What if the anxiety you most want to get rid of is the one you most need to listen to? Existential psychologist Dan Koch and marketing strategist Kristen Tideman join Evan Rosa for a conversation about what anxiety is actually for—and what happens when it turns against you. "To be human is to be unfinished. It is to have constantly limits around you, and your choice is to accept them or pretend they're not there." In this episode, they reflect together on the existential roots of anxiety and what it looks like to confront real limits—from an MS diagnosis to faith upheaval to collective crisis. Together they discuss healthy versus unhealthy anxiety and how to tell them apart, the post-WWII origins of existential therapy, boundary situations and “thrownness,” what denial costs us spiritually and psychologically, and how accepting our limits can paradoxically expand our world. The conversation moves between lived experience of multiple sclerosis and philosophical framework about mortality, between Kierkegaard's "dizziness of freedom" and a three-month-old baby in an emergency room—asking not how to eliminate anxiety, but how to let the right kind of anxiety make your world bigger. Episode Highlights "To be human is to be unfinished. It is to have constantly limits around you, and your choice, among other things, is to accept them or pretend they're not there."—Dan Koch "I was literally in the ER. I'm holding my three-month-old baby who just got here. I'm like, my life just started—and I don't even know what this means. I don't even wanna Google what it means."—Kristen Tideman "Our brains are big enough and our minds are strong enough that unlike deer, plants, and coconuts, we can think about the future. We can imagine our own death."—Dan Koch "There's ways I wanna deny the MS. I wanna deny that that's part of my existence now. I wanna deny even components of my own faith change."—Kristen Tideman "Is my world getting smaller, or is my world getting bigger?"—Dan Koch --- About Dan Koch Dan Koch is an existential psychologist, therapist, and host of Religion on the Mind, a podcast and media project exploring the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and everyday life. His clinical work focuses on religious change—deconversion, deconstruction, reconstruction—and the downstream effects on identity, family, and meaning-making. He draws on the existential tradition from Kierkegaard and Jaspers through Viktor Frankl and Irvin Yalom. Koch has spoken openly about his own fifteen-year experience with panic disorder. Learn more and follow at religiononthemind.com [VERIFY] About Kristen Tideman Kristen Tideman is the founder of Tidy Studios, a marketing strategist and creative consultant. She holds a master's degree in philosophy and has brought that background into her work exploring questions of meaning, anxiety, and faith in public conversation. She lives with multiple sclerosis and is a new mother. Learn more and follow at [VERIFY—need Tidy Studios URL and social handles] --- Helpful Links and Resources Religion on the Mind https://www.religiononthemind.com/ Religion on the Mind https://religiononthemind.substack.com/ Religion on the Mind https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/religion-on-the-mind/id1448000113 Tidy Studios https://www.tidystudios.com/ Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl https://www.beacon.org/Mans-Search-for-Meaning-P602.aspx Dan Koch on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/dankoch --- Show Notes - Why tackle anxiety now—geopolitical overwhelm, media firehose, personal crisis converging - Kristen's competing anxieties: new motherhood, MS diagnosis, ongoing faith change - Dan's path into existential psychology through clients navigating religious change - Existential psychology's post-WWII roots—Viktor Frankl, concentration camps, the search for meaning - The atomic bomb as psychological turning point—from imagining one's own death to imagining collective annihilation - "Our brains are big enough that unlike deer, plants, and coconuts, we can think about the future. We can imagine our own death." - Healthy vs. unhealthy anxiety—the central distinction in existential thought - Healthy anxiety broadens your world; unhealthy anxiety becomes self-referential spiral - The inner critic mistaken for motivation—when unhealthy anxiety masquerades as drive - "I was literally in the ER. I'm holding my three-month-old baby. I'm like, my life just started—and I don't even know what this means." - Philosophy becoming flesh—studying mortality vs. receiving a diagnosis - "There's ways I wanna deny the MS. I wanna deny that that's part of my existence now. I wanna deny even components of my own faith change." - Ontological anxiety vs. pathological anxiety—Kierkegaard's "dizziness of freedom" - Avoidance vs. acceptance as the fundamental hinge in existential psychology - The body carries what the mind tries to bypass—emotions as literal electricity in the nervous system - Thrownness—Heidegger's concept of being tossed into unchosen circumstances - Jaspers' shipwreck, Sartre's blind man on a raft, Kierkegaard's captain in a storm - Boundary situations—MS, new parenthood, AI, sociopolitical chaos, loss of shared reality - Kristen on maturity: "Anything that comes at us, we can use as an excuse to weaken our resolve or to strengthen it." - "To be human is to be unfinished. It is to have constantly limits around you, and your choice is to accept them or pretend they're not there." - "Is my world getting smaller, or is my world getting bigger?" - Neurotic anxiety spins us inward; accepting limits pushes us toward collaboration and community - Emmy van Deurzen and Irvin Yalom—real problems require more than one person - Loving your neighbor as a practical consequence of accepting your own limits --- #ExistentialPsychology #Anxiety #MentalHealth #FaithDeconstruction #HumanFlourishing #Kierkegaard #ViktorFrankl #ChronicIllness #MSAwareness #ForTheLifeOfTheWorl --- Production Notes - This podcast featured Kristen Tideman and Dan Koch - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Noah Senthil - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
What if the anxiety you most want to get rid of is the one you most need to listen to? Existential psychologist Dan Koch and marketing strategist Kristen Tideman join Evan Rosa for a conversation about what anxiety is actually for—and what happens when it turns against you. "To be human is to be unfinished. It is to have constantly limits around you, and your choice is to accept them or pretend they're not there." In this episode, they reflect together on the existential roots of anxiety and what it looks like to confront real limits—from an MS diagnosis to faith upheaval to collective crisis. Together they discuss healthy versus unhealthy anxiety and how to tell them apart, the post-WWII origins of existential therapy, boundary situations and “thrownness,” what denial costs us spiritually and psychologically, and how accepting our limits can paradoxically expand our world. The conversation moves between lived experience of multiple sclerosis and philosophical framework about mortality, between Kierkegaard's "dizziness of freedom" and a three-month-old baby in an emergency room—asking not how to eliminate anxiety, but how to let the right kind of anxiety make your world bigger.
