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This month in our NerdTown Topics Meetup, our colleague, Bill Woodburn, MEd, LPC-S, LMFT-S, shared about using stories in therapy.
Diagnosed with Complex Trauma and a Dissociative Disorder, Emma and her system share what they learn along the way about complex trauma, dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality), etc.), and mental health. Educational, supportive, inclusive, and inspiring, System Speak documents her healing journey through the best and worst of life in recovery through insights, conversations, and collaborations.
Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, finding stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma and dissociation, Please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org where there is a button for donations and you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. You can also support us on Patreon for early access to updates and what's unfolding for us. Simply search for Emma Sunshine on Patreon. We appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our with others.
Speaker 2:Let me begin with a little bit of introduction. What I wanna talk about are using healing stories to work with clients, particularly dissociative clients, but really any any client and any person. I've been in private practice in Austin, Texas for about thirty plus years now, and you can tell by the gray hair. Though most of the gray hair I had over the first two years in private practice, you know, but it'll do that to you. I was originally trained in the systems theory and worked with families and couples.
Speaker 2:And so I tend to come at things from a systemic perspective. But then all of a sudden, I got involved in learning psychodrama. And that took me my system's perspective and took it into this amazing story perspective. And so what you're getting is a is a bit of a mix here. It's it's neither exactly one or exactly the other.
Speaker 2:It is so good to see you.
Speaker 3:Hello.
Speaker 2:Hi.
Speaker 3:Good morning. On
Speaker 2:Zoom, I'm never sure, you know, whether it's morning or night or what with the people I'm talking to. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I I'm I'm having this interesting response this morning internally because last time you were going to present, I was super excited, but I was literally trying to drive to the cabin
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 3:get to hear you speak without children interrupting me, and things kept going wrong. And so by the time I came, I was, like, trying to hop into the cabin, and I couldn't get the Internet to work, and kept missing pieces, and I wasn't there for you to start, and I felt so bad about And then I listened to it after, and, like, I mean, I got in on it at the end, and then listened to it after, like, at least a hundred times, and so
Speaker 2:Oh, good. You wanna give it? I mean, you you know, you probably know what I'm do.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm glad to be here. I hope some people come, but I do know that your episode is one of the top 10 episodes of the podcast. And so even if people can't come for their workday, it's so, so good for them.
Speaker 2:That works for me.
Speaker 3:I'm so excited. You're totally on my list of favorite things in the world, Bill.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm ready when you are.
Speaker 3:Okay. There's somebody ready. We'll start. People who don't wanna be on the podcast could type in the chat room, so you may wanna make sure that you've got the chat pulled up. Hello, everyone.
Speaker 3:People are still coming in. There is a I'm excited about this. Thank you so much for what you all are doing. There is a LGBT group that I have right before this bill, so that is just now finishing. So some people
Speaker 1:are coming in from that.
Speaker 3:The today kind of you. It will give them just a minute. Sure. Oh, here's some people. Hello.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People. Nice.
Speaker 3:So if you're just joining us and we haven't started yet, This is my colleague, Bill, for several years, and he has been very gracious to visit us. He has spoken last year. I'll introduce him in a minute a little bit. Not really officially, but people are still So those of you who are just getting here, just a reminder that it is being recorded for the podcast. So if you don't want to be on the podcast, then you are welcome to watch the I mean, type in the chat, and Bill will watch the chat and can respond to things there as well.
Speaker 3:Hello, everybody. We're just there's still more coming. Good morning. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:I think everyone has audio connected. So we are going to go ahead and start. More people may come in. You people may come and go. That's okay.
Speaker 3:But I just want to, first of all, hello people. Hello, hello. So this is my friend Bill. He is a colleague of mine, has been our friend for several years. He's very gracious to us, very gracious about DID, very insightful, and I appreciate having safe friends in the world.
Speaker 3:And Bill came on the podcast or did a presentation about a year ago, and, that is episode three twenty three. Kate and Brooks looked that up for us. And, also on the website, on Assistantspeak.org, on the page with all the guests, he's at the bottom because it's alphabetical by last name. So he's at the bottom of that page there if anyone wants to go back to listen to his first session. But I told him that some of you weren't here in the community then, and so he's gonna do a little bit of review, and I will let him do his thing.
