Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino

His Daughter Asked Him What Depression Was. Nine Years Later, He'd Defined 272 of Them.

D. Earl Johnston came on Lens of Hopefulness to talk about a book unlike anything else I’ve come across in years of doing these interviews. It’s a 376-page reference work that defines 272 separate emotions, not through clinical theory, but through more than 8,000 quotes and phrases from people who actually lived through them. The book is called Choosing Emotions: Thinking with Your Head and Acting with Your Heart, and it took nine years to put together, drawing on more than 1,800 contributors across roughly 2,500 years of recorded human experience, from Confucius, Buddha, and Plato up through voices most of us would recognize today. Doug, as he goes by, didn’t come to this work through psychology. His career was spent as a finance executive in banking, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity in Los Angeles, and later as a professional researcher retained by national law firms to assess complicated business lawsuits. He’s also a world champion sailor. None of that is the typical background for someone who spends nine years cataloging the entire emotional range of being human, and that contrast turned out to be one of the more interesting threads in our conversation. Understanding feelings, he kept reminding me, isn’t the exclusive property of psychologists. It belongs to anyone who’s ever felt something and tried to put a name to it. A Question His Daughter Asked at the Dinner Table The book’s origin starts with a game. When Doug’s daughter was in eighth grade, the two of them began having dinner together once a week, just the two of them, and he’d bring a list of 150 to 200 trivia questions covering everything from geography to politics. They called it College Bowl, and every correct answer earned her a two-dollar bill slid across the table. It became something she looked forward to, and a way for a father to stay close to a teenager’s world, which isn’t always easy. Two years later, in tenth grade, after she’d been out of school for a month recovering from an injury and surgery, she came to dinner and told Doug it was her turn to ask the questions. Her question was simple: what is depression? Doug told me, plainly, that he faked it. He gave her the economic definition, a slowdown in business activity accompanied by a decline in interest rates, because he didn’t want to deal with the emotional one. She wasn’t fooled, and told him that wasn’t the kind of depression she meant. Doug admitted to her that he didn’t know enough to answer honestly, and spent the next two weeks researching it. What helped him most wasn’t the clinical literature, although he found plenty of it. It was quotes from people who had lived through depression themselves. The first one came from Rollo May, one of the original self-help writers from the 1950s, before the term even existed, and a depression survivor himself. “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” — Rollo May A few days later he found a quote from J.K. Rowling, who has spoken publicly about her own depression before she became one of the best-selling novelists in history. “Depression is that absence of being able to envision you will ever be cheerful again. It’s the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever experienced.” — J.K. Rowling And then one from a freelance writer named Haley Cornell, who Doug suspects will be well known in her own right one day. “Depression lies. It tells you you’ve always felt this way and you always will, but you haven’t and you won’t.” — Haley Cornell Doug texted the three quotes to his daughter, who was back at school. Three minutes later she wrote back: “I’m crying.” Alarmed, he asked why, since everyone in those quotes had survived what she was going through. Her answer: “That’s why I’m crying. Thank you, dad.” It’s a sweet father-daughter moment on its own, but Doug said it’s also when he realized something that shaped the entire book: clinical descriptions explain what an emotion looks like, while the words of someone who’s lived through it explain what it feels like. He was careful to add that this isn’t a knock on psychologists; he’s leaned on them himself and calls a good one “worth their weight in gold.” But there’s a gap that clinical language alone doesn’t close, and closing that gap is what eventually grew into 8,000 quotes across 272 emotions. From One Word to 272 What started with depression expanded to anxiety, codependence, and eventually every emotional state Doug could document, including the lighter ones: excitement, enthusiasm, charisma, even an entry on zeal. By the time the manuscript was finished, it covered 272 distinct emotional states. In January, a friend suggested Doug submit the finished book to AI just to see what it would say. He was hesitant; the book was done, and he wasn’t looking to change anything. He sent it anyway. Within minutes, both Claude AI and ChatGPT came back with nearly the same response: this was the single most comprehensive consumer-facing book on emotions in the English language. It has gone on to rank in the top three and top ten of three different Amazon categories. One thing Doug emphasized more than once is that the book isn’t political and isn’t tied to any single faith or culture. It draws on writers, scientists, and public figures of every kind, including a quote each from Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton sitting in the same reference work without commentary on any of them. His point: emotion is something every human being shares, regardless of where anyone lands on anything else. The Word “Ego,” His Mother’s Advice, and What the Project Taught Him About Himself I asked Doug what the project changed in him personally, and he didn’t hesitate. The most affecting night of the nine years, he said, came while researching the entry on ego. When Doug was around ten years old, he asked his mother, a successful athlete, writer, painter, and by his account a remarkable person in several different arenas, how she managed to do so many things well. Her answer was that it takes a big ego to succeed in life. Doug believed her, because he loved and admired her, and carried that belief through a corporate career in which, by his own description, he was “pretty autocratic.” Researching the ego entry years later, he came across a line from Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego. The second half is in going inward and letting go of it.” — Carl Jung Doug told me he read it several times, then put his head in his hands and cried, recognizing how much explaining and apologizing he owed people who’d had to tolerate, in his own words, his “frankly stupid ego.” Soon after, he found a related passage from Eckhart Tolle. “The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.” — Eckhart Tolle The same entry includes a line from Gandhi. “Many could forego heavy meals, a full wardrobe, a fine house, etc. It is the ego they cannot forego.” — Mahatma Gandhi And it closes with a far more contemporary voice, musician Nikki Sixx, who said the same thing in five words. “Your ego is not your amigo.” — Nikki