Episode Highlights
"To be human is to be unfinished. It is to have constantly limits around you, and your choice, among other things, is to accept them or pretend they're not there."—Dan Koch
"I was literally in the ER. I'm holding my three-month-old baby who just got here. I'm like, my life just started—and I don't even know what this means. I don't even wanna Google what it means."—Kristen Tideman
"Our brains are big enough and our minds are strong enough that unlike deer, plants, and coconuts, we can think about the future. We can imagine our own death."—Dan Koch
"There's ways I wanna deny the MS. I wanna deny that that's part of my existence now. I wanna deny even components of my own faith change."—Kristen Tideman
"Is my world getting smaller, or is my world getting bigger?"—Dan Koch
About Dan Koch
Dan Koch is an existential psychologist, therapist, and host of Religion on the Mind, a podcast and media project exploring the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and everyday life. His clinical work focuses on religious change—deconversion, deconstruction, reconstruction—and the downstream effects on identity, family, and meaning-making. He draws on the existential tradition from Kierkegaard and Jaspers through Viktor Frankl and Irvin Yalom. Koch has spoken openly about his own fifteen-year experience with panic disorder. Learn more and follow at religiononthemind.com [VERIFY]
About Kristen Tideman
Kristen Tideman is the founder of Tidy Studios, a marketing strategist and creative consultant. She holds a master's degree in philosophy and has brought that background into her work exploring questions of meaning, anxiety, and faith in public conversation. She lives with multiple sclerosis and is a new mother. Learn more and follow at [VERIFY—need Tidy Studios URL and social handles]
Helpful Links and Resources
Religion on the Mind https://www.religiononthemind.com/
Religion on the Mind https://religiononthemind.substack.com/
Religion on the Mind https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/religion-on-the-mind/id1448000113
Tidy Studios https://www.tidystudios.com/
Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl https://www.beacon.org/Mans-Search-for-Meaning-P602.aspx
Dan Koch on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/dankoch
Show Notes
#ExistentialPsychology #Anxiety #MentalHealth #FaithDeconstruction #HumanFlourishing #Kierkegaard #ViktorFrankl #ChronicIllness #MSAwareness #ForTheLifeOfTheWorl
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Kristen Tideman: I never felt so aware of my mortality. I was literally in the emergency room. I won't get into all the details of the day. I'm holding my three month old baby who just got here. I'm like, my life just started and I, I was like, I don't even know what this means. I don't even wanna Google what it means. I'm scared, you know, I'm scared for what it could be.
Sorry, I did this before with Dan. I'm like, I think I'm good. And then I'm like, here, here comes like, you can see it really affect.
Evan Rosa: Me, Kristen Tideman had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but not just that she was a new mother and had been undergoing some religious change, adjusting her belief system.
So all those years spent reading about mortality finitude and the weight of the human condition. When she was studying philosophy, all of a sudden became real. Instead of just studying limits, she slammed right into one or two or three.
Kristen Tideman: It was just so close to home. And I did a philosophy masters, not a PhD, which does half, quite a bit of a different workload.
I had a lot less reading. But you deal with the text, you get it, you're talking about it, you're with all your, you know, philosophy friends. It's so rich. But then I think actually running into the wall of. Oh, this is, this is real. This is actually me. This is my life. And it will end is definitely a hard pill to swallow.
And then recognizing all the ways, like we're even saying, you know, anxiety and embracing mortality. There's ways I wanna deny. Uh, the ms. You know, I wanna deny that that's part of my existence. Now. I wanna deny even components, I would say, of my own faith change instead of continuing to wrestle with them,
Evan Rosa: these denials, this natural human response of anxiety running away, avoiding denying that a diagnosis like this could happen, let alone when you're a new mother denying the new identity.
It requires that you adopt, denying the significance of the way that faith. Shifting underneath you whether you want it to or not, destabilizes the rejection and the aversion the impulse to look away. Maybe it's not always maladaptive. It's one of the most natural and universal things we might do when we hit a wall.
We can't think our way past. The question becomes whether this anxiety shrinks your life or expands it.
Dan Koch: I think the idea in existential psychology is everything is unfinished all the time. That doesn't mean that there's no progress. It doesn't mean that nothing gets done. Some discrete things are accomplished, but to be human is to be unfinished.
Evan Rosa: That's my friend Dan Koch, a therapist, a podcaster. He's making his way into a new modality of existential.
Psychodynamic therapy, working with anxiety in a different kind of way.
Dan Koch: Anxiety is a central concept and existential thought because the idea there is our brains are big enough and our minds are strong enough that unlike deer and plants and coconuts, we can think about the future. We can imagine our own death.
And what the bomb does is it goes, not only can we now imagine our own death, we can actually imagine with pretty good specificity. The death of every person at once. You know the death of the planet if it really went wrong.
Evan Rosa: Facing our own mortality, imagining your own death. Imagining the death of the species.