Speaker 3:But also the reminder just one more time that it is being recorded for the podcast. And so if you don't want to be on the podcast, that's totally okay, but you can type questions. So Bill will watch the chat a little bit, he's very conversational, very fun in that way, no pressure, no pressure, But questions are totally okay. And so, and Bill, I will turn the time over to you and let you tell us about using Stories for Youth. Welcome!
Speaker 2:Wonderful. Thank you. I'm so glad to be back. I so thoroughly enjoyed the first workshop and and being part of the community, and so I'm glad to be back. So let me start with who I am.
Speaker 2:I'm a therapist in Austin, Texas, and have been for about thirty five years. I started out as a family therapist and so I trained in systems theory and so I have a very systemic view on things even when I moved over to doing more individual counseling and doing trauma counseling. But early in my career I met a couple of wonderful folks, Dorothy and Mort Satten, who introduced me to a technique called psychodrama. Not only did I learn psychodrama, but from them I learned a whole way of looking at what I'm doing as a therapist that has become more and more intensely focused on stories. You know, I'm kind of a storyteller but really by profession I guess you could say I'm a story listener.
Speaker 2:So you know the last thirty five years or so I've been I've been listening to a lot of stories and basically what I want to do today is just talk about my observations on stories and stories with that get brought into me and things that as as a professional we can do to help people's stories and that people themselves can do to help their stories. So it'll be a little bit of both. You know, a little bit of a caveat here. I am not a major theorist and I'm not a researcher. I'm really a guy that just loves stories.
Speaker 2:So and I'm very, you know, I go and speak and I'm very aware of the fact that, you know, I may not know everything and I may not be the best therapist in the room, I may not be the smallest person, smartest person in the room, and I may not know your experience exactly, because it's yours. Occasionally I'll ask for questions and I am happy with questions. Happy with observations. What I would suggest we do though is to keep your mic muted so we don't get environmental sounds in on the podcast. And we can, but if you have something to say, if you would raise either an electronic hand or if you're on video, an actual physical hand, and I'll call on you and then you can unmute.
Speaker 2:And then we'll that way we can end up with a cleaner recording just for the podcast. Okay. So what are we gonna do here? Well, I'm gonna review some of the ideas from last time about what makes a story healing or not so healing. And then I want to push on to explore how to help clients and help ourselves find more healing stories.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna bias it toward working with dissociative clients and dissociative folks, but that's not all of what we're doing. So we're just gonna we're just gonna explore. Really, this workshop is itself just a story. And like most stories, we're gonna gather up as a community and go on an adventure. I'm not a big fan of Lord of the Rings, but that is such a model for the way stories unfold in our lives.
Speaker 2:We grab some allies and we head off into the unknown, and we're trying to achieve something. And and maybe we do and maybe we don't, and that's okay. So I'm gonna start the story workshop with a story, of course. And it's a story about stories. Oh, I think it happened somewhere in the late nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2:There was a man who had gone into a restaurant in New York City, a fairly nice restaurant, and he'd had a lovely meal. And at the end of the meal, he offered to pay and he pulls out a $50 bill that he had drawn himself. Now it was clear that this was not a forgery because it didn't look anything like the $50 bills that, you know, you get from the Treasury Department. This was one he'd obviously painted, and he'd he'd use all sorts of colors and design. It was absolutely lovely.
Speaker 2:And he said, I'd like to pay with this. And they said, you've got to be kidding. No. We we need real money. And he says, but this is really pretty, you know, and and and it's and and it's a lot nicer.
Speaker 2:It's more colorful. And they said, no. No. No. We we want the real money.
Speaker 2:So he pulls out a a $50 bill from the treasury department, you know, the green ones that you see, and paid, and it was all good. He tried that several places around town. Nobody took his $50 bill. But you see, he was an artist. So after doing this for a while, he had a gallery show of his artwork.
Speaker 2:And a lot of the artwork were these various bills that were up there on the wall with titles and the story of where he had had eaten and what he'd said. And and oh, and and the art world in New York was just taken with this. And so they began buying his art. You know, and and some of these $50 bills went for, you know, couple thousand dollars. 1 of them went for, like, $5,500 for this this terrific piece of art.
Speaker 2:And so when word went out, a lot of the the restaurant managers and owners went to their staff and said, listen. If this crazy guy comes by and he wants to offer you this $50 bill, take it. It's worth $5,000. Let's think for a moment. What just happened here?
