful about how much I’m putting myself out there, how much public sex, yes, but public success I achieve because people are going to come for me. It’s like an invariable thing. I will say, and I write about her in Choosing Wholeness, but one example of a woman in our space who I use almost as exposure therapy for this is Kara Swisher because she flexes no one’s business.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, she does.
Elise Loehnen:
She just flexes all over the place and it makes me-
Tori Dunlap:
She name-drops like crazy.
Elise Loehnen:
Name-drops, access journalism, et cetera. And Scott gives her. He is also flexy. I’m much more tolerant of it from him. But I listen to them, I mean, I love Pivot, but also as exposure therapy because I spend the time being like, this is making me uncomfortable, Kara, stop bragging, stop bragging, as a way to just be present with myself and to recognize what’s happening in me in that moment. And she doesn’t give a fuck. And that’s another good example of our culture where women are conditioned to perform their goodness in the world. Men are conditioned for power. But because women are conditioned to perform their goodness, we’re incredibly susceptible to reputational harm. All you have to do is say a woman is bad, and then we usually take ourselves out. It’s just so uncomfortable. But Kara doesn’t care. And so in that way, she’s a great example of someone who just keeps going. She doesn’t give a shit. And so as much as we can embody that energy and use her as a persona, it’s good for us. Go and brag a little bit. Go and just practice. Do it with your friends. Just brag to each other. It’s so uncomfortable, Tori, and yet we all need to practice.
Tori Dunlap:
You want to hear mine?
Elise Loehnen:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Bragging is I don’t have a problem with that.
Elise Loehnen:
Good.
Tori Dunlap:
It will shock no one to hear that I have big tits. And I only discovered I had big tits seven years ago. And I didn’t know because I was always taught to cover up and taught to not wear anything too revealing and to not basically dress my body type. And a woman I follow, she’s very famous, I’ll say it. I’ve never told this to her. I think it’s Noelle Downing. Have you seen this woman? Similar size to mine. They’re out all the time, all the time. And not in a way that is like OnlyFans, purposely provocative. It’s just like I’m on a trip in France with my child and my husband. I’m wearing a dress that I want to wear. I happen to have bigger boobs, so they’re just out. And a couple years ago, I was following and I was seeing so much boob and it made me uncomfortable and I unfollowed her because I was like she’s showing off and sexualizing herself.
Now, I grew up Catholic. Again, I grew up with you do not dress like this. And then I got more comfortable with my own body because of course it was me. Of course it was me being like I feel deeply uncomfortable with this because I feel like it’s wrong or bad or it’s drawing attention to yourself or it’s asking for it. And as soon as I started uncoupling that belief with the way my body looked, I literally started following her again. And I realized I hadn’t followed her for a while. So started following her again probably six months, a year ago when I got more comfortable with that because I was like this challenges this feeling I have that I grew up with, that society tells me. And now you’ll see on Instagram, the titties are out all the time for me.
Elise Loehnen:
I love your boobs, just for the record.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you. Thank you. They’re so heavy, dude. And I thought about cutting them off, but that’s a story from another time. But it was literally like, okay, the bragging thing, whatever, talking about money, those things have never truly made me uncomfortable, but this is one thing that did. And I saw another woman doing something that I thought was scandalous or bad, or again, asking for it, calling attention to herself. She was just existing. Her boobs happen to be big. And in society we have conflated busty women with male desire. And it’s like that is a socialization. That is a social construct. And as soon as I realized that that was what was triggering me and unpacked it, my life got better.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah, no, but it’s so the first step is just consciousness. It’s just that. It’s like, oh, I can actually take a breath and recognize what’s happening in me. And then can I get more comfortable with this? And it will show up as you become… Honestly, whenever I get upset… I do this with one of my best friends, Sarah, who’s my neighbor, and we walk all the time. It’s like we diagnose each other. It’s like, Sarah, what’s happening? Why is this person driving me crazy? What can you tell me what’s happening? And then we diagnose it together until we land at like, oh, oh, I’m just jealous she’s getting away with this. I’m jealous so many people are celebrating this thing about her. It’s so helpful. It will change your life. It will change your life, just that one action. Right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. And it doesn’t-
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. Your boobs need to be free. Tori. Don’t cut them off.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and the comments are going to continue. I never commented on Noelle’s videos or photos, but it was what was going on in my head. And there’s just some people that make the stupid decision to take every thought in their head and put it on the internet. Or even your family might say something to you that is deeply hurtful. But it’s like once you realize what’s going on and start unpacking that for you, that’s not where it ends because you’re going to continue getting challenged in that belief over and over and over again. So how do we sustain the work we just did? How do we carry that through when something else is triggering for us or when we do have a very significant thing happen in our life? Like, oh, I went for the raise and I was told no, and I was, I don’t know, fired because of it. Or I posted a photo on the internet where I was confident and I got 40,000 people who unfollowed me, which is a real life thing that happened to me. How do we deal with the real life consequences of that?