Sixx I appreciated how openly Doug told that story. It would have been easy to keep the book’s origin story in the safer territory of his daughter’s question and leave his own reckoning out of it. He didn’t, and that kind of honesty is part of what makes the book land the way it does. Reaction or Decision? Churchill, and the Case for the Head and the Heart Doug also walked me through how he arrived at a working definition of emotion itself, since, surprisingly, even foundational figures like Freud and Jung never spelled it out clearly. Most people describe emotion one of two ways: as a reaction to a situation, or as a feeling about something. Doug’s research pointed him somewhere else. The emotional system, he said, does two jobs. First, it protects us, the same instinct that pulls your hand off a hot stove or moves you away from people who make you feel unsafe. Once we’re protected, it does a second job: it lets us advance our lives, fall in love, get curious, feel enthusiasm, create something. Emotions, in other words, are both a reaction and a decision. He illustrated the point with eight words from Winston Churchill, delivered over BBC radio while London endured nightly bombing during the Second World War. “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.” — Winston Churchill We can react and be victims of our circumstances, Doug said, or we can decide and be the people who rise above them, and both are entirely human. From there, we got into a comparison that runs through the book and is illustrated on its cover: the head versus the heart. The head, Doug explained, is generally the domain of facts, thoughts, and knowledge, while the heart is the domain of love, emotions, and feelings. The head is in charge of the body; the heart, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the seat of the soul. The head is the domain of science, the heart of conscience. The head holds belief, the heart holds faith. And in a line Shakespeare himself would have appreciated, the head is in charge of words, while the heart is in charge of poetry. We’re happiest, Doug said, when the two are in alignment, which is really just another way of describing emotional intelligence. Why Your Vocabulary Might Be the Real Key One of the more practical threads in our conversation was about language, and how much it shapes our ability to handle what we feel. Doug pointed to neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University, among the most cited scientists in the world. “The more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain can construct emotion.” — Lisa Feldman Barrett UCLA clinical psychiatrist Dan Siegel made a similar point in five words: “name it to tame it.” Shakespeare said something close to it four hundred years earlier: “suit the action to the word, and the word to the action.” Charles Kettering, the General Motors engineer who co-founded what became Memorial Sloan Kettering and held 186 patents, summed it up just as cleanly: “a problem well stated is a problem half solved.” Even Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, landed in the same place: “what is it that we human beings ultimately depend upon? We depend upon our words. We are suspended in language.” And Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, put it this way: “language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.” The thread connecting all of them, in Doug’s words, is that we solve problems with words, whether we’re a physicist working in equations or a person trying to describe what’s bothering us to a friend or a therapist. The wider your emotional vocabulary, the more precisely you can locate what you’re actually feeling, and the research, across psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, points to that precision being directly connected to happiness. This reminded me of a separate conversation I’d had with a professor of rhetoric, who pointed out that the three classical pillars of persuasion, ethos, logos, and pathos, still apply today, and that pathos, the emotional appeal, has been used masterfully by political figures across the spectrum, from Donald Trump to Barack Obama to Martin Luther King Jr. Doug agreed, and we were both careful to note that this wasn’t a comment on any of their politics, just an observation about how powerfully emotional language can move people. Three Things Most of Us Get Wrong About Our Own Feelings Doug laid out three misunderstandings about emotion that came up again and again in his research. The first is simple undercounting. Ask most people how many emotions exist, and you’ll get an answer somewhere between eight and twenty-eight. Doug documented closer to three hundred, settling on 272 for the book, using ordinary words like silence, provocation, flirtation, and curiosity rather than clinical jargon. If most of us believe we only have a couple dozen words available to describe what we feel, it’s no surprise that conversations with friends or therapists often stall before they really start. The second is the assumption that emotions are occasional, that you were angry last Tuesday or annoyed on Thursday afternoon. In reality, Doug said, we’re constantly shifting between emotional states, even while asleep. He walked me through an ordinary Saturday afternoon as an example: bored, then curious about the TV, disappointed by a rerun, curious again about what’s in the kitchen, excited at the fridge, briefly annoyed by a telemarketer’s call, satisfied once the snack is gone, and bored again soon after. None of it is dramatic, but it’s constant, and his point is that emotions aren’t an occasional visitor. They’re how we navigate every hour of our lives. The third, and the one Doug called the most important, is the belief that emotions are inferior to logic. He brought up the old image of Spock from Star Trek, perpetually exasperated by how illogical humans are, as a stand-in for how culture has long treated feelings, as something to manage, tolerate, or override with reason. The research doesn’t support that view. Doug cited USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, whose work shows that we can’t actually arrive at logical decisions without our emotional system functioning first, and NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who put it directly. “It is only because our emotional system works so well that our rational functioning can function at all.” — Jonathan Haidt Add Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to that list, Doug said, and you get something close to consensus across neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics: emotion isn’t subordinate to reason. It’s the foundation reason stands on. What I Took From This Conversation A few things stayed with me after we wrapped up. I grew up in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and the approach to emotion in my house back then was closer to “go to your room” than anything resembling a real conversation. My parents were Depression-era, and they got through hard things by toughing them out, because there wasn’t money or language available for much else. Listening to Doug describe the gap between knowing what an emotion looks like and