Speaker 2:What just happened here? A transition of stories is what happened. You see, a regular $50 bill that comes from the treasury department has a very potent story behind it. One we almost all accept that that's worth $50 worth of buying power. It's worth a great meal at a fancy restaurant.
Speaker 2:It's worth some clothing. You can use it to pay your rent. Because everybody agrees on the story. This is worth some in fact, it's not actually worth very much. I say it's a piece of paper with some kind of so so engraving on it.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not really worth very much. And clearly, if I just drew one that didn't fit the story that we all accept about money, it wouldn't be worth anything. Unless unless it gets a new story. Unless suddenly it becomes the part of the story about art. See, art's also a story that we have.
Speaker 2:And art is worth sometimes thousands of dollars because it's unique. It's it's interesting. It's lauded. It's an investment. Whatever.
Speaker 2:We had two stories here about the same thing. Was it that $50 bill he drew, was it the money story or the art story? Well, was the money story. It was worth nothing. Was the art story.
Speaker 2:It's worth $5,000. Oh, so stories are really powerful, and they they really do determine what we think something is worth, how we treat it, how other people treat it based on the story. Yeah. Most folks I talk to also know a particular kind of story that I'll touch on a bit later, I'm gonna mention it here. It's called stigma.
Speaker 2:See, stigma is a story too. It's a story that can preempt the story you're trying to tell about your life. And if it's spread enough, if it becomes a more a very common story, then it becomes a very powerful stigma. Or sometimes, if you're able to tell your own experience powerfully, then your story becomes more powerful in the stigma. Again, stories.
Speaker 2:And stories are like lenses we see the world through. We don't see the world directly. We see our stories, and our stories are interacting with the world. So story is powerful. That's why I spend so much time with them.
Speaker 2:That's why I spend so much time with my clients' stories. But let's take a moment. What is what do I mean when I use the word story? Well, I I know what the experience is for me. You see, when I'm telling a story or or when I'm hearing a story, it's a it's a dance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a dance between my conscious intentional side to tell a story and my unconscious improvisational side. A lot of people when I'm out as a storyteller will say how do you remember all the stories I say I don't. I remember like the first two sentences and then I go. Because remember, it's a dance between intentional and improvisational.
Speaker 2:And pretty soon, I'm improving the story. I just let the story unfold because it has its own logic, and it has its own motion, and it's its own adventure and I don't know where a story is going. And even a story I've told a lot before, don't know exactly where it's going. I also believe that when I'm telling a story, there are witnesses around. Some of it's the audience, but some are my ancestors, and some are my descendants.
Speaker 2:And I am really caught in this web and this kind of sacred space when I'm telling a story that I have to remember I'm telling it for more than me. I'm telling it for the community, the community past, the community future. You know, when I go out as a storyteller, I'm very, very aware that the stories I tell will impact the future of a community and our descendants. And so I really take it as a very sacred duty to be careful of the stories I tell. You know, lot of people say, well if it's going to be therapeutic, it's going be a healing story, then it's got to be happy story, and everything's got to be fine.
Speaker 2:Wait a minute, you know, I suggest that to be a healing story it has to be a real story, which is about success, and it's about failure, and it's about pain, and it's about triumph, and it's about strength, and it's also about weakness. And we have to have all of those in the story, not just for entertainment value, but for reality value. For a story to have traction, I want you to tell me not just about how things are working, but how things aren't working. Though sometimes if you come in and tell me how things aren't working, I also want you to tell me how things are working. You see, we've got to have a balance here, we've got to include as many pieces as we can as human beings.
Speaker 2:You know, when I was younger, I used to read a particular Western writer. And then later as an adult, I went back to reread some stories that I had enjoyed so much, and I didn't enjoy him very much anymore. Because you see, his his hero was always like the best shot and the fastest draw and and had the the best horse and always did the right thing, and and it was just so false. See, now the stories I'm interested in are the story where the hero struggles, or maybe there's something that she can't do. Maybe something that she's afraid of.
Speaker 2:Maybe there's something to be overcome. So when I talk about a healing story, please don't think that I am talking about happy, happy stories for people to make them feel better. Sometimes healing stories actually make you feel a little worse, at least on the on the road to feeling better. One of the things I noticed, and I noticed this in my office and I noticed this in the world, it's kind of a sad thing. I noticed how many people are pushed by shame to silence their story.
