爱2.0：重塑我们的关系

这里是《隐藏的大脑》。我是尚卡尔·韦丹塔。无论你参加过多少场婚礼，都很难摆脱那种具有感染力的乐观情绪。新人承诺无论疾病健康、富贵贫穷，都会彼此相爱。

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. No matter how many weddings you've been to, it's hard to shake that contagious feeling of optimism. Couples pledge to love one another in sickness and in health. For richer, for poorer.

家人们擦拭着眼角的泪水，认同这两个人注定要永远在一起。但许多婚姻最终变得不幸福。有些解体了，有些以离婚告终。即便是成功的婚姻也并非没有挑战。

Family members dab tears from their eyes, agreeing that these two people are meant to be together forever. But so many marriages become unhappy. Some dissolve. Some end in divorce. And even the successful ones are not without challenges.

没有人会否认长期关系是艰难的。事实上，有证据表明它们正变得越来越难。过去几周，我们的《爱情2.0》系列探讨了与浪漫伴侣和配偶互动的新思维方式。我们讨论了如何与重要他人建立新的纽带，如何加强已有的纽带。我们审视了如何应对伴侣最恼人的习惯，以及如何放下改变他们的欲望。

No one would deny that long term relationships are hard. And in fact, there's evidence they're getting harder. Over the past few weeks, our Love two point zero series has explored new ways to think about how we engage with romantic partners and spouses. We've talked about how to build new bonds with our significant others, how to strengthen the bonds we already have. We've looked at how we respond to our partner's most annoying habits, and how we can let go of our desire to change them.

今天，我们为您带来一期经典节目，许多听众告诉我们这是他们最喜欢的节目之一。它讲述了美国及世界其他地区婚姻性质的变化。

Today, we bring you a classic episode that many listeners have told us is one of their favorites. It's about the changing nature of marriage in The United States and other parts of the world.

很多人认为抱有这些高期望是有问题的，它正在损害婚姻制度。坦白说，过去持这种观点的人中就包括我自己。

Lots of people argue that having these high expectations is problematic, and it's harming the institution of marriage. And frankly, among the people who used to argue that is myself.

我们对婚姻的期望如何演变，以及一种在关系中实现更多幸福的悖论方式，本周《隐藏的大脑》。为了理解当今的婚姻，我们认为最好回到一个婚姻形态迥然不同的时代和地方。

How our expectations of marriage have evolved and a paradoxical way to achieve more happiness in our relationships, This week on Hidden Brain. To understand marriage today, we thought it best to go back to a time and place when marriage was very different.

嗯，我研究家庭生活史已经很多很多年了。但当我开始参与关于什么是传统婚姻的辩论时，我对婚姻产生了特别的兴趣。

Well, I've been studying the history of family life for many, many years. But I specifically got interested in marriage as we got into these debates about what traditional marriage was.

那是斯蒂芬妮·孔茨。她是常青州立大学的名誉教授，也是《婚姻的历史：爱情如何征服婚姻》一书的作者。我在2017年采访过她。斯蒂芬妮说，最早的婚姻与两个人的感情或彼此吸引毫无关系。正如你可能知道的，婚姻更多是关于经济因素和获得有权势的姻亲。

That's Stephanie Kuntz. She's an emeritus professor at the Evergreen State College and the author of the book Marriage, a History, How Love Conquered Marriage. I interviewed her back in 2017. Stephanie says the earliest marriages had nothing to do with the feelings of two people or their attraction to one another. As you probably know, marriage was much more about economics and acquiring powerful in laws.

婚姻最初起源于更平等的部落社会，作为一种分享资源的方式，并与那些你可能只是偶尔见到、不确定是敌是友的群体建立和平关系。它是一种循环义务和货物的方式。我把我的孩子嫁给你，这意味着你欠我一些东西，但我也欠你一些东西。

Marriage originally arose in more egalitarian band level societies as a way of sharing resources and establishing peaceful relations with groups that you might otherwise only see occasionally and you might not know if they were going to be friends or enemies. It was a way of circulating obligations and goods. I marry my child off to you, and that means you owe me things, but I also owe you things.

斯蒂芬妮举了一个历史上的著名例子，埃及的克利奥帕特拉与罗马的马克·安东尼的结合。

Stephanie brought up a famous example from history, the union between Cleopatra of Egypt and Mark Antony of Rome.

伊丽莎白·泰勒饰演克利奥帕特拉，尼罗河的妖娆女子。

Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, siren of the Nile.

这是来自1963年的电影版本。

This is from a 1963 film version.

理查德·伯顿饰演马克·安东尼。曾经无敌军团中鲁莽冲动的领袖，战场上令人畏惧的对手。

Richard Burton as Mark Anthony. Rash, impetuous leader of once invincible legion. Dreaded adversary on the field of battle.

好莱坞版本的故事将克利奥帕特拉和安东尼描绘得非常相爱，但斯蒂芬妮描绘了一幅略有不同的画面。

The Hollywood version of the story portrays Cleopatra and Anthony as being very much in love, But Stephanie paints a slightly different picture.

或许曾有过激情，但那更多是对权力的渴望而非情欲，尽管情欲可能也掺杂其中。

There may have been passion, but it was more passion for power than sexual, although sexual probably entered into it too.

克利奥帕特拉与安东尼的婚姻主要是出于战略考虑。

Cleopatra and Antony's marriage was primarily about strategy.

罗马和埃及是当时世界上最强大的两个帝国。因此，任何人若能促成它们的联合，建立联盟，都将势不可挡。

Rome and Egypt were the two most powerful empires in the world. So getting them anybody who got them together and they got an alliance between them would be unstoppable.

传说克利奥帕特拉曾嫁给她的兄弟。细节就不多说了，总之她对此并不满意。于是她与罗马统治者尤利乌斯·凯撒开始了一段恋情。克利奥帕特拉怀孕了，孩子出生后被命名为凯撒里昂。

The story goes that Cleopatra was married to her brother. And without getting into all the details, let's just say she wasn't too happy with that. So she started an affair with Julius Caesar, the ruler of Rome. Cleopatra became pregnant. When the baby was born, he was named Caesarion.

这个孩子让克利奥帕特拉和凯撒互相对对方的王位有了继承权。这是他们双方都极度渴望的。听起来像《权力的游戏》的一集，对吧？

The child gave Cleopatra and Caesar a claim to each other's throne. It was something they both desperately wanted. Sounds like an episode of Game of Thrones. Right?

嗯，后来凯撒死了，马克·安东尼出现了。当然，故事说她诱惑了他。但你知道，当你真正从现实角度审视时，这其实是另一个政治联盟。

Well, then Caesar died, and Mark Anthony came along. And, of course, the story tells that she seduced him. But, you know, when you really look at what was happening practically, this was another political alliance.

首先，像凯撒那样，你将按照埃及的仪式与我结婚。

First, as did Caesar, you will marry me according to Egyptian ritual.

这不是一个条件，而是一种奖赏。

It's not a condition. It's a reward.

你将凭借你的权威宣布凯撒里昂为埃及国王，我们将以他的名义共同统治。

You will declare by your authority, Caesarion to be king of Egypt, and we will rule together in his name.

凯撒里昂太年轻无法统治，安东尼可以代替他执政。所以这就像《权力的游戏》一样，是一个巨大的政治联盟。

Caesarion was too young to rule, and Anthony could rule in his place. So it was a great big political alliance just like Game of Thrones.

这种婚姻策略不仅限于国王和王后。人们普遍误解当时下层阶级的人是为爱结婚的，但斯蒂芬妮说事实并非如此。

This marriage strategy wasn't just for kings and queens. There's a common misconception that people of lower classes in this time married for love. Not true, Stephanie says.

一个人无法经营农场，一个人也无法经营面包店。所以面包师会与其他面包师结婚。如果你是农民，你会想要一个以勤劳著称的人。这远比那种被视作轻浮奢侈的相互吸引重要得多。

You couldn't run a farm with one person. You couldn't run a bakery with one person. So people who were bakers married other bakers. If you were a peasant, you wanted somebody who had a good reputation as a hard worker. And that was much more important than this frivolous luxury is the way it was really thought of as how attracted you were to the person.

在18世纪，一种不同的观念开始变得更加普遍。著名小说家简·奥斯汀可能是先驱者。对于那些不记得她的小说《傲慢与偏见》情节的人：达西先生原本被许诺与富有的表妹结婚，却爱上了家境普通的伊丽莎白·班纳特，这让他姑姑勃然大怒。

A different idea started to become more common in the '17 eighteen hundreds. Jane Austen, the famous novelist, may well have been the trailblazer. For those who don't remember the plot of her book Pride and Prejudice, mister Darcy, who has been promised in marriage to his wealthy cousin, falls instead for Elizabeth Bennet, a woman of modest means. That throws his aunt into a rage.

达西先生已经和我女儿订婚了。现在你还有什么可说的？只有一句：如果是这样，你就没有理由认为他会向我求婚。你这个自私的女孩。

Mister Darcy is engaged to my daughter. Now what have you to say? Only this. If that is the case, you can have no reason to suppose he would make an offer to me. You selfish girl.

这桩联姻自他们幼年便已计划好。你认为一个出身低微的年轻女子能阻止得了吗？天哪，彭布罗利家的门第难道要这样被玷污吗？现在明确告诉我，你和他订婚了吗？

This union has been planned since their infancy. Do you think it can be prevented by a young woman of inferior birth? Heaven and earth, are the shades of pembroly to be thus polluted? Now tell me once and for all, are you engaged to him?

我没有。

I am not.

那么斯蒂芬妮，谈谈这个。这可以说是爱情在某些方面开始战胜婚姻观念的最初萌芽。

So Stephanie, talk about this. This is the first glimmers, if you will, of the idea that in some ways love was coming to conquer marriage.

你用的这段剪辑非常完美，因为它说明了一个事实：男性比女性更容易接受以爱情为基础的婚姻。男性可以‘下娶’，因为他们可以外出工作赚钱。女性则必须非常、非常谨慎。就像你可以说，我的心倾向于哈里，但你知道，我最好还是嫁给父母希望我嫁的人，以及最有可能养活我的人。因此，在很长一段时间里，在求爱领域，男性实际上比女性更浪漫。

This clip you used is perfect because it illustrates the fact that men found it easier to embrace the love match than women did. Men could marry down because they could go out and earn wages. Women had to be very, very cautious. You know, as you could say, my heart inclines to Harry, but, you know, I'd better marry who my parents want me to and the person who is most likely to be able to support me. And so there was a prolonged period of time where men actually were more romantic than women in the courtship arena.

到了十九世纪下半叶，简·奥斯汀式的婚姻模式已在美国牢牢扎根。为爱情以外的任何原因结婚的观念开始被视为过时。随着这种新观念的兴起，另一种观念也随之而来。如果说婚姻曾被视为背景相似、社会阶层相同的人之间的伙伴关系，那么新的婚姻模式则开始颂扬那些据称截然不同的人的结合。

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Jane Austen model of marriage had taken firm hold in The United States. The idea of marrying for anything other than love came to be seen as old fashioned. And with the rise of this new idea came another. If marriage was once seen as a partnership between people from similar backgrounds and similar social classes, the new model of marriage began to celebrate the coming together of people who were supposedly radically different from one another.

于是出现了这种新理论，认为爱情是 opposites（对立面）的结合。接着又出现了这样一种观念，即男性和女性是完全不同的，你只有通过结婚并维持婚姻，才能获得对方的情感、资源和能力。没有婚姻，你是不完整的。

And you got this new theory that love was a union of opposites. Then this idea came that men and women were totally different, and you could only have access to the emotions, resources, abilities of the other by getting married and staying married. You were incomplete without it.

在实践中，这与美国不断变化的经济形势相吻合，男性越来越多地成为养家糊口的人，而女性则成为家庭主妇。1950年的情景喜剧《反斗小宝贝》（Leave It to Beaver）清晰地展现了这种男女角色的分工。

In practice, this dovetailed with a changing economic landscape in the country, where men increasingly became the breadwinners and women became homemakers. The 1950 sitcom Leave It to Beaver makes clear this division between male and female roles.

你知道吗，爸爸，这很有趣。什么有趣？嗯，每次我们在室内做饭，妈妈总是说她在做饭。但每次我们在户外做饭，总是你来做。这是为什么呢？

You know, dad, it's funny. What's funny? Well, whenever we cook inside, mom always says it cooking. But whenever we cook outside, you always do it. How come?

嗯，我想这有点传统吧。你知道，他们说女人的位置是在家里，而既然她在家，那她不妨待在厨房里。

Well, it's sort of traditional, I guess. You know, they say a woman's place is in the home, and I suppose as long as she's in the home, she might as well be in the kitchen.

嗯，这解释了妈妈的情况。但为什么总是你做户外烹饪呢？

Well, that explains about mom. But how come you always do the outside cooking?

好吧，我告诉你，儿子。女人在有所有现代便利设施时做得不错，但我们男人更擅长这种粗犷的户外烹饪。有点像回到穴居人时代。

Well, I'll tell you, son. Women do all right when they have all the modern conveniences, but us men are better at this rugged type of outdoor cooking. Sort of a throwback to caveman days.

跟我谈谈这个想法，斯蒂芬妮。很明显，性别偏见在我们如何看待婚姻方面起了作用。

Talk to me about this idea, Stephanie. So clearly, gender biases played a role in how we came to think about marriage.

嗯，绝对是的。但这个片段有趣之处在于，男性养家糊口的观念在十九世纪之前是未知的。女人在家工作，但男人也一样。男人并不外出挣钱养家。女人帮忙养猪。

Well, absolutely. But what's interesting about this clip is that the concept of the male breadwinner was unknown before the nineteenth century. Women worked in the home, but so did men. And men didn't go out and bring home the bacon. Women helped raise the pig.

也许男人负责屠宰，但女人通常腌制培根并把培根拿到市场去卖。所以，这又是我之前谈到的关于爱情的新观念的一部分，即男人和女人如此不同，以至于男人必须做所有外面的事，因为女人做不了，而女人必须做所有家里的事，因为男人做不了也不该做。

Maybe the man butchered it, but the woman often cured the bacon and took the bacon to market. So again, this was part of this new idea of love that I talked about earlier, The idea that men and women were so different that the man had to do all the outside stuff because the woman couldn't do it, and the woman had to do all the inside stuff because the man couldn't do it and wasn't supposed to do it.

爱情匹配的理念起初可能颇具争议。但当人们担忧来自不同背景的夫妻在没有共同工作纽带或更广泛的社群框架维系时如何长相厮守，爱情婚姻的拥护者提出男女双方会因为需要彼此来实现心理上的完整而相守。这一理论后来被浪漫故事和电影所采纳。想想那句老话：异性相吸。但随着七八十年代美国离婚率飙升，许多人开始认为择偶标准不应是寻找对立面，而应是志趣相投、价值观契合之人。

The idea of the love match may have been controversial at first. But when concerns were raised about how people from different backgrounds would stay together when they didn't have the bond of shared work or the larger framework of a shared community, advocates for love marriage said men and women would stay together because they needed one another to feel psychologically complete. This theory was later appropriated in romantic stories and movies. Think of the saying, opposites attract. But as the divorce rate in America surged in the nineteen seventies and eighties, many started to think that what you should look for in a mate was not your opposite, but someone who shared your interests and values.

这并非完全等同于面包师找面包师联姻，而更像是人们选择与教育背景相似、文化政治观点相近的对象结婚。

It wasn't quite the same as one baker looking to marry another baker, but more along the lines of people marrying others with similar educational backgrounds and similar cultural and political attitudes.

要知道，关键在于理解爱情本身的定义已经改变。如今的爱情与最初作为对立面结合的爱情匹配截然不同。现在它更像是价值观高度契合者的结合。这正是当代爱情面临的重大挑战之一——我们花了一百年时间让人们将差异视为情欲与爱情的源泉，而现在的核心难题是如何让平等变得充满激情？

You know, it's important to understand that love itself, the definition, has changed. It's different today than it was at the beginning of the love match when it was a union of opposites. And today, it's really like a union of people who share so many values. And that's one of the big challenges of love today, because we spent a hundred years trying to get people to see a difference as erotic and the source of love. And now our big challenge is how do we make equality erotic?