knowing what it feels like, I thought about how different my own adolescence might have looked with even a fraction of what’s available now. I also brought up something closer to home. My wife and I have been married, by my own count, somewhere around forty-three years (I told Doug I’d lost exact track a while back), and I mentioned a recent moment where I came home preoccupied with how I wanted to approach this very episode, while she walked in with groceries that happened to include a few extra bottles of soda on sale. She read my distracted expression as annoyance about the soda. I wasn’t thinking about the soda at all. It’s about as ordinary an example as you’ll find of two people morphing through entirely different emotional states in the same room at the same moment, which is exactly the point Doug was making about why staying close to anyone, in marriage or otherwise, takes real attention. I also came away with real respect for how Doug handled the story about his mother and his own ego. It isn’t easy to admit, on a recorded conversation, that you carried a belief for years that made you harder to work with and harder to be around. He didn’t dress it up and he didn’t excuse it. He told it straight, the way the Carl Jung quote had landed on him, and that kind of honesty is worth naming. Doug is already working on his next book, which he described as less of an A-to-Z reference and more about our relationship with the voice in our own heads, making friends with emotion rather than fearing it, since, in his words, emotions are tools, not threats. We also talked about bringing him back for a future conversation alongside a psychotherapist, to look at the same definitions side by side from a clinical perspective. He was glad to do it. I’m hoping that one happens. Where to Find Doug Johnston’s Work, and the Rest of This Conversation D. Earl Johnston’s book, Choosing Emotions: Thinking with Your Head and Acting with Your Heart, is available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle, including through Kindle Unlimited if you’re already a subscriber, and as an audiobook through Audible. You can learn more about Doug and the book at choosingemotions.com. The full conversation, including the parts where Doug walked through the book’s zeal entry live and the appendix on what he calls the “masters of emotion,” figures like Cervantes and Shakespeare, is available now. You can read the newsletter version on Substack at lensofhopefulness.substack.com, watch it on YouTube, or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Audible. If you’re a podcaster looking to book Doug, or you’d like to be a future guest on Lens of Hopefulness yourself, we’re both listed on Podmatch [https://podmatch.com/hostsetupsheet]. Podcast and article copyright Passadino Publishing LLC [https://johnpwrites.com] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lensofhopefulness.substack.com [https://lensofhopefulness.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Answer Is Too Big for Us: Lolo of the REALMS Podcast on Psychology, the Paranormal & Finding Hope

I was not sure what to expect from my recent Lens of Hopefulness interview with Lolo—psychotherapist, paranormal explorer, and host of the REALMS Podcast but was happy to cover ground that I had honestly been wanting to explore for a long time: the space where clinical psychology and the unexplained overlap, where grief and ghost voices coexist, and where a practicing therapist can sit with questions that have no clean answers. REALMS is Lolo’s YouTube channel. It stands for Real Experiences, Answers, Lore, Myth and Sanctuary. I had watched his YouTube channel and liked what I saw. As I told him on air, it was the kind of show where you cannot bring yourself to turn it off. The approach is open, unhurried, and—something I rarely see in the paranormal space—genuinely humble. From Existential Anxiety to Podcast Host Lolo did not arrive at the paranormal through fascination alone. He describes a history of existential anxiety that pushed him to ask the hard questions about life, death, and meaning. Several close brushes with death sharpened the urgency. His background in therapy—he is a licensed psychotherapist who works with trauma, anxiety, and grief, currently through Teladoc—gave him a clinical lens. But clinical tools, he found, have limits. “Things have to be proven, it has to be very black and white,” he said, describing the constraints of evidence-based practice, “but that’s also not real life. There’s so much that we can’t explain and we don’t fully understand.” That recognition—that the clinical model has a ceiling—drove him to create a community rather than a stage. REALMS is less a ghost-hunting show and more a conversation space where people with unusual experiences can share without being laughed out of the room. No slick host, no click-bait production values. Just people telling their stories, his co-host included, in a space where grief, wonder, and uncertainty are all allowed in at once. The Big Conclusion: The Answer Is Too Big for Us I asked Lolo what his most profound discovery has been after years of investigating, interviewing, and questioning. His answer was not what I expected. After all of it, he has arrived at a kind of acceptance of not-knowing. “Whatever the answer is, it’s too big for us to understand,” he said. “It’s just so out of our perception that we just can’t even try to understand.” He followed that with something even more practical: truth, he observed, is a little bit relative. And if a belief system makes a person feel better and helps them function, you have to ask yourself how much it matters whether it is objectively provable—as long as the person is not losing themselves in it. Balance, he said, is everything. He understands why people go all-in on certain systems; the exhaustion of seeking direction makes it tempting. But he holds back from that himself, always taking baby steps and staying skeptical enough to keep perspective. Personal Experiences That Are Hard to Dismiss This is where the conversation got personal—on both sides of the microphone. Lolo described being present at a Catholic exorcism ritual—a full church closed down for a three-to-four-hour event, presided over by a priest, for a single individual. He witnessed the person behaving in ways he still cannot fully account for, while also noting, with his therapist’s eye, how much the cultural and media landscape (particularly the enormous impact of The Exorcist) could influence a person’s presentation. He does not dismiss what he saw. He does not fully explain it either. That tension is exactly where he lives. I brought my own experience to the table as well. I shared that when my father passed away, during a period of deep grief, I had what felt like a channeling experience. I asked him to give me a piece of information I could not have known—my grandmother’s maiden name—and I received the name Ingrassia. When I checked with my mother, she confirmed it. I also shared that during a particularly intense period of spiritual engagement, I found I could touch someone in pain and the pain would stop—and that the experience frightened me enough that I stepped back from