Speaker 2:And once their story is silenced, they really can't access a real foundational identity because our identities are about the stories we tell and about the stories we hear and the stories we react to. And it also isolates us from group healing because, you see, if we can't if we're ashamed to tell our story, then because we're human beings and we connect through stories, now we can't connect to the group. And that's why it's so important to find a group where you can tell your story, and why it's so important to go ahead and confront those monsters of shame that try to get you to shut up about it. And it's not just, oh, this is just therapeutically good. No.
Speaker 2:You won't know who you are until you tell your story, and you won't have company on the adventure unless you tell your story in a group that accepts your story. Okay. So, you know, I like it when my clients come in and tell stories because one of the things I know is that stories allow my clients to have that kind of useful resistance in therapy without squaring off with me as their ally and as their therapist. They don't want to square off, they want me to be an ally, but they need to deal with resistance to change and fear and those other things. And by telling a story, we can put all that in the story.
Speaker 2:And so it doesn't have to go bounce off me as their ally or bounce or they have to shut up about it and then it's a problem to them. We can put it out in a space that's safe. A story space. So what we're talking about here really today is how do we construct a story space that is safe and powerful enough and a good enough container to hold the big stories? I mean, anybody can hold the little stories.
Speaker 2:That's like, you know, what did you eat for lunch yesterday? I mean, come on. I'm talking about the big stories. Matter of fact, I just had a client come in a couple weeks ago, and he's a young man, at least young to me. Did, like, three tours in Iraq and he's out of the army now and he's sitting across me from me and we have a pleasant chat the first session.
Speaker 2:And then he looks at me and says, I wanna know if you can handle what I've got to say. I wanna know if you can handle what I have to say. Yeah. That's a major professional question. He's got only the right to ask it.
Speaker 2:I think it's a smart question. And it puts me in an interesting therapeutic professional spot. Because you see, haven't heard the story yet, so I don't really know. The real answer is I don't know. I mean, I've got my own demons.
Speaker 2:I'm not all perfect. I can't hold every story. But I gave him an answer. I said, I don't know your story, but I know I'm very loyal to you finding the hero inside you that can be part of the stories that you tell. You see, don't I don't know if I can withstand the stories, but I know I can join with the heroic part inside of him.
Speaker 2:I know that I can be there to remind him that whatever stories that he's telling, he made he made it through them. And we're sitting in my office, or as Emma says, now time is safe. That he that he got that he got through those stories. And I can do that. And after thirty five years, I can probably handle at least most of his stories.
Speaker 2:Alright. Let me review a little bit of what we did. I'm gonna just assume that some people were here for the last workshop. Some people were not here for the last workshop. Both those are okay.
Speaker 2:But since I'm going to be referencing some of the concepts from last time, I'm going run through them quickly, and then we'll get on to the new stuff. So if you were at the last workshop or you heard the last podcast, be a little patient. We are gonna get to the new stuff in just a minute. One of the things I talk about are story spaces. It's just my way of saying that when we're telling a story or when we're listening to a story, we don't do it the same way all the time.
Speaker 2:You see, one of the story spaces that we often inhabit is what I call a history story. I want to tell a history story. So I go into my therapist and I say, Yesterday I did this or I did that. And the idea of a history story is I'm trying to recount as accurately as possible and objectively as possible what happened. And you know, sometimes objectivity is fine.
Speaker 2:Sometimes accuracy is great. Believe me, when I go to my dentist and he says, you know, when did this start happening? You know, it makes a difference. I said, well, okay, wait a minute. That was about that was last week on a Tuesday.
Speaker 2:Okay. That gives him some important information. So nothing wrong with accuracy. Nothing wrong with a history story. Remember though that it's not talking about truth.
Speaker 2:It's talking about accuracy. Yeah. My favorite story about that is, gosh, in the early nineteen hundreds, an anthropologist went out to the Lakota Reservation and was gathering stories from a very famous medicine man, Black Elk. And as Black Elk was telling the traditional stories, the anthropologist said, are all their stories true? I mean, did they really happen?