This deeply human capacity, and the fear and anxiety of confronting it. What do we do with this? Do you leave it in the abstract reasoning of existential philosophy? You just slap a bandaid on it with some of the advice you can find all over social media. Kristen realized she. Had to answer that question in real time.
Kristen Tideman: What is within my, within my realm of control, how can I be responsible with that? How can I be faithful with that? And you know, there are days I wake up and I think I do that well and days where I'm sure I kind of resort to the pathological. But again, these tools can help us and I think a very concrete way where a lot of things can be abstract.
A lot of, I mean, social media advice can be abstract, but then this is, yeah, this is something that's more grounded.
Evan Rosa: The difference between doing it well and doing it in some kind of path. Logical way. Well, that's a pretty fast and steep drop. This line between the kind of anxiety that eats you alive and the anxiety that's trying to tell you something true, give you the gift of survival or even thriving.
It's exactly along this sharp long where our conversation today lives
Dan Koch: healthy anxiety broadens our world. It. It is a signal to us that we gotta do something or stop doing something and, and that can usually be combined with what we care about and the direction of our life. Anxiety of the unhelpful, neurotic type spins us in our own mind.
Our worlds get smaller, they become more insular, self-focused, self-referential. Is my world getting smaller or is my world getting bigger?
Evan Rosa: Dan Koch is a. Licensed therapist and the host of the podcast, religion on the Mind. Kristin Tiesman is a founder of Tidy Studios, a marketing strategist and a creative consultant living with a recent diagnosis of ms.
And in this conversation opening up quite a bit about the anxiety that has followed together, we discuss healthy versus un. The anxiety, their symptoms, and how to understand the difference, how existential philosophy treats anxiety and thrownness, or the brokenness or the shipwreck of our life, mortality, motherhood, and multiple sclerosis, the post World War II roots of existential therapy, the prospects of your world either shrinking or expanding, and a much deeper appreciation for what it means to be a work in progress.
The hope. That comes from being an unfinished human being. Thanks for listening today,
Kristen. Dan, thanks for joining me.
Kristen Tideman: Hi. Hey,
Dan Koch: pleasure to be here, man.
Evan Rosa: A pleasure to talk about anxious times.
Dan Koch: Nothing better, frankly. Evan, I'm an existential therapist, so That's right. This is my, this is my cue zone. Yep. Love it.
Evan Rosa: Um, what are you observing about our times? That you would characterize as anxious and in what way?
Kristen Tideman: In the general sphere of, you know, why tackle this? Why now? I don't think it'll be a surprise to many people as there's a lot going on geopolitically speaking in terms of, I mean, yeah, you turn on the news and you're like, what? Like you're getting bombarded, you're getting kind of, uh, fire hosed news, which is not, you know, we could say this is maybe not the first time it's happened, but of course.
Prior to, you know, 20, 30 years ago, we didn't have it at this rate. And then there's the personal side of things and I, I think that's where I was excited to tackle this project with Dan and, and kind of get into it because I have a number of competing anxieties, if you will, or, or anxieties actually joining hands coming together.
Um, I have a, a new daughter. I'm a, I'm a new mother that's got its own anxieties. Yeah, I have a new, fairly serious diagnosis that's the rest of my life. A chronic disease of multiple sclerosis, which I've had to navigate and, and then I think, you know, the ongoing faith change questions, which for me really started in grad school, kind of nicely coinciding with the beginning of COVID.
But that is not something that just. As, you know, neatly resolves and there's ongoing questions and kind of it's, you know, this one day and maybe that another. So in, in kind of trying to manage, not just manage, but really when we seek thriving, which I think we all talk about, how do you. How do you do that amidst all the anxieties that are in there?
Dan Koch: Um, I'll pick up at the religious change 'cause that's kind of how I got into existential psychology. Uh, and the series is taking ideas from existential psychology and making them really practical. And I got into it more deeply because of therapy. Clients I have. Therapy clients and my, my sort of main specialty as a therapist is religious change.
Usually that's either deconversion leaving a fold or. Deconstruction, reconstruction, major belief change, major, major practice change. Generally not still comfortable at the same church from before that happened. That type of change. And there's often, you know, family, there's sort downstream effects with family, marriage, parenting, all kinds of things.
But really you get into the more existential issues of who am I? What is morality? How am I going to sort of piece back together my orientation to the world? And so I felt like I need to, I gotta dig deeper here in my own training to meet some of what I'm hearing as needs from my clients. And. As I did it, I also just felt really personally a lot of, a lot of resonance and it, it didn't take long.
Chatting with Kristen and just kind of a couple other therapist friends of, whoa, there are obviously personal applications here, but there's also this collective application and turns out that existential psychology really comes out of post-World War II thought it's that. It's that post-World War II flavor of existential.
Philosophy, but also, you know, people think of Viktor Frankl. Man's Search For Meaning. This is a, a, a very important text in the sort of modern development of existentialism toward therapeutic and psychological applications. And he's talking about finding meaning in the concentration camps. And it just doesn't get more anxious than World War II and post World War II and, you know, give it 10 more years.
It'll be the nuclear kind of Cold War fears and you know, like. Those were extremely anxious times. And so it's, it's not a big jump to think maybe there's something from that time, and as it's been developed over the decades by careful psychologists and therapists and stuff, and it's been applied, it's become more practical.
Well, we're kind of, we kind of find ourselves in a, you know, not in, not the same as those times in, in certain ways, but man, we recognize, we recognize the flavor from the mid 20th century anxiety and our own.
Evan Rosa: I, I wonder if it really is the bomb. If, if, like in the middle of the 20th century, the, the newly found capacity to destroy ourselves.
