Allison Pugh
speaker
77 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Allison Pugh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Sure. You know, right. The youngest of five. It was a generally loving environment, but I would say it was one my mother still sometimes calls it benign neglect. So I did not get a bathing suit that wasn't owned by someone else until I was in college. Wow.
And I went myself to a department store and picked out, I think, a pink bathing suit that I that I wanted instead of the, you know, scores of other kinds I had had over the years.
I remember coming home kind of full of outrage and being like, this is not okay. They shouldn't be doing this. And I was trying to figure it out. I just didn't know how to handle it. And she did not take it seriously at all, unfortunately. She just kind of said, oh, that's because they like you. That was her reaction. That was her rationale.
And at the time, I remember a really sharp disjuncture between my own, I would say, half-desperate outrage and her kind of semi-humorous, oh, you know, they just like you.
No, that was a big moment of a kind of cognitive dissonance between what I thought was going on and her response, for sure. I did not feel seen.
At the time, we were living in California and there would be old boxes or, you know, interesting rocks or, you know, kind of things that they'd be on the sidewalk. Obviously, either somebody, part of nature that was just there or some things that other people were putting out for either garbage or for people to pick up. And my daughter was always the one picking. to pick them up.
So she had a name for them. She called them her inventions. She was very young. I think she meant that they were a kind of art or maybe that she was inventing, that she would be imagining what she could do with them or something. But I really viewed them as junk. I actually threw them out. And she still remembers that and reminds me.
And, you know, to me, it's really a primary moment of me not seeing her and how she viewed these small, we'll call them treasures.
it didn't land well at all. I have a very unusual lifestyle, I think, that she probably doesn't see very often because I row crew and I have done so for 30 years. And right now I'm involved in a team that's very intense. in Washington, D.C., which involves one to two hours daily. I also don't have any caffeine. I don't have any alcohol. I think I'm an unusual person health-wise.
And so when she was like, these are elevated, try not to have so many cookies, she didn't see the person she was talking to. She didn't really have all that context that can produce a good witnessing moment, and along with it, good advice.
Yeah, the fabulous writer Abraham Verghese has called that the eye patient, that we're all to some degree an eye patient, meaning a patient that exists almost more by computer than in our holistic embodied selves in front of each other. And if that is how you feel, that often will affect whether or not you do what they say.
Like it's going to take a lot more than that to have me stop eating cookies.
Sure. Yeah, Hank. He started off as a minister in a very large church in the Washington, D.C. area. And he started a whole bunch of programs for low-income youth in in the community. So he started tutoring centers and I think sports camps and all sorts of things to try and reach kids. And by his account, he did reach them.
They would come to his tutoring centers and they would kind of hang out with him and share stories. And he felt like he had attained some real connection to those youth. And he was so proud of it, as he's telling me. And then he gets a job in another city, moves there, but he ends up losing that job and feeling really defeated in that moment.
And so he leaves that and he comes to be a chaplain in the hospital in which I was doing some observations. And so he talks to me about this trajectory. And at the very end of the exchange, he talked to me about what it was like to be interviewed. And he said, you know, this was very powerful. And then he said, therapeutic, almost therapeutic.
Oh, yeah. It's something that's very common. People often say, oh, this was just like therapy. It's not like therapy because I'm not really there to solve any problems or really to counsel them in any way. And they know that. So it's more like it's the language we have for that feeling of being seen.
Yeah, so Greta was a pediatrician and she was kind of surprised when she first started her practice how much she was supposed to be attending to the mothers rather than the children. That was something that was a surprise to her. She often found herself giving, say, parenting advice or talking about car seats or talking about what it's like when you can't get any sleep or something like that.
And the mothers kind of desperately needed that. She felt their need on the other end, but she often felt like she told me she didn't feel like she was practicing on the top of her medical license. That was the language she used. to mean that she had all this expertise in children and children's symptoms and diseases and disorders.
And really the bulk of her job was about like kind of listening, hearing, and being attuned to what the mothers were saying. And she ultimately ended up saying, you know, the mothers don't need me. They need an hour with a good listener.
Yeah, I think that's the most important dimension of this for me is the emotional impact because so many of the other impacts get kind of carried on along on the emotional impact. The emotional impact of being seen, people feel like they have dignity. People feel like they have understanding. People feel like they have purpose, right?
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