it entirely. And there was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Long Island that a family had opened for viewings by appointment, once a year, after seeing the image of their late son in the painting. My family went. I saw my father’s face in that picture. These are not things I trot out in casual conversation. But with Lolo, there was no performance required, in either direction. He listened as a therapist does—with interest and without the need to nail it down. Science, Scripture, and the Surprising Overlap One moment in this conversation that surprised me was when Lolo pointed out that the Big Bang theory was developed by a Catholic astrophysicist—and that its core concept, a sudden explosive emergence of light from nothing, aligns rather neatly with the opening of Genesis: “In the beginning, God said, let there be light.” I thought that was worth sitting with for a moment. He also referenced something that resonated with me personally: the statistical near impossibility of any individual human being here at all. The probability of the specific sperm and egg that created any given person has been estimated at one in 400 trillion. Add to that the extraordinary series of cosmic accidents that make Earth habitable—Jupiter shielding us from asteroids, a sun at just the right distance—and the odds of existing become almost theoretical. “We are a like theoretic impossibility of existing,” Lolo said, “and here we are. So it’s like if I am and I’m only here for a blink of an eye, it has to mean something, has to be worth something.” Prayer, Meditation, and the Anxiety Connection Lolo made an observation that felt important in its simplicity: praying is a form of grounding. Psychologically, he said, it does the same thing that mindfulness and meditation do. The act of saying a prayer is functionally a mantra. Why do we work so hard to keep these two things separate? I told him about my own attempt at morning prayer that very day. My mind kept jumping ahead—I have ADD, which I was fairly upfront about—and I finally said, God, help me pray. And the response that came to me was simply: breathe slowly. I did. My mind quieted. Whatever you want to call that, it worked. Lolo was not surprised. He said that in his clinical work, he has noticed that purpose and direction and motivation are deeply intertwined, and that a lot of what religion offers—community, ritual, a sense of being held—overlaps substantially with what good therapy offers. His take on the confessional was particularly candid: a priest hearing confession, he noted, is essentially an untrained therapist. You go in, you unburden yourself, you walk out lighter. Trauma, Anxiety, and the Bear at the Door Toward the end of our conversation, Lolo got into the mechanics of anxiety in a way I found useful—and personally recognizable. He described the way the anxious brain cannot reliably distinguish between a perceived threat and a real one. His analogy: if you are doing your taxes and a bear shows up at the door, the bear wins your attention. That is the right response. The problem is that anxiety treats the taxes themselves as the bear. “Your brain is like analyzing the world and perceiving a threat,” he said. I told him that described a good portion of my own life. For much of it, everything was urgent and dramatic and felt like a crisis. As I have gotten older—I am in my sixties now—I have settled into something different. The sands in the hourglass are visible. And I find I am less interested in spending them in a state of alarm. Lolo’s approach to coping with his own anxiety, when I asked him directly, came down to two things: grounding—feet on the floor, present in the body—and gratefulness. Not the forced, performative kind, but just genuinely pausing on what is actually there. His picnic analogy made the point well: if it rains and ruins your outdoor plans, you can either stay miserable about what did not happen or go bowling. Something better might come from the detour. What I Came Away With After about an hour with Lolo, a few things stayed with me: The answer to life’s biggest questions may genuinely be beyond our comprehension. That is not a cop-out—it is actually a kind of relief. It means we are not failing to find something that is findable. We are simply small beings standing in front of something enormous. Stigma around paranormal experiences keeps people isolated. Lolo’s entire project with REALMS is about giving those people a place where the story can be told without shame. Purpose is a survival mechanism, not just a self-help concept. Viktor Frankl’s observation—that Holocaust survivors were more likely to endure when they had something to hope for—is a profound point to contemplate. It can apply to every person sitting with existential dread right now. Prayer and meditation are closer than most people allow. The separation may be more cultural than practical. If one settles you and the other settles you, they may be the same thing. Can human connection be the paranormal? Lolo observed that an emotion—love, loyalty, grief—can give people a kind of superhuman capability. A soldier shot seven times who keeps fighting for his fellow soldier. A mother who lifts a car off her child. A country that finds unity for a brief window after a catastrophe. Science can gesture at adrenaline, but it cannot quite account for all of it. Where to Find Lolo Lolo’s podcast, REALMS commune, is available on YouTube and is worth exploring. If you have any interest in the paranormal approached without sensationalism, or in the human psychology behind extraordinary experiences, the episode library will keep you busy. If you are looking for therapeutic support—particularly around trauma, anxiety, and grief—Lolo works through Teladoc. Both Lolo and I book guest appearances through Podmatch, for anyone interested in having either of us on their show. Listen to the Full Conversation The full episode is available on the Lens of Hopefulness newsletter on Substack at lensofhopefulness.substack.com, and on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible. This article covers the main points, but there is quite a bit more in the full hour—including Lolo’s thoughts on near-death experiences, the fine line between mystical experience and psychosis, the Medjugorje apparitions, and what it means to live with “calm acceptance” when the people you love most pass away. Podcast and article copyright 2026 Passadino Publishing LLC This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lensofhopefulness.substack.com [https://lensofhopefulness.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

From the Red Sox to Brain Cancer: Michael Bugary on Addiction, Personal Responsibility, and the Disease of Me

