Hi. Thanks for having me, it is a pleasure.

Absolutely. I would also say that the education system is slowly shifting in a direction where this conversation is starting to happen a bit more. Children can learn to read and write within the context of relational literacy as well. What they learn to read and write about can be just as important as the reading and writing itself. So as I had mentioned in the video, relational literacy is the phrase that I use to describe the understanding of an ability to practice healthy ways of relating. One of the really important reasons to work on understanding relational literacy is because so many of the most serious problems that we experience in our interpersonal lives or personal lives globally are the problems that arise because we have not learnt how to understand healthy ways of relating and we haven't learned the practical tools to actually engage in healthy ways of relating. So we continue to make choices that harm ourselves and that harm others. That prevents us from developing these connections that all of us ultimately want and need.

There have been a lot of interesting studies recently looking at the science of connection. In discovering that humans and also some other animals are hard wired to feel empathy for others. Empathy is in many ways our natural state. We are also hardwired to seek meaningful connections with others and to avoid the pain of disconnection. Yet, so often, we engage in the ways of thinking and behaving that create the disconnections that we want to avoid and that seeds many of the pressing problems we are facing in our world today from problematic systems of oppression like sexism, racism, speciesism, and problematic practices like animal exploitation, environmental degradation.

That's a great question and the answer to it depends. Often, it's not possible and often it's not even desirable to shrug off the past, but rather to look at the past to face the past, to understand to the best of our ability so that we can use this learning as we move forward. Sometimes the best choice for a relationship moving forward is a choice to end that relationship. Because if you're engaging with a person who is not responding to your attempts to relate in a helpful way, to cultivate a healthy connection, that person may not be ready or able to engage with you in a way that's not toxic. There is plenty of interesting research looking at attachments, how we form attachments to other individuals.

Healthy relationships are relationships where we have healthy boundaries. What this means is that we let ourselves take in information about ourselves and a sense of attachment to others, but we have healthy boundaries and we don't attach so much that we lose sight of our own selves or own needs. What this essentially means is that when we have healthy boundaries, we stay connected with our own truth. We are as clear as possible about what we think and feel and we're also able to understand other people's truths. We don't look at the world through other people's eyes so much that we lose sight of what we want, think and feel. We don't refuse to look at the world through other people's eyes so much that we can't take in feedback or important information. Then we're able to have more healthy attachments and connections with others.

Absolutely. Dynamic is basically interactions. Healthy relational dynamics look the same. Whether we are engaging with another individual, a person, whether we're engaging on a collective level, on a social level, two groups engaging, whether we're relating to other animals, our beloved dog for example, or beyond that, whether we're relating to the environment, even whether we're relating to ourselves. So the principles and tools for practicing healthy ways of relating look exactly the same, regardless as to who you're relating to. This doesn't mean that there isn't variation. Obviously, the way that you're going to interact with your companion animal is not exactly the way that you're going to interact with your spouse or your partner. But what it does mean is that the same formula applies to all of our relationships and to every interaction we have. Once we understand this, we can apply this. Part of relational literacy or practicing healthy ways of relating also means practicing compassion, practicing this respect to ourselves so that we want to be our best selves but we also recognize that we are flawed human beings. We're all struggling. None of us has really learnt how to do this. There's a lot of wiggle room we need to have for ourselves and to others as we navigate our relationships.

Well, the formula that I describe in my book is very simple. It's a set of principles and lots of tools that various people have been working on in developing for many years now. The formula is when we want to create healthy ways of relating or healthy relationships or relationships where people or the individuals feel connected. Again, this also applies to how we relate to ourselves. We can feel more or less self connected. I know you talk about this a lot in your own work. In order to cultivate this healthy connection what we need to do is two things, practicing integrity and honoring dignity.

Essentially, the formula for healthy relationships is the practice of integrity and the honoring of dignity. I can break this down and be even more specific about this. Integrity is integration of core moral values and practices. It's basically walking the walk. The core moral values that have been found to be consistent across the primary human values are compassion or caring and justice or fairness. When we practice these values to the best of our ability, we honor the dignity of others, meaning we perceive others and treat others as though they're not less worthy than we are of being treated with respect. So, again, healthy relationships are relationships that reflect integrity and that honor dignity. You know what this feels like, because everybody watching here has been engaged in these dynamics and the violation of these dynamics throughout their entire lives. So if you think about, for example, a relationship in your own life that you would consider a really good relationship or a great relationship. Chances are that somebody that you feel a connection with, you feel connected with that person. Chances are you trust that that person will practice integrity towards you, meaning you trust that that person will be caring or compassionate towards you and fair to you. To simplify it even further, you trust that person will treat you with respect. Practice the golden rule towards you. By doing this they honor your dignity. They're communicating with you that you are no less of an individual than they are. You are no less worthy of being treated with respect than they are.