如何让平等变得充满激情？当日复一日的育儿接送、医生预约中的共识与妥协取代了激情，当生活方式的象征从炫酷法拉利变成本田思域时，火花何在？稍后回来我们将解答这个问题。您正在收听《隐藏大脑》，我是尚卡尔·韦丹塔。

How do you make equality erotic? Where is the sizzle in consensus and compromise in child care pickups and doctor's appointments in a lifestyle symbolized by a Honda Civic rather than a flashy Ferrari? When we come back, we'll answer that question. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

这里是《隐藏大脑》，我是尚卡尔·韦丹塔。我们一直在与历史学家斯蒂芬妮·库恩斯探讨婚姻如何从以经济合伙和政治联姻为主的制度转变为以浪漫爱情为基础。十九世纪这一转变在美国扎根后，爱情婚姻成为主流。很快，人人都想知晓让爱情持久的秘诀。

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. We've been talking with historian Stephanie Koons about how marriage changed from an institution that was primarily about economic partnerships and political experience to one based on romantic love. Once this shift took hold in The United States over the course of the nineteenth century, love marriages became the norm. Soon, everyone wanted to know the secrets of making love last.

您一定看过那些关于相守大半生的耄耋夫妇的纪录片和新闻报道。

You've seen those documentaries and news stories about elderly couples who've managed to stay together for most of their lives.

来认识米尔顿和利奥塔，相守一生的甜蜜爱人。

Meet Milt and Leota, sweethearts for life.

我们结婚六十年了。六十年美好的时光。当人们问我你们结婚多久了？我诚实地回答，还不够长。

We've been married sixty years. Sixty beautiful years. When people ask me how long have you been married? I truthfully say not long enough.

一部感人至深、温暖人心的纪录片，讲述了一对在一起四分之三个世纪、七十五年的夫妇的生活。

A hard, just been warm documentary about the life of a couple that has been together for three quarters of a century, seventy five years.

这些故事没有告诉你的是，西北大学的社会心理学家伊莱·芬克尔研究了斯蒂芬妮所记录的历史变迁对心理的影响。伊莱是《全有或全无的婚姻：最佳婚姻如何运作》一书的作者。他用一个非常戏剧化的术语来描述当今许多夫妻面临的挑战。他说，现代婚姻有窒息的风险。

There's something that these stories don't tell you. Social psychologist Eli Finkel at Northwestern University has studied the psychological effects of the historical changes that Stephanie has documented. Eli is the author of The All or Nothing Marriage, How the Best Marriages Work. He has a very dramatic term for the challenge that many couples face today. Modern marriage, he says, runs the risk of suffocation.

伊莱说，要理解这个术语，你必须看看另一个始于二十世纪六七十年代的转变。

To understand that term, Eli says you have to look at yet another shift that started in the nineteen sixties and seventies.

我们想在强调通过婚姻获得爱情的基础上，增加一种新的重点，即通过个人成长的方式实现个人成就感。所以，用心理学术语来说，我们希望通过婚姻实现自我实现。我们想成长为一个更真实的自己。

We wanted to complement our emphasis on love, achieving love through marriage, with a new emphasis on achieving a sense of personal fulfillment in the way of personal growth. So in in the terminology of psychology, we wanted to self actualize through our marriage. We wanted to grow into a more authentic version of ourselves.

这方面的一个例子来自伊丽莎白·吉尔伯特的畅销书，讲述了她离开丈夫并试图为自己创造更有意义的生活。我们聊天时会播放电影中的一些片段，这个片段来自朱莉娅·罗伯茨主演的电影《美食、祈祷和恋爱》。

One example of this comes from the bestselling book by Elizabeth Gilbert about walking out on her husband and trying to create a more meaningful life for herself. We're gonna play a few clips from the movies as we chat, and this one comes from the movie eat, pray, love featuring Julia Roberts.

我们一年前才买了这房子。难道我不想要这个吗？我积极参与了创造这种生活的每一个时刻。那为什么我在其中看不到自己？比留下更不可能的是

We'd only bought this house a year ago. Hadn't I wanted this? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life. So why didn't I see myself in any of it? The only thing more impossible than staying was

离开。

leaving.

听起来她是在寻找真实的自我，Eli。

It sounds like she was searching for her true self, Eli.

是的，完全正确。从某种意义上说，她体现了这种现代婚姻观的优缺点——我们不仅向配偶寻求爱情，还寻求个人成长和满足感。你开始看到这样的情况：就像莉兹·吉尔伯特说的那样，她身处一段充满爱的婚姻，丈夫是个好人，待她很好。但她感到停滞不前，不愿在未来三四十年忍受这种停滞的生活，于是她选择了离开。

Yeah. That's exactly right. She, in some sense, helps to epitomize both the strengths and the weaknesses of this modern contemporary approach to marriage where we're looking to our spouse, again, not only for love, but also this sense of personal growth and fulfillment. And for the first time, you start to see cases where people would say, as as I think Liz Gilbert would say, that she was in a loving marriage and he was a good man, and treated her well. But she felt stagnant, and she really wasn't willing to endure a stagnant life for the next thirty or forty years, and and she walked out.

这在一百年前当然是不可想象的，更不用说五百年前了。

This would have been unthinkable, of course, a hundred years ago, let alone five hundred years ago.

没错。这种说法在当时会显得非常非常奇怪。要知道，直到七十年代才开始出现无过错离婚法。以前你必须证明存在虐待或遗弃等严重不当行为才能离婚。是的。

Yes. This would have been a very, very bizarre thing to say. And marriage, you know, it wasn't really until the seventies that you started seeing no fault divorce laws. It it used to be that you had to prove some type of serious mistreatment like abuse or desertion. Yes.

所以，我们有权利通过婚姻获得真正的满足感和个人成长，这是一个非常现代的观念。如果婚姻无法满足这些，很多人认为仅凭这一点就足以成为结束婚姻的合理理由。

So it's a very modern idea that we are entitled to a sense of real fulfillment and personal growth through the marriage. And if our marriage is falling short, many of us consider it to be a reasonable option to end the marriage for that alone.

你提出了一个著名心理学概念的变奏。多年前，亚伯拉罕·马斯洛提出人类有一系列不同需求，从生理安全开始，到寻求意义和满足感结束。你说类似的层次结构现在被用来描述许多美国人对婚姻的看法。请谈谈你所说的“马斯洛山”。

You come up with what I think of as a riff on a very famous psychological concept. Many years ago, Abraham Maslow proposed that human beings have a series of different needs that begin with physical security and end with a search for meaning and fulfillment. And you say that a similar hierarchy has come to describe how many Americans think about marriage. Tell me about what you call Mount Maslow.

嗯，在写这本书的过程中，最让我兴奋的事情之一是，我学到了很多关于婚姻的历史、社会学和经济学知识，特别是阅读了斯蒂芬妮·昆茨等人的著作。因为我主要是一名实验室心理学家，我把夫妇们带到实验室，录制他们互动的视频，并长期跟踪他们。但这些其他学科的学者采用了不同的方法。所以我意识到，婚姻实际上已经发生了根本性的变化，尤其是在美国，我们对婚姻满足我们需求的方式的期望已经完全不同了。

Well, one of the most exciting things that happened to me in the process of writing the book is I learned a lot about the history and the sociology and the economics of marriage, particularly reading people like Stephanie Kuntz. Because my primary expertise is as pretty much a laboratory psychologist. I I bring couples into the laboratory, and I videotape them interacting, and I follow them over time. But these other disciplines, scholars in these other disciplines adopt a different approach. So I realized that marriage had in fact changed radically in terms of the way we expect it to fulfill our needs in America that is.

过去，婚姻关乎基本的经济生存。我们从斯蒂芬妮·昆茨和其他人那里看到了这一点。你可以把这看作是马斯洛需求层次理论的底层，即生理和安全需求，真正基于生存的需求。然后，随着我们追踪婚姻的发展，它变得更关乎爱情，现在我们更接近马斯洛需求层次的中层。然后在20世纪60年代，一直到今天，我们进入了一个新时代，是的，我们仍在寻找爱情，但现在我们处于马斯洛需求层次的顶端，他谈论的是诸如尊重和自我实现之类的东西。

And it used to be that that marriage was about basic economic survival. We we've seen that from Stephanie Kuntz and others. And you can think of that as being at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy toward the physiological and safety needs, really survival based needs. And then as we track marriage and it becomes more about love, now we're more toward the middle of Maslow's hierarchy. And then in the nineteen sixties and then really up until today, we're in this new era where, yes, we're still looking for love, but now we're toward the top of Maslow's hierarchy where he's talking about things like esteem and self actualization.

因此，在美国历史的进程中，我们对婚姻的期望基本上从马斯洛需求层次的底层上升到了顶端。我在写这本书时产生的一个想法是，我们可以将马斯洛需求层次不仅概念化为一个三角形，还可以概念化为一座山。对吧？这样将马斯洛需求层次视为一座山的优势在于，它让人联想到许多与登山相关的隐喻。我们知道，当我们攀登一座大山时，越到山顶景色越壮丽，但氧气也变得更稀薄。

And so our expectations of marriage have basically ascended from the bottom to the top of Maslow's hierarchy over the course of American history. And one of the ideas that emerged as I was writing this book is that we can conceptualize Maslow's hierarchy not just in terms of a triangle, but in terms of a mountain. Right? And and the advantage of thinking of Maslow's hierarchy as a mountain in this way is that it brings to mind a number of metaphors related to mountaineering. And one thing that we know when we climb up a big mountain is the views get increasingly gorgeous as you get to the top, but the oxygen gets a little thinner.

因此，要在山顶成功体验，你需要投入大量氧气，要么在山上携带额外的氧气，要么在婚姻中投入大量时间和精力才能在那里取得成功。

And so having a successful experience way up there at the top requires that you are able to invest a lot of oxygen, either bring extra oxygen with you on the mountain or invest a lot of time and energy in the marriage to succeed up there.

所以，继续你的类比，如果我们想登上马斯洛山的顶峰，但我们没有带上氧气瓶，这大概会导致你所说的窒息模型。

So to continue your analogy, if if we want to get to the top of Mount Maslow, but we have failed to bring our oxygen tanks with us, that's what leads presumably to what you call the suffocation model.

没错。没错。山顶上的风景很美。如果我们不仅试图通过婚姻获得这种爱与连接的感觉，还寻求个人成长和真实性，但我们试图以低成本的方式做到这一点。这种脱节就是我在谈论婚姻窒息时所指的。

That's right. That's right. That that is that is it's lovely way up there at the top. And and if we're looking to try to achieve not only this this sense of of love and connection, but also this sense of personal growth and authenticity through the marriage, but we're trying to do it on the cheap. And that disconnect is what I'm talking about when I talk about the suffocation of marriage.

我喜欢这个类比的地方在于，它几乎将这种心理过程、我们期望的这种效应具象化了。我们都能想象，如果某天早上突然醒来决定，我要跑马拉松或者我要爬一座很高的山，却没有任何准备，会是什么样子。我们会认识到这不仅困难，而且可能很鲁莽。

What I love about that analogy is it makes physical almost this psychological process, this this this effect of our expectations. All of us can imagine what it would be like to suddenly wake up one morning and decide, you know, I'm gonna run a marathon or I'm gonna climb a mountain, a very tall mountain without really any preparation. And we would recognize that it's not just difficult to do, but potentially foolhardy.

完全正确。我认为，如果我们思考一下如今对婚姻的真正期望有多么雄心勃勃，就会意识到，如果我们太累或太懒于投入关系质量，自然就无法尝试登顶，自然就无法成功满足那些接近马斯洛需求层次理论顶端的期望。因此，这本书详细探讨了如何将我们对婚姻的要求与婚姻实际能提供给我们的东西对齐。

That is exactly right. I think if we think about what we're really asking of our marriages these days in terms of the, you know, ambition of these expectations, then we realize that if we're too tired or lazy to invest in the quality of the relationship, that of course, we're not gonna be able to make the summit attempt. Of course, we're not gonna be able to succeed in meeting those expectations toward the very high end of Maslow's hierarchy. And so the book talks a lot about how we can in fact align what we're asking of the marriage with what the marriage is realistically able to offer us.

所以，伊莱，多年来有几个人尝试探索与你相同的想法。当然，埃丝特·佩雷尔浮现在脑海中。在她著名的TED演讲中，她总结了其中一些挑战，我想给你播放一小段剪辑。

So there have been a few people, Eli, over the years who've tried to explore the same ideas that you have. Esther Perel, of course, comes to mind. In her famous TED talk, she summarizes some of these challenges, and I wanna play you a short clip.

于是我们来到一个人面前，基本上要求他们提供曾经整个村庄所能给予的一切。给我归属感，给我身份认同，给我连续性，但还要同时给我超验、神秘和敬畏。给我舒适，给我刺激，给我新奇，给我熟悉感，给我可预测性，给我惊喜。而我们觉得这是理所当然的，以为玩具和情趣内衣就能拯救我们。

So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge, give me novelty, give me familiarity, give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are gonna save us with that.

我非常喜欢那段话，伊莱，但你在书中也讨论了同样的观点。你打了个比方，说一位女性曾经向五位不同的朋友寻求所需的重要事物。但结婚后，她向丈夫寻求同样的五样东西，而他无法全部提供，于是她感到不满足。

So I love that passage, Eli, but you talk about the same idea in your book. You gave the analogy of a woman who once turned to five different friends for important things needed. But once she gets married, she turns to her husband for those same five things, and he's not able to provide all of them, and she feels now unfulfilled.

没错。在研究我们如何实现目标的文献中，有一个拗口的词叫‘多终效性’，意思是一个给定的手段可以服务于多个目标。例如，我步行上班可能同时满足了我上班的需求，也满足了我呼吸新鲜空气和锻炼的需求。所以这一项活动可以发挥各种功能。有趣的是，我们确实对婚姻做了同样的事。

That's right. In the research literature on on how we achieve our goals, there's a clunky word called multifinality, And this is the idea that a given means can serve multiple goals. So for example, when I walk to work, that might simultaneously meet my need to get to work, but also my needs to get some fresh air and get some exercise. And so this one activity can can serve all sorts of functions. What's interesting is that's really what we've done to marriage.

对吧？长期以来，婚姻为我们提供了一套相对有限的功能。随着时间的推移，我们堆砌了越来越多情感和心理上的功能。因此，对于夜晚外出娱乐、深度亲密倾诉等，我们越来越多地转向配偶，而不是亲密朋友和其他亲戚，配偶已经取代了我们过去依赖更广泛社交网络所提供的许多功能。

Right? Is that marriage for a long time served a set and relatively limited array of different functions for us. And over time, we've piled more and more of these emotional and psychological functions. So instead of turning to our close friends and other relatives for nights out on the town, for deep intimate disclosure, To a larger and larger extent, our spouse has replaced a lot of what we used to look to our broader social network to help us do.

你知道，伊莱，读你的书时我意识到，不仅我们对伴侣的期望在改变，我们现在还期望能激发伴侣身上的特殊品质。这一点也反映在电影中。1997年的电影《尽善尽美》中有一个场景，一位受够了追求她的男人的贬低言论的女性，要求他给她一句赞美。好吧。

You know, as I read your book, Eli, I realized that it's not just what we expect from our partners that's changing. We also now expect that we can unlock special things in our partners. And and this is also reflected in in the movies. The 1997 movie, As Good As It Gets, has a scene where a woman who is fed up with, you know, put downs by her by the man who's trying to woo her demands that he give her a compliment. Okay.

我开始了。显然是个错误。我有这个，怎么说，毛病？我的医生，一个我以前经常去看的心理医生，他说在百分之五六十的情况下，吃药确实有帮助。我讨厌吃药。

Here I go. Clearly a mistake. I've got this, what, ailment? My doctor, a shrink that I used to go to all the time, he says that in fifty or sixty percent of the cases, a pill really helps. I hate pills.

我的赞美是，那天晚上你过来告诉我你永远不会...是的。好吧，当时你在场。你知道你说了什么。嗯，我对你的赞美是，第二天早上，我开始吃药了。

My compliment is, that night when you came over and told me that you would never Yeah. All right, well, you were there. You know what you said. Well, my compliment to you is The next morning, I started taking the pills.

我不太明白这怎么是对我的赞美。

I don't quite get how that's a compliment for me.

你让我想成为一个更好的人。

You make me want to be a better man.

这可能是我一生中收到过最好的赞美。

That's maybe the best compliment of my life.