Elise Loehnen:
I mean, that’s a major question. I tend to be, I’m a very spiritual person, and so I think… And I’m not like a let’s slap some toxic positivity on this and say everything is to your benefit always. But I would say, all right, Tori, you’ve been liberated from 40,000 people who feel like that you are in some way reflection of them and that they should be able to control your actions and you should be according to their preferences. So many of us live our lives like we get to control the external thermostat of the world to fit our preferences. It’s actually bonkers, but this is how many of us feel. I can’t be around anything that bothers me right now.
And for the person who went for the raise, and clearly these people don’t see your value. They feel like they can just live, get on without you, and that’s really good information to have. These are not your people. This is not your job. And so I’m not suggesting that these aren’t hard, horrible lessons, but I think we get sort of the redirection that we need from life sometimes to… You can either sort of orient your success to pleasing people externally, recognizing you actually have no control over how people feel about you and whether they’re going to like you or not, or you can just keep working on your own internal GPS and integrity and not trade off your values for likes or a job that feels bad.
Tori Dunlap:
I’ve said this many times on the show, but it’s like if you are sacrificing your own happiness, your own contentment, your own worthiness to make other people feel more comfortable-
Elise Loehnen:
Bad idea.
Tori Dunlap:
Bad idea.
Elise Loehnen:
It’s a bad idea.
Tori Dunlap:
I tried it, guys. It doesn’t work. It’s not fun.
Elise Loehnen:
And yeah, in might work in the short term. We all do things that we hate in the short term to do what needs to be done.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, it absolutely works in the short term when somebody else is more comfortable. But then it festers and it’s like a little, I don’t know, it’s like you swallowed a tapeworm and it just starts feeding on you from the inside.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. And it becomes increasingly threatening. Look, you not only survived losing 40,000 people, but you’re doing great. Right?
Tori Dunlap:
And again, I’m giving an example, but there’s a million. I have even higher stakes examples of this in my life that for privacy reasons I’m not going to share. But I have very high stakes examples of this. I know other people who have even higher stakes examples of this where they’ve lost their livelihood, they’ve lost their spouse, they’ve lost close family relationships. And that’s deeply, deeply hard and deeply uncomfortable.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. And life unfortunately is, suffering is part of life, and so are things happening to us that we would never choose and do not want. And yet when you look back, it is easy to say, well, often easy to say… Even I think about some of the horrible things that have happened to me. My best friend died, my brother’s husband when he was 39. He was like my brother, my best friend. And I can even look at his death at this point, it’s been eight years. I mean, I would do anything to have another conversation with him. And yet he course corrected, there was something about that loss that course corrected me in a way for which I can actually find gratitude. And that might sound like a perverse example, but I’m not alone in having that experience. It’s like when you take a terrible thing that’s happened and then you’re like, I need to actually use this. This can’t be for naught. And I’m sure a lot of people who… We’ve all lost jobs. It’s the rite of passage. And often it can just put you on a better track. It’s very scary. I’m not suggesting that it’s not, but this is life.
Tori Dunlap:
There’s a line I love that you said, and I felt the same way for so long. Quote, “I was carrying my head around on a stick,” when referencing being so so in your head and disconnected from your body. I think this is another thing that we’re told is logic is good, and of course it is. But I logic-ed my way to so much anxiety. I logic-ed my way to so much worry and concern to the point where I was not checking in on my body at all or felt like even that was too woo woo or that was kind of bullshit because your brain and your thoughts are what matter. So how has your relationship to your body changed throughout this work? And is this something women are conditioned into?