It's huge. It is like the anxiety bomb, you know, uh, literal in this case that then creates a cascade of anxiety that just sort of is in a cycle now. Ever since, I don't know if, if I would characterize the modern period prior to the bomb as an anxious period, there might be other factors that that lead it.
Maybe there's a growing anxiety and we don't have to detail Well, yeah, no, like, like the history of anxiety, but
Dan Koch: depressing time. Like as in the Great Depression.
Evan Rosa: Indeed.
Dan Koch: I actually, I think the atomic bomb is a really good way of describing how. Existentialist thought, which is profoundly individualistic.
It is literally about the human individual experience and trying to not say too much universally about the world and metaphysics and all that stuff, and let's really look at just what am I going through? What are you going through as one person, and, and, and learning to understand that. And so it starts out as talking about anxiety.
Anxiety is a central concept and existential thought because the idea there is our brains are big enough and our minds are strong enough that unlike deer and plants and coconuts, we can think about the future. We can imagine our own death. And what the bomb does is it goes, not only can we now imagine our own death, we can actually imagine.
With pretty good specificity. The death of every person at once. You know the death of the planet if it really went wrong. And so the we, we talk in the series at both individual levels. That's religious change. That's Kristen's diagnosis, that's new motherhood, it's anxiety disorders, et. We also talk collectively and the bomb takes us to collective in, in one move.
Like psychologically, it's just one move from individual to collective death. And so I think from an existential psychology perspective, it's super relevant and sort of ripe.
Evan Rosa: I want to introduce a little bit of clarity around. What anxiety is, and it's too easy for this to be kind of conflated, you know, like the inner emotional space I'm speaking personally often is, is one of.
A little bit of confusion, you know, like, what, what exactly is the emotion that's emerging and how do I find the language to, to, to bring to it? And, and it's too tempting to overexplain it and then perhaps wrongly explain it. So I, I,
Dan Koch: okay. So you wanna talk about anxiety versus something like depression, for instance?
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Or fear, like kick guard or fear, like distinguishes it from fear, for instance.
Dan Koch: Well, I think the. Best way in is to actually talk about anxiety, the way that existential psychologists talk about anxiety, distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy anxiety. And then from that, if we wanna further distinguish between like depression or mania or OCD or something like that, we can also do that, but for them, some anxiety because it is the natural result of our big old brains.
Some anxiety is good. If you, if someone was running at you with a knife. You felt no foreboding about what was about to happen, well, you're, you're gonna die. Like you're not gonna pass on your genes. That's not adaptive. It's literally maladaptive if you don't have certain types of healthy anxiety. If I am sitting there in the evening and I've got a full slate of clients tomorrow and I look at my calendar and I was like, maybe I should stay up till 2:00 AM tonight, partying with my buddy.
Then I should be feeling some healthy anxiety that if I do that, I'm gonna be a bad therapist tomorrow and that that'll have consequences. And so I will go, okay, I'm not, I'm gonna say no thank you to the invitation to go clubbing or whatever. I've never been clubbing to go drink with a buddy. Let's not get ourselves.
So there's healthy anxiety and, and the thumbnail version is healthy anxiety. Broadens our world. It, it is a signal to us that we gotta do something or stop doing something and, and that can usually be combined with what we care about and the direction of our life and and whatnot. So in that tu on that Tuesday evening, I'm like, no, I'm not gonna go get drunk.
I care about being a good therapist. I have a full slate tomorrow. I gotta get my ass to bed. I need to start my bedtime routine and get rest. Unhealthy anxiety becomes sort of self-referential spiral like, and it's like, oh my, you know, I look at my calendar and I go six clients tomorrow. I'm gonna do bad.
I, I'm, maybe I'm not a good therapist. Uh, maybe they're, they're gonna be able to tell, you know, da da da falling down that path, right? That's not spurring me towards anything that's not. It's gonna contribute to getting good sleep. It's not, it's not about who I wanna be, it's just like it's becoming consuming.
And so from a therapeutic perspective, when I've got a client who's feeling anxiety or coming in to talk about anxiety, one of the first things I want to figure out is which of this is the kind that we should be treating? Directly, let's, let's give you some more breathing room here. Let's give you some, some headroom and which is the type that should be listened to because it's actually a message about a way that your life could be better than it currently is.
Kristen Tideman: Hmm.
Evan Rosa: How does that capture you, Christian?
Kristen Tideman: Well, I'm kind of thinking about how, I'm sure you've run into clients, Dan, of those who probably over-intellectualize even their maybe neurotic sort of anxiety and maybe even defend it. Like I could see my, dare I say myself, being able to get to that place where I'm like, well, I, this is serving me.
This is helping me. And I wonder how you help people kind of cross that bridge and you know, when it's. When it's more of a, you know, justified belief, if you will.
Dan Koch: Yeah. Where I've seen that concretely most often is a belief that, say someone has a very strong inner critic, and that's a term that people seem to pretty much understand what that means.
You know, a lot of in internal criticism about. How they might go wrong and where they might fail and whatever. And a lot of clients will come to genuinely believe that if they silence that incessant inner critic, that they will lose motivation. That that is the thing that they, they basically, exactly what you're saying, they mistake unhealthy anxiety for healthy anxiety.
Well, that's the reason I get things done, but. The thing about it is that kind of criticism tends to lead to depression, and depression SAPs you of motivation. So unless there's some pretty good evidence, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna come in with the assumption that this is actually not helping you, and that what would be better is to bring down the stakes, bring down the overall distress.