伊莱，在你的书里看到这段让我觉得特别有启发性。海伦·亨特的角色告诉杰克·尼科尔森的角色，真正让她感觉良好的不是他为她做了什么，而是她能在他身上激发出某种特别的东西。

I found this so revealing in the context of your book, Eli. Helen Hunt's character is telling Jack Nicholson's character that the thing that makes her feel really good is not what he does for her, but what she can do to unlock something special in him.

是的。他迷恋她，他对她的渴望，他对她的钦佩以及想让她更喜欢他的愿望，实际上让他想要成长为一个更好的人。在某种意义上，这正是我们在当代婚姻中看到的绝对原型。如今，我们寻找配偶是为了让对方激发出我们理想中的版本，那个潜藏在我们内心、希望随着时间和努力能够成长成的潜在自我。

Yeah. He is smitten with her, and his desire for her, his being impressed with her and the desire to make her like him more actually makes him want to grow into a better person. And in some sense, that's the absolute archetype of what we see in contemporary marriage. Today, we're looking for a spouse to bring out the ideal version of us, the latent version that's inside of us that we can hopefully grow into with enough time and effort.

你的书中有一个很棒的术语，你称之为米开朗基罗效应。

You have a wonderful term in in your book. You call this Michelangelo effect.

是的。这个术语其实是我从我的博士导师卡罗尔·拉斯博尔德那里学来的。很多听众会知道，米开朗基罗在谈论雕塑过程时，不是用揭示或雕刻这样的词，而是说把它从沉睡的岩石中释放出来。所以雕塑家的任务不是创造新东西，而仅仅是打磨、抛光，也许刮掉粗糙的边缘，把已经潜藏在岩石中的东西展现出来。这对于当今伴侣如何相处是一个非常好的隐喻。

Yeah. This is a term I actually got from my doctoral advisor, Carol Rusbold. Many of your listeners will know that that Michelangelo, when he talked about the sculpting process, talked not in terms of revealing or sculpture, but in terms of unleashing it from the rock in which it's been slumbering. So the sculptor's job is not to create something new, but merely to refine and buff and polish and maybe scrape away the rough edges of what was already nesting within within the rock. That's a really good metaphor for how partners today try to relate to each other.

也就是说，我们所有人都有一个真实的自我，即我们目前的这个人，但我们也有一个理想的自我，一个我们渴望成为的版本。就像，如果我能成为最好的自己，我可能会变成什么样子？我们期待我们的伴侣成为我们的雕塑家，帮助我们真正成长，朝着最好的理想自我迈进。

That is all of us have an actual self, the person that we currently are, But we also have an ideal self, a version of ourselves that's aspirational. Like, what could I maybe become if I could be the best version of myself? And we look to our partners to be our sculptors, to help us until we actually grow toward the best ideal version of ourselves.

那么埃利，我们真的拥有这种力量吗，这种扮演雕塑家并激发他人最好的一面的力量？

So Eli, do we actually have this power, this power to play sculptor and bring out the best in someone else?

答案是肯定的。我们确实拥有这种力量，但这并不容易做到，而且不是每个人都兼容。有时候，你想要成长成的版本并不是我希望你成长成的版本。这是一场非常微妙的舞蹈。你知道，当今最好的关系，我称之为全有或全无婚姻的那种关系，在这方面是非常契合的。

The answer is yes. We do have this power, but it's not easy to do and not everybody is compatible. And and sometimes the version of you that you want to grow into isn't the version of you that I want you to grow in to. And this is a this is a very delicate dance that we play. And, you know, the best relationships today, the the the sorts of relationships that that I call the all relationships and the idea of the all or nothing marriage, they're well aligned in this sense.

他们能够激发彼此最好的一面，并以一种促进彼此个人成长的方式连接，从而产生非常深厚的情感联系和心理满足感。

They're able to bring out the best in each other and connect in a way that facilitates each other's personal growth and therefore helps to produce a really profound amount of emotional connection and psychological fulfillment.

你知道，许多婚姻专家说，高期望是婚姻幸福的敌人。你得出了一个略有不同的结论。你说平均而言，许多婚姻可能确实比半个世纪前更不幸福，但这并非所有婚姻都如此。谁是例外呢？

You know, many marriage experts say that high expectations are the enemy of happiness in marriage. You come to a slightly different conclusion. You say that it's true that on average, many marriages might be unhappier today than they were half a century ago, but that isn't true of all marriages. Who are the exceptions?

例外是那些抱有这些期望并能满足它们的人。我认为，这是整个问题的关键。许多人认为，抱有这些高期望是有问题的，它正在损害婚姻制度。坦白说，过去持这种观点的人中包括我自己。当我开始写这本书时，我以为我写的是关于婚姻随时间衰退的书，以及我们如何在这一个制度和这一段关系上堆砌越来越多的期望，却没有投入足够的时间。

The exceptions are people who bring those expectations and are able to meet them. And this is, I think, the crux of the entire issue. Lots of people argue that having these high expectations is problematic, and it's harming the institution of marriage. And frankly, among the people who used to argue that is myself. I, when I set out to write this book, thought I was writing a book about the decline over time in marriage and how we're throwing more and more expectations on this one institution and this one relationship, but we're not investing enough time.

因此，我们确实创造了一种严重有问题的婚姻方式。直到我回顾了其他科学文献，并更多地了解了事情是如何变化的，我才意识到这其实只是故事的一半。确实，我们要求得更多，尤其是在这些更心理化和基于爱情的需求方面，比过去要多。但有些婚姻能够满足这些需求。那么，如果你有一段婚姻，你希望它能满足这些最高层次的需求，比如在马斯洛的需求层次理论中，而婚姻成功地做到了这一点，这意味着什么？

And therefore, we've really created a seriously problematic approach to marriage. And it wasn't until I I reviewed these other scientific literatures and learned more about how things have changed that I realized that's really half the story. It is true that we are asking a lot more, especially when it comes to these more psychological and love based needs than we did in the past. But some marriages are able to meet those needs. And so what does it what does it mean if you have a marriage that you're looking for to meet these very highest level needs, say, for example, in Maslow's hierarchy, and the marriage succeeds in doing so?

你能够在婚姻中实现一种满足感，这种满足感在一个我们甚至没有尝试满足这类需求的时代是无法企及的。因此，在这些高期望压垮我们、使实现健康婚姻更加困难的同时，在这些高期望使得1950年对我们来说可接受的婚姻在今天令我们失望的同时，这些同样的期望也使得一种婚姻满足感变得触手可及，而这种满足感直到最近才成为可能。

You're able to achieve a level of fulfillment in the marriage that would have been out of reach in an era where we really weren't even trying to meet those types of needs. So at the same time that these high expectations are weighing us down and making it more difficult to achieve a healthy marriage, at the same time that a marriage that would have been acceptable to us in 1950 is a disappointment to us today because of these high expectations, those same expectations have placed within reach a level of marital fulfillment that was out of reach until pretty recently.

所以，这种一些人为了婚姻而大量投入，甚至牺牲事业和朋友，也许还有他们孩子的活动的想法，你说这在另一部电影的场景中得到了完美体现。在《杯酒人生》中，保罗·吉亚玛提饰演的葡萄酒鉴赏家角色向他的爱慕对象解释了黑皮诺和赤霞珠的区别。

So this idea that some people invest heavily in their marriages at at the expense of careers and friends, maybe even, you know, their children's activities, you say this is perfectly captured in a scene from another movie. In sideways, Paul Jamadi's wine connoisseur character explains to his love interest the difference between a pinot and a cabernet.

你为什么这么喜欢黑皮诺？

Why are you so into pinot?

我的意思是，这好像是你的一种癖好。

I mean, it's like a thing with you.

我不

I don't

知道。我不知道。

know. I don't know.

正如你所知，这是一种难以种植的葡萄，对吧？所以它皮薄、性情多变、早熟。你知道，它不像赤霞珠那样是生存能手，赤霞珠几乎可以在任何地方生长，即使被忽视也能茁壮成长。不。

It's a hard grape to grow, as you know. Right? So it's thin skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It's, you know, it's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it's neglected. No.

黑皮诺需要持续的关怀和关注，你知道吗？事实上，它们只能生长在世界上这些非常特定、隐蔽的小角落里。而且，真的只有最有耐心、最懂得培育的种植者才能做到。只有真正花时间去理解黑皮诺潜力的人，才能引导它展现出最完整的风味。

Pinot needs constant care and attention. You know? And in fact, they can only grow in these really specific little tucked away corners of the world. And and only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.

然后，我的意思是，哦，它的风味。它们是这个星球上最令人难忘、最卓越、最激动人心、最微妙、最古老的风味。

And then, I mean, oh, it's flavors. They're just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet.

所以，当然，Eli，当我们听到这个，并在婚姻的背景下思考时，我们为什么不想‘种植’黑皮诺呢？

So, of course, Eli, when we hear this and we're thinking about this in the context of marriage, why wouldn't we all want to grow Pino?

嗯，我认为我们很多人都应该对黑皮诺非常谨慎。我的意思是，我认为那段剪辑非常巧妙地提供了一个类比，说明了婚姻在过去，比如说，五十年或更长时间里是如何改变美国的。它从一个近似于赤霞珠的机构转变而来——赤霞珠几乎可以在任何地方生长，即使被忽视也能茁壮成长——变成了一个更加精致、脆弱的机构，需要大量的照料和维护。所以你问我，除了黑皮诺，谁还会想要别的，至少根据Miles对那些葡萄的看法？我会说，很多人可能不想处理那么脆弱和精致的东西。

Well, I think a lot of us should be pretty careful about Pino. I I mean, I think that clip does an absolutely masterful job of providing an analogy to how marriage has changed America in the last, say, fifty years or more. It's changed from an institution approximating Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it's neglected, to a much more delicate, fragile institution that requires a lot of of tending and maintenance. So you ask me, who would ever want anything other than than Pinot Noir, at least according to how Miles thinks about those grapes? And I would say a whole lot of people might not want to deal with something that fragile and delicate.

但就像他说的，我们中那些做对了的人，嗯，他是在谈论葡萄。当有合适的种植者和合适的环境时，风味就是那么令人难忘、卓越、微妙和古老。我认为他所说的是，这是一种高维护的葡萄。它需要大量的工作。如果你不小心、不专注，你会对它感到失望。

But like he says, those of us who get it right, that is well, and he's he's talking about the grapes. When there's the right grower and the right context, the flavors are just haunting and brilliant and subtle and ancient. And what I think he's saying is this is a high maintenance grape. It takes a lot of work. And if you aren't careful and attentive, you're gonna be disappointed in it.

它会让你失望。但如果你足够努力，你就能拥有真正美好的东西。这就是我们今天所处的状态——婚姻要么全有，要么全无。

It's gonna fail you. But if you work hard enough, you can have something truly exquisite. And that is where we are today with the all or nothing marriage.

你书中的一个结论是，面对这个挑战——我们许多人都想站在马斯洛金字塔顶端，却没有投入时间、精力或耐心去真正实现——我们在某种程度上主要有两种选择。在你自己的婚姻中，你描述了去西雅图的一次旅行，用你自己的比喻来说，你发现自己‘缺氧’了。

One of the conclusions of your book is that we have, in some ways, two major alternatives when it comes to dealing with this challenge that many of us want to be at the top of Mount Maslow, but are not investing the time and effort or the patience to actually get there. In your own marriage, you describe a trip to Seattle where, in your own analogy, you found yourself starved of oxygen.

没错。我们经历了一段艰难时期。尤其是我，在适应为人父母的过程中非常挣扎。坦白说，我认为我之所以这么艰难，正是我在书中讨论的那些原因——我没有充分调整或重新校准自己对新生儿生活的期望。

That's right. We went through a hard time. I, in particular, went through a hard time with the adjustment to parenthood. And I frankly, I I think that the the reason I had a hard time is the sort of stuff that I'm talking about in the book. I hadn't sufficiently calibrated or recalibrated my expectations to what life would be like with a newborn.

关于这方面的研究其实很复杂。显然，拥有一个‘快乐宝贝’是件美妙的事，你会疯狂地爱着新生儿，亲吻那毛茸茸的小脑袋是我们一生中最满足的体验之一。但现实是，最近有估计表明，每周需要额外投入约33.5小时的照顾时间。我会问没有孩子的听众夫妇：这每周33.5小时从何而来？再加上睡眠不足，坦白说，与配偶情感交流或亲密相处的时间也大大减少。

And the research on this is is in fact tricky. Obviously, having a a, you know, a bundle of joy is is a wonderful thing, and you love the the new baby like crazy, and kissing that little fuzzy head is one of the most satisfying things we ever get to do in our lives. But the reality is a recent estimate suggests that it's about thirty three and a half additional hours a week of of extra time, like, of care that goes into that. And I would ask the couples out there listening who don't have a kid, where would those thirty three point five hours a week come from? And then you're complementing that with with some sleep deprivation and frankly much less time for emotional connection or sexual connection with your spouse.

那么研究证据显示第一个孩子的到来往往会严重影响关系质量和婚姻满意度，这还有什么奇怪的吗？正是在那段时期，我们去西雅图看望我最亲密、交往最久的朋友——这本是我三十多年来生活中一直带来幸福与快乐的经历，但我却痛苦不堪。事实证明，带着八个月大的孩子跨州旅行与不带孩子完全不同。你和最好的朋友在一起，有所有你们曾经常做的事，但现在有个八个月大的孩子在场，你们什么也做不了。

And is it any surprise that the research evidence shows that the arrival of the first baby tends to be pretty hard on the quality of the relationship, on the marital satisfaction, for example. And it was during that period where we took a trip to Seattle to see my closest and longest longest term friend, one of these life experiences that has always been a source of bliss and joy for me throughout the, you know, thirty some odd years of my life at the time, and I was miserable. It turns out that traveling across the country with an eight month old is not anything like traveling across the country without an eight month old. And then you're you're together with your best friend, and there's all the stuff that you used to do. But now there's an eight month old there, and you're not doing any of those things.

我真的非常难受。我的意思是，我毫不夸张地说，我在情感上真的很难适应。我对妻子说了句话，我现在很后悔说出口，甚至难以启齿。

And I really had a hard time. I mean, I'm I can't really exaggerate this. I I really struggled emotionally with with the adjustment. And I I said to my wife, and I regret saying this. It's hard for me to say out loud right now.

你知道，我可以忍受这些。我能熬过去，我当然爱我的女儿，但我必须停止试图享受快乐。因为如果我试图享受生活、享受与你在一起的时光，结果总是失望。她对此非常难过，我让她哭了。

You know, I can endure this. Like, I I can get past this and I I certainly love my daughter, but I need to stop trying to have fun. Because if I'm trying to enjoy my life and I'm trying to enjoy you, I keep end up disappointed. And she was very upset about that. And, you know, I made her cry.

我对此一点也不感到自豪。但她哭了，心想，什么？这就是我们试图共同过上好生活的终结吗？我们就要一起蜷缩起来，一起不快乐吗？但事实是，这最终成为了最低点，但也是我开始稍微恢复的起点。

I'm not proud of this at all. But she cried and thought, what? Is this the end of us trying to to live a good life together? Are we just gonna hunker down and and be unhappy together? But but the truth is this ended up being the lowest point, but also the starting of where I started to recover a little bit.

直到那一刻，我才开始认真让生活重新变好。我实现这一目标的主要方式之一是重新调整我的期望，是的，但也通过重新投入，确保我与妻子的联系比以往更紧密，这需要一些努力。它确实要求我们在某些方面降低期望，然后努力达到那些降低的期望，我们实际上做到了，但这当然不容易。

It took that moment before I started to get serious about making life better again. And one of the major ways I did it was by recalibrating my expectations, yes, but also reinvesting in a way that made sure that I was more connected to my wife than we had been, and it took some work. And it did require that we lower expectations in some ways and then try to meet those lowered expectations, and we were in fact able to do it, but it it certainly wasn't easy.