Elise Loehnen:
I think definitely conditioned into. In part, I mean it gets into the sort of the metaphysical, the masculine is associated with sort of ascension and spirit and our father, the Lord, and the woman is sort of the base material. Material, actually it shares the root of mother, mater is mother. So it’s like the feminine is the body and sort of the womb and the tomb and then-
Tori Dunlap:
I was just going to say, right where you’re giving birth is center. That’s your center of gravity is your pelvic center.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. And we live in a culture that doesn’t really have much reverence for women, for women bodies, for the planet. There’s extreme devaluation of the feminine. So yes, I think that we are taught you want to be thoughtful, ascended, out of your body. And many of us have lost connection. I became dissociated from my body through early sexual trauma. That happens to a ton of women too, and boys and men. So we sort of disconnect. It doesn’t matter what our body wants. And it gets into the gluttony chapter in our hunger. You can’t know what you want, body. You’re bad. And I need to discipline you and rule over you and decide what you get and what you don’t get. So our whole lives is really spent in discounting, devaluing, ignoring, and ruling over the body. There’s so much to be gained from being embodied. It’s how we experience pleasure. It’s just amazing to do the work to become more embodied. This has been a big thing for me in the last five to 10 years and it’s ongoing.
The other thing is, and we write about this a fair amount in the book, but I have learned how to bring my body into decision-making in a way that has kept me from betraying myself. I practice what I call the full body no. Before I say yes to doing anything, it’s like, okay, mentally I can give you a million reasons why this is a good idea and I should do this thing, but I run it through my body. Does my energy go up or does my energy go down? And if it goes down, it’s like, I don’t want to do this. This is a no. This is a no. I couldn’t do that until I learned how to bring my body into it. In fact, we were having a conversation before this about this whole strategy that we’re supposed to do around our shows. And every part of my body was like, this is an energy down, full body no for me. I cannot do this. I’m still fighting between my head and my body about that. But right now, I have to listen to my body. It’s a no.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Again, said it a million times. If you’ve listened to this show many times, you’ve heard me say this. But what I’ve realized is intuition is knowing without being able to know why you know, if that makes… You can’t logically tell somebody. When somebody asks you how do you know that, you literally can’t. The only answer is I don’t know, I just know. And every time I’ve had an intuitive feeling, it’s one, been a hundred percent correct, but two, it’s been very hard to describe how I know, which makes decision making in a very brain logical masculine society very difficult, especially running a business. How do you know? I just know. That’s not a good answer, but it’s a true answer.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. And I think if you were to poll most major decision makers at companies, day traders, et cetera, they’re making decisions based on that knowing, and it is intuitive, it is instinctual, and it is not… They’re not evaluating all the data and using that to inform their every single decision. They are just, they know. And I think that that gets stronger the more that you exercise it.
Tori Dunlap:
When we come back from a word with our sponsors, we’re wrapping up our conversation with Elise, including talking about why we have such a hard time trusting our intuition and our bodies. Also, fair warning, we have a light spoiler for Life of Pi, which is one of my favorite books of all time. You’ll hear it coming. You can pop ahead two minutes if somehow you haven’t read the book that came out in 2004. All right, see you after the break.
I’m not going to spend too much time on this, but one thing I have thought a about that you’re actually the perfect person to talk about this with, is that all of these things we use stereotypically as women to inform our decisions, so I’m thinking like tarot, astrology, our gut, all of these things are dismissed and I think they’re dismissed because they’re feminine.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes, a hundred percent. And yes, this is my bailiwick, as you said. I love this stuff. If it’s remotely woo woo, I’m interested in it because I think it is this devalued source of wisdom and a way to connect with the universe. And so much of patriarchal religion has been funneled through this God, the Father archetype. Right?
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Which is also crazy. And I can say that as someone who went to 18 straight years at Catholic school. If you’re not in it and you look at any other religion, it’s fucking bananas. You want me to eat… And Catholics literally believe it is the body and blood of Christ. They believe it has been transfigured. That’s insane if you’re not part of that religion. That’s bonkers. And I can do this for every religion. But we believe that, so why can’t we believe other things?
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. No, Catholicism, it’s like the mystery cult of it is wild. And as you mentioned, the rituals, it’s wild. It’s nuts.
Tori Dunlap:
Tradition.