Let's clarify who you are and what you're about. And let's let your genuine values centered goals achievable goals that you can do. Let's let that be the motivation, because when you can identify that stuff and when you're not racked with depression or anxiety, people do tend to move toward that stuff, and it does provide its own source of energy without.
The sort of side effects of the self-hatred and the self-doubt. Mm-hmm. And the, and the sweaty palms and the heart rate increase. Mm-hmm. And the discomfort in social situations, you know, all of it comes with the anxiety or depression. You can just get the good energy from the, you know, from stuff that you wanna be doing in the world.
Kristen Tideman: Yeah, I mean, it's funny, again, I, I bring this up partially 'cause I can, you know, I've seen myself in that, that you can hold on to your own anxiety as kind of this cru a crutch of a sort, you know? And yeah, and it's just how you know how to operate. But as we went through, you know, everything with the existential therapy, a lot of that values.
Identification by kind of looking at what matters to us and then seeing, you know, maybe something really great matters to us. Something we discussed is that everyone has maybe basic media literacy or something like that. That might be impossible. We can't, and we can't control other people. But what do we see in the values that are in that?
And, and it's, it's more like, okay, well we'd like to be able to talk with people that we care about and have a thoughtful conversation. We'd like to know that what we're, you know, kind of hearing. We'd like to be able to kind of assess what's generally true and, and have a, a sense of a shared reality.
Those things, again, not everything is within our control, but then. What is, and how do we start to approach that? And that was, I think, for me, incredibly helpful. Again, with the different layers, you can assess the values in the, in the different arenas, but I think that includes the faith as well.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Yeah.
I kinda wanna hang out on this point. I'm trying to understand anxiety because how you move from big words, ontological anxiety to pathological anxiety being. A, a pretty important distinction as I understand it for Kiir, ki guard and other existentialists, which is to say that there's some kind of given anxiety in the human condition where there's this discovery of our own freedom, right?
Like, it's like it has to do with freedom, the price of freedom, you might say, uh, kick guard is, is concerned about that. Anxiety is the product of that, that, that once, once one faces the absolute. Capital A once is, once one is a individual before God, there's nowhere to hide. There's you're, you're kind of approaching, maybe it's, maybe this is jumping ahead, but we're like, maybe you're approaching a boundary situation.
You're, you're finding a boundary of your own existence and then asking what's beyond it. And you're also faced with certain questions of, of personal freedom and. And what your place is in, in the world. That is a sort of like commonality. And, and one thing that would be interesting to parse out is how the, how neurotic anxiety, harmful anxiety has been cultivated over the years as different from this sort of basic ontological anxiety that might face just anybody.
Dan Koch: So going back to our big brains. The mind is incredibly powerful. It shapes our individual realities in ways that most of us are usually unaware of. But, you know, with, with things being pointed out with, with a good therapeutic relationship, like we can kind of come to see that stuff better. Or even just, you know, smart people reading, you know, doing a workbook or whatever by themselves.
You're talking about personal freedom. The, the fact that I have free choices. They matter in the world. They are capable of. Genuinely harming people. For instance, this is for existential thinkers. This is one of the existential givens, one of these tough, heavy burdens, especially initially, that nonetheless are just true of a human life.
And where I think it, it sort of hinges from a psychological perspective. I can't speak to the philosophy as well. It hinges on avoidance or engagement and acceptance. That's the. That's the dichotomy. So if I am avoiding those realities, if I am doing whatever I can to deny moment by moment, my understanding that I will die.
My understanding that I am fundamentally just my own person. No one can kind of make me good. If I am denying the responsibility I hold as a person with free moral choices, you know, these kinds of things, then that's gonna move me towards unhealthy anxiety.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Dan Koch: Basically, I am. It's like I have a giant sore on my forearm and I am just gotten really good with concealer and band-aids, and I wear long sleeve shirts, but eventually it's gonna get gangrenous, you know?
And it's like what I really need to do is treat the sore and I need to accept and engage with. Those heavy realities of being a human being with a big old brain. And if I do that, then it has this paradoxical way of like, you know, it's such a scary thing to, to consider dealing with this big sore that is causing me so much pain.
And every time I touch anywhere near it or think about it, I get worried and it hurts. And so there is this sort of hurdle to jump over a sort of, it gets better before it gets worse, before it gets better. Kind of a thing, which anybody who's done trauma work will recognize. But then on the other end of it, you're able to go, oh, okay.
There's really a, a Plato's cave kind of element of this, of you. You kind of get up out and you see things more clearly and those things, some of those things are hard, but. There is a, it's, I mean, Kristen said flourishing earlier. I think that's a pretty good word for what I'm searching for of like mm-hmm.
A, a really flourishing human life will never be. A person who ignores the fact that they will die someday, that they have real responsibility. That's not a flourishing person. See, it's sort of a prerequisite for a certain kind of maturity and flourishing, and it also tends to have a positive effect on things like neurotic or unhealthy anxiety.
I'm not sure, I'm not totally answering the kike guard part maybe, but I
Evan Rosa: mean,
Dan Koch: there's, that's my psychological angle.
Evan Rosa: I, that's we're gonna just be kind of like exploring around it and kind of just be wondering. Kristen, I was, I was curious about, about how you'd answered that question, like the move from ontological anxiety, which is sort of basic to the human condition per se, you know, the species level, and then given how you're conceiving of, of anxiety, how does that land.
How does, like, how does it move into the threat of, of a harmful anxiety that that is, is pathological?
Kristen Tideman: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Evan Rosa: I mean, I could easily refer to my own pathological anxiety in my like single you out.