伊莱和其他研究人员发现，当你挣扎着支付账单或打三份工时，满足伴侣的情感和心理需求并不特别容易。这可能是婚姻制度在低收入夫妇中显得尤其脆弱的原因之一。稍后回来，我们将探讨切实的解决方案。如果你负担不起带伴侣去巴黎的浪漫之旅，但仍想登上马斯洛金字塔的顶端，我们会告诉你如何实现。您正在收听《隐藏的大脑》。

Eli and other researchers have found that it's not especially easy to fulfill a partner's emotional and psychological needs when you're struggling to pay the bills or working three jobs. This might be one reason that the institution of marriage appears to be especially fragile among low income couples. When we come back, we're going to look at tangible solutions. If you can't afford to take your partner on that romantic trip to Paris, but you still want to get to the top of Mount Maslow, we'll show you how to get there. You're listening to Hidden Brain.

我是尚卡尔·韦丹塔姆。这里是《隐藏的大脑》。我是尚卡尔·韦丹塔。今天的节目是关于婚姻。婚姻是今天把我们聚集在一起的主题。

I'm Shankar Vedantham. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. On today's show Marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today.

没错。婚姻。婚姻。那神圣的安排，我们梦想中的梦想。《公主新娘》中那个标志性场景的牧师描述得最好。

That's right. Marriage. Marriage. That blessed arrangement, that dream within our dream. The priest from that iconic scene in The Princess Bride describes it best.

或者他真的描述得最好吗？我们正在审视婚姻如何随时间演变。它从一个必需的伙伴关系，变成了两个非常不同的人的结合，他们需要彼此的爱才能完整。现在它已经变成了心理学家伊莱·芬克尔所认定的全有或全无的关系。伊莱认为，我们对婚姻的期望，无论是同性恋还是异性恋，富人或穷人，都已急剧增加。

Or does he? We're taking a look at how marriage has evolved over time. It went from a partnership of necessity to a union of two very different people who need one another's love to be complete. Now it's gone to the all or nothing relationships identified by psychologist Eli Finkel. Eli argues that our expectations for marriage, both gay and straight, among rich and poor, have dramatically increased.

能够满足这些更高期望的夫妇比以往任何时候都更幸福。但未能达到这些期望的夫妇比一个世纪前的同类夫妇更不快乐。如果您对这些想法有后续问题或想法，并愿意与《隐藏的大脑》听众分享，请在手机上录制语音备忘录。然后通过电子邮件发送到 ideashiddenbrain dot org。请使用主题行“婚姻”。

Couples who are able to meet these higher expectations are happier than couples have ever been. But couples who fall short are unhappier than their counterparts a century ago. If you have follow-up questions or thoughts about these ideas, and you'd be willing to share them with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone. Then email it to us at ideashiddenbrain dot org. Use the subject line marriage.

那个邮箱地址是ideas@hiddenbrain.org。艾利说，我们可以做一些事情，他称之为爱情技巧，来重新调整我们对婚姻的思考方式，让我们在长期关系中更加满足。

That email address again is ideas@hiddenbrain.org. Eli says there are things we can do, what he calls love hacks, to reorient how we think about marriage and make ourselves more fulfilled in long term relationships.

你的一些听众可能是马塞尔·普鲁斯特的粉丝，他认为神秘不在于去新的地方，而在于用新的眼光去看待。而这些爱情技巧正是如此。我们可以尝试用不同的方式看待同样的关系，从而在关系本身中更快乐一点。

Some of your listeners might be fans of Marcel Proust, who argues that mystery is not about traveling to new places, but about looking with new eyes. And the love hacks are exactly that. There are ways that we can try to experience the same relationship, but view it in a different way, and therefore be a little bit happier in the relationship itself.

所以心理学家长期以来一直在谈论所谓的根本归因错误，即当我们看到某人做出我们不喜欢的举动时，有两种解释方式。你可以说这个人行为不好是因为他们是个坏人，或者你可以说这个人行为不好是因为环境中有某些因素，他或她周围发生的事情导致了他或她这样行为。而你建议的技巧之一是以更同情而非批判的方式重新解读伴侣的负面行为。

So psychologists have long talked about something called the fundamental attribution error, which is sometimes when we see someone behave in a way that we don't like, there's two ways to interpret it. You can either say this person is behaving badly because they're a bad person, or you can say this person's behaving badly because there's something in the context. There's something happening around him or her that's causing him or her to behave this way. And one of the hacks that you suggest is to reinterpret negative behavior from your partner in a way that's more sympathetic rather than critical.

对。我不是说这是魔法。我不是说这是最容易做的事情，但我是说通过一些努力，我们可以在这方面做得更好一些。所以你的配偶迟到了。你的配偶不尊重人。

Right. And I'm not saying it's magic. I'm not saying it's the easiest thing to do, but I'm saying that with some effort, we can get a little better at this. So your spouse is late. Your spouse is disrespectful.

我的意思是，理想情况下不是很大的事情，但你的配偶做了一些不体贴的事情。你对这种行为如何影响你有很大的控制权。特别是，你可以选择是否用你配偶身上可能稳定且性格评估的方式来解释这种行为。比如，我的配偶总是这么混蛋。你可以试着说，看，我的配偶刚才是个混蛋，但他在工作上压力很大。

I mean, ideally not in a huge way, but your your spouse does something inconsiderate. You have a lot of control over how that behavior affects you. And in particular, you have control over whether you want to explain that behavior in terms of something about your spouse that's maybe stable and and a characterological assessment. Like, my spouse is always such a jerk. You can try instead to say, look, my spouse was a jerk just now, but he's a lot under a lot of stress at work.

或者你可以想，看，他可能已经尽力了。你知道，可能有些交通问题或工作中的危机。我就随它去吧。我不是说这些事情容易做到，因为我们确实倾向于默认用性格因素来解释他人的行为。但事实是，我们应该更好地理解这一点，有很多因素会影响为什么某人选择这种行为而不是另一种行为。

Or you can think, look, he probably tried the best he could. You know, there was probably some traffic or some crisis at work. I'm just going to let it ride. Now, I'm not saying these are easy things to do because we do have a default to explain other people's behaviors as elements of their character. But the fact is, and we should be better at understanding this, there are all sorts of things that contribute to why somebody engaged in one behavior over another behavior.

我们有一定程度的控制权，可以选择以更慷慨和善良的方式解读伴侣的不体贴或粗鲁行为，而这种更善良的方式会让我们在关系中更快乐，我们的伴侣可能也会更快乐。

And we have some control over the extent to which we interpret our partner's inconsiderate or rude behavior in a way that's more generous and kind, and the kinder approach will make us happier in the relationship, and our partner will probably be happier too.

你也认为拥有所谓的成长型思维是有益的。你这是什么意思？

You also think that having what you call a growth mindset is a useful thing. What do you mean by that?

斯坦福大学心理学家卡罗尔·德韦克提出了这个观点，认为人们在如何看待各种特质方面存在差异。例如，她研究智力。人们在多大程度上认为智力是固定、稳定的，要么有要么没有，还是可塑的，可以随时间发展，这方面存在差异。现在有很多研究表明，人们在多大程度上认为关系中的契合度是固定的。你称之为命运型思维。

So the psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford, she's developed this idea that people differ in terms of how they think about various attributes. So she studies intelligence, for example. And people differ in the extent to which they think intelligence is something that's fixed and stable and you have it or you don't versus it's malleable and it's something that you can develop over time. Well, turns out there's a lot of good research now on the extent to which people feel like compatibility in a relationship is something that is fixed. You call this a destiny mindset.

有些人认为，伴侣要么契合要么不契合，就这么简单。而更倾向于成长型思维的人则认为，有很多空间可以发展契合度。事实上，经历关系中的困难并不是说‘天哪，我们不合适’的信号，而是一个机会，通过解决冲突来更好地理解彼此，并加强关系。同样，我们并非完全控制对这些事情的看法，但我们可以尝试让自己采取更具建设性的成长型方法来思考关系中的冲突，而不是更倾向于命运型的方法，后者常常将冲突视为不契合的深刻迹象，这对关系相当有害。

People who think, look, partners are either compatible or they're not, and that's the end of the story. Versus more of a growth oriented mindset who think, look, there's a lot of room where you can develop compatibility. And in fact, going through difficulties in a relationship isn't a signal that, oh my goodness, we're incompatible people. It's it's an opportunity to learn to understand each other better and strengthen the the relationship through the resolution of the conflict. And here again, it's not like we have complete control over the thoughts that we have about these things, but we can try to make ourselves adopt a more constructive growth oriented approach to thinking about conflict in a relationship rather than a more destiny oriented approach that can often view conflict as a deep sign of incompatibility, and that's pretty destructive for the relationship.

你还谈到了更严肃的替代方案。所以，如果人们随着时间的推移发现彼此就是不合适，但他们对自己生活中想要的不同事物有很高的期望，你建议其中一个替代方案可能是发展系统，让人们实际上从不同的人那里获得不同的东西。

You also talk about more serious alternatives. So if people find over time that they are just incompatible with one another and yet they have these high expectations of different things they want from their life, you suggest that one of the alternatives might be to develop systems where people are actually getting different things from different people.

没错。这又是同样的逻辑，对吧？所以我们有这种全有或全无的方法。我们期望这些高层次的东西，而我们的许多婚姻实际上都达不到这一点。

That's right. It's the same logic again. Right? So we have this all or nothing approach. We expect these high level things, and many of our marriages are in fact falling short of that.

所以一种可能是我们尝试在关系中投入更多。第二种可能，我们称之为爱情技巧，是如何更高效。但第三种可能，我认为我们应该认真对待这一点。做出这类牺牲并没有什么可耻的。我们应该要求更少。

So one possibility is that we try to invest more in the relationship. And the second possibility, which we've called love hacks, is how to be more efficient. But the third possibility, and I actually think we should be pretty serious about this. There's nothing shameful about making these sorts of sacrifices. We should ask less.

在我们自己的婚姻中，我们可以从哪些方面审视关系并看到，比如，我长期以来一直试图在关系中满足这种需求，但对我们作为一对夫妇在帮助满足这种需求方面，我常常有点失望。我是否可以通过其他朋友甚至独自一人来满足这种需求？心理学家伊莱恩·钟有一些研究，她称之为社交多样化。就像，你是否可以多样化你的社交组合？她研究我们在感到情绪时求助的人，这些人可以帮助我们调节这些情绪。

In what ways can we in our own marriage look to the relationship and see, man, like, I have been looking to fulfill this sort of need in the relationship for a long time, and I'm chronically a little disappointed about how we do as a couple and helping to fulfill this sort of need. Is there some other way that I might be able to meet this need I have either through some other friends or even on my own? And there's some research by the psychologist Elaine Chung that looks at what she calls social diversification. Like, can you diversify your social portfolio, if you will? And she looks at at the people we turn to when we're feeling emotions that can help us regulate those emotions.

那么当你感到悲伤时，你会向谁寻求安慰？当你想要分享快乐时，又会找谁庆祝？她评估了人们在多大程度上依赖少数人来满足所有这些需求，而不是分散到更多人身上。通过一系列研究，她发现那些实现社交多元化的人——即针对不同情感需求寻求不同类型的人——往往会更快乐一些。特别是在婚姻方面，我们确实将太多的情感寄托都压在了这一段关系上。

So to whom do you turn when you're feeling sad? To whom do you turn when you want to celebrate your happiness? And she assesses how much people look to a relatively small number of people to do all of those things versus a larger number of people. And she finds across a range of studies now that people who've diversified their social portfolio, that is turned to different sorts of people for different sorts of emotional experiences, tend to be a little bit happier. And so with regard to marriage in particular, we've really lumped a lot of our emotional fulfillment on this one relationship.

对我们许多人来说，如果在某些方面降低期待，不仅我们自己会受益，我们的婚姻实际上也会变得更好。

And for many of us, we would benefit and our marriage would actually benefit if we asked a little bit less in some respects.

我很喜欢多元化的概念以及与金融多元化的类比。意思是，你的投资组合中可能有债券，它们表现不太出色，增长有限，但非常稳定。然后你可能还有一些股票，增长潜力大，但也有可能亏损很多。你的建议是，通过让不同事物满足你不同方面的需求，你的整体‘投资组合’会比把所有鸡蛋放在一个篮子里更稳定。

I love the idea of diversification and the analogy with financial diversification. I mean, so the idea, of course, is that you might have, you know, bonds in your portfolio and they don't do very well and they don't grow a lot, but they're very stable. And then you might have some stocks in your portfolio that, you know, are high growth, but they also have the potential for losing a lot. And and what you're suggesting is that by having different things accomplish different parts of what you need, your portfolio as a whole ends up being more stable than if you put all your eggs in one basket. Basket.

没错，这是一种很巧妙的思考方式，我之前没有完全理解到这一点。在某种程度上，如今我们对婚姻的做法就像是一个重仓股票的投资组合。这意味着市场上涨时，我们收益巨大。但把这么多鸡蛋放在一个篮子里风险很高。

You know, that's right. And that's a neat way of thinking about it that I hadn't fully processed previously. In some sense, what we're doing with marriage these days is we've got a heavily stock loaded portfolio. And that means that when the market is up, we make huge gains. But that's a lot of eggs to put in that one basket.

而当市场下跌时，我们会受到沉重打击。在某种程度上，这也可以合理地比喻为自我表达型婚姻，即我们指望一个人来满足如此多的情感和心理需求。回报可能很大，但风险也很高。

And when the market goes down, we're gonna get hit pretty hard. And to some degree, that that's also a reasonable metaphor for the self expressive marriage, where we look to one person to fulfill so many of our emotional and our psychological needs. The payoff can be huge, but there's a lot of risk.

现在，如果人们真的考虑在浪漫和情感上多元化他们的‘投资组合’，这想必也会对我们所理解的婚姻带来压力。所以，如果人们在婚姻之外寻求情感支持或其他需求，有些人可能会问：那你们还算真的结婚吗？

Now for people to actually consider diversifying their portfolio romantically and emotionally, presumably this also creates stresses on what we think of as marriage. So if people are looking outside the marriage for emotional support or other needs, some people are gonna say, well, are you really married anymore?

我认为这是一个合理的问题，也是当你思考像婚姻这样的制度如何随时间演变时出现的复杂性。我猜想，如果有人从1750年穿越到今天，他们可能会环顾四周然后说，哇，这看起来根本不像婚姻。我甚至不太明白你们在做什么。或者更甚，如果我们穿越回1750年，看看当时人们的期望以及他们多么不指望从婚姻中获得个人满足，我们会感到非常困惑。

I think this is a valid question, and this is a complexity that comes up when you think about how an institution like marriage changes over time. I suspect that if somebody transported from 1750 to today, they might look around and say, woah. That that doesn't look like marriage. I don't even really get what you guys are doing. Or better yet, if we transported back to 1750 and looked at what people were expecting and how little they were looking for personal fulfillment from the marriage, we would be bewildered.

所以我在书中探讨的一个较有争议的想法是，当我们讨论如何对婚姻要求更少时。顺便说一句，我这样做是在探讨如何通过减少要求来加强婚姻。我考虑的其中一个领域是浪漫或性方面。那么，有些人考虑某种形式的自愿非一夫一妻制是否合理？请注意，这绝不是欺骗。

So one of the more controversial ideas that I play with in the book is when I'm talking about ways that we can ask less of the marriage. By the way, when I am doing that, I'm talking about how can we strengthen the marriage by asking less of it. One of the places that I consider is in the romantic or sexual domain. So is it reasonable for some people to consider some type of consensual non monogamy. Now this is not cheating.

这就是自愿非一夫一妻制的核心理念。这是一种理解，即我们不需要始终保持完全的一夫一妻制。你们可以协商出一种替代方案。事实上，在千禧一代中，这正日益成为思考理想关系的一种常见方式。因此，这是一个理想的选择，尤其适用于那些通常相处得很好、彼此相爱、共同作为家庭的优秀'联席CEO'，但却难以维持彼此满意的性生活的人——这些情况特别适合考虑这一选项。

That's the whole idea of consensual non monogamy. This is an understanding that we don't need to have complete monogamy all the time. And you can negotiate an alternative. In fact, among millennials, this is becoming an increasingly common way of thinking about the ideal relationship. So this is an ideal option, especially for people who generally are connecting pretty well and they love each other and they're good co CEOs of the household together, but they're really struggling to sustain a mutually satisfying sex life together, those are particularly good opportunities to consider.

我们能否通过以双方同意的方式开放关系，来减少一些失望和压力？这无疑是一个高风险的选择，但它可能对某些关系有益。

Could we reduce some of the disappointment and pressure by opening up the relationship in some ways that we can both agree to? It's certainly a high risk option, but it's an option that probably will benefit some relationships.