If you think about the opposite, if you think about a relationship in your own life that's not a good relationship. Maybe it's like just an online troll that you've encountered. So it's not even like a "Real relationship", chances are you have the very opposite experience. Instead of feeling connected, you feel disconnected. Instead of them treating you with integrity, they're violating their integrity towards you. They're not treating you the way they would want to be treated. And chances are, you feel that your dignity is not being honored, your dignity is being harmed, that they're perceiving you as less worthy of being treated with respect. So when we practice integrity and honor dignity, we foster healthy connections. When we violate integrity and harm dignity, we create disconnection. There's a lot more that I can say around the periphery of this, but that's really the core.

First of all, John Gottman's work and his work with his partner is amazing. They've done some really groundbreaking work. Speaking about your question about appreciation, it's important for us to really try to stay connected with our empathy, which is what I think you are ultimately suggesting because when we lose our empathy for others, it's a lot easier for us to engage in some of these disconnecting behaviors toward others. When we appreciate others, it also helps us to empathize with them. We also have to be careful not to over empathize with others. If you're in a situation where you're not being respected, if you're in a situation not just physically abusive, but potentially emotionally abusive, empathizing in those situations is actually dangerous. People who are on the receiving end of abusive or disrespectful behaviors are people who often need to feel less empathy in those situations in order to protect themselves from further harm. So it's really knowing when to turn on and off the empathy is quite important. That's something I could speak to a bit later.

But I do want to make sure I address your other question, which is how do we navigate relational dynamics in this bizarre time of Covid? I think the first step is for everybody to recognize that this is a very strange, extremely difficult time. There's a huge range of experiences. Some people are having a much more difficult time, obviously, than others. But for virtually all of us, our lives have been destabilized in many ways. In our relationships, we are often now forced to be in situations where we're either too close or not close enough. We're in confinement with one another or we're unable to be connected or at least be physically connected with the people we would want to be connected with. The first step is recognizing that these are very difficult times and not expecting yourself to be at your best or anywhere close to your best. Because, as we talked about earlier, most of us have never even learned relational skills in better times. In normal times, we struggle with relationships and communication. Communication is the primary way we relate, of course.

One of the things that I've heard from a lot of people who I have talked to is that part of the frustration or stress they are feeling is that they are feeling guilty for not doing better in a situation where it's just so hard. For many people, they just really need to give themselves permission to be very imperfect right now and to have a lot of wiggle room in their relationships. Now, all of the principles for healthy relationships, in particular, healthy communication, obviously, apply now more than ever for many people. This is a fantastic time to learn to build your relational literacy and your communication skills so that you can navigate these complicated times more effectively and more easily.

One of the things that I have been hearing from people about their relational struggles right now is that a difference in perception about the level of risk posed by Covid and to some degree, the level of security measures they should be taking is causing a lot of conflict. For example, you're living together and one person wants to be using Purell all the time and to be washing down counters and to be cleaning groceries when they're coming in and another person says, well, that's going over the top. Don't force me to change my behavior. This much is just too much for me. So effective communication skills obviously go a long way and one point they are annoying is that when people's needs are in conflict, which is what this is an example of needs being in conflict. Needs are not all equal or all do not have a weight. Safety needs in order to feel safe and secure, need to be given precedence over other kinds of needs, otherwise navigating that relationship will become difficult, if not impossible. If you can make a lifestyle change that takes you a little bit of effort or maybe even a lot of effort, but the other person who is asking you to make that change is actually going to feel more safe and secure because of it, it's almost a no brainer. That's a great investment in your relationship account. Now, I gave an example of hygiene needs because that is a common difference. But there are lots of differences that are emerging right now. It's a time where our differences are becoming magnified.

Yeah, absolutely. Really understanding that we are so different in so many ways. We have a lot in common as individual humans. People are wired very differently. Look at introversion and extroversion as an example. I have a colleague who is very extroverted and who is having a really hard time in lockdown. And I have colleagues who are introverted and they're saying, "Finally, I'm getting a break." So there's no right or wrong way to be when it comes to personality and when it comes to temperament. Very often many of the conflicts that we experience in relationships, not just love relationships come from our belief at differences. Difference equals deficiency. We assume because we're different, we're going to clash. Really, what matters is not our differences. It's how we relate to those differences. If we learn to relate to those differences in a healthy way, we learn to really ask ourselves, what does the world look like through this other person's eyes to really understand them and really validate their experience, even if it's not ours. Even if we don't agree with it, meaning even if we don't feel that it's a healthy experience, we can really significantly change the quality of our relationships.