Kristen Tideman: Well, I mean something Dan that Yeah. You mentioned we could get into later and maybe we will, is that component of like kind of OCD or, and it doesn't maybe necessarily have to be the official diagnosis to recognize that Anxiety does have a com.
There's a control component. At times. And I would say definitely in my life, I'm not saying for everyone. It's funny, even in some of my, uh, you know, kind of exposure to co cognitive science of religion is like, there can be even a component where you're like, if I am anxious, it's almost like that that's staving off the negative outcomes.
Like it's almost, you know, you're kind of superstitious, which is again, I think there's just. This is all the pathological side of things, but on the ontological side, there's being cognizant of it and then there's kind of feeling it and and accepting it. Really embracing that as reality, which is I, I don't know if I had ever, I.
I even had the full chance to do until my diagnosis where I just, I told Dan this, I never felt so aware of my mortality because there was so many questions. I was in, literally in the ER emergency room. I won't get into all the details of the day. Hmm. I'm holding my three month old baby who just got here.
I'm like, my life just started and I. I was like this, I don't even know what this means. I don't even wanna Google what it means. I'm scared, you know, I'm scared for what it could be. Sorry, I did this before with Dan. I'm like, I think I'm good. And then I'm like, here, here it comes. Like you can see it really, really affected me.
Evan Rosa: It's, it just,
Kristen Tideman: it was, it was just so. Close to home and, and saying, you know, all this time, 'cause I, I did a philosophy master's, not a PhD, which does have quite a bit of a different workload. I had a lot less reading, but I, you know, yeah, you deal with, you deal with the text, you get it, you're talking about it, you're with all your, you know, philosophy friends.
It's so rich. But then I think actually running into the. The wall of, oh, this is, this is real. This is actually me, this is my life, and it will end is definitely a hard pill to swallow. But then. I, I think again, you know, having to embrace that that's what this process is, and then recognizing all the ways, like we're even saying, you know, anxiety and embracing mortality.
There's ways I wanna deny the ms, you know, I wanna deny that that's part of my existence now. I wanna deny even components, I would say, of my own faith change. And, and instead of, instead of continuing to wrestle with them, and I, I have sympathy for people who. I mean, a lot of people are tired. That's what's a little, you know, tricky in some of this is there's a lot of exhaustion.
Even if we just talk about, you know, the, the media side of things kind of ingesting all of that can be just so tiring. And it's maybe more than we were designed to handle, but at the same time, yeah. You know, having a certain recognition of this is, you know, this is, there are tough things going on. Let's not deny that.
And then yes. What is within my, what is within my realm of control? How can I be responsible with that? How can I be faithful with that? And you know, there are days I wake up and I think I do that well and days where I'm sure I kind of resort to the pathological and, and I think that's, you know, but again, these tools.
Can help us. And you know, and I think a very concrete way where a lot of things can be abstract. A lot of, I mean, social media advice can be abstract, but then this is, yeah, this is something that's more grounded.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm. Thank you. I mean, I hear the, the reality of it in your voice and your story, and I think it's, it gives voice to like.
The particularity of your situation, which I'm really sorry about, and in the acknowledgement of how that multiplies in different ways and into different extents with any individual. And I think it does lay laid up. Lay down the individual nature of it. And that's why, I mean, here's one just like fairly important if not obvious distinction here between the ontological anxiety and then moving into what feels like anxious times right now, you know, post atomic bomb and, and then in the wake of any atomic bombs in our own individual lives is individuality.
And it's the individual staring into the abyss and and wondering what's there. And it feels dizzying that, like, that would, I'm borrowing again from Ki Guard there that it's like he, he calls anxiety the dizziness of freedom.
Kristen Tideman: Mm mm-hmm.
Evan Rosa: And the dizziness of maybe our precarity, like our, our finitude.
Dan Koch: Well, dizziness is great too, because it's a bodily metaphor.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Dan Koch: And one thing that I was sort of thinking about your question, and Kristen's answer both is that acceptance, so accepting these limits. Limits of on the length of our life, the limits of our agency, what we can and can't control it. That happens cognitively, but it also happens bodily. So, mm-hmm.
Coming up against an MS diagnosis, I don't mean the MS itself. I mean the acceptance of that fact that's gotta be cognitive. There is a thought related element of that. Kristen Will has come to sort of be able to think about it and talk about it and accommodate that knowledge, but it is also bodily affective.
Somatic. One thing I like to say with clients about processing and feeling our emotions is. I was thinking about it one day and I was like, it's kinda like a charge, a built up charge in like a power plant that needs to get worked out, out through the wires. It needs a place to go, like it's it, otherwise it's gonna make the transformer spark and blow up.
Evan Rosa: Oh yeah.
Dan Koch: And then I was like. Oh, emotions aren't like electricity that needs to go through electrical system. They literally are in part electricity that needs to get through an electrical system. Our nervous system is electric and, and so that metaphor. Is is pretty good. Right. And so also it's more literal, even also it's pretty literal.
It's, yeah. It's, it's only, it's barely even a metaphor. And so for Kristen and for anyone else in a similar situation, which could be both sort of like concrete, like new motherhood or the diagnosis or more, more general, like recognizing these limits of our own individual lives, like that does happen. Have to have to happen cognitively.
It also has to happen in your body, and if it doesn't, then there will be downstream consequences of that if you don't find a way to feel and sit with and process the emotional side of it.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Yeah. On the acceptance point, and I, I'm not sure if, if, if I'm getting this right or representing him well, but Jasper,
Dan Koch: Jasper, let's talk about Carl.