Elise Loehnen:
But most modern religions, and I say this as a deeply spiritual person, it’s a form of culture. It’s actually quite different than the way that it was intended. So Jesus didn’t write, he had his 12 disciples, this Jewish rabbi wandering around the desert. The New Testament was written a hundred years after he died, passed on by… So we’ve structured these things. It’s all a culture. But when you go into the wisdom traditions of all the Abrahamic religions, et cetera, they’re all more or less describing the same thing, which is this oneness that it becomes duality, et cetera. They’re all telling very similar stories. And it’s much more aligned really with tarot.
Tarot and Kabbalah, for example, which is the mystical arm of Judaism and sort of the wisdom tradition of Judaism, they are rooted together. There’s this amazing guy, Mark Horn, who teaches Kabbalah tarot and astrology. Like the three Magi, they’re astrologers. The sign of Jesus is the fish. He was born in Pisces. So anyway, so these are all these super ancient emergent ideas. The I Ching, I mean, it’s incredible when you actually go into the Tao Te Ching, and it’s this way of talking to the universe, and they’re old and beautiful and so fun. I mean, let me tell you, I ask I Ching a lot of questions, I throw coins all the time, and I always get the advice I need. I love, love all of these systems. I think they’re so rich, in part because they just put you in conversation with yourself.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, it’s like flip of coin. It’s not about the outcome, it’s about your reaction to the outcome. So it’s like, should I do this thing? And you flip it and you get an answer, and you either like the answer or you don’t like the answer. That tells you what you want.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah. And I would say, for example, the Tao Te Ching or the I Ching, and there are lots of, I have a lot of resources for this, and I’ve done podcast episodes about it, but you have to ask a well formulated question, and what you get back in these hexagrams are these cones, this incredible beautiful wisdom that you have to then translate and apply. So it’s also not like I don’t call a psychic and say, do I do this or do I do that? I don’t even believe in it. I believe in free will, and there are endless options. But I like to be in a dialogue with my higher self or the universe or God or whatever it is, my spirit guides. One, it just makes life more fun, Tori. And two, I find it as it’s a way of me getting in touch with myself.
Tori Dunlap:
We can cut this. Did you ever read Life of Pi?
Elise Loehnen:
I did a million years ago. About being on the boat with all the animals?
Tori Dunlap:
But it turns out in the end he maybe didn’t, and then he asked, “What’s the better story?” It’s one of my favorite books of all time. Because you spend this entire book, he’s on a raft with Richard Parker the tiger, and he survives, and the orangutan name Orange Juice and all of this. And then you get to the end and it’s about a three pager where he’s like, maybe none of that happened, here’s the actual story. Orange Juice is a representation of my mom, Richard Parker was the chef who tried to kill me, all of this stuff. And then you get to the end and the guy’s like, “Well, that happened.” And he goes, “Maybe it did. What’s the better story?”
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Does it actually matter what happened?
Elise Loehnen:
Does it actually matter? I find that’s, think that’s such a critical question. And I also find that when people try and shut me down or other often women about I have 18 crystals on my desk, I-
Tori Dunlap:
They’re pretty.
Elise Loehnen:
They’re pretty. But I think they’re really helpful.
Tori Dunlap:
What if that’s it? They’re pretty.
Elise Loehnen:
How does your iPhone work? There’s a crystal in there. I love crystals. I wear them all the time, black tourmaline on a string in my bra. But I find that when people, it’s like it drives people, some people crazy.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, yeah, because it’s not logical, it’s not masculine.
Elise Loehnen:
No, it’s not masculine.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe a lot of the things that men do don’t work either.
Elise Loehnen:
Don’t work. But it gives my life meaning. I think it even brings my awareness to what do I need to shake out of my body? Black tourmaline is like, they call it the energetic vacuum cleaner. So it’s like, all right, I need to actually, instead, I’m going to take a shower, just get this day off of me. What’s the harm? And what’s the better story? And I think in my life, having faith in some higher order and wanting to talk to the other side and wanting to be in communion has made my life so much richer, adds meaning. And yeah, I’m sorry if that’s offensive to someone. Go find your own meaning.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re not hurting anybody. Yeah. The other thing with Pi too is that he practices three religions. And his rabbi, his priest, and his-
Elise Loehnen:
Imam?
Tori Dunlap:
Yes, thank you. But yeah, they all get together and they basically are like, he can’t do this. And he’s literally-
Elise Loehnen:
I need to reread this.
