Amygdala Hijacks, Simple Stories, and the Oscars with Grace Aduroja Kolker

My guest today is Grace Aduroja Kolker.  

I met Grace through Brian Levinson, my guest on episode 27.  Grace and I had a list of things we were looking forward to talking about and that was disrupted at the last minute.  In fact, we almost didn’t record a conversation at all, but then decided to go for it.  Here’s what happened: our scheduled call to record the podcast was the evening of the Oscars.  Grace logged into Zoom at the scheduled time which happened to be about 2 minutes after Will Smith walked on stage and slapped Chris Rock for making the joke about Jada Pinkett Smith.  

Those of you who know me, won’t be surprised to know I was NOT watching the Oscars, so Grace fills me in and I offered for us to delay our recording until after the ceremony was over which she accepted.  In the meantime, I jumped on Twitter to catch up and see the posts coming in including the video of the scene.  

When Grace and I got back on Zoom, we talked about what happened and how we each felt impacted.  Maybe we skip the podcast.  Or maybe we talk about this and see where the conversation goes.  

So, this is a different angle than I’ve ever taken on a Make Life Less Difficult podcast where we take a current event (literally it happened just before our conversation), and we share our own reactions, thoughts, and emotions.  We discuss the possible implications, the complexity of the situation, amygdala hijacks, the emotional response of the brain, the desire of the human brain to tell a simple story, and the deep complexity to what happened at the Oscars. 

I’m deeply grateful to Grace for her willingness to step into this conversation, sharing her reflections, reactions, emotions, and for the opportunity to process something so recent and raw in a way that left both of us feeling more settled in the end. 

I hope our conversation adds to your own processing of difficult emotional situations whether you watched the Oscars or not.  We are each deeply complex human beings, with deeply complex stories.  The more we can have compassion for ourselves, the more we can extend that compassion to others.  Notice the judgements you have (they are normal) and also I challenge you to step into a place of curiosity  and see what else you can learn (about yourself and others).

And thank you for indulging me in this episode of Make Life Less Difficult which is a bit different than some of the others.  But then again, this entire podcast is an experiment, so perhaps an experimental episode is the norm! 

Resources:
Blog: What is an Amygdala Hijack?
Video: Amygdala Hijack explained
Book: What Happened to You? by Oprah Winfrey & Bruce Perry


Connect with Grace:

www.makelifelessdifficult.com