我们看到你和你的妻子艾莉森发展出了一种简略的方式，用于在想要表达爱意但时间紧迫的时候。这与一首歌有关。

You see that you and your wife, Alison, have developed a shorthand of sorts for the times you want to communicate affection but are starved of time. And it has to do with this song.

那是保罗·麦卡特尼在《Abbey Road Medley》结尾的部分。就像一段23秒的附加曲目。很有趣。我有一阵子没听了。即使刚才你播放时我听到，我还是有点眼眶湿润。

That's Paul McCartney at the end of the Abbey Road Medley. It's like a little twenty three second bonus track. And it's interesting. I I haven't heard it in a while. And even as as I listened to it as you just played it, I sort of teared up a little bit.

因为这首歌在我和妻子的婚姻中意义重大。当我们刚开始约会时，人们坠入爱河时常会说'爱你'之类的话。但我特别偏爱'酒足饭饱'这个说法。对吧？我想告诉她我很爱她，但我得先'酒足饭饱'。

Because it's been a very significant song for my wife and me in our marriage. When we were first dating, people are falling in love, they often say, love you or whatever. But I was very partial to this idea of belly full of wine. Right? I want to tell her that I love her a lot, but I got to get a belly full of wine.

最终，说'酒足饭饱'成了我们代替'我爱你'的小暗号。我们使用'酒足饭饱'这个短语的妙处在于，它能够容纳关于爱、尊重和情感的一整个太字节的信息，就像用一秒钟的短语表达出来。我们可以转向对方，只说'酒足饭饱'，就能用这几个词传达如此多的信息。这是一个更广泛理念的例子，我们对此重视不足：每段婚姻都有其自身的文化，拥有自己的语言和期望，我们可以利用文化运作的特点来造福婚姻，通过一种情感简略表达方式来帮助传递爱意。这在你们经历困难时期、可能气氛有点紧张、濒临争吵时尤其关键。

And eventually, saying belly full of wine was our little replacement for I love you. And what was neat about the way we used the phrase belly full of wine is it was able to contain, like, a whole terabyte of information about love and respect and affection in this, like, one second phrase. We we could turn to each other and just say belly full of wine and just really communicate so much information in that very little just those few words. And this is an example of of a broader idea that we don't appreciate enough, which is that every marriage has its own culture, that has its own language and its own expectations, and we can leverage the features of how culture works to benefit the marriage with a sort of emotional shorthand that can help express affection. And it can be especially crucial if you're going through a difficult time and maybe things are getting a little hot and maybe you're on the verge of a fight.

你可以说，嘿，宝贝，肚子里装满了酒。这样或许能化解一些原本可能相当棘手的冲突场面。

And you can say, hey, baby. Belly belly full of wine. And you might be able to diffuse some of what could have been a pretty problematic episode.

Eli Finkel是西北大学的社会心理学家，著有《全有或全无的婚姻：最佳婚姻如何运作》一书。Eli，非常感谢你今天做客《隐藏大脑》。

Eli Finkel is a social psychologist at Northwestern University. He's the author of The All or Nothing Marriage, How the Best Marriages Work. Eli, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

非常感谢你的邀请。

Thank you so much for having me.

你是否愿意分享一个关于自己生活中一段长期关系进展非常顺利或非常糟糕的个人故事？如果你愿意与《隐藏大脑》的听众分享这个故事，或者对这期节目有后续问题、想法或评论，请找一个非常安静的房间，用手机录制一段语音备忘录。两三分钟就足够了。然后将文件通过电子邮件发送给我们，地址是ideashiddenbrain.org，主题请注明“婚姻”。

Do you have a personal story to share about a long term relationship in your own life that has gone very well or gone very badly? If you'd be willing to share this story with the Hidden Brain audience, or if you have follow-up questions, thoughts, or comments about this episode, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at ideashiddenbrain dot org. Use the subject line marriage.

再次提醒，那个电子邮件地址是ideashiddenbrain.org。休息之后，解答你的问题。心理学家Jonathan Adler将再次来到节目，回答听众关于我们讲述生活故事的问题，我们还将听到听众们关于如何面对生活中戏剧性和艰难时刻的非凡故事。您正在收听的是《隐藏大脑》。

That email address again is ideashiddenbrain dot org. After the break, your questions answered. Psychologist Jonathan Adler returns to the show. He'll answer listeners' questions about the stories we tell about our lives, and we'll hear remarkable tales from listeners about how they came to terms with dramatic and difficult moments in their lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain.

我是Shankar Vedantam。这里是《隐藏大脑》。我是Shankar Vedantam。历史上最早的电影非常简单，一系列移动画面展示了一匹奔跑的马、一个在花园里玩耍的家庭，以及一名拳击手击打对手。

I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. The first films in history were quite simple. A series of moving pictures showed a horse running, a family playing in a garden, and a boxer punching his opponent.

随着技术的发展，银幕上呈现的故事复杂性也随之增加。在1902年的电影《月球旅行记》中，Georges Melies描绘了天文学家飞往月球、被外星人捕获然后逃回地球的故事。随着好莱坞进入制片厂时代，电影情节凝聚成一种具有明确开端、发展和结局的独特风格。在当今大多数大片中，角色 inevitably 达到一个令人满意的结局。具有艺术倾向的电影制作人尝试了不同的叙事手法。

As the technology developed, so did the complexity of the stories portrayed on screen. In the nineteen o two film, A Trip to the Moon, Georges Melies depicted astronomers who fly to the moon, get captured by aliens, and then escape back to Earth. As Hollywood evolved into its studio era, the plots of films coalesced into a distinct style with a beginning, middle, and end. In most blockbuster movies today, the characters inevitably reach a satisfying conclusion. Filmmakers with an artistic bent have experimented with different storytelling devices.

1950年的电影《罗生门》讲述了一位武士被谋杀的故事。它从四个视角叙述了同一个事件，最终却呈现出四个截然不同的版本。电影《记忆碎片》以倒叙方式展开情节，而《盗梦空间》则唤起了一种梦境般支离破碎的感觉。请。

The 1950 film, Rashomon, is about a samurai who gets murdered. It tells the same story from four perspectives. They end up being four completely different stories. The film Memento tells its plot in reverse, while Inception evokes the feeling of a fragmented dream. Please.

能请你的潜意识放松些吗？

Mind telling your subconscious to take it easy?

我的潜意识。记住，我无法控制它。

My subconscious. Remember, I can't control it.

当我们观看这些电影时，我们会被人物的命运、动作场面和对白所吸引。但我们往往忽略了叙事方式对我们感受的根本性影响。如果《阿甘正传》没有采用闪回手法，那就只是一个坐在长椅上与陌生人聊天的普通人。如果《星球大战》以卢克炸毁死星开场，那将会是一个完全不同的故事。虚构作品中的真理在现实生活中同样适用。

When we watch these films, we're riveted by the characters, the action, and the dialogue. But we often fail to notice that the way the story is told has a fundamental impact on how we feel. If Forrest Gump didn't have flashbacks, it would simply be a guy sitting on a bench talking to a stranger. If Star Wars had started with Luke blowing up the Death Star, it would be a completely different story. What is true in fiction is true in real life as well.

我们讲述故事的方式——包括讲述自己人生的故事——会对我们的幸福产生深远影响。我们选择包含谁、排除谁、采用何种视角，所有这些选择都会改变我们对自己和世界的感受。我们在最近一期《隐藏大脑》节目《U2.0：改变你的故事，改变你的人生》中探讨了故事科学以及所谓的叙事心理学。我们的嘉宾是欧林学院的心理学家乔纳森·阿德勒。今天，乔纳森再次做客节目，回答听众关于个人故事及其如何塑造我们生活的提问。

How we tell stories, including the stories of our own lives, has profound consequences for our well-being. Whom we include, whom we exclude, and what point of view we take, all these choices alter how we feel about ourselves and the world. We explored the science of stories and what's known as narrative psychology in a recent episode of Hidden Brain titled U two point zero Change Your Story, Change Your Life. Our guest was Jonathan Adler, a psychologist at Olin College. Today, Jonathan returns to answer listeners' questions about personal stories and how they shape our lives.

乔纳森·阿德勒，欢迎回到《隐藏大脑》。

Jonathan Adler, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

哦，非常感谢您的邀请。

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

乔纳森，我们不断在给自己讲故事，即使是小细节在编织我们是谁的叙事中也很重要。我将从让你讲述你今天的故事开始。从你醒来后发生了什么？

Jonathan, we're constantly telling ourselves stories, and even small details are important in weaving the narrative of who we are. I'm going to start by having you tell me the story of your day today. What happened since you woke up?

嗯，今天早上我起床了。我帮助我的孩子们去上学。他们上五年级和七年级，所以他们正在驾驭自己的自主权和他们负责的事情，同时也要注意时间。然后我来到校园，有一点时间完成了一些工作。我和我新的一年级指导学生在午餐时见了面，让他们熟悉环境。

Well, this morning I got up. I helped my kids get off to school. They are in fifth and seventh grade, so they are navigating their own autonomy and what they're in charge of, but also attending to the clock. And then I came here to campus, and I had a little bit of time to get some work done. I met with my new first year advisees over lunch to get them oriented.

然后我来到这个录音室，准备和你交谈。

And then I came here to the sound studio to get ready to talk with you.

我必须承认，我们有时问人们这个问题的一个原因是建立音频水平并确保他们听起来不错。但在我与你进行的这次对话中，乔纳森，你能稍微阐述一下为什么我们讲述关于自己生活的故事如此重要吗？

I have to confess that one reason we ask people this question sometimes is to establish audio levels and to make sure they're sounding good. But in the context of this conversation I'm having with you, Jonathan, can can you just articulate for a moment why the stories we tell about our own lives are so important?

当然。那个故事，我不知道，是否符合任何有趣或重要故事的标准。事实上，当我们回顾自己的生活时，往往是那些重大时刻留存下来。但我刚才告诉你的故事真的只是时间顺序。除此之外没有太多内容。

Sure. That story, I don't know, meets any kind of criterion for for interesting or important story. And in fact, when we look back over our lives, it's often the big moments that stick around. But the story that I just told you is really all chronology. There's not much more to it than that.

但故事实际上在我们的生活中扮演着许多角色，无论是在个人层面、人际关系层面，还是在广泛的文化层面。所以在我的领域，我们特别关注故事如何为我们提供统一感和意义感。故事整合了我们。它们让我们感觉自己在时间和情境中都是同一个人。它们帮助将混乱的生活流转化为有意义的东西。

But stories actually play a huge number of roles in our lives at the level of the individual, the level of the interpersonal relationship, but also at the broad cultural level. So in my field, we're especially focused on the ways stories provide us with a sense of unity and meaning. So stories integrate us. They make us feel like we're the same person across time and across situations. And they help turn the messy flow of life into something meaningful.

但故事也是与他人和社区联系的重要工具，故事在维持和改变文化方面都扮演着巨大的角色。

But stories are also a vital tool for connection with other people and with communities, and stories play a huge role in both maintaining and changing culture.

您的主要发现之一是，我们讲述故事的方式可能与故事内容同等重要。例如，我们从何处开始故事、在何处结束故事具有重大意义。您将这些称为我们故事中的章节划分吗？

One of your main findings is that the way we tell stories can be just as important as the content of our stories. For example, there's a lot of significance in where we start our stories and where we end our stories. You call these the chapter breaks in our stories?

是的。是的。重要的是要记住，在我们的生命故事中我们扮演着两个角色。我们既是主角，也是叙述者。因此，虽然我们对发生在自己身上的事情控制有限，但对于如何解析这些经历，我们有相对更多的掌控权。

Yeah. Yeah. It's important to remember that we have two roles to play with respect to our life story. We are both the main character, but we're also the narrator. So while we only have so much control over the things that happen to us, we have somewhat more control over how we parse those experiences.

而改变我们人生的章节划分，意味着重新构建我们经历的起点和终点。因此，在我们生活的过程中，很难判断自己是处于某个经历的开端还是尾声。但回顾过去时，我们可以决定如何将人生划分为不同的片段，仅仅移动片段的起点或终点就能彻底改变其意义。

And shifting the chapter breaks of our lives means reframing the beginnings and endings of our experiences. So while we're living our lives, it's hard to know whether we're towards the beginning of some experience versus towards the end of it. But in retrospect, we can sort of make some decisions about how to chunk our lives into episodes, and simply moving the beginning or ending of episodes can really recast its meaning.

您描述了两种故事类型：污染型故事和救赎型故事，这两种故事都与我们如何安排人生的章节划分有关。乔纳森，您能否举例解释一下这两种故事？

You described two kinds of stories that you call contamination stories and redemption stories, and both these stories have to do with how we are arranging the chapter breaks of our lives. Can you explain what these two are perhaps with some examples, Jonathan?

当然。这是人们故事中出现的众多主题中的两种。污染型故事就是好事变坏事，而救赎型故事则是坏事变好事。所有人生都包含好坏两面，但这些主题很大程度上关乎我们如何建立联系并划分章节。例如，上次交谈时我分享的那个故事，是关于我在大学期间、留学以及进入研究生院的经历。

Sure. And these are two of many themes that show up in people's stories. Contamination stories are simply good turns bad, and redemption is bad turns good. So all lives have good and bad in them, but these themes are very much about where we draw connections and parse the chapter breaks. For example, in the story that I shared with you the last time we talked, it was a story about my experience in college, in studying abroad, and then going into graduate school.

很长一段时间里事情都很艰难，我全身心投入学业，期待着进入研究生院。但当我申请研究生院时，只被其中一所录取。当时，这感觉像是一次重大失望。如今，从二十年后的视角回望，那却是我人生中最重要的转折点之一。我真正找到了自己的学术热情。

And things had been challenging for quite a while, and I really threw myself into my academic work looking towards graduate school. And then when I applied to graduate schools, I only got into one of the programs that I had applied to. And at the time, that felt like a big letdown. Now, when I look back from a vantage point twenty years later, it's one of the most important turning points in my life. I really found my intellectual passion.

我与一位研究生导师合作，他真正培育了我的职业生涯。我遇到了后来结婚生子的人。所以当时，我本可能将这段经历切割成一个污染型故事——我非常努力却未能如愿。但当我将故事的终点后移，纳入之后开始研究生生涯的内容，从大学到研究生院的这个章节过渡，实际上变成了一个救赎型故事，我唯一的选择最终成了一条非凡的道路。

I worked with a graduate mentor who really nurtured my career. I met the person who I went on to marry and have children with. So at the time, I might have cut that experience into a contamination experience where I was working really hard and it didn't turn out. But when I move the ending of that story later and incorporate what came afterwards when I started graduate school, the chapter, the transition from college into graduate school, actually turns out to be this redemptive story where my one option turned out to be a fantastic pathway for me.

当然，这里引人注目的是，你故事的事实本身并不一定改变，而在于你选择从哪里开始讲述，又在哪里结束故事。

The striking thing, of course, here is that the facts of your story are not necessarily changing. It's just where you choose to start and where you choose to stop the story.

没错。实际上，甚至

That's right. And actually, even

这

the

情感体验也没有改变，对吧？事情曾经很艰难，后来变好了。但我可以把同样的客观时间顺序事实以及与之相关的情感，切割成不同的片段。我可以用不同的方式剪辑这个故事，使其呈现出不同的主题弧线。

emotional experience isn't changing. Right? Things were hard, and later things were better. But I could cut up the same exact sequence of not only sort of objective chronological facts, but also the emotions associated with them. And I could cut up that story into ways that would render it with different thematic arcs.

而且这会产生实际后果。我们从研究中得知，人们故事中的污染主题往往与较差的幸福感相关，而救赎主题则往往与积极的幸福感相关。

And and there's real consequences for that. We know from the research that contamination themes in people's stories tend to be associated with worse well-being, and redemption tends to be associated with positive well-being.

乔纳森，我想带你一起看一位名叫卡桑德拉的听众的故事。这是她故事的第一部分。

Jonathan, I want to walk you through a story from a listener named Cassandra. Here's the first part of her story.