Speaker 2:And Black Elk thought for a moment and said, you know, a lot of these stories never happened, but if you listen carefully, every one of them is true. So, yes, a history story, an objective accounting as accurately as possible of the material world, that's right there, that's important. If you're a therapist, if you're a counselor, and you find that you're getting very bored with your clients stories, quite possibly you have steered them into all history stories. It's just a recounting of facts. If you don't help them move on, or worse, if you keep trying to hold them into a history story, and we all do that.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you know, client comes in and says, you know, I angry at my partner the other day, a classic therapist response is, what happened? And you said the other day, was it like yesterday or was it like last week, was it over the weekend? What I'm doing is I'm steering my client back to a history story, that history story space, and we go into a different place in our brain for a history story. Unfortunately, if you're working with a client who has dissociated a lung, they may not be able to tell you a history story, or they may feel terribly ashamed of a history story because it's got a lot of holes in it. What happened yesterday?
Speaker 2:Nobody wants to walk in and say, I don't know. That just like no, that just feels bad. Okay? So to push someone into that spot with a history story who's got a lot of dissociative problems going on, then they may not be able to maintain that very well. And one of the things we see, and it's a big deal, is my clients who have gone through a lot of trauma that's not remembered in detail with all the pieces in line will come in and say, I don't know if this really happened or is it real, or is it true?
Speaker 2:And I remind them that really what they're talking about is is every piece accurate. And we don't always know. But there's something more. Things can be true without being totally accurate in every part. And that leads us to the other kind of story space, which I call autobiographical story space.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm telling you about my experience. It's a non objective history. Oh, it might have objective pieces. You know, I can tell you about the restaurant I went to at lunch yesterday and the really huge sandwich that had that they gave me that I could not possibly eat. And you notice how I'm starting though to put my point of view.
Speaker 2:I arrive in the story. A history story doesn't really have us in it. It's just two eyes looking at the world. An autobiographical story has me in it. That sandwich was so big, I could not eat all of it.
Speaker 2:And if I did, I would feel both guilty because I'm too old to eat that much meat all at once, and I you know? But I was worried because the sandwich was expensive, and so maybe I should save it for later. Now this is an autobiographical story because I'm adding myself, the effect of it on me. It's really told from a first person point of view. It is my story about what happened to me.
Speaker 2:And see, I believe that those are very true stories. Just as true as a history story. Truer than a history story because it has us involved in it. So history stories can be accurate. Autobiographical stories can be true.
Speaker 2:There's a great quote from Winston Churchill when he says, I know history will be kind to me because I will write the history. And he did. He he he wrote like a multi volume set of World War two that was a history. But really what it is, it's Winston Churchill looks at World War two and tells you his story about being prime minister of England during World War two. That's an autobiographical story.
Speaker 2:That is not exactly a history story. Oh, it has some historical pieces in it. Not exactly. Okay? Now, as a therapist, as a counselor, I'm a big fan of autobiographical stories.
Speaker 2:Because autobiographical stories have the capability of being very empowering because you see I'm present in them. I don't get erased in them. There are so many families of so many people that come to me where they were erased. Where their story was not allowed or their truth was not allowed or their observations about the family were not allowed. They were not allowed an autobiographical story.
Speaker 2:And to have a space to tell an autobiographical story can be incredibly healing. This is about my experience. This is about how I interacted with the world. This is empowering me. This is also setting up a boundary against hostile invading stories.
Speaker 2:Not all stories are nice. Not all stories are pretty. Remember, I touched on stigma before. That's a that's an invasive story. Back in the the old days, we would say that was a curse, which is like telling a story that invades someone and changes the way their story works and disempowers them.
Speaker 2:So autobiographical stories are way more empowering than history stories. Though you need occasional history stories just to know what happened. It says the context. Nothing wrong with it. But you don't want to stay there.
Speaker 2:And if you're a therapist, you want to help clients move from a history story to an autobiographical story that puts them more central to the story and their experience more central to the telling of the story. There is also another kind of story space though. And maybe you've been there, maybe you haven't, maybe you have seen a truly great movie or read a truly great book that, yeah, it's telling a history story. It starts in a history space. There are actual events that happen.
Speaker 2:But it soon moves into an autobiographical space about what the hero in the story was thinking or feeling. What did she do in that moment? How did she overcome this? Okay? But then that moves on to what I call the mythic story space.