I read Michael Bougari’s book The Disease of Me before we sat down to record this episode, and that was the right call. By the time we got on, I felt like I already knew who he was — not because the book is a polished, carefully packaged personal brand, but because it reads exactly like the person who wrote it: honest, unguarded, and sometimes uncomfortable in the best possible way. The book opens with a section called “Why You Shouldn’t Read This Book,” which Michael basically uses as a disclaimer. Right there, before chapter one, he writes: I am not a psychologist, nor do I have any fancy initials after my name. I do have a bachelor’s degree that took more than six years to finish. I’m not a self-help guru. For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to help myself, and I have failed miserably at it. That sets the tone for everything that follows. No toxic positivity. No memes. No pretending that the answers are easy if you just follow the right steps. What Michael offers instead is his story — the unvarnished version. And the story is a lot. The Triple Count of Adversity Michael describes his book as being organized around what he calls “the triple count of adversity”: sports, addiction, and cancer. He argues that just about everyone is touched by at least one of these three — either directly or through someone they love. Michael went through all three, and he went through the extremes of each. He was drafted by the Boston Red Sox and had everything physically to make it in professional baseball. What he didn’t have, by his own account, was the mental piece. He describes being driven almost entirely by insecurity and a desperate need for external validation — chasing something he could never quite name. Baseball was my first addiction. Drugs and alcohol are a symptom of my disease. They make me worse. Addiction is not my disease. It’s me. His career ended before it really began. He was hurt in his first spring training and never got the chance to find out how far his physical gifts might have taken him. What followed was years of substance use, self-destruction, and gradually burning through the patience of just about everyone around him. The Brain Tumor The cancer part of the story is the one that stops you cold. Michael was diagnosed with a medulloblastoma, described in the book as an extremely rare tumor of the central nervous system. The MRI scan is on the book cover and it’s a striking photo. Here is where Michael’s brand of radical honesty gets particularly hard to argue with. He spent years blaming God for the brain tumor. Until he stopped. His words: I was the one that chose to go out and buy human growth hormone and other anabolic steroids from a shady source and misuse them without medical supervision. That most likely gave me my brain tumor. I caused my brain tumor, not God. He came up in the steroid era of baseball — McGuire, Bonds, Sosa were his heroes at age twelve. He thought he could do both: be the talented player and the party guy. That thinking caught up with him in a way he didn’t see coming. But getting there, and surviving it, became the basis for everything that came after. He lost his hair. He lost feeling in his toes. He didn’t know if he’d walk normally again. Ten years later, he says he’s stronger physically than when he played baseball. His dog Lingo — a military base dog that found its way into Michael’s life through his mother — was born the same month Michael’s tumor was removed. That coincidence isn’t lost on either of them. He was what saved me. He came to me in my darkest moment. The Disease of Me The title of the book is the key to understanding Michael’s whole framework. He distinguishes between addiction as a disease (which he understands scientifically and doesn’t dismiss for others) and his own experience, where he sees himself as the problem — not the substances. His logic is straightforward: if he views his substance use as a disease, it gives him an easy out. “Oh, I have a disease, I can’t help myself.” Instead, he holds himself accountable in a more direct way — he calls himself the disease. The drugs and alcohol just made it worse. What changed everything was personal responsibility. Once he was willing to stop blaming the Red Sox for his arm injury, stop blaming God for his tumor, and start looking at his own choices honestly, something shifted: All the bad things that happened to me in my life were my fault, right? They’re just products of the choices that I’ve made. Once I started to take that personal responsibility, I began to look at things in a different way. He’s careful to say he didn’t get better quickly or cleanly. His description of the process: “I just clawed my way out of it. I dragged myself.” There was no single breakthrough moment, no sudden switch that flipped. It was accumulative, gritty, and ongoing. What Actually Helped Throughout the book (and the conversation), Michael returns to the same theme: therapy rarely gave him hope. What gave him hope was other people’s stories. Not people with the same experiences, but people who found something inside themselves to get through impossible circumstances and came out with a different view of the world. That’s why the book is full of other people’s stories — they’re what kept him going. He also makes an interesting point about credibility. He’s drawn to people who have actual skin in the game — people who have lived what they’re talking about. His ears, he says, open differently when he hears from someone who has been through something. Which is exactly why he says things in the book that a more calculated author might have left out. And there’s his dog. Michael and Lingo now participate in the PEP house program at University Hospitals and Rainbow Babies Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, visiting adult cancer patients. He avoided it at first. Now it’s part of how he sustains everything he’s built: I can only have those thoughts when I help somebody else without the expectation of something in return. That’s how helping other people helps me. Lessons From This Conversation A few things from this episode: Honesty before help. Michael’s whole approach starts with the acknowledgment that he can’t help you with your issues — he has enough of his own. But he can share his experience. That distinction matters. There’s a version of this that sounds like a disclaimer, but with Michael it’s the foundation of why the book lands the way it does. The thoughts don’t go away. He makes the point that writing this book didn’t change his thinking. He still has the same judgmental, arrogant thoughts he always had. What changed is that he learned to identify them and not act on them. This is refreshing. It doesn’t ask you to become someone you’re not — it asks you to work with who you actually are. Personal responsibility is painful to accept. I said this during the interview and I meant it. Getting to a place where you stop blaming everything and everyone else and look at your own choices is not easy. Michael argues it’s necessary. But he doesn’t claim it happened quickly or without a fight. Real influence looks different from the highlight reel. Michael has a way of framing this that I think is worth holding onto and that is that the real question isn’t how many followers you have, it’s whether you put your shopping cart back, hold the door, and treat strangers decently when no camera is rolling. That’s what he tells the kids he speaks to. I think that’s what he means when he says he’s a real influencer. Connection beats therapy (sometimes). This isn’t anti-therapy, but it’s an honest observation: for Michael, sitting with a therapist rarely produced hope. What