那是在2005年2月的感恩节周末，我和家人在德克萨斯州的家中，午夜时分大多数人都在床上睡觉，有人闯进我的车库，放置了一个爆炸装置，炸毁了我的房子。我们当时在睡觉，但我十几岁的女儿没有睡。她在楼上缝纫。灯突然灭了，然后她看到一道火焰从我们家车道射过U形房屋，落到对面的房产上。她跑下楼梯叫醒我和我丈夫，喊着：着火了，着火了。

It was in 02/2005, Thanksgiving weekend, and I was with my family in our home in Texas, and most of us were asleep in bed around midnight when someone came into my garage, planted an explosive device, and blew my house up. We were sleeping, but not my daughter, my teenage daughter. She was upstairs sewing. The lights went off, and then she saw a flame shoot from our driveway across our u shaped house to the opposite property. And she she ran down the stairs to wake me and my husband up, and she said, fire, fire.

她尖叫起来，把我们俩都惊醒了。我试图打开灯，但停电了，我不明白为什么灯打不开。房子里弥漫着黑烟。我和丈夫慌乱中从床尾跑过，撞在了一起。

She screamed. She woke us both up. I tried to turn my light on, but the power was off, and I couldn't understand why the light wouldn't turn on. The house was covered in black smoke. My husband and I wound up running across the end of the bed, and we slammed into each other.

我把他撞晕了。我跑出卧室门，在楼梯底下遇到了我的女儿们。我们朝前门跑去。我的小女儿伸手越过我的肩膀去摸门。

I knocked him out. I ran out the bedroom door. I met my daughters at the bottom of the stairs. We ran toward the front door. My younger daughter reached over my shoulder to touch the door.

你知道，如果你不开门，火势就会加剧。我当时在想，停下，趴下，我甚至还没来得及说出‘翻滚’这个词，门就向内爆炸了。它把我炸得仰面倒地。我的狗从我俯卧的身体上跳了过去。我的两个女儿当时都跑出去追狗了，我的车库门爆炸了，那可是金属的。

And you know, if you don't open a door and feed the fire. And I was thinking, stop, drop, and I didn't even get the word roll out before the door exploded inwards. It knocked me onto my back. My dog jumped over my prone body. Both of my daughters were now out chasing the dog, and my garage door had exploded, and it was metal.

门的碎片像锯片一样呼啸着飞向她们的头部。我当时想，她们会被斩首的。

And shards of the door were whizzing towards their heads like saw blades. And I thought, they're going to be decapitated.

所以乔纳森，故事还有后续，但到目前为止你听到了什么？哇哦。

So Jonathan, there's more to the story, but what are you hearing so far? Woah.

谢谢你，卡桑德拉，愿意分享这个故事。对你遭遇的一切我深感抱歉。这是一个极具戏剧性的时刻，无疑营造了强烈的戏剧张力。我迫切想知道接下来发生了什么。

Thank you, Cassandra, for being willing to share that story. And I'm so sorry that happened to you. This is a highly dramatic moment, and it's certainly setting up the dramatic tension. I'm dying to know what happens next.

所以我认为可以公平地说，乔纳森，在故事的这一点上，卡桑德拉的经历是相当可怕的。没有人会真的想处在卡桑德拉的境地。这几乎肯定是一个‘污染’型故事（指叙事类型），因为它开始时是每个人都在夜晚安然入睡，突然之间，可怕的事情就降临到了他们身上。让我给你们播放卡桑德拉故事的剩余部分。故事从这里继续。

So I think it's fair to say, Jonathan, that at this point in the story, Cassandra's story is pretty horrific. No one would actually want to be in Cassandra's shoes. This is definitely almost a contamination story because it started out with everyone sleeping peacefully at night, and suddenly there's this terrible thing that happens to them. So let me play you the rest of Cassandra's story. It picks up from here.

我看到锯片，心想他们会被斩首。幸运的是，锯片从他们周围、旁边、上方飞过，他们毫发无伤。而我几乎什么也看不见，因为接下来的爆炸几乎让我失明，还震破了我的耳膜。但我勉强看到有人穿过邻居家的栅栏，边跑边提裤子。那是我的邻居杰夫。

Saw blades, and I thought, they're going to be decapitated. And luckily, the saw blades went around them, by them, over them, and they were untouched. And I could barely see anything because the next explosion just just about blinded me, and it blew up my ear eardrums. But I could barely see someone charging through the neighbor's fences pulling on his pants. It was my neighbor, Jeff.

他抓住我的狗，抓住我的女儿，匆忙把他们带进了他的房子。我挣扎着站起来，然后朝街那头瞥了一眼，透过近乎失明的双眼，我看到红蓝相间的圣诞灯光朝我靠近。那是消防车。三小时后，40位邻居和我的全家以及狗狗站在我家外面的街上，看着我的房子烧成灰烬。一位邻居拿出他最好的苏格兰威士忌，大家轮流传递着喝。

He grabbed my dog, he grabbed my daughter, and he hustled them into his house. Now I picked myself up, and then I glanced down the street, and I could see through my near blindness, the Christmas lights of red and blue lights coming towards me. Those were fire trucks. Three hours later, 40 of my neighbors were standing with my whole family and my dog in the street outside my house, watching my house burn to the ground. And one of the neighbors got out his best scotch, and they passed it around.

还有人给我端来了草药茶。另一个人给了我一件浴袍。我忘了说，我丈夫睡觉时是裸着的，当他醒来时——我不知道那是什么时候——从房子里出来，他去拿了一件浴袍。我抬头看着这两层楼的房子，火焰从每个窗户喷出，像巨大的橙色睫毛。而我丈夫背对着我站在前门，借着门前的火焰取暖，他正穿上浴袍，系好腰间的丝绸腰带。

And somebody else got me some herbal tea. Somebody else gave me a bath robe. Now I neglected to say that my husband was naked when he was sleeping, and when he came to, and I don't know when that was, and came out of the house, he went and grabbed a bathrobe. And I looked up to this two story house, and fire was coming out every window like giant orange eyelashes. And there was my husband standing with his back to me, warming his cockles by the fire at the front door, and he was putting on his bathrobe and tying the silk skash around his waist.

那是我见过最滑稽的事情之一。总之，当我们看着大火时，我们看到了爆炸。有人邀请我进屋，是我们的邻居。我们都恢复了。大家都没事，而且因此变得更好了。

It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. So anyway, as we watched the fire, we saw the explosions. Somebody invited me into the house, our neighbors. And We've all recovered. We all are okay, and we're better for it.

谢谢。

Thank you.

乔纳森，这是一个惊人的故事。谈谈她在这里的转折。

Jonathan, this is an amazing story. Talk about the turn that she makes here.

这确实是一个惊人的故事，我很高兴每个人都安然无恙。能在这其中找到幽默感已经很了不起了，更不用说圣诞灯光作为首批救援者到来的诗意。是的，我的意思是，卡桑德拉确实以救赎的转折结束了这个故事，对吧？一切都好起来了。她最后还说，我们因此甚至变得更好了。

It sure is an amazing story, and I'm glad that everyone turned out okay. It's kind of remarkable to be able to find any humor amidst this, let alone the poetry of the Christmas lights being the first responders on their way. Yeah, I mean, Cassandra certainly ends this story with a redemptive turn, right? It all turned out okay. And she says at the end, we're even better as a result.

所以能够在如此戏剧性和可怕的事件之后看到这种转变，确实是相当了不起的。

So that is quite something to be able to see that kind of turnaround in the wake of such a dramatic and terrible event.

乔纳森，请多谈谈救赎故事对我们幸福感的影响。

Talk a little bit more about the effects of redemption stories on our well-being, Jonathan.

研究反复表明，当我们能够从负面经历中找到救赎的意义时，这往往对我们的心理健康有益。但我们生活在一个丰富的故事叙事生态中，故事无处不在。其中一些故事比其他故事对我们生活的影响更大。我所在领域的学者将这些强有力的故事称为主导叙事。

So the research demonstrates over and over that when we're able to take negative experiences and find something redemptive in them, that that tends to be good for our psychological well-being. But we live in a rich narrative ecology of stories. There are stories all around us. And some of those stories exert more influence over our lives than others. So scholars in my field call these potent stories master narratives.

主导叙事往往无处不在却又隐而不见。只有当我们的生活故事以某种方式与主导叙事不符时，我们才会注意到它们。丹·麦克亚当斯的出色研究表明，救赎是一种特别强大的美国主导叙事。我认为，尤其是对癌症患者而言。在美国，关于成为癌症患者意味着什么，我们有一个强烈的主导叙事。

Master narratives tend to be ubiquitous but invisible. We only see them when we bump into them, like when our life story doesn't fit in some way with the master narrative. And there's excellent work by Dan McAdams suggesting that redemption is an especially potent American master narrative. And I would say, especially with cancer patients. We have a strong master narrative of what it means to be a cancer patient in The United States.

癌症是一场战斗，它应该展示你有多坚强。这种对癌症的救赎性解读对患者有两种影响。首先，如果你被迫卷入战争故事中，它会影响你的行为。有研究表明，战争隐喻实际上可能导致人们较少关注健康支持行为，比如少喝酒、少吸烟或吃得健康。如果你要上战场，可能不会太在意这些，但这些实际上对你的整体健康很重要。

Cancer is a battle and it's supposed to show you how strong you are. And that kind of redemptive spin on cancer has two kinds of impacts on patients. First, if you get cast against your will in a war story, it's going to influence your behavior. So there's research suggesting that the war metaphor might actually lead people to pay less attention to health supporting behaviors like drinking and smoking less or eating healthier. If you're going into battle, you might not care as much about those things, but those can actually make a difference to your overall health.

但其次，我曾与一些不觉得癌症让他们变得更坚强的患者交谈过。所以，如果癌症不是什么复杂的伪装礼物，如果它只是糟糕透顶，那么你不仅生病了，而且你讲述的生病故事没有人想听。事实上，有研究表明美国人喜欢听救赎故事，而不喜欢听污染故事。所以，当你以不符合文化主导叙事的方式叙述自己的生活时，可能会雪上加霜。

But second, I've talked with cancer patients who don't feel like cancer made them stronger. And so if cancer isn't some complex gift in disguise, if it just sucks, then not only are you sick, but you're not telling a story about being sick that anyone wants to hear. And indeed, there is research demonstrating that Americans love to hear redemption stories and don't love contamination stories. So when you narrate your own life in ways that don't fit with cultural master narratives, it can be a double whammy.

稍后回来，告诉我们讲述救赎故事的主导叙事是否会成为对经历过艰难时期的人的一种压力？您正在收听《隐藏的大脑》。我是尚卡尔·韦丹塔。这里是《隐藏的大脑》。我是尚卡尔·韦丹塔。

When we come back, can the master narrative that tells us to tell redemption stories become a form of pressure on people who've been through tough times? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

乔纳森·阿德勒发现，我们讲述故事的方式会改变对自己生活的感受。他指出，当我们以成功和幸福为故事开端，却以灾难和悲剧收尾时，我们讲述的就是他所谓的'污染型故事'——事情开头美好却急转直下。相反，若以困境与挑战开场却以积极局面结尾，这类'救赎型故事'往往与更好的福祉相关联。乔纳森，我们收到一位听众反馈，说强求讲述救赎故事有时会让人感到不公平。

Jonathan Adler has found that the way we tell stories changes the way we feel about our lives. He says that when we start stories from a place of success and well-being and end the tale with disaster and tragedy, we are telling what he calls a contamination story. Things started out great and then turned bad. On the other hand, when we tell stories that start out with difficulty and challenge but end in a positive place, these redemption stories are often associated with better well-being. Jonathan, we heard from a listener who said that the pressure to tell redemption stories can sometimes feel unfair.

接下来是克莉丝汀的分享。

Here's Kristen.

自从我的孩子们年幼时起，我先后因癌症失去了双亲，作为独生子女独自处理丧葬事宜和哀伤过程，孩子们还曾在我们旧居门廊上目睹过暴力袭击事件。我还发现自己患有两种罕见疾病，其中一种花费数年历经重重压力才得以确诊，另一种则需要承受持续的压力性监测。这仅是部分经历，但我确实感受到需要给生活强加救赎色彩的压力。基本上，过去几年我一直在处理这些事情的后续影响。

Since my children were young, I've lost both my parents to cancer, had to manage the business of death and of grieving on my own as being an only child, and my children also had witnessed a violent attack that happened on the porch of our old home. I also found out that I had two rare medical conditions. One of them took a few years and a lot of stress to get diagnosed and the other one is just requires a lot of stressful surveillance. So this is just a short part of the list, but I definitely felt the pressure for a redemptive spin on my life. Basically, I spent my last several years just dealing with the fallout of this.

我无法在聚会上向人们给出什么电梯演讲，说明我的生活如何从这一切中奇迹般达到有意义的高潮。但支撑我走下去的是，我意识到我们遭遇的连串打击大多超出掌控范围。我们带着伤痕，却依然一步步向前迈进，我们的故事仍在继续。谢谢。

I have no elevator pitch to give to people at parties about, you know, how my life has somehow come to a meaningful culmination out of all of this. But, you know, I guess what's gotten me through is just that, I realized that we were hit by an onslaught of events that were most of which were out of our control. And, we bear the scars, but, we're still putting one foot in front of the other, and, our story is still continuing. Thank you.

那么乔纳森，你刚才谈到某种程度上我们被要求构建救赎故事的主流叙事框架。从克莉丝汀讲述她人生中诸多挑战的方式里，我能强烈感受到这种压力。

So, Jonathan, you were talking a moment ago about how in some ways we have this master narrative that we're supposed to come up with a redemption story. And I feel I can very much hear that in the way Kristen is telling the story of the many challenges she has encountered in her life.

是的。哇。克莉丝汀，听到这些我深感难过。不知道听众们感受如何，但仅是听闻克莉丝汀的经历就让我的身体产生异样反应。非常感谢你分享这个艰难的故事。

Yeah. Wow. Kristen, I am so sorry to hear about this. I don't know how listeners are feeling, but my body feels different just hearing what Kristen has been through. So I'm really grateful for sharing this hard story.

我认为重要的是记住负面经历是每个人生活的一部分。若一味忽略，我们就错失了从中成长的契机。但我们已经讨论过主流叙事，并将救赎故事视为美国主流叙事的一种范例。我们的文化确实存在急于求成的救赎倾向，总想尽快度过负面阶段，系上完美的救赎缎带后继续前行。但负面经历也能迫使我们跳出习以为常的生活剧本。

I think it's really important to remember that negative experiences are a part of everyone's life. And if we just ignore them, we'd miss out on an invitation to grow from them. But we've already talked about master narratives and looked at redemption as one example of an American master narrative. And I think there's a real rush to redemption in our culture where we want to get through the negative as quickly as possible, put a nice redemptive bow on it, and move on. But negative experiences can also force us out of the story that we've sort of gotten used to living.

通过这样做，他们可以邀请人们以不同的方式看待事物。我想非常明确地指出，不同的看待方式不一定让人感觉良好。有些事情就是很糟糕，我们只需要承认它们在我们生活中的作用，而不必将其转化为积极的东西。但即使感觉良好不是一种选择，我们也可以找到意义。而克里斯汀似乎一直在努力做的，正是这种积极寻找意义的过程。

And in doing so, they can offer an invitation to see things differently. I wanna be really clear that different ways of seeing things don't necessarily feel good. Some things are just awful and we just need to acknowledge their role in our lives without needing to transform them into something positive. But even when feeling good isn't an option, we can find meaning. And that active search for meaning is what it sounds like Kristen has been working to do.

这本身就是一个有价值且值得追求的目标。在负面经历之后，救赎并不是唯一的选择。

And that in and of itself is a worthwhile and valuable goal. Redemption isn't the only option in the wake of negative experiences.

我很高兴你提到这一点，乔纳森，因为当克里斯汀说‘知道有些事情超出我的控制让我感觉更好’时，我深受触动。所以她并不是在讲述一个事情出现戏剧性好转的故事，而是说通过这些负面经历，她对自己生活的理解发生了变化。

I'm so glad you mentioned that, Jonathan, because I was struck when Kristen said, I feel better knowing some things are out of my control. So she's not necessarily telling a story that says things have taken a dramatic upswing, but she is saying her own understanding about her life has changed as a result of these negative experiences.

