The Consigliera Papers Podcast

What I didn’t know about getting older

Our cultural narratives about aging are focused on diminished mental capacity, not expanded spiritual authority. But I understand more as I get older, I have a perspective and, yes, wisdom, I didn’t realize I would achieve. I was born in 1962, and I am now 62 years old, at least for a couple more weeks. When I was young I had a vague idea of what it would be like to be in my sixties, and I am quite pleased that I was mostly wrong. Here are some wonderful things about being this age which I didn’t anticipate when I was younger. Really, truly, not giving a f**k. While there are, and always will be, a few people whose good opinion matters to me, I am much less concerned with how society, or individuals think of me anymore. It is infinitely freeing not to reference what “other people” will think of what I wear, who I vote for, how I spend my money or style my hair. I save so much by not being compelled to buy, do or want the latest thing, whatever that might be, to help me conform to someone else’s idea of beauty, prosperity or success. Listen for more! Get full access to Fierce Grace at speirolo.substack.com/subscribe [https://speirolo.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Roll Your Own

When I was in college I fell in love with a man who loved to smoke. He consumed both pot and tobacco with a craftsman’s attention to detail. I never much cared for pot, alcohol was my preference, but I did smoke cigarettes. I bought mine in packs from the gas station. At the time, I smoked Camel nons, what we used to call filterless cigarettes, the kind where you inevitably pick a fleck of tobacco off the tip of your tongue. This was before the trendy American Spirits, which I smoked later, but well after everyone knew smoking was bad for us. This man rolled his own cigarettes. He was so skilled at it he could roll one handed, while driving, and come up with a perfect cylinder of tobacco wrapped in thin paper. I thought we were so cool, driving to his house by the beach, suntanned, young, windows open, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and drinking a cold Heineken. Yes, while driving – I was an alcoholic even then. It’s summer now, warm, and I’m thinking about things I love that are inherently fraught. I love catch phrases, labels, easy tags. At work, I call them terms of art. A term of art is a phrase a group uses to describe a pattern or behavior. It can be as simple as a father whispering to his teen-aged kids “FHB” when Uncle Jim and his family arrive unexpectedly for dinner, meaning “Family Hold Back” as in, don’t take your customary second helping until everyone has eaten. It’s shorthand, but it often conveys cultural information. The FHB family – (this is a real example) values hospitality, and wants everyone to feel welcome. Nobody’s going hungry, there’s plenty of snacks for later, but with FHB Jim and family each get a plateful. In-jokes and neologisms can be terms of art, shorthand that conveys cultural information about what is in or out, a kind of linguistic side-eye, side-eye being a term of art. When I coach work teams I invite them to come up with their own terms of art. What are phrases that can serve as shortcuts and emphasize cultural values or aspirations? A lot of my clients are in advertising, so they come up with some very creative ways of expressing things like a commitment to being direct or tolerating conflict or setting good boundaries with clients. Confidentiality precludes my sharing these phrases with you but they are usually memorable, sometimes involve profanity, and they really work. But there’s a dark side to the labels, catchphrases and terms of art when we use them as shorthand at work or in our personal relationships. What could, in theory, be useful becomes, in practice, toxic and disruptive. Catchphrases, when widely adopted, get encrusted with political, social and cultural baggage that makes them more damaging. They move from tool to weapon. It’s like pouring molten lead into a piece of wood to make a cosh, heavy and lethal. I wrote [https://consigliera.substack.com/p/controlling] a few weeks ago about therapy speak and recovery speak being co-opted by people who are not therapists and not in recovery to attack others. The backlash to those kinds of facile overused terms has been written and spoken about widely. And yes, it is bad for us. Bad for relationships, bad for communication, reductive and limiting. Here's an example. The New York Times ran an article about the term “mankeeping” [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/well/family/mankeeping-definition.html?searchResultPosition=1] this week. Mankeeping is the emotional labor many women experience in opposite sex relationships when their male partner has no friends or social network and turns to his wife or partner to fulfill all his social and emotional needs. Last week the Times ran a long article called The Trouble With Wanting Men [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/magazine/men-heterofatalism-dating-relationships.html?searchResultPosition=1] about “heterofatalism” the sense of frustration, dread or doom women seeking men feel about the men they date. These men are described as commitment phobic, unreliable, immature, passive, helpless. I read both these articles, and I will admit some of the points landed. I felt like the labels had some resonance. Women often talk with other women about their frustrations with their male partners, and I am susceptible to all the catchphrases we use to describe unskillful patterns of behavior that feel gendered. Often because they are gendered. This is what made me think about the cigarettes. I loved smoking, and did it for a long time. There was a delicious subversive delight in the snick of the lighter, that first inhale, the kick when the nicotine hit my bloodstream. It was an excuse to step out of a party and a reason to gather with friends, huddled in a doorway outside of a club. Labels that sum up behavior which irks or challenges, phrases that expertly sketch power dynamics run amok, give me that same hit. There’s a reason these terms take off on social media, because they are reductive and delicious, especially if you are the one who can wield them. Even though I really try to be less judgmental, more compassionate, to move with curiosity and openness rather than condemnation and censure, I can feel all the slights and damage of years as a woman in the world reach out for the tasty psychic snack of the snappy label drenched with derogatory implications. Listen for more Get full access to Fierce Grace at speirolo.substack.com/subscribe [https://speirolo.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Grief Porn