Speaker 2:And this is an exploration of what does it mean to be human. What does it mean to be human? Because there's a story where I am telling that I am it's all about connecting my experience with the human experience. You know, one of the great things about the Internet these days is you can get online with people that have had similar experiences. And one of the things that can happen is you can realize that you're not dealing with a diagnosis, you're dealing with a human experience shared by millions of people.
Speaker 2:That's moving from history space to autobiographical space, now to mythic space, to be part of the human beings in the world. You know, there was a wonderful moment. It was it was very visual, and I remember its impact from back in the sixties. You see, prior to landing on the moon in 1969, we'd never seen pictures of the Earth. We'd seen pictures of the land, pictures of the sky, but there was something surprising, mythic, so real to watch this blue ball come over the horizon of the moon and have the astronaut's camera capture that small blue ball hanging all alone there in the darkness.
Speaker 2:We'd never seen that before. Oh, now you can get on the Internet and get a thousand pictures of the Earth. But we'd never seen that before, and it changed how we thought and how we thought about the earth and how we thought about ourselves on the earth. It was a mythic moment. It wasn't about Bill.
Speaker 2:It wasn't about what happened to Bill yesterday. Just the facts, please. It was about all of us, where we are. And a lot of us said that Blue Ball looks very fragile and alone out in that huge blackness, and maybe we need to start thinking about taking care of it. Again, mythic story space.
Speaker 2:It teaches humility, it is very interested in how we connect. It helps us connect as fellow fellow human beings. It lets our experience be wider and larger and deeper. Okay, so three story spaces. History, just about the facts, and while it can be accurate, it has a somewhat a relationship to truth.
Speaker 2:Not a very good one. Then we can move into autobiographical, which is a story told with the teller in the story, now we can move into something that is not just accurate but true. And we can take both of those and move them into a mythic story space where we realize that all of this stuff actually connects us together as human beings, as part of the world. Three different story spaces. And if you're a professional, if you're a therapist listening to this, you can steer your clients for better or worse into different story spaces.
Speaker 2:If I keep asking factual questions, I will trap my client into a history space, And when they come to a dissociative disruption in their history story, they'll bog down or get resistance or look at me blankly or feel ashamed. None of which I want. So one possibility is to begin to hear ourselves, Am I directing this client back into a history space when they have told me plenty of history for context and we need to move on to autobiographical space? And as a therapist, also to think, am I holding my client too much into an autobiographical space? Have they already established their power?
Speaker 2:Have they protected themselves against invasive stories? Have they already worked through this? And do they need, at least on this moment, with this experience, to also connect it to something greater and larger and realize that they're human beings living on a planet with a whole bunch of other human beings? Some of whom have had a very similar experience. So it's knowing how to help clients inhabit different story spaces so they can get what they need from each one.
Speaker 2:So that's part of what we did last time. And I spent a lot more time talking about it, but it's a fun topic. We also talked about closed stories versus open stories. This is kind of where the rubber meets the road in counseling. A closed story takes a dilemma and puts it central.
Speaker 2:And a closed story says, well you can't get out of this story, you can't change this story until you solve this dilemma, which is by definition unsolvable. So now you're stuck. It has a really restricted point of view, and it it is a basically a trap. If you've ever seen a family that used a lot of double binds, or you grew up in a family that used a lot of double binds, by the way double bind means handing a child a dilemma where there is no right answer. Where either choice you make is going to be judged wrong.
Speaker 2:Well, what happens is you're training someone to inhabit a closed story. That what you do is you shut down and you don't think that stories go anywhere. And you just replay and go on. One of the classics I see, and I see with a lot of trauma clients, who come in and at some point they will begin to tell me the story of something really bad that happened to them. And they'll stop as they get toward the end, and they'll go back to the beginning and tell me again, and then they'll stop before they get to the end, and then go back, and then they'll go back, and then they'll go back, and I'm just like, Woah, woah, woah, wait a minute.
Speaker 2:What I'm seeing is a closed story loop. They're not going all the way through the story to where things get better or they survive. They're looping back. That's not because they're stupid. That's not because they're they're manipulative.
Speaker 2:Uh-uh. No. No. What's happened is that they have learned they are trapped in a closed story where stories don't have a conclusion, they don't have a path through. And so if there's not a path through stories, if you've never experienced that, if you were taught that that's wrong or whatever, well of course you're in a close story.