没错。所以如果我们从技术角度审视她的叙述，我们可能会看到所谓的探索性处理的证据，即那种对意义的追寻，这与救赎不同。救赎是将负面转为正面。探索性处理可以让我们获得一种意义感，但这可能感觉并不好。然而，这种对意义的追寻仍然是一个非常值得追求的目标。

Exactly. So if we were sort of technically looking, examining her narrative, we might see evidence of what we call exploratory processing, that search for meaning, which is different than redemption. Redemption turns negative positive. Exploratory processing can lead us to a sense of meaningfulness, but it might not feel good. But that search for meaning is still a really worthwhile pursuit.

我们从许多听众那里听到的一个常见故事与受伤或疾病有关。这是来自艾莉森的一个故事。

One common story we heard from many listeners had to do with an injury or an illness. Here's one from Allison.

我认为我是一个相当积极的人，我认为部分原因在于我以一种救赎的方式讲述我的人生重大故事。大约一年半前，我丈夫被诊断出患有第三期结肠癌，我想我们当时觉得这非常可怕和糟糕，但我们做了必须做的事情来度过难关。现在我们只是觉得非常幸运他恢复了健康。据我们所知，他已经没有癌症了。所以那确实是我们生活中非常艰难的时期，但我们最终走了出来。

I think I'm a pretty positive person, and I think part of that is telling, my big life stories in a redemptive way. About a year and a half ago, my husband was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer, and I think we we sort of thought it was very scary and crappy, but, we did what we had to do to get through it. And now we just feel so lucky that he's healthy. And as far as we know, he's cancer free. So it was a really tough time in our lives, but we came out the other side.

而且我认为这让我们更加感激彼此。

And I think it just makes us more grateful for each other.

所以，乔纳森，艾莉森讲述的显然是一个救赎故事。但我在想，有时候我们是否需要让一些时间过去，才能看清故事的救赎弧线？当艾莉森和她的丈夫正处于应对癌症的过程中时，可能更难从救赎的视角来看待这个故事。

So, Jonathan, Alison's story is clearly a redemption story the way she's telling it. But I'm wondering, is it possible that sometimes we need to let some time pass before we can see the redemption arc of a story? When Alison and her husband were in the midst of dealing with this cancer, it's possible that it might have been harder to see the story through a redemptive lens.

是的。我想这是真的，我与许多癌症患者及其亲人交谈过。确实，我在想艾莉森和她的丈夫是否被推入了一种癌症主导叙事，这种叙事在最初其实并不关乎救赎。结局总是承诺着救赎，但那种故事真正聚焦的是另一个主题，我们称之为能动性，即你在多大程度上掌控自己的生活，而不是被外部力量摆布。

Yeah. I imagine that's true, having talked with many cancer patients and their loved ones. And indeed, I wonder if Alison and her husband felt pushed into sort of a cancer master narrative, which is really not about redemption at the beginning. There's always the promise of redemption at the end. But that kind of story really centers a different theme, which we call agency, which is sort of the degree to which you are in the driver's seat of your life versus being batted around by external forces.

再次强调，这些是故事中的主题。没有人能完全掌控自己的生活。但癌症的战争故事是一个高能动性的故事。有时，当人们面对真正的生存威胁时，被提醒自己的能动性会感觉良好。所以我同意你的观点。

And again, these are themes in stories. No one is completely in control of their life. But the war story of cancer is a high agency story. And sometimes when people are in the face of real existential threat, being reminded of your agency can feel good. So I agree with you.

尽管人们常常感到有压力要这么做，但在负面经历中实现救赎往往很难。因此，我经常鼓励人们抵制急于求成的救赎，先承认负面经历中真正糟糕的部分，然后再考虑是否存在一个救赎的结局。

It's often hard to do redemption in the middle of negative experiences, though I think people feel pressure to do that all the time. And so I often encourage people to resist the rush to redemption and to acknowledge the real awful parts of negative experiences before thinking about whether there's a redemptive end or not.

乔纳森，你刚才谈到了能动性的重要性，我想再稍微深入一下。很多人觉得坏事发生在自己身上，无论是疾病、受伤、失去亲人还是家园被烧毁，许多这些都是发生在我们身上的外部事件。然后我们许多人感觉像是被生活的风浪颠簸摇摆。请谈谈讲故事这一行为本身如何可能成为一种重获某种能动感的方式。

You talked a moment ago, Jonathan, about the importance of agency, and I want to just stay with this for a moment longer. A lot of people feel bad things happen to me, and whether that's an illness or an injury or you lose a loved one or your your home burns down, many of these things are external things that happen to us. And many of us then feel like we are effectively buffeted around by the winds of life. Talk a moment about how the act of storytelling itself might be a way of regaining some sense of agency.

是的。这实际上是我最近经常思考的事情。吸引我研究叙事身份领域的原因之一就是，你无法总是控制发生在你身上的事，但你可以控制你如何讲述发生在你身上的故事。在很大程度上，我认为这是真的。正如我所说，我们既是自己人生故事的主角，也是叙述者，我们确实有能力讲述支持我们福祉的故事。

Yeah. This is actually something I've been thinking a lot about recently. Certainly one of the things that drew me to the field of studying narrative identity was the idea that you can't always control what happens to you, but you can control the story you tell about what happens to you. And to a large extent, I think that is true. As I've said, we're both the main character and the narrator of our life story, and we do have agency to tell stories that support our well-being.

所以我一点也不想贬低这一点的重要性。但同时，我们的故事不仅仅存在于我们的脑海中。故事是需要被讲述的。如果你讲述了一个关于你生活的故事，而其他人并不认同，那么要继续活出那个故事实际上相当困难，人们就会失去对自己人生故事的控制。

So I don't want to diminish the importance of that at all. But at the same time, our stories don't just exist in our heads. Stories are meant to be told. And if you're telling a story about your life that other people don't affirm, it's actually quite hard to keep living out that story, where people lose control over their life stories.

你能谈谈我们生活中的重大事件，比如婚礼、孩子的出生、亲人的离世，这些场合如何成为讲述污染与救赎故事的特别有力时刻吗？

Can you talk about how the big events in our lives, weddings, the birth of children, the death of loved ones, how these might be particularly powerful occasions to tell both contamination and redemption stories?

是的。这类重大事件在某种程度上契合了一种不同的主导叙事。在我的领域里，我们称之为文化传记概念，意思是任何特定文化中都存在一种预期的里程碑时间线。当你的生活与这些里程碑重合时，社会会施加一种可接受的压力，要求你叙述这些事件。多年前我做了一项研究，阅读了完整的人生故事转录稿，和我一起分析叙事的学生们说，我再也读不下去另一个以婚礼或第一个孩子出生为高潮的故事了。

Yeah. So big events like that, to a certain extent, play into a different kind of master narrative. We call this in my field the cultural concept of biography, which means in any given culture, there's sort of an expected timeline of milestones. And so when your life coincides with those milestones, there's a socially acceptable pressure for you to narrate those. So I was doing a study years ago where we were reading transcripts of entire life stories, and my students who were working with the narratives said, I can't read another high point that is about a wedding or the birth of a first child.

确实如此。这些故事对人们来说太直接了，很容易被当作人生的高潮点。事实上，往往正是我们生活中的重大时刻充当了章节分隔符，成为我们故事中的锚点。但我也想提醒大家，不一定非得是客观上的重大时刻。我读过并采访过一些人，他们拥有极其美妙、非常微小的时刻，但这些时刻却蕴含着非常重大的主观意义。

And it's just like, right. Those are such straightforward stories for people to point to as the high point of their life. And indeed, it is often the big moments of our lives that serve as chapter breaks, that serve as anchor points in our stories. But I also want to remind everyone that it doesn't have to just be objective big moments. I've read and interviewed people with absolutely gorgeous, very small moments that have very big subjective meaning associated with them.

所以，那一碗Cheerios麦片粥时的有意义对话，可能最终成为你人生的高潮点或转折点。不一定非得是重大的里程碑事件。真正重要的是我们赋予经历的主观意义。

And so that meaningful conversation over a bowl of Cheerios could turn out to be a high point or a turning point in your life. It doesn't just have to be the big milestone events. It's really about the subjective meaning that we associate with our experiences.

乔纳森，我们在《隐藏大脑》的很多期节目中都探讨过记忆的可靠性，可以说科学共识是：我们的记忆并不十分准确，即使是对于生活中的重大事件也是如此。叙事在我们生活中的准确性有多重要？

We've looked at the reliability of memory in many episodes of Hidden Brain, Jonathan, and it's fair to say that the scientific consensus is that our memories are not very accurate, even when it comes to the big events in our lives. How much does the accuracy of a narrative in our lives matter?

是的。这是个非常重要的话题。我想这取决于对什么而言重要，对吧？从根本上说，故事是重建。

Yeah. This is such an important topic. I guess it depends on mattering for what. Right? So fundamentally, stories are reconstructions.

重建。如你所说，关于记忆的出色研究表明，我们并不是特别准确地报告发生在我们身上的事情。这是有充分理由的。我们的记忆系统进化是为了帮助我们解读现在和预测未来。现在和未来从来都不是过去的精确复制品。

Reconstructions. As you said, there's excellent work on memory demonstrating that we're not particularly accurate reporters of the things that happen to us. And there's good reason for that. Our memory systems evolve to help us interpret the present and anticipate the future. The present and the future are never exact replicas of the past.

所以，如果我们只能精确地抓住过去的每一个细节，实际上我们就不会有足够的认知灵活性来如此适应性地驾驭生活。因此我喜欢说，我们的人生故事是基于真实事件改编的。如果你讲述的是关于发生在你身上的极不可能的事情，没有人会相信那个故事，这也会让你难以活出那个故事。但我们确实无法获取自己生活的客观历史。我们总是在重构过去、解读现在、想象未来。

So if we could only hold onto the past precisely as it happened, we actually wouldn't have the cognitive flexibility to navigate our lives so adaptively. So I like to say that our life stories are based on a true story. If you are telling a story about wildly improbable things that could have happened to you, no one's going to believe that story, and that's going to make it hard for you to live that story. But we just don't have access to the objective history of our lives. We're always reconstructing the past, interpreting the present, imagining the future.

所以我经常把我的领域称为主观性科学，对吧？用科学工具来理解人们如何将经历转化为意义。

So I often refer to my field as a science of subjectivity, right? Using the tools of science to understand the ways in which people turn their experiences into meaning.

稍后回来，乔纳森将回答更多关于叙事科学的问题。您正在收听的是《隐藏的大脑》。我是尚卡尔·韦丹塔。这里是《隐藏的大脑》。我是尚卡尔·韦丹塔。

When we come back, Jonathan answers more of your questions about the science of storytelling. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

2006年2月，作家兼记者琼·迪迪昂出版了一本非虚构作品集，名为《我们讲述故事以生存》。在奥林学院，心理学家乔纳森·阿德勒非常赞同这个标题的前提，但他可能会将其修改为：我们讲述故事以塑造我们的生活。今天他加入我们，为我们最新一期的《你的问题解答》栏目。乔纳森，我们收到了许多听众的来信，他们正在重写自己的个人叙事。也许他们正处在人生的转折点，或者只是在反思过去发生在他们身上的事件。

In 02/2006, the writer and journalist Joan Didion published a collection of non fiction pieces titled We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. At Olin College, psychologist Jonathan Adler couldn't agree more with the premise of that title, but he might edit the title to say, We tell ourselves stories to shape how we live. He joins us today for our latest installment of Your Questions Answered. Jonathan, we heard from lots of listeners who are in the process of rewriting their personal narratives. Maybe they're in a transition point in their lives or just reflecting on events that happened to them in the past.

他们正在努力弄清楚如何以一种有用的方式重新构建我的故事。以下是听众丹尼斯的分享。

And they're trying to figure out how do I reframe my story in a useful way. Here's listener Denise.

所以我想分享一下我的故事，是关于我患有耳鸣的经历，这始于我二十多岁的时候。多年来，它时不时地出现。但随着年龄增长，音量稍微增大，并且一直伴随着我。我去看过医生，他们基本上说无能为力，我感到很沮丧。是的，对此有些焦虑，直到我改变了故事的叙述。

So I thought I would share my story, is about my experience of living with tinnitus, which started in my twenties. I was a visitor now and then through the years. But as I got older, it was a little bit more in volume and was with me constantly. I did go to a doctor who pretty much said there isn't much they can do and felt discouraged. And yeah, there was some anxiety about it until I had a change of story.

我的新故事是，如果这将一直伴随着我，那它不妨成为我的朋友。甚至可能不止如此。它可以成为我的一部分，几乎像一个帮手，一个守护天使。一旦我改变了故事的叙述，我就可以说是习惯了这种声音。从那以后，我再也没有真正感到过紧张。

And my story was that if this is going to be with me all the time it might as well be my friend. And it could be even more than that. It could be a part of me, almost a helper, a guardian angel. Once I change the story, I am what you might call habituated to this sound. And I haven't really experienced any nervousness about it since.

新的故事是，耳鸣可以成为我的朋友。

The new story is that tinnitus can be my friend.

那么乔纳森，你说这样的故事可能是你所谓的整合的一个例子。你所说的整合是什么意思？

So Jonathan, you said that a story like this might be an example of what you call integration. What do you mean by that term?

是的。首先，我想说，哇。不是每个人都能将那些长期挑战重新以这种方式构建。如果丹妮丝能够真实地做到这一点，那真的很了不起。所以我认为这个故事确实凸显了，正如你所说，故事讲述中整合的重要性。

Yeah. First of all, let me just say, wow. It is not everyone who can take those chronic challenges that get thrown at us and reframe them in quite that way. And if Denise was able to do that in an authentic way, that's really spectacular. So I really see this story as highlighting, yeah, like you said, the importance integration in storytelling.

我与劳伦·米切尔等人所做的一些工作试图说明，整合是中年期的核心发展任务之一。在青春期和成年早期，我们实际上是在撰写人生故事的初稿。在中年期，我们的任务是培育这些故事，在需要时维护它们，在必要时帮助它们发展，就像丹妮丝的故事那样。许多事件，比如医疗诊断的开始，可能会破坏我们的整合感。当然，许多负面的事情，如得到医疗诊断、离婚或被解雇，这些都可能让我们感觉失去了连续性。

Some of the work that I've done with Lauren Mitchell and others really tried to illustrate the ways in which integration is one of the central developmental tasks of midlife. In adolescence and early adulthood, we're really laying down early drafts of our life story. In midlife, our job is to nurture those stories, maintaining them when that's what's called for, helping them develop when that's what's needed, like in Denise's story. Many events like the onset of medical diagnoses can disrupt our sense of integration. And of course, many negative things getting a medical diagnosis or getting divorced or getting fired, those things can make us feel like we've lost our sense of continuity.

但积极的事情也可能产生同样的效果。比如成为父母通常会对身份认同产生巨大的冲击。因此，中年期的工作实际上是努力实现整合，弄清楚在破坏性事件发生之前的故事中，哪些部分仍应成为我们身份的一部分，哪些部分需要改变。

But positive things can also do that too. Like becoming a parent can often be a huge shakeup to identity. And so the work in midlife is really about striving for integration, figuring out what parts of the story from before the disruptive event ought to still be part of our identity and which parts need to change.

你能谈谈丹妮丝在这里做了什么吗？她基本上是将一种负面体验转化为一种正面体验。我必须承认，我有时也会这样做。如果我在等待某件事，感觉等待非常痛苦，比如等待飞机起飞，我会给自己讲一个故事。这个故事是，这是我生命中最后的二十分钟。

Can you talk a moment about what Denise is doing here? She's basically transforming something that's a negative experience into something that is a positive experience. I have to confess, I sometimes do this myself. If I'm waiting for something and it feels excruciating to be waiting and waiting for an, you know, an airplane to take off, for example, you know, I'll tell myself a story. And the story is, you know, these are the last twenty minutes of my life.

突然间，我希望那二十分钟尽可能延长，我不再因为延误而感到焦虑、担忧或恼火。你能谈谈这是否是一种故事讲述的行为，以及这是否是一种对我们心理健康有效的故事讲述形式吗？

And suddenly, I want those twenty minutes to extend as far as they possibly can, and I'm not, you know, anxious or worried or exasperated by the delay anymore. Can you talk a bit about whether this is an act of storytelling and if this is an effective form of storytelling for our mental health?