Tori Dunlap:
Please read it. I’ll send you a copy if you don’t have it.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes. I have it, I have it.
Tori Dunlap:
I love this book so much. I studied it in school, which was so cool. It was one of the books we read in high school. And yeah, they all literally have basically a conference call with him. They’re like, “You need to pick one.” And he goes, “Why?” And they’re like, “Well, you just, you need to.” And all three of them are talking about how, yeah, it’s crazy that he’s trying to do all three at once. And he’s like, “Well, I get different things from all of them.”
Elise Loehnen:
I think that most people don’t know though that they’re all have this Abraham, they’re all Abraham, they all have the same father. People don’t know that about our three major religions.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes.
Elise Loehnen:
It’s funny. Right?
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. So you wrote this workbook. I have it on my desk. I’m so excited. I’m just going to just-
Elise Loehnen:
You’re going to have fun in there.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s going to rip me a new one, and I’m so excited for it. So you wrote this with a coauthor, Courtney, who you said, “Okay, I want to collaborate with this person for the workbook.” Why was it important for you to have a collaborator in this?
Elise Loehnen:
So when I would take On Our Best Behavior out into the world, women would say, okay, great, now what? What do I do about this now that I can see it? And I didn’t really have great answers. I have far more answers now, having lived that for a while. But amazing things would happen in these groups of women once women start talking and sharing. Now, I’m not a therapist and I’m not a coach, and I could probably grant myself more authority, but when you’re getting into really deep territory with women, I felt like I am not equipped to take people apart and put them back together again in a way that sometimes really deep sharing can evoke. And so I was asked to do a workshop and I wanted to do it with a coach or a therapist. And so my friend Courtney said she would do it, and she’s a brilliant coach and she uses the Enneagram and a lot of different other models. And the Enneagram and the sins are related.
And so we did this workshop together and it was amazing. And she brought to the workshop this process, which is now in the workbook of these seven tools for figuring out what stories are running your life, making them really big, teaching the class, which we discussed, creating personas, et cetera. And it was so powerful, so fun, and really deep. People shifted, did some work in that room, and really started to shift some of these stories. And so it was just a no-brainer, I was already working on this workbook, to use this process as the backbone for the book. And it was fun. I love collaborating as much as I also love doing my own work. So that was the genesis. I felt like I wanted to go into rooms and feel like I could relax into letting what things happen.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, well-equipped.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah, without being like, oh my God, what am I going to do if something big comes up?
Tori Dunlap:
Are you an Enneagram three?
Elise Loehnen:
I am a six, though a three is a good guess. I always type as a one, three, or five. I’m an Enneagram six, the empath.
Tori Dunlap:
I was going to say one, and I was like, I get more three vibes from her. You’re a six.
Elise Loehnen:
I’m a six. What are you? Eight?
Tori Dunlap:
No. Nope. My public version of me is an eight.
Elise Loehnen:
Three?
Tori Dunlap:
Nope.
Elise Loehnen:
Okay.
Tori Dunlap:
As soon as I say it… I’m a two.
Elise Loehnen:
You’re a two. Okay.
Tori Dunlap:
A classic two.
Elise Loehnen:
Well, eights and twos. Two. Okay.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Elise Loehnen:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m also a Cancer, which shocks people. But as soon as you know me in real life, I am actually very sensitive. I’m very sensitive. I cry at everything. And I also just want to be loved. I’m Leslie Knope. I want to be loved so badly.
Elise Loehnen:
That’s amazing, Tori.
Tori Dunlap:
Isn’t that so funny?
Elise Loehnen:
Well, eights go to twos under stress.
Tori Dunlap:
And twos go to eights.
Elise Loehnen:
Does a two go to eight under stress?
Tori Dunlap:
Yep.
Elise Loehnen:
Okay. All right. So this makes sense. Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep.
Elise Loehnen:
Sag Sun, Pisces Moon, Virgo Rising.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh.
Elise Loehnen:
I have a lot of Virgo.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s why everybody likes you. Virgos are the best. Okay. My last question for you. And I literally, I could talk to you for so much longer. I could talk to you for six hours about this.
Elise Loehnen:
Me too.
Tori Dunlap:
What is the most rewarding part about embracing wholeness in your life?