Evan Rosa: He, he's also using a metaphor of a shipwreck and acceptance of a shipwreck, and yet accepting it without nihilism. And I think what I understand that to be is that the, the, the sense in which there's this sort of crisis moment of, of a, of a human being coming up against the boundary. Of themselves coming up against a wall where our ordinary coping structure just does not work.
Our defenses, our, our healthy defenses that enable us to continue flourishing might break down, and that is a shipwreck. And yet, can we, can we live in this shipwreck? Can we live in this sort of brokenness, um, without resorting to nihilism?
Dan Koch: Kristen, you or me?
Kristen Tideman: You, you please.
Dan Koch: So Jasper talks about a shipwreck.
SART has his version. Man is like a blind person on a raft. Ki guard has his version. A man, humans, they mean humans are like a ship captain in the middle of a storm. All of these, no, women
Kristen Tideman: are, women are fine. Actually they exist
Dan Koch: in these metaphors sheets. But, so these metaphors, you know, what they share is this idea.
To use a term from SAR of Thrownness, we are thrown into the world and what's interesting is, is there can be a little. Conflict here between, let's just say like a standard Christian view or the way it typically gets taught to children. You know, unit me together in my mother's womb, you know, the count of every hair in my head.
There. There is a sense in in Christianity as I received it that. I am born here in this family. I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. I'm in the image of God. And, and I remember thinking like, oh, how lucky I am that I was born into a Christian family. Right? And these kinds of thoughts will sometimes hit you as you're growing up.
And, and there can be a sense in which like, no, no, God, God, like God specifically, chose all the details of your birth. Not every Christian believes that, but that's a kinda a common way of thinking of it. And existentialism would say, it may be that in some sense, God is certainly God. If God exists, God's okay with.
Whatever we were born with and happened to be born into, but our lived experience of being a human is one of being kind of tossed haphazardly into a particular genetics. I didn't choose my genetics. I didn't choose what year or what continent I would be born on. I didn't choose my parents' previous life experiences that shaped the way that they raised me, you know?
So I had panic disorder for 15 years. Came by it, honestly and genetically through my grandpa and my mom didn't choose that so much of what we deal with is not chosen. I didn't chose, I didn't choose for a OL broadband to become readily available when I was hitting puberty, but that's what happened.
Right. So like all these things, you know, you think, you think about, like we, we've been talking on the show about, on the podcast about, let's say you're. 25 first kid starting your business, but you're in Ukraine and then Russia attacks you like, you didn't choose that. You're thrown into that situation.
Mm-hmm. And so if, if it's true that everyone is similarly thrown with whatever the particular details are there, but if the thrownness is consistent, what Jaspers is saying is you can fight that. And you can pretend it's not true, but your life is gonna get better if you accept it. And if you go, okay, what pieces are left from my shipwreck?
Ooh, I've still got a few planks over there. One of the cannons is still working. Whatever, you know, fill it out the metaphor, take it as far as you want. But we all have those limitations, and a lot of them are, are, are identical in, in basic form, if not identical in detail.
Kristen Tideman: Well, I, sorry to be picky here, Dan, but credit to our credit is due.
I think this is a bit of a heiddeger concept. Maybe start expanded. It's
Dan Koch: thrown this, I was thinking when I said start, I was like, wait, is that one heiddeger? Okay. Yeah.
Kristen Tideman: This is a, that was one. I'm a
Dan Koch: psychology guy. Okay.
Kristen Tideman: No, it's okay. That's why we, we don't blame you. And also Heider, you know, he reputation as a
Dan Koch: little, I try and give Heiddeger as little credit as possible.
You know, just the whole unrepentant Nazi thing, that's really the main, it's
Kristen Tideman: tough.
Dan Koch: That's, that's the main problem I have with him. But you mileage may vary on that.
Kristen Tideman: Well, and that, that could open up a whole other can of worms. But yeah, he, uh,
Dan Koch: he,
Kristen Tideman: he's the
Dan Koch: throne. This guy, you're right,
Kristen Tideman: he's the throne. This guy on his, on his tombstone.
Me.
Evan Rosa: Uh, let's go toward like, then the, the flight from that. These are boundaries situations that we're talking about, um, which I understand them to be at least. These death, guilt, struggle and chance. So
Dan Koch: just briefly, the, those are like the givens. That's what we would say. Those are like the, the realities boundary situations, which Jasper's talks about is, are moments in time.
He starts at an individual level. When you recognize those givens because something has changed in your life, Kristen, receiving an MS diagnosis is an example of a boundary situation. It's like, okay, I had a. I had one plan and I had one set of tools, and now I have to modify that. That's, I can't do business as usual anymore, and we've been applying it also collectively.
So I think that. Kristen has sort of gestured at these already earlier, but like the way that our sociopolitical situation is feeling very chaotic, the way that related to that, there is apparently a, a pretty profound lack of shared reality between people on opposite sides of some of those issues. I think the precipitous rise of ai.
A boundary situation. It asks us what is intelligence? What's humanity? Are there whole swaths of the economy that are gonna basically go away and be automated? Uh, what is what, what do I bring to the world? So these are boundary situations, and what boundary situations do is highlight the reality of those difficult existential givens like death freedom.
Isolation.
Evan Rosa: What would it be then to genuinely confront this? And let's, let's hone in on acceptance,
Dan Koch: if anybody knows, tell me. No, I'm kidding. Um,
Evan Rosa: yeah, I know. Okay.
Dan Koch: Okay. Well, Kristen, like what I, I'm, I'm curious, you could speak from lived experience. I know you're very much still in the middle of some of this, but where do you see evidence.