从你和丹尼斯的情况来看确实如此，你们能将不受控制的负面经历，通过改变自己对其讲述的故事来转化它。我认为，对于我们生活中许多像丹尼斯那样留下持久印记、不会消失的挑战性经历，我们必须学会与之共存。她最初将耳鸣视为一位访客，后来它变成了一位朋友。

It sure sounds like it in your case and in Denise's case where you can take a negative experience that's not in your control and transform it by changing the story that you're telling yourself about that. I think indeed for many of the challenging experiences in our life like Denise's that leave a lasting mark, that aren't gonna go away. We have to learn how to live with them. So she initially framed her tinnitus as a visitor. And then it became a friend.

我当时想，哇，这真是一个相当大的转变。如果我们能把发生在自己身上的负面事情看作是在帮助我们的老师，或是其他来援助我们的角色，那真是太了不起了。但丹尼斯更进一步，她真正努力将其融入自我的认知中。这确实改变了故事的主角——丹尼斯自己，并真正为这个角色腾出空间，让积极和消极的经历得以共存。

And I thought, wow, that's really quite a transformation there. If we can see the negative things that happen to us as teachers who are there to help us, as other characters who are there to help us, that's really amazing. But then Denise goes one step further and she really does the hard work of integrating it into her own sense of self. That really transforms the main character of the story, Denise herself, and really makes room in that character for both positive and negative experiences to coexist.

乔纳森，当我们失去所爱之人时，我们常常不仅反思自己的人生故事，还会反思对方的人生故事。一位名叫拉奎尔的听众来电分享了她的经历。

Jonathan, when we lose a loved one, we often reflect not just on the story of our life, but on the story of this other person's life. A listener named Raquel called in with this experience.

2014年，我刚读完研究生，开始了一份新工作。在我20岁生日的前一天，我姐姐打电话告诉我，我父亲遭遇了车祸。不幸的是，几天后他去世了。时间快进到2019年，我开始在教堂协助一个哀伤支持小组，每次有新组员加入时，我都得讲述我父亲去世的故事。我开始注意到故事中的一些细节改变了我的看法。

In 2014, I had just finished graduate school and I was starting a new job. The day before my 20 birthday, my sister called to tell me that my dad had been in a car accident. Sadly, he passed away a few days later. Fast forward to 2019, I began helping with a grief support group at my church, and I had to tell the story of my dad's passing with each new group. I started to notice things in the story that changed my perspective on it.

自从父亲去世后，我一直以遗憾的心情回顾那段时光，因为新工作让我没有优先安排时间陪伴他。我感到非常糟糕，没能好好道别，也没能在他——我现在意识到是他最后的日子里——抽出时间陪他。但当我向哀伤小组讲述这个故事时，我想起其实在我20岁生日前后，我有一种不祥的预感。我听说过一些名人在这个年龄去世，特别是科特·柯本、艾米·怀恩豪斯、吉米·亨德里克斯，这让我担心自己会不会出事。然后我意识到，确实有事发生了，但发生在了我父亲身上。

Since my dad had passed, I had looked on that time with regret for not having prioritized time with him because of my new job. I felt awful that I wasn't able to say a proper goodbye or make time to spend with him in what I realized now were his last days. But as I told the story to the grief group, I remembered that I had had a sense of foreboding actually around my 20 birthday. I had heard stories of celebrities dying, specifically at this age Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix and it made me wonder if something might happen to me. And I realized something did happen, but it happened to my dad.

如今我回首往事，讲述的是一个父亲替我承受的故事。也许我本是目标，那个20岁生日诅咒是冲我来的，但我父亲保护了我。我知道这没有证据，但以我对父亲的了解，他乐意牺牲自己的生命来给予我们所需，这并非牵强。所以现在，我看到父亲对教学和学习的热爱在我身上延续，我努力尊重这些特质，以及我觉得他赐予我的这份礼物。

Now I look back and I tell a story of my dad taking my place. Maybe I had been the target, that 20 birthday curse coming for me, but my dad protected me. I know there's no evidence for this, but knowing my dad, it's not a stretch to believe that he would gladly give his life up to give us what we needed. So now I see the ways my dad's love for teaching and learning live on in me, and I try to honor these traits and the gift I feel he's given me.

乔纳森，我想知道你对拉奎尔的故事有什么看法。

Jonathan, I'm wondering what you make of Raquel's story.

哦，是谁出版的？太美了。我是说，这是一个多么凄美却又讲述得如此美好的转变故事。我认为悲伤往往是那些负面经历之一，它并不容易带来救赎。我不确定拉奎尔在那里所做的，是否是在救赎她父亲的死亡本身。

Oh, who's publishing it? It's gorgeous. I mean, what a poignant but beautifully told story of this transformation. I think grief is often one of those negative experiences that doesn't neatly lend itself to redemption. And I don't know that what Raquel is doing there is redeeming the death of her father itself.

对吧？她仍然承认那件事有多悲伤，她对他生命最后几天仍有遗憾。但她所做的，是看向她自己的能动性和她作为故事讲述者的行为，思考讲故事本身如何为她提供了一种不同的方式来与那段负面经历建立联系，而不改变经历本身。讲故事并没有削弱悲伤。我确信它不会阻止悲伤的浪潮冲击她，但它确实给了她一个为那段经历增添内容的机会。

Right? She still acknowledges how sad that is, how she still has regrets about the last few days of his life. But what she's doing is looking towards her own agency and her act as the storyteller to think about the ways in which the storytelling itself offers her a different way to relate to that negative experience without transforming it itself. The storytelling doesn't undermine the sadness. I'm sure it doesn't stop the waves of grief from crashing over her, but it does give her an opportunity to add to that experience.

确实，正如我一直所说的，我们的故事不仅仅存在于我们自己的脑海中。我们把故事讲给别人听，别人也把他们的故事讲给我们听。他们成为我们自己人生故事中的重要角色。

And indeed, as I've been saying, our stories are not only living in our own heads. We tell the stories to other people, and other people tell their stories to us. They become important characters in our own life stories.

我在拉奎尔的故事中听到的一件事是，她一遍又一遍地重述她父亲去世的故事。而在那种重复的讲述中，某些东西实际上改变了她自己脑海中的故事。我们听到了一位名叫米歇尔的听众的经历，她也经历了类似的事情。

One thing I heard in Raquel's story is that she retold the story of her father's passing over and over again. And something in that repetitive retelling actually changed the story in her own mind. We heard from a listener named Michelle who went through something similar.

过去十二年来，我一直在与一种原因不明的疾病、无法解释的症状作斗争。我看过很多医生，做过很多检查，但没有人能真正告诉我问题出在哪里。有件事无法解释地持续这么久，真的会让人非常不安。于是我转向了录音机。过去十二年里，我一直用手机上的录音功能记录自己谈论这件事、努力应对它的过程，这真的很有帮助。

I've struggled with an unexplained illness, unexplained symptoms for the last twelve years. I've gone through many doctors and many tests, and no one can really tell me what's wrong. And it can be really unsettling to have something unexplained go on for so long. And I've turned to voice recorder. I've used the voice recorder on my phone just to record myself talking about it and working through it for the last twelve years, and it's been really helpful.

而且，你知道，作为人类，我们总想从事情中找到意义，想找到模式并试图理解它。我觉得这真的帮助我做到了这一点。我现在甚至有点喜欢这些疑问了。我认为这整个经历让我对正在经历不确定时期的其他人敞开了心扉，也让我对自己生活中所有的疑问和不确定性更加开放。谢谢让我分享我的故事。

And, you know, as humans, we wanna find meaning in things, and we wanna find patterns and try to make sense of it. And I feel like it's really helped me do that. I'm kind of loving the questions at this point. And I I think it's this whole experience has opened my heart to other people who are going through uncertain times, and it has opened me up more to all the questions and uncertainties in my life. Thanks for letting me share my story.

乔纳森，米歇尔的故事有趣之处在于，在十二年间一遍又一遍地梳理这个故事的过程中，她从中获得了新的见解。这是你在听到人们一遍又一遍讲述同一个故事时发现的现象吗——重复讲述能改变故事本身？

What's interesting about Michelle's story, Jonathan, is that in working through the story over and over again for twelve years, she has found fresh insights in it. Is this something that you find in the stories that you hear from people telling the same story over and over again can change our stories themselves?

是的，是的。我认为这是一个非常好的问题，因为它促使我们不仅思考我们所讲述故事的内容和主题，还要思考与他人分享故事如何帮助塑造这些故事。对吧？当我们讲述一个故事时，我们脑海中的版本会受到人际背景的影响。

Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a great a great question because it invites us to think more not just about the content of the stories we tell and the themes, but how sharing stories with others help shape them. Right? So when we tell a story, the version in our head gets shaped by the interpersonal context.

我们在向谁讲述这个故事？他们是怎样的听众？然后，在讲故事的过程中，我们通过言语和非言语获得的反馈，必然会塑造我们在脑海中巩固这个故事的方式，以及下一次讲述它的方式。我们的故事总是在当下发挥心理功能。因此，除了先前讲述的影响外，特定故事的意义会随着时间的推移而改变，导致我们以不同的方式讲述故事。

Who are we telling the story to? What kind of audience are they? And then the feedback that we get both verbally and non verbally during the experience of storytelling will inevitably shape the way we consolidate that story in our mind and then the way we tell it the next time. Our stories always serve a psychological function in the present. So in addition to the impact of prior tellings, the meaning of specific stories changes over time, leading us to tell stories differently.

这并不意味着我们在撒谎。这只是意味着我们总是通过当下的视角来思考我们的过去。事实上，我在退伍军人医院做过一些临床工作，治疗创伤后应激障碍的一种主要治疗方法，本质上是要求人们在准备好后，掌握了应对工具后，一遍又一遍地讲述他们的创伤经历。我们发现，这种对创伤事件故事的暴露可以帮助人们转变它，不仅在他们所赋予的意义上，而且在讲述时身体的生理反应上。

That doesn't mean we're lying. It just means we're always thinking about our past through the lens of the present. And indeed, I did some of my clinical work at a a veteran's hospital and one of the leading therapeutic approaches to treating post traumatic stress disorder essentially asks people once they're ready, once they're prepared with tools for navigating it, to tell the story of their traumatic experience over and over. And we do find that that kind of exposure to the story of the traumatic event can help transform it for people, not just in the meaning that they make, but in the physiology of their bodies while they're telling it.

叙事心理学不仅适用于个人。正如你所指出的，乔纳森，它也适用于我们在国家、工作场所和家庭中讲述的集体故事。我们收到了一位名叫黛比的美国听众的来信，她写道：我现在个人生活相当不错。然而，我发现我对国家和世界的看法变得越来越悲观。我想知道，面对当今这些分裂的州所发生的一切，我们如何创造更好的心态、更好的故事或更积极的故事。

Now narrative psychology doesn't just have to apply to individuals. As you've indicated, Jonathan, it's also relevant to the collective stories we tell in our country, our workplaces, our families. We heard from a listener in The United States named Debbie who writes, I'm at a fairly good place in my personal life now. However, I find that my thinking about our country and the world is becoming increasingly pessimistic. I'm wondering how do we create a better mindset or a better story or a more positive story in the face of what's going on in these divided states today.

我认为我们的国家故事正变得非常消极，我想知道是否有办法重新构建它。你怎么看，乔纳森？我们能重写我们普遍的文化叙事吗？

I think our national story is turning very negative, and I'm wondering if there's a way that we can reframe that. What do you think, Jonathan? Can we rewrite our general cultural narrative?

嗯，所有的叙事，无论是个人还是文化，都是基于真实的故事。对吧？所以在某种程度上，如果你想看到一个文化中的事物发生变化，你必须倡导该文化中的权力杠杆来实际改变事物，这将有助于改变故事。但正如我谈到的支配性叙事，我们经常体验到它们是自上而下的。就像我们被周围关于癌症、性别、种族、政治或许多其他文化中的支配性叙事所束缚的感觉。

Well, so all narratives, individual or cultural, are based on a true story. Right? So to a certain extent, if you want to see things change in a culture, you have to advocate to the levers of power in that culture to make things actually change, and that will help change the story. But as I've talked about master narratives, we so often experience them as top down. Like our feeling of being penned in by stories around us about things like cancer or gender or race or politics or many other, you know, master narratives in our culture.

但正如故事在个体之间的动态空间中展开一样，它们也在个体与更广泛的文化叙事之间的对话中展开。所以我领域还有另一位学者菲尔·哈马克说，当我们叙述自己个人的生活故事时，我们实际上只有两个选择：要么复制，要么抵制我们文化背景中的支配性叙事。这有点像‘个人的就是政治的’的终极体现。但这意味着权力动态也以自下而上的方式运作。事实上，文化支配性叙事改变的唯一途径是个人愿意分享自己不符合支配性叙事的故事。

But just as stories play out in the dynamic space between individual people, they also play out in the dialogue between individuals and broader cultural narratives. So there's another scholar in my field, Phil Hammack, who says that when we narrate our own individual life story, we really only have two options, to either reproduce or to push back on the master narratives in our cultural context. It's kind of the ultimate, the personal is political. But that means that the power dynamic works in a bottom up way too. In fact, the only way cultural master narratives change is by individual people being willing to share their own stories that don't fit with the master narrative.

正如我之前所说，这样做能为他人提供他们可能从未考虑过的叙事选项，并邀请他们以不同的方式叙述自己的生活。因此，个人生活故事不仅仅是共同叙述的，文化叙事也是如此。我们可以通过以不同方式叙述自己在文化背景中的经历来干预文化叙事。

Doing so, as I said before, provides other people with narrative options that they may not have considered before, and it invites them to narrate their lives differently. So individual life stories aren't just co narrated, so are cultural narratives. And so we can intervene in cultural narratives by narrating our own experience of our cultural context differently.

乔纳森·阿德勒是奥林学院的心理学专家。乔纳森，非常感谢你今天再次加入《隐藏的大脑》节目。

Jonathan Adler is a psychologist at Olin College. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain.

完全是我的荣幸。谢谢你。

Totally my pleasure. Thank you.

《隐藏的大脑》由Hidden Brain Media制作。我们的音频制作团队包括安妮·墨菲·保罗、克里斯汀·王、劳拉·夸雷尔、瑞安·卡茨、奥顿·巴恩斯、安德鲁·查德威克和尼克·伍德伯里。塔拉·博伊尔是我们的执行制片人。我是《隐藏的大脑》的执行编辑。在节目结束前，我们要感谢Atlassian旗下的Loom赞助了《隐藏的大脑》2025感知之旅。

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarrell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Before we go today, we want to say thank you to Loom by Atlassian for sponsoring the Hidden Brain twenty twenty five Perceptions Tour.

在巡演期间，我们请观众分享他们收到过的最佳建议。这是在亚利桑那州梅萨站分享的一条智慧箴言。

While on tour, we asked members of the audience to tell us about some of the best advice they ever received. Here's one piece of wisdom shared during our stop in Mesa, Arizona.

我是尼克。我得到的建议始于一句你可能听过的话：我们通过行为评判他人，却通过意图评判自己。我一生中多次听不同的人说过这句话。但我一直不明白的是，该如何实际运用这个信息。

My name is Nick. The advice I have begins with a statement that you probably may have heard. We judge others by their actions and we judge ourselves by our intentions. And I've heard that a lot of times throughout my life by many different people. But something I didn't understand was what that really what to do with that information.

我和朋友讨论了很长时间，最终得出结论：必须将这两者互换才能真正理解他人并产生共情。你必须通过自己的行为来评判自己（从他人视角审视自己），同时通过他们的意图来评判他人。

Me and my friend talked about it for a long time and we came to the conclusion that you must flip those two to really be able to understand others and have empathy for others. You must judge yourself by your actions. You can see yourself from their perspective, and you must judge them from their intentions.

谢谢。谢谢。感谢尼克分享的建议，也再次感谢Loom赞助2025年Perceptions巡演。Loom是AI驱动的视频沟通工具，推动团队前进，无论您是在分享反馈、获取批准还是设定背景。它通过让分享和协作工作变得轻松，消除了摩擦，无需身处同一房间或时区。

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to Nick for sharing that advice, and thanks again to Loom for sponsoring the twenty twenty five Perceptions Tour. Loom is AI powered video communication that moves teams forward, whether you're sharing feedback, obtaining approvals, or setting context. It removes the friction by making it easy to share and collaborate on work without having to be in the same room or time zone.

今天就在loom.com试用Loom。网址是l00m.com。我是Shankar Vedantum。下次见。

Try Loom today at loom.com. That's l00m.com. I'm Shankar Vedantum. See you soon.