Speaker 2:And if it's a close story about something that hurt you, that's a pretty bad story to be closed into. Matter of fact, early in my practice, they came out with the Nightmare on Elm Street films, which looks like a closed story, right? You know, the bad guy, the monster shows up, kills a bunch of people, they save some people, you know, it ends, da da da da, everybody finishes the popcorn and goes home. Actually, the problem with Nightmare on Elm Street is that it is a closed story and it's a trauma loop closed story. It's not just a closed story like I can't imagine the ending.
Speaker 2:Remember, Elm Street Nightmare on Elm Street number one ends with the monster where they look what? Look out the window and they think the monster has been has died and fallen out the window and is lying dead on the grass and there's nothing there. Oh my gosh. The monster is still out there somewhere. And they did that with Nightmare on Elm Street number two and number three and number 427.
Speaker 2:The monster, there's no resolution to that. The monster keeps getting away. Now, this was bad for a lot of kids out where I was, but it was really great for my practice. I was struggling to build a practice and I built a practice almost overnight because I got a ton of calls. My child isn't sleeping.
Speaker 2:Okay, so when did you take him to Nightmare On Elm Street? And I would talk to the kids and it's like, He's still out there. He's waiting to come back. And I thought, yeah. We're just terrorizing these kids with a closed story.
Speaker 2:There's no resolution here. There's no getting past this. It you you you think it. You thought you got to through the story, but, oh, no. They're gonna recycle the monster.
Speaker 2:And it's like, oh, crud. You know? So I I I helped a bunch of folks dig out of that one and and really suggested a bunch of parents that they not take their 10 year olds to horror movies. That's a whole other yeah. The opposite of closed story, course, is an open story.
Speaker 2:In an open story, there is a path through the story. There is a beginning and a middle, and guess what? There's an end that the story does resolve, meaning that the hero of the story triumphs over the adversity. He's not stuck in the adversity, but triumphs. You know, imagine a story where and we've seen them.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can you can literally imagine, like, a movie you've seen that was a really good movie. And, you know, there's the setup, then the hero is is is beset by all of these challenges. And, you know, some of them hurt, and some of them are awful, and some of them, you know, are are are fixable, and some of them he moves past, but there's an end. You know, one of the most famous, of course, is for those people that saw the original Star Wars, and yes, I'm old enough to have seen it in an actual theater. Remember the the the end end?
Speaker 2:Where they have the big party and the celebration and the the heroes march in procession through the cheering crowds. You know, what that said was, hey, the heroes triumph. There's an end. This is an open story. There is a path through.
Speaker 2:No matter how bad it got for Princess Leia or or Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, they made it through. And they made it through to the support of the community and where they were uplifted and held and healed whatever had happened. Man, great, great open story. I love that open story. And a lot of audiences love that open story.
Speaker 2:Was it cheesy? Maybe. But you know, right about that time in my life, I really needed an open story. I really needed to see the heroes win. So that was a great story.
Speaker 2:There's a there's an interesting, very quick, beautiful open story, and it's in the trailer for a mini series that came out years ago called The Pacific. Is about a bunch of Marines fighting World War II in The Pacific. And part of the clip is the commanding officer of this Marine regiment, infantry regiment, and they've been fighting all day, and it's at night, and they are just depleted and exhausted. And the the lieutenant says, you know, I fight this war because I believe it's all worthwhile because our cause is just. Open story.
Speaker 2:We are moving through this. There is a reason for this. We are not stopping and being derailed by a sense purposelessness. We're not buying the evasive stories that says it's not worth it. No.
Speaker 2:It's worth it. We're going through it. We're coming out the other side. There will be sacrifices. They're worth it.
Speaker 2:Why? Because our cause is just. That makes a difference. That makes a difference. Okay.
Speaker 2:Cool. Now let's start with the new stuff. There's a ton more old stuff, and I could stay here for another hour and a half, and we could just recycle the old podcast. But let's go into the new stuff. There is a thing that is important not just for therapists to do for our clients, but for each of us as human beings to learn to do for ourselves, And I call it finding the hero.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Finding the hero. I truly believe there is a hero inside each of you. I believe there is a hero inside each of my clients. Now sometimes the hero is so weighed down by so much that it's hard to find.