How do you know that you've grown in acceptance of some of these realities? Like what would you point to? What do you point to internally?
Kristen Tideman: Yeah, that's a good question and I would say. A big theme in what we discussed. It's already even come up today, is a little bit of this maturity component, and that seems to be thematic when I assess anything along the lines of anxiety and in in, in any of these realms where again, I think especially the neurotic pathological anxiety that has almost an attitude of like, you know, like.
It's almost an expression and it's a tenseness. You can, you know, you feel it. Like my shoulders whenever they go up in my real life, when I am in anxious situations. I've been told that someone in college was like, put your shoulders down. I was like, okay, you're not helping. But I, I would say that it's not, you know, it's, there are days where I recognize I was not.
Totally. Like it wasn't totally linear, you know, it wasn't like, there are days where I'm like, oh, I, I think I succumbeded to the pressure of that and, and then there are days where I'm like, you know, this was, it's an, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to say, you know, kind of this, yeah, this is the life I've been given.
There's actually, I would call, it's coming to mind as a Frederick Buchner quote, this is your life. Terrible and beautiful things will happen. Don't be afraid. And it's, and I think on my better days, that's the attitude I'm taking. And it came up recently, I was like looking for something in my archives.
Mm-hmm. And, and I, and I used to have it actually as a daily reminder, which is so funny. Because I was like, oh, this is more appropriate than ever. And it was, it, one of the quotes is the, the well-known ARD quote of like, you know, marry and you'll regret it. Don't marry and you'll regret it. You know, whether you marry or don't marry, you'll regret it.
It was like, you know, weep for the world's foolishness, laugh at the world's foolishness. All these, you know, those sorts of things. So the, there are different Yeah. Quotes on there, but the one that has really stood out is basically anything that comes at us. We can use as a, an excuse to weaken our resolve or to strengthen it.
Dan Koch: Mm-hmm.
Kristen Tideman: Yeah. And I feel very appropriately challenged by that. I, I think that there are days where I, I want to be like, oh, I'm poor me, really? You know? I think, and that's a very human impulse too. I'm not trying to shame people, but in the end, it's like what you said, Dan of. That, does that help in the long run?
Does that lead towards flourishing? Does it lead towards proper maybe integration of reality and I, I don't think so. And then, yeah. The last thing I'll say, Dan knows, I always have these kind of tendrils quotes, connected moments, life. Yeah. When I, I studied abroad in Costa Rica, there was someone I met and he had this Yeah.
Phrase in, in Spanish. It was like, which is basically like poor little. Poor little person, kind of like poor guy, no one, you know, so no one's like a poor. And it was kind of like, you know, you could go too hardcore and not say, you know, not say poor me or whatever, but it's like you can also see that in a positive light and say, no, I could say, you know, pocito or I could say, no, let's, let me, let me just take this day.
I don't need to focus on why it's. Why it could be bad or I could see the misfortunes in it and I could, I can embrace it and again, integrate it. So I, hopefully that's, that's my intent as I alluded to. Not always successful every day, but
Evan Rosa: I think where I would want to end is how to, how to move forward with, with no resolution, where there's no solution necessarily, but it's just unresolved.
Uncertainty, disagreement, uh, unresolved issues that, that are just gonna become moment to moment. I'll let you land a plane. I,
Dan Koch: I mean, I think that's the whole game. I think the idea in existential psychology is everything is unfinished all the time and. That doesn't mean that there's no progress. It doesn't mean that nothing gets done.
So in a sense, like some discreet things are accomplished, but to be human is to be unfinished. It is to have constantly limits around you, and your choice, among other things, is to accept them or pretend they're not there. You know, Kristen mentioned the sort of bodily signs of anxiety being reframed and getting healthier.
Right. I think we can connect that back to the unhealthy versus healthy anxiety thing here as well. And one way that we talk about that is, is my world getting smaller or is my world getting bigger? And one way that I think is a a cool thing we haven't added on yet is all of us together have these limits.
We have these real limitations. But that's, we are all in the same boat raft, shipwreck. When it pick your nautical metaphor, we're all in the same boat. And so one way that, like Emmy Van Duren, the sort of a British popularizer of existential therapy along with Irvin Yala in the states sort of contemporaries, she says, one way that your world gets bigger in accepting those limits is that.
The real problems of the world tend to require collaboration. They are bigger than one person can solve, and I think this connects back to human flourishing that we, we evolved. We are designed to work in groups. We are social animals, we are family and community oriented. And so anxiety of the unhelpful, neurotic type.
Spins us in our own mind. We sort of, our worlds get smaller, they become more insular, self-focused, self-referential. And when we go, oh, okay, here's the limit. Now what I wanna do, it often forces us to go, well, who can help? And now we're relating, and maybe we're even loving. Our neighbor and they're loving us.
And if we're Christians, we can also say, now God is loving us through that person and we are loving God through loving that person. And so that's maybe how I would put a little gloss or an end cap on, on Kristen's. Wonderful answer.
Evan Rosa: Well, I wanna thank each of you, Kristen, you in particular for, for both the courage and the clarity of sharing where you're at at the moment, and. Allowing any listener, including myself, to feel less alone about the anxieties that crop up in our own individual lives. Thank you both.
Dan Koch: Thank you, Evan.
Kristen Tideman: Thank you Evans.
Evan Rosa: I look forward to the next time
for The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Kristen Tieman and Dan Koch, production assistance by Noah Senthil. I'm Evan Rosa. And I edit and produce the show for more information. Visit us online at faith dot Yale dot edu and life worth living dot Yale dot edu.
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