“Talk about your dead kid. It will get people’s attention, make them relate to you, it’s a compelling story.” I’m a relatively unknown author promoting a new book from a small publisher in London. The topic of the book, spiritual tools for decision making, isn’t enough of a hook, I’m told. The PR consultant who I paid to advise me gives me some useful advice, but I don’t like this suggestion. Talk about your dead kid. Because apparently a dead kid is a good hook. There is a chapter in my book, The Saint and the Drunk, about making decisions in a season of grief in which I discuss the death of my father when I was 19 and the death of my son, when he was 19. I have told the story of my son’s death on multiple stages [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WebsjShV0ZA] and in various books and magazines. I’m working on a new book about grief. I took the PR consultant’s advice, and got press coverage in major publications with dead kid stories and maybe that’s sold some books. The journalists who interviewed me were respectful, kind, and thoughtful. I hope the resulting articles are helpful. It's not the topic that disturbs me, it’s the hunger for it, the fact that content about my dead kid drives engagement. People click and share and comment more. It is painful to see pictures of my dead son served up next to advertisements for shoes and beauty products. But I wonder if my discomfort is more than just the pain of remembering, the visceral reaction to seeing his beautiful face. What if I’m uncomfortable because I am participating in a practice that is distorting grief and loss? When does sharing a story become grief porn? Grief porn takes a real, complex subject and highlights the drama until it becomes almost unrecognizable. It is meant to titillate, excite, induce that sense of relief that my life may suck but at least I didn’t have to go through that. Listen for more. Get full access to Fierce Grace at speirolo.substack.com/subscribe [https://speirolo.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Community

Since the presidential election, I have seen many exhortations to lean into community. I agree, I have tried to do that myself. But what the often anodyne exhortations fail to explain is that community is challenging. It’s hard to be with a disparate group of people trying to do a thing together while hewing to norms and standards that can be very different from what we encounter at work or in our algorithm driven online interactions. Community can be found anywhere; from a group of parents whose children play team sports together to an open water swimming club. They are all good. I am primarily thinking about what I call intentional communities. The phrase “intentional community” is often used to describe a residential arrangement where people volunteer to live in communities organized around specific principles and/or shared tasks or spaces. My definition is broader. I mean any group of people who work together to do something positive in the world. They gather with shared values and goals. The neighborhood group that clears invasive plants from a nearby forest. Volunteers who run a food pantry. A community theater group. A church or synagogue is often host to a number of intentional communities gathered around shared interests like a men’s scripture study or a jail ministry. Animal rescue groups, environmental justice coalitions, support groups, recovery groups. You get the picture. I have been a member of groups like these for most of my adult life. And getting that kind of group to make decisions and work together effectively requires almost the opposite skills that we learn in the corporate world. Some of my communities are pretty countercultural, so there’s the added interest of working against capitalism, patriarchy and exploitation of the earth. It's interesting to watch people move from a corporate world driven by a capitalist mindset into an intentional community. I’ve done it, and I’ve watched other people do it, and we often struggle with some of the same things. It can be like watching a bull plow through the proverbial china shop, snorting and tossing his big head and wondering why everything is so complicated. LIsten for more! My book, The Saint and the Drunk A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life is available online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. If you want me to do a reading or workshop in your town, get in touch. More at speirolo.com [http://speirolo.com] Get full access to Fierce Grace at speirolo.substack.com/subscribe [https://speirolo.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Controlling

I’m in recovery, and have been for a long time, and I’ve started to call it the Recovery Mindfuck. It happens in recovery and outside of it, when people use concepts and phrases meant to highlight and help, admonitions intended for instruction and illumination, to weaponized and pathologize ordinary human behaviors. “You’re so controlling.” Have you ever heard the word controlling used in a way that isn’t pejorative? I haven’t. When someone says “controlling” we know what they mean. Controlling behavior at work means micromanaging, trying to exert influence over something not in one’s purview or job description. In the personal arena, a controlling individual trys to dictate the behavior, choices and responses of the people around them, often in ways that limit the autonomy or independence of those people. Bad. Right? How did that word, and others like it, become honed into weapons, lobbed into conversations at work, home, media? Our cultural conversation is full of therapy speak. People without any training in psychology label the behavior of others as narcissistic, borderline, PTSD. I get it, those terms are juicy with the authority of science; deep and definitive. We know this. What I hear less about is the way that recovery speak has also become braided with therapy speak. Words like enabling, controlling, denial are tossed about, in and out of recovery, until they, too, have saturated the cultural conversation. Recovery speak, like therapy speak, is often used against someone. “You’re controlling” is a phrase wielded as a cudgel. If you protest, you can be accused of being in denial. We all know the disease model of addiction, it is a common scene in television or film – you are incapacitated, not responsible, enmeshed in denial which needs to be smashed. Listen for more. Get full access to Fierce Grace at speirolo.substack.com/subscribe [https://speirolo.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]