Many people are already doing it, using technology to stay connected when they can't stay physically connected and also recognizing the limitations of technology. There have been some interesting articles that have come out recently on studies that have looked at why video conferencing is often very draining for people, because it's harder for us to read social cues, our brains have to actually work harder and are trying to fill in the gaps because sometimes the slightest delay can throw our ability to actually read other people's experiences off. So this is sort of the beauty of relational literacy. Once you understand the basic set of principles and tools, you can apply it to everything. So giving yourself the opportunity to perhaps spend more one to one time with people rather than group chats to have your meetings, more as one to one, rather than having too many group meetings, pausing and asking people, how are you? and doing the same for yourself. As I said before, we are always relating to ourselves and our primary relationship is with ourselves and that we are relating to ourselves more frequently than we were relating to anybody else. We relate to ourselves through our self talk. We all have this internal dialogue that's going on all the time. We are always relating to our future self, five minutes from now or five years from now.

Well, at least most of us learn this belief. We learn to believe that we can't love others until we love ourselves. Most of us have grown up hearing this. I don't know where this idea came from. I don't know if it was ever supported by studies. I don't think so, because it's been around for a very long time. Yet, we've all just bought into it as though it's some sort of a universal truth. When we take a more relational view of love, growth and of human and non-human connection, we can recognize that we can learn to love ourselves through loving others. We are social animals. We're not meant to exist in isolation. Feminist psychologists back in the 60s and 70s really started advocating for a more relational approach to understanding human psychology and its development. They said we need to look at people as though we're islands unto ourselves. We don't develop, for example, psychological problems generally in isolation of our relationships. We are relational beings. We grow, we heal and we get harmed in relationship to others. Many people can testify to the experience of never having felt that they loved themselves, but became loved by their newborn baby or by their partner. They fell in love with the person who became their great love and their life partner and they learnt to love themselves through looking at themselves through that other's eyes. And they learnt to love themselves because they started practicing the principles of loving or healthy relationships toward someone who they valued enough to do that. That taught them how to practice these principles and then they could apply them to themselves. So we don't need to love ourselves before loving others. We can learn to love through loving and being loved.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you for the introduction. This really emerged out of my own journey. Earlier in the show, I was talking about the way that we relate healthy relationships when we were relating to all living beings. In my journey, like many people in the West in particular, but around the world, I grew up with a dog who I loved, who I practiced healthy ways of relating towards. I would never want to harm my dog. I would never want to cause my dog suffering. I always wanted to be kind to my dog. I wanted to treat my dogs fairly and treat my dog the way that I would wish my dogs would treat me if he were in the position of having more power. I cared about animals in general, like many people do. I also grew up contributing to a system that I later called Carnism, which I'll talk about in just a moment, contributing to the system that causes such incredible intensive and extensive harm to animals, it is absolutely mind boggling to think about it. This is the system of animal agriculture. Of course, I grew up eating meat, eggs and dairy. I was a meat lover's pizza girl at Domino's Pizza. I never made the connection over so many years that I could be petting my dog with one hand while I ate a pork chop with another, a pork chop that had come from an animal who had once been as intelligent, obviously, and as sensitive as my dog. It wasn't until I ended up getting sick back in 1989. I was 23 years old at that time from eating a contaminated hamburger that wound me in the hospital on intravenous antibiotics. At that point, I just stopped eating meat because I was disgusted by it.

What happened was it led me to want to learn about my new diet. At the time, I was vegetarian, but became vegan quickly thereafter, which led me to learn information about animal agriculture and what I learnt really shocked and horrified me. But what shocked me perhaps even more was that nobody I talked to about this was willing to hear what I had to say.

Well, absolutely. My family and friends were like myself. They were rational thinkers, they are empathic people. People who cared. I said we're hardwired to feel empathy for others, and that includes empathy for other animals. What we have in common is that the vast majority of us really do care. We really do care about our impact on others, including our impact on other animals and because we've been born into this system of carnism, which is basically the opposite of veganism. Carnism is the invisible belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals that basically conditions us so that we distort our perceptions and disconnect from our natural empathy for animals. Then we don't feel any discomfort or really think about the reality of what we're doing when we're eating animals. What we have in common is that we share, we are hardwired to seek connection with others, we are hardwired to feel empathy for others, including other animals and most of us really do want to make choices that reflect our integrity. There are choices of integrity that reflect compassion and justice. We simply have not learnt about the ways that we've been conditioned to not reflect on our food choices. But we can all undo this conditioning and we can all move along the spectrum in a way that helps us to contribute to a world that is more relational in a way that includes other animals.

