Dr. Sunita Sah

speaker

332 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 6 Feb

Dr. Sunita Sah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard · Sunita Sah (on defiance) · 22 Jan 2025 podcast

Yeah. So in war, that type of compliance is very helpful on the battlefield, for sure.

Yeah, I think there's many situations where it is complicated. That's why we struggle with it, too. If it was that simple, then we would get it right every single time. And we don't.

I think that's definitely worth it. I'm with you.

So when I said earlier on that there's some stories of my parents to find that have really stayed with me, the one of my mom is one that really I think was transformative. So I was about seven or eight and I was walking back from the grocery store with my mom and it was quite a long walk back and we had this rickety shopping cart. And we were rolling that back home.

And we decided to take a shortcut through what you call in Yorkshire a snicket, which is just a narrow alleyway, right? When I went to elementary school, I was not supposed to go through that snicket.

It was there. But anyway, mom and I, we went through the Snicket and we were confronted by about seven or eight teenage boys and they blocked our path. And they started shouting out some stuff to us, like some racist comments, go back home. We're trying to.

But my reaction was instant, which is what you had described before, right? Immediately, eyes down, averted. All I wanted to do was not look at them and maneuver my way through and get home as fast as I could. And my mom, she's petite. She's smaller than me now. She was taller than me at the time, but she's like 4'10". She had like her hair very neatly plaited back and single braid at the back.

And I had thought of her as completely compliant person. And she did something that really surprised me that day. She put the shopping cart up vertical and she put one hand on her hip and she looked at them and she said, what do you mean? My fear was going up at this point. So I grabbed her arm even tighter and I started whispering to her. I was like... mama.

And I wanted to be the compliant person. And she shook me off. She was like, no. And she looked at them again and she said, what do you mean? They stared at her. She stared at them. And then she said, oh, you think you're big, tough boys, right? Big, strong boys. And she started telling them off in broken English. Oh, wow. And they like just looking at each other thinking, What's going on here?

And one of them just said, let's go. Yeah. And they just dispersed. Yeah. And I was like, what happened? My mom grabbed the cart and she walked as fast as she could through that snicket. I never thought the day would come that she would tell off a group of boys on the street in that way.

Protection, responsibility. And people do like I can defy for my son so much easier than I can defy for myself. And isn't that sad?

I also think there's something beautiful about having responsibility for someone else.

But you can tap into that.

To a loved one. What would you do in that situation? I say that to my son at times when he gets stressed about things. Like, what advice would you give a loved one? What would you tell someone who's in ninth grade right now how to handle a situation? But what that really taught me was that defiance is a skill set, it's a practice, it's not a personality.

And even though compliance might be our default, it's not our destiny. So we can change. I had seen her come home several times and she would be muttering away. So I'm pretty sure she had seen those boys before. Wow. and not said anything. But now I was with her and she showed me that. And even though it might have changed her, because I do think defiance changes your brain, how you react.

It also changes the people that observe it because that had a ripple effect on me and made me feel like we can all be defiant if we want to be. And that does give quite a bit of hope.

Yes. We were in London and we were on our way to see the flame that they hold. And it was like, oh, it's a once in a lifetime experience. He's like not impressed with this at all. Yeah. And he just wouldn't walk there. And he sat down on the pavement. And I was like, no, come on. I was like pulling his arm and trying to pick him up. And I could only get a few steps. He was heavy at that point.

I was like, no, I can't carry you. And we just completely missed the whole thing. And we went home and he's just not realizing this moment in history that I have now missed forever. And I said to him, why can't you be good?

And that kept me up at night. I was like, why did I say that when that's what I learned, right? This whole obedience equals good and defiance equals bad. And here I was just repeating it. That really took me back to why is it so strong? Even when he was a baby, I would have relatives asking me, is he good? It's a baby. Right. There's no such thing.

And what they mean is like, does he sleep?

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