produced hope was hearing how someone else got through something. The book is essentially a collection of those stories stitched around his own. God of his understanding. He says it simply and doesn’t dress it up: “I have a god of my understanding that ironically I don’t understand — and that’s perfect for me.” That’s a framework a lot of people can work with regardless of where they land on religion. The Letter The book ends with an epilogue — a letter Michael wrote to his younger self. He opens it by saying, affectionately, “you are an idiot and not that important.” It gets more serious from there. He closes with something I read aloud on the show because it felt like the right note to end on: Embrace the struggle. Have fun. Laugh at yourself. Know that God doesn’t do anything by mistake. You are always right where you need to be. Embrace your spirituality and find your faith. I compared it to content of a letter St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians — not because Michael is a saint (he’d be the first to say otherwise), but because it has that same quality of a person putting their real experience on the page and handing it to strangers. Michael took it in stride. He’ll take either comparison. Where to Find Michael Bougari Michael’s book The Disease of Me is available on Amazon. It’s a substantive read — and the appendix and references alone are worth your time if you’re interested in this genre and want to go deeper into the sources that shaped Michael’s recovery and thinking. His website is michaelbugary.com — well organized, with tabs for speaking engagements, resources, and more. He speaks at athletic facilities, schools, treatment centers, and hospitals, and tailors his message to wherever he’s showing up. If you want to hear the full conversation, the podcast is available on: • Lens of Hopefulness Newsletter on Substack • YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Audible The show is called Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino. If this piece gives you enough to think about, the full conversation will give you more. Article and podcast copyright 2026 Passadino Publishing LLC This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lensofhopefulness.substack.com [https://lensofhopefulness.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Kerri Mangis: Why the Mud Is the Point

Kerri Mangis is a TEDx speaker, author, and spiritual guide who has spent more than 20 years as a seeker. She came on Lens of Hopefulness to talk about her book Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness, her forthcoming book The Essential Ingredient: Remaking Ourselves in Times of Crisis (August 25, 2026), and a philosophy of transformation rooted in alchemy, Jungian psychology, and hard-earned personal experience. Self-Help Got It Wrong Kerri opened by taking aim at the self-help industry’s most persistent failures — toxic positivity and the “fake it till you make it” approach to emotional life. She didn’t just critique it from a distance. She admitted she bought into it herself. The alternative she offers is not another system of positive thinking. It’s embodiment — the idea that all of it, the anger, the shame, the fear, belongs to you and deserves acknowledgment. “I am my soul, I am my ego, I am my anger, I am my shame and my fear, and all of that — if we acknowledge it and we learn to live with it — it doesn’t have power over us. It allows us to be in power.” She extended that point to emotions specifically: “Our emotions aren’t out to sabotage us. They’re there to get our attention.” Even anger, which she named as her most difficult emotion, she treats as a messenger. She gives anger a pronoun — he — and said he “has a lot to teach me and is usually trying to get my attention to something that I’m not paying attention to.” The Three Stages Kerri’s next book, The Essential Ingredient, organizes her philosophy into a three-stage model of transformation: breakdown, reflection, and rebirth. Breakdown is the stage where you question everything — the social contracts, the childhood conditioning, the beliefs handed down from parents and grandparents. Reflection is where you sit with those beliefs and ask whether they’ve helped you or hurt you, whether they once protected your heart but are now sheltering it. And rebirth is returning to the world transformed, carrying fewer of the old ways of thinking. “Your greatest rebirths always came at the end of something that was hard.” The model didn’t come from a textbook. It came from alchemy. Alchemy in the Kitchen During the pandemic, Kerri went to her local New Age bookstore and cleaned out their alchemy section. Then she went hands-on, practicing a related discipline called spagyrics — working with herbs to make tinctures using the same philosophical principles as alchemy. She was up at 4 a.m. mixing herbs, and she found in that physical process the same breakdown-pause-transformation arc she’d been observing in her own life. From there she discovered that Carl Jung had drawn heavily from alchemical principles in his own work. Jung posed a question Kerri found essential: what happens if we allow people to break down, instead of constantly picking them back up right away? She also shared three mantras she encountered across her yoga and spiritual studies — what’s here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere; as above, so below; and as within, so without — and traced them all back to alchemy’s central principle: all is one. “It’s one river,” she said, “lots of tributaries, lots of different directions, but it’s all the same truth.” The Soul Has a Name In 2014, Kerri attended a women’s retreat. One of the closing exercises was to write vows to your soul and read them aloud to the group. The retreat leader also suggested giving the soul a name. Kerri chose Serene Voyager. “I liked the word serene because I like the idea of being serene on the inside,” she said. “And yet Voyager — my soul wants to travel, my soul wants to explore, doesn’t want to sit still.” She shortened it to Seri, which rhymed with Kerri, and kept the piece of paper with her vows on it. She still uses that relationship as a counterweight to ego. When the metrics of publishing and podcasting start to wear on her — the subscriber counts, the views — it’s Seri that pushes back: “Yeah, but did you have fun?” Heroes vs. Elders Kerri’s TEDx talk, delivered last August, made the case that menopause is a rite of passage, not a medical inconvenience to be minimized. In the West, women are conditioned to hide it. Her argument was that this transition from the adult years — defined by work, family, and obligation — into a wiser stage of life should be honored, not suppressed. That argument connects to a broader framework she writes about: the difference between heroes and elders. A hero is someone we look to out there, to save us. An elder is a community guide that everyone seeks counsel from, but who still holds people responsible for themselves. “In the hero model, we outsource our power. In the elder model, we embody it.” Grief Became Steadfastness Kerri lost both of her parents in the fall and early winter of last year, one after another. She