A Coffee Conversation
Companion to: “The Lies We Believe”
The participants:
Nate — 41 years old, electrician and small business owner, father of two; diagnosed with ADHD at age 36
Dr. Rachel Torres — licensed psychologist, positive psychology orientation
Rabbi Ezra Halpern — congregational rabbi, teacher of Torah and Jewish ethics
Dr. Douglas Cowan — licensed marriage and family therapist, 39 years clinical practice
They’ve gathered to talk through the first article in the Weekly Feature series — “The Lies We Believe” — and what it actually looks like to unlearn them.
Nate: I want to start by saying that when I read that list — the “you can’t, you won’t, you’ll never” list — I knew every single one of them. Not just as words. I knew them the way you know a phone number you’ve called a thousand times. They were automatic.
Dr. Cowan: When did you first hear them?
Nate: Elementary school. Somewhere in third or fourth grade. I don’t remember one specific day — I just remember that at some point I stopped raising my hand. Not because I didn’t know the answer sometimes. Because even when I did, I’d lose the thread on the way up. By the time I was called on I’d already forgotten what I was going to say. And the kids thought that was funny.
Rabbi Halpern: There is a teaching in the Talmud — Bava Metzia 58b — that says shaming a person in public is like shedding their blood. The rabbis took public humiliation seriously as a moral category. What you’re describing is not just a bad memory. It is a wound. And wounds, if left untreated, teach us things about ourselves that aren’t true.
Nate: I never thought of it as a wound. I thought I was just — bad at school.
Dr. Torres: That’s exactly the pattern Seligman and Maier were documenting. When painful outcomes are repeated and feel unavoidable, the brain learns to predict the outcome rather than attempt the action. It’s adaptive, in a sense — it’s conserving energy and protecting from further hurt. But the cost is enormous. Because the learned prediction outlasts the original conditions. Nate is 41 now. The classroom is gone. But the prediction is still running.
Nate: Yeah. I have a business. I’ve been running it for twelve years. I’m good at what I do. And I still have this thing that happens before I walk into a room full of people where I hear the voice that says, you’re going to say something stupid.
Dr. Cowan: And do you say something stupid?
Nate: Sometimes. But not more than anyone else.
Dr. Cowan: Right. The lie is wrong. The prediction is inaccurate. But it doesn’t update on its own.
Rabbi Halpern: There’s a question I always bring to the text, and I want to bring it here. When the angel appears to Gideon and says “mighty warrior” — Gideon argues back. He says, if God is with us, why has all this happened to us? He doesn’t accept the reframe easily. He has years of evidence on his side. And yet the angel doesn’t withdraw the name. Doesn’t say — fair point, Gideon, let me reconsider. The name stands. Why?
Dr. Torres: Because the name wasn’t based on the track record.
Rabbi Halpern: Precisely. In Jewish thought there is a concept that one’s true name — one’s essential nature — is given by the Creator and is not derived from one’s history. What Gideon had done or failed to do was not the basis for what the angel saw. The angel was reading from a different document.
Dr. Cowan: And that document said: mighty warrior. Whether Gideon felt like one or not.
Nate: That’s a hard thing to take in. Because when the evidence is long — when you’ve been failing at something for thirty-some years — it doesn’t feel like the evidence is wrong. It feels like you’re just being honest about yourself.
Dr. Torres: This is one of the most important distinctions I work with. There is a difference between accurate self-knowledge and what Seligman calls a permanent, pervasive, personal explanatory style. Nate, when you say “I’m bad at school,” that feels like accurate self-knowledge. But let’s test it. Is it permanent? Are you exactly where you were in fourth grade?
Nate: No. Obviously not.
Dr. Torres: Is it pervasive? Does it apply to everything you do?
Nate: No. There’s a lot I’m good at.
Dr. Torres: Is it personal — meaning, is it about some fixed flaw in your character rather than a specific set of circumstances and challenges?
Nate: I mean… it’s about how my brain works. Which is not something I chose.
Dr. Torres: Right. So the belief that you’re “bad at school” was not permanent, not pervasive, and not about a character flaw. It was a specific challenge, in a specific environment, at a specific age, with no support. That is a very different story.
Nate: When you say it like that it does sound different.
Rabbi Halpern: There is an interesting parallel in Moses. Exodus 4:10 — when God calls Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt, Moses says: “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” He produces his longest speech to argue that he cannot speak.
Dr. Cowan: That’s never not funny to me.
Rabbi Halpern: And God’s response is not: “You’re right, Moses, I hadn’t thought of that.” God says: “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Is it not I, the LORD? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” The calling doesn’t wait for the confidence. The confidence is expected to follow the movement.
Nate: So Gideon was afraid and went anyway.
Rabbi Halpern: Gideon was terrified and went anyway. Moses objected until God essentially said — we’re moving, I’ll be with you. The courage in both cases was not the absence of fear. It was action in the presence of fear.
Dr. Cowan: That’s the part I want people to hear most. Because the five-step drill in the article — name the lie, place it, test it, replace it, act on it — the last step is the one that matters most and the one people most want to skip. Feeling differently is not enough. Acting differently is the proof.
Nate: How do you even start? Because when the voice is loud, “act differently” sounds easy to say.
Dr. Torres: You start small. And I mean very small. You’re not trying to undo thirty years in one morning. You’re trying to find one piece of counterevidence that the lie doesn’t account for. One moment where the prediction was wrong. And then you point at it. Not in a motivational-poster way. In a clinical, factual way. “The voice said I was going to say something stupid. Here is what actually happened. The evidence does not support the prediction.”
Nate: That sounds like keeping score.
Dr. Torres: It is keeping score. But the lie has been keeping score for thirty years, only writing down the evidence that supports it. You’re auditing the books.
Dr. Cowan: And this is where I come back to Ephesians 2:10 — “we are God’s handiwork, created to do good works prepared in advance.” Nate, you have been running a business for twelve years. You are raising children. You have built something. The works were prepared in advance — and you have been doing them. You don’t always have the internal experience of that, because the old voice is still narrating. But the works are there.
Nate: I’d never looked at it like that.
Dr. Cowan: Most people don’t. Because the lies are loud and the evidence is quiet. Part of this work is making the evidence louder.
Rabbi Halpern: And I would add — from the tradition — that this is not work we do alone. Gideon needed the angel. Moses needed Aaron. None of the great figures in our tradition arrived at their calling by reasoning their way there in isolation. There is a reason this conversation is happening in a room with four people. The lies were often learned in community — they can be unlearned in community, too.
Nate: That’s actually — yeah. The diagnosis helped. But talking about it helped more. Knowing other people had the same list.
Dr. Cowan: That’s usually how it goes. The information is necessary. But the relationship is what makes it real.
The cell door has been open a long time. It just takes someone — sometimes several someones — to point at it.
Note: Nate, Dr. Rachel Torres, and Rabbi Ezra Halpern are fictional characters. Rabbi Halpern is drawn from the spirit of Jewish thought and teaching, and does not speak for any real person.
References
Hofmann, S. G., Asnaani, A., Vonk, I. J. J., Sawyer, A. T., & Fang, A. (2012). The efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy: a review of meta-analyses. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 36(5), 427–440. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-012-9476-1
Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000033
Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Vintage Books.
Scripture quotations (NIV): Judges 6:11-15; Exodus 4:10