Speaker 2:I admit it. It's hard to find. But I truly believe and have faith that there is a hero in there. We just have to work together to find out how to get the hero back out moving through the adventure. You see, a hero it's really kind of simple in a way.
Speaker 2:A hero is someone or the part of us that believes that their actions make a difference in the world and that the world is worth it. Yeah. Yeah. I I am fighting this war because I believe our cause is just. That's a hero statement.
Speaker 2:I believe my actions make a difference in the world and that the world is worth me taking action to make a difference in. Our hero part can really get messed up because people can try to convince us that our actions don't make a difference in the world. And if that falls away, or they can, know, help us believe our actions make a difference, but somehow convince us that the world is not worth us taking action. And then the hero falters. So a hero needs both of those in place, and to subtract either one of them, the hero falters.
Speaker 2:As you can tell, I watch a lot of movies, I love movies. There is a particular movie that I think all therapists should watch called Equus. It's a very old movie with Richard Burton. And in it he's a psychiatrist who's treating a young man who has really damaged some horses. Along the way he discovers that the young man actually worships horses and he it is in that literal sense, he feels that they are are gods or his his root to god and he is spiritually attached and it is, you know, feeding him and then all sorts of things happen.
Speaker 2:The saddest possible scene is at the end where Richard Burton is the psychiatrist saying the treatment was a success. He no longer figured under he no longer saw horses as special. He no longer felt that anything was special. He no longer felt that being in the world was worth it. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We got a problem here. So a hero. You know, one of the curious things about a hero, our heroic selves are very good at balancing is a is a difficult balancing act between acceptance and resistance. Accepting the world as it is, but also resisting some things that need to be resisted.
Speaker 2:And another great movie quote where a young pilot, a young American pilot goes to England to fly in the RAF against the invading Nazi bombers and one of the British pilots say, you know, why do you young Americans come over here to be killed? And the young American says, I don't wanna die. I just wanna matter. That's a hero statement. The heroes inside us accept that we are cocreators of our future.
Speaker 2:Not total determiners. That's the co in the cocreation. I don't get to just have any future I want, but I am co creating it moment to moment. And I am able on my good days, on my real heroic days, to face that absolute terror of having choice and having freedom. Jean Saad once said, you know, man is condemned.
Speaker 2:Having your choices, man leads make a difference in the world. That sounds, oh, great. And then it's like, oh, crap. It they do? Then I have to start thinking about things like right action and wrong action.
Speaker 2:I have to think about what's best, not just for me, but the communities that and the people that I value. Oh my gosh. That's a lot of homework. You cannot be lazy and be a hero. The other piece is that heroes are often very visible and so very vulnerable.
Speaker 2:When we are heroes, when we find that hero apart, when we bring it out in the world, we bring it out into the story or in action, yeah, it's visible. And now we're And I wish I could just make that, oh, it's gonna all be safe. Not necessarily. You know, one of my heroes is John Lewis. I was just watching a documentary.
Speaker 2:And it talks about how in the early sixties his mother gave him advice as he was going off to college as a young black man in the sixties going off to college in the South and don't get in the way. And the John said, you know, I discovered after a while that I needed to get in the way. And on the documentary, can see that moment when several hundred nonviolent marchers cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge heading towards Selma and are met by a phalanx of Alabama State Police in gas masks and helmets and clubs. And they fired the gas mask and they charged and beat the protesters with the clubs. And John Lewis is in the middle of that.
Speaker 2:He was leading that. He was a hero who was visible and vulnerable and in the way. So, yeah, that also leads me to another piece about heroes, and John Lewis is a great example. You see, heroes are not something that you just buy off the shelf. No.
Speaker 2:Heroes are created by initiations. John Lewis was initiated on that bridge on that March in 1965, he went through something to become a hero. He he didn't he couldn't just, like, you know, put the sign on his door. I'm a hero. No.
Speaker 2:No. You have to go through something. Now luckily, as therapists by the time a trauma client has come to my office, they've gone through something. The problem is sometimes that initiation gets messed up, and they never end up being a hero. We'll talk more about that later.
Speaker 2:You know, I was I also do some business consulting, which is mixed bag. But I was doing it one day. I was sitting in the back, and a different consultant from a different group was doing a