described them as soulmates — one not willing to be here without the other. As the oldest of three, she became the one others leaned on. “Because of the practice and the work that I’ve done over the years, I was able to come into a position of… steadfastness, and presence, and clarity. I was able to be the bridge between my brothers when they were over-emotional. I was able to help ground them. I was able to be this presence for other people — because I’ve done my work.” She was quick to add that she didn’t do it alone. She still works with a spiritual guide herself. “Nobody should do this alone.” She spoke at both funerals, and said she was proud of the words she found. No Mud, No Lotus Kerri addressed the manifestation industry directly, and without much softness. Dream boards, vision boards, affirmations — she tried all of it and walked away. Not because positivity is wrong, but because it’s incomplete. “Nothing was as powerful as sitting with my own stuff. Not pretending it’s not there. Not pretending to be somebody different. Just living in the truth, in the mud.” She borrowed the Buddhist expression — no mud, no lotus — and applied it to the manifestation world: “That manifestation work, it’s beautiful and it sounds good. But it’s all lotus, it’s no mud. You gotta have the mud.” Where to Find Kerri Website: kerrymangis.com — includes a transformation-stage quiz and a self-love quiz Book (out now): Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness — available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited Book (August 25, 2026): The Essential Ingredient: Remaking Ourselves in Times of Crisis Podcast: Awaken Your Power on Apple Podcasts (currently on hiatus through book launch) Also on: Substack, Medium, and Instagram Kerri Mangis was a guest on Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino, available on YouTube, Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Audible Article and Podcast copyright Passadino Publishing LLC [https://johnpwrites.com/] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lensofhopefulness.substack.com [https://lensofhopefulness.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

You're Not Broken — You're Protected

She Called It the Process of Unbecoming — And It Changed How I See Everything Lacey Kelly is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and author of three books — The Process of Unbecoming: A Different Relationship to Being Human, Already Human: Why the Culture of Self-Improvement Is Making Us Feel Broken, and God Is a Dirty Word: A Cultural Reckoning with the God We Left Behind. All three are available on Amazon. I went into this conversation a little uncertain. I told Lacey — and my listeners — exactly that: “I was tentative... what am I going to say today? I’m not sure if I’m ready for this.” By the time we wrapped, my shoulders had literally dropped. A weight I’d been carrying for a long time quietly lifted. The Premise That Changes Everything The process of unbecoming is not another self-help system. It’s a response to what Lacey kept seeing in her therapy practice — people arriving with the underlying belief that something was fundamentally wrong with them and then finding that all the effort they put into fixing themselves only reinforced that belief. “The core that I see in this is the premise that people go into self-help or therapy with is that it makes sense, it’s this way, but there’s something wrong with them, they’re not good enough, or that they’re somehow broken,” she said. “And until we address that premise the work itself can become rather fruitless because it tends to set up a pattern of effort that often reinforces that premise they came in with.” The starting point — the base of her entire framework — is this: wholeness is not something you earn. It is inherent to every human being. You were born with it. No experience takes it away. You will die with it. “When we operate from that place,” she said, “everything starts to change on its own.” Six Principles That Reframe the Whole Picture Lacey built the process of unbecoming around six core principles. She was careful to call them philosophical, grounded in what she considers fundamental truths about human beings. Here’s what we covered: 1. Wholeness is inherent Worth and dignity are not conditions to be earned. They are built into every human being. “When we believe that we are whole and complete as we are,” Lacey explained, “and within that wholeness holds our worth and our dignity as human beings, it holds the vulnerability that reaches and can feel and connect with other people.” 2. Identity is adaptive. Human beings are exceptional at adapting to their environment. The problem is that during childhood, identity is forming at the same time we are adapting. The patterns and behaviors we developed to get our needs met — in whatever environment we were raised in, functional or not — later get labeled as personality flaws or pathology. “Adaptation isn’t necessarily who we are,” Lacey said. “It’s just what we needed to do in that environment.” She also pushed back against putting too much weight on the family unit alone. Biologically, she pointed out, we are designed to be raised in groups of 25 to 150 people. Today, we’re lucky to have two parents in the house. That mismatch puts enormous pressure on parents — and on children. I grew up in the 1960s with relatives up and down the block. I told Lacey about my cousin who took me under his wing when I was a heavy, uncoordinated kid who couldn’t pay attention in school. He put me to work alongside him, bought me lunch, took pictures of me holding a tool in front of a car. That relationship built something in me. I think back and wonder: without that kind of community support, where would I have ended up? 3. Capacity is inherent. This principle challenges the common therapy-world idea that capacity — the ability to tolerate and meet experience — is something you build or develop through work. Lacey disagrees. “Capacity is always within us,” she said. The issue is not that it doesn’t exist. The issue is access. When we don’t have enough co-regulation — the steadying presence of other nervous systems around us — we lose the ability to reach our own capacity. The goal in her work is not to develop something new. It is to reconnect with what is already there. 4. Protection precedes pathology. This gave me a long pause. The behaviors and patterns we most hate about ourselves — the walls we put up, the ways we push people away, the cycles we feel trapped in — are not evidence of brokenness. They are protection. “We are born vulnerable,” Lacey explained, “and humans have the instinct to protect what’s vulnerable.” When that vulnerability felt threatened, protection came online. What we often call personality problems or disorders are adaptive protections that got locked in. “When we relate to them as protective rather than something wrong with us, the intervention changes, and the protection tends to soften through the relationship that we build with it.” 5. Change happens through relationship. Study after study shows that the primary driver of change in therapy is the relationship between the therapist and the client — not the method. And yet, Lacey pointed out, self-improvement culture has largely flipped this idea on its head. It tells us we have to do all the inner work first, get ourselves regulated and healed, and then we can engage with other people. “I’ve seen it taken to a different kind of extreme where all the healing work feels like it needs to be done in isolation,” she said, “which reinforces the protection that’s there in the first place.” 