Yes. That's a big part of the reason that I wrote my book. I didn't want to write a book simply about why people shouldn't eat animals. I wanted to write a book about why we eat animals in the first place when doing so is very much against our actual feelings about animals in general and contributes to many serious problems in the world. So really understanding the system that is carnism that we're born into and that deeply conditions us so that we think, feel and act in certain ways that can really help us to recognize and feel compassion for ourselves as we begin to reflect and ask ourselves, "OK, how can I make food choices? How can I make my food choices more freely?" And this is really the goal of my work, is to raise awareness of carnism so that people can, in fact, make their food choices more freely, because without awareness, there is no free choice. Unless we're aware of how we have been conditioned to distort our perceptions in a particular way and disconnect from our empathy for specific types of animals, we're not making our choices freely, and everybody needs and deserves to know the truth. Not just the truth about animal agriculture, but the truth about carnism, which is the system that so deeply socialized all of us. And then we become more empowered to really think about how we want to be and how we want to move through the world.

Yeah, absolutely. This is not to say that we have to be perfectionistic. All of us can move it. I think it's helpful to see carnism and veganism on a spectrum. In many ways, it's not where you are on that spectrum, but is what direction you're heading in. So you can ask yourself how can I move along the spectrum in a direction that helps me to reduce my negative impact on other animals, also on my body? We can also choose to be allies in transforming carnism. People often think, oh, either you have to be fully vegan in your part of the solution or you are not vegan and you are part of the problem. You can also be an ally. You can use your influence to support the transformation of carnism in whatever way you're capable. Some of the people who interview me for papers or articles that sometimes have millions of readers, they are not vegan themselves, but they really want to use their influence to transform the system. Some of the people who donate to my organization Beyond Carnism are not vegans, but they recognize these problems and they want to use their influence to help transform a very problematic system.

When I talk about in my book it is really the psychology of eating animals, how is it that those of us who are compassionate people end up supporting an industry that is cruel? I talk about how carnism uses these psychological defense mechanisms. Carnism is structured like other problematic isms, such as sexism for example. It distorts our perceptions so that we don't recognize that we're making harmful choices when we're making harmful choices. Therefore, we get disconnected from our empathy.

For example, carnism teaches us to see farmed animals as abstractions, as lacking any individuality or personality of their own. For example, that a pig is a pig and all pigs are the same. It's much easier to support violence toward individuals if we don't see them as individuals. We don't think of pigs the way we think of dogs, for example. We don't get outraged at the treatment of billions of pigs, the way that we get outraged at the treatment of hundreds or thousands of dogs somewhere else in the world. As you pointed out earlier, in some places in the world people eat animals or don't eat animals and the types of animals that we do or don't eat have very little, if anything, to do with who and how those animals are and everything to do with how we perceive those animals.

Well, I mean, clearly climate change is the most pressing issue of our age. It requires and deserves immediate attention. When we ask ourselves about how we're relating to the environment, we can ask ourselves absolutely this same question. When I make this choice, this is really what it comes down to, whoever you're relating to. We are constantly making choices. We are constantly engaging in behaviors that impact others and that impact ourselves. The nice thing is that healthy relational behaviors are always the win–win. They are in the best interest of the greater good of the integrity of the core of the system. When we make choices, we can ask ourselves is this choice going to cause harm or not? Obviously, there are many questions to unravel and there are a lot of nuances to consider. But we can ask ourselves, does this choice that I'm going to make reflect my integrity? Does this reflect integrity? Am I practicing compassion and fairness or justice right now in making this choice? And we're not always going to make perfect choices because we're very flawed human beings who have been born into a deeply relationally dysfunctional world. We really have to accept that.

Nevertheless, we can work to bring integrity more fully into our choices on an ongoing basis. We're not treating our co-workers differently than our boss, differently than our partner, differently than the animals with whom we share the planet, the less compartmentalized we are, the more integrated we are. It is a holistic way of being. We practice kindness and respect toward everybody who comes into our orbit. This frees up a tremendous amount of psychological energy for ourselves because we don't have to continue to stay to block out unpleasant truth, the consequences of our choices and the relational fallout from us not being kind.

I don't think that I've said that. It wasn't my intention to communicate that message in this. My goal in this conversation is to raise awareness of how many of us have been socialized to think about the issue of eating animals from within a system that makes it very difficult for us to think for ourselves and to make choices that reflect our core values. Also, to really encourage people to have a conversation about relationships is a very limited conversation if it is leaving out certain populations, any populations, and I think it's very important for us to really consider the big picture when we're talking about relationships. As psychologists, one of the things that they assess when they are looking at behavior of children and human development is how do children relate to animals? If a child is relating to an animal in a way that is harmful, is actively seeking out an animal to harm them then that's a huge red flag that there's a problem in that child's relational development and psychological development.

It would be irresponsible of me, in my opinion, to have a conversation about healthy relationships and not have that conversation to encompass the whole of humanity's relationship, which includes our relationships with other animals.

Absolutely.

Thank you Hitendra. It has been really wonderful being here. I appreciate it so much. Thank you.