Elise Loehnen:
Oh, just to be able to relax. I feel like I was holding, I was so rigid about some major stories in my life, like the one I mentioned earlier, I’m the only one who can do it right, so I should do it all. And even just working with that story to relax around it and release it and to say I’m not going to be the person who does everything today. I’m going to sit on the couch and watch Love Island. And while I do that, I’m going to patrol my own brain to stop me from criticizing myself. Even just being like I want to be slothful, I want to be lazy, I want to be someone who understands popular culture. It’s just better to just be like I am all of these things and I can be lazy, I can be gluttonous, I embrace these parts of myself too. It’s a much, much better way to live, let me tell you.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s very freeing.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes. Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
And I think that’s what we all want, is to actually feel free.
Elise Loehnen:
Yes. And I think what we all want, or at least what I want, is just to turn down the volume on that voice inside my head that is scolding and chastising and judging me all the time. And I have really gotten good now at doing that. And it’s like, not today. Leave me alone. Go away.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. I admire you and your work so deeply.
Elise Loehnen:
Same.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m so thankful to have you. Please plug away both books because I have both of them on my desk and everybody needs to read them. They are a required reading.
Elise Loehnen:
Thank you. All right, so On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good, that book is coming out in paperback. The companion workbook is called Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming Your Full Self. You can just do the workbook without reading On Our Best Behavior. My editor wouldn’t want me to say that, but it’s true. And it works in any format, any story in your life. And my podcast is Pulling the Thread, which is the name of my Substack as well. And you can follow me on Instagram, but eh, @eliseloehnen.
Tori Dunlap:
Eh. In our 100K club program, we do a book club every quarter, and yours is our third book after myself and another financial book. So I’m really excited.
Elise Loehnen:
Oh my God. Amazing.
Tori Dunlap:
I literally, I was like, I talked to my programs manager and I was like, “This one next. We’re doing this one next.” So thank you.
Elise Loehnen:
Well, if you need anyone to answer any reader questions, you know where to find me.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh my gosh. Don’t tempt me with a good time. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Elise Loehnen:
Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. As we’re wrapping up, have you ever read the poem Warning by Jenny Joseph?
Elise Loehnen:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
Do you know this poem?
Elise Loehnen:
Will you read it?
Tori Dunlap:
I’m going to do a really bad version of it. I’ve talked about this on a different episode. I saw this poem probably eight years ago. It was on the wall of a bathroom.
Elise Loehnen:
Amazing.
Tori Dunlap:
And I took a photo of it. Yeah. I had to have been like 23. Ugh, okay. “When I’m an old woman, I shall wear purple with a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves and satin sandals and say we have no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired and gobble up samples and shops and press alarm bells and run my stick along the public railings and make up for the sobriety of my youth. I shall go out in my slippers in the rain and pick the flowers in other people’s gardens and learn to spit. You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat and eat three pounds of sausages at a go or only bread and pickle for a week and hoard pens and pencils and beer mats and things in boxes. But now we must have clothes that keep us dry and pay our rent and not swear in the street and set a good example for the children. We must have friends for dinner and read the papers. But maybe I ought to practice a little now so people who know me are not too shocked and surprised when suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.”
Elise Loehnen:
That’s an amazing poem.
Tori Dunlap:
I cry every time I read it. It’s so good. It’s literally everything you’re talking about. It’s like I don’t give a fuck, I’m going to wear a hat that doesn’t go with my purple dress, and I’m going to eat a bunch of food that makes me happy, and I’m going to spit in public, and make up for the sobriety of my youth.
Elise Loehnen:
That is amazing.
Tori Dunlap:
And then like but now I have to do the right thing. I have to buy clothes and pay our rent. But what if I just practice a little bit right now? I love it.
Elise Loehnen:
Here’s to practicing.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you so much to Elise for joining us. You can find her incredible life-changing, and no, I don’t use life-changing in hyperbole here, her life-changing workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness wherever you get your books. You can also subscribe to her podcast, Pulling the Thread, wherever you’re listening right now, and her Substack, eliseloehnen.com, L-O-E-H-N-E-N. Thank you as always for being here, Financial Feminist. Thank you for your support of feminist media. Please share this episode with somebody that you know it will impact and help. And we’ll see you back here soon. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist a Her First $100K podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