6. The human condition is complete. We are complete beings living in an imperfect reality. The dysfunction is part of the package — not evidence that something has gone wrong. “The human condition is complete,” Lacey said, “is to renew that sense of everything we need is here. And that includes the muck.” When we land on the difficult side of the human spectrum, it doesn’t mean we are broken. It means we are human. I mentioned the Buddhist expression that came to mind as she spoke: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Where the Books Come From I asked Lacey about her background. She is a licensed clinical social worker with extensive training in complex trauma and attachment. But she was clear that her credentials had less to do with this work than her own experience. She started yoga when she was 12. She described herself as someone who always had “a temperament towards questioning what we’re doing here.” When she found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, her next question was: Am I real? Is anything real? She spent years trying everything the self-help world had to offer — and kept finding that she was just getting more tense, not less. “I’m trying everything they’re telling me to do to help with this,” she said, “and it seems like I’m just getting more tense.” That experience is the driver behind all three of her books. Already Human — The Industry That Sells You the Problem Already Human takes on the self-improvement industry directly. It’s a massive industry built around the premise that you are not enough and need to be fixed. “These answers that they sell to you often reinforce the premise,” she said, “because they just produce more effort, more checklists, more morning routines, more ways you have to regulate yourself, more data you have to track.” The result: you end up exhausted, still feeling inadequate, and now with even more evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you. I told her I had a vagus nerve stimulator behind me. And an emWave2 that clips to my earlobe for meditation. I’ve gone to psychiatrists who had the prescription pad out before I’d finished my second sentence. I have been searching my entire adult life for the solution. Lacey’s response was one of the most validating things I’d heard in years: “A lot of us are really struggling to accept the fact that we’re human. And that means we’re flawed. We’re imperfect. There’s just no way to therapy yourself out of this.” God Is a Dirty Word — The Conversation We’ve Been Afraid to Have God Is a Dirty Word is a different kind of book. Lacey grew up firmly secular — a yoga therapist before she was a clinical therapist, raised in the New Age, with psychics as her mother’s pastors. She developed a strong aversion to anything associated with the God of organized religion. Then she started questioning that aversion. “This book is more of a proposal of — was there something there that we threw out when we threw out the institution?” she said. “So, if we throw out the institution, does that mean we need to throw out all the contents as well?” She said she ends the book with the same honest admission she started with: she still doesn’t know. But now she has a Bible on her crystal shelf, right next to her tarot cards. I struggle with my faith too. I have a picture of Jesus above my desk. I have self-help books and books about Jesus behind me on the shelf. I spent some time in this episode going off on what I called my soapbox — asking out loud how a God who sent his son to one small group of people expected that truth to reach billions across every culture and language on earth. Lacey didn’t discuss or argue religious points with me. Her point was only to ask whether the defensiveness we carry about the word God is worth examining — and what we’ve filled that space with now that it’s gone. Lacey has agreed to come back and talk about God Is a Dirty Word in depth once I’ve read it. That is a conversation I’m genuinely looking forward to. What She Actually Recommends I asked Lacey to leave listeners with something practical. She was careful, because she didn’t want to create another checklist — another model that becomes effort, that becomes more evidence of falling short. Her suggestion was simple: zoom out. “We tend to feel like our problems are so personal,” she said. “The things we’re going through are so individualized and personal, and then the culture reflects back to us that it’s on the individual to fix it.” But we are more isolated than we have ever been. Social media gives us the illusion of connection while leaving us physically and neurologically starved for it. A loneliness epidemic was declared in 2023. Mental health issues are rising even as access to care increases. “You are part of a bigger system that is actively working against your biology as a human being,” Lacey said. “You are going to have that low-grade stress just by simply existing in this world right now. So, let’s just level set with that.” Then, once you’ve zoomed out, zoom back in — and question the premise. Ask yourself what you actually believe is wrong with you. Ask whether you believe it, or whether you were conditioned to believe it. And then ask what might become possible if even a small part of you could accept that you were born with worth and dignity — and that you are not an exception to that rule. A Burden Lifted Near the end of the episode, I told Lacey about a moment during the recording I couldn’t hold back. I had been watching myself on camera while she spoke. At one point, she said something about how not everything is our fault, how we are part of a bigger system — and my shoulders just dropped. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t perform it. A burden I had been carrying for a long time quietly lifted. I have done exhaustive work on myself. I have read the books, done the therapy, collected the devices. And I kept coming back to the same place: judging myself, asking why, wondering what was wrong with me. What Lacey offered was not another fix. It was a different starting point entirely. If any part of this conversation lands for you the way it landed for me, go find her books on Amazon. And if Lacey turns out to be in your insurance network — well, I’ll let you make that decision for yourself. Lacey Kelly’s books — The Process of Unbecoming, Already Human, and God Is a Dirty Word — are available on Amazon. Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino is available on Substack, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Audible. Article and podcast copyright Passadino Publishing LLC This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lensofhopefulness.substack.com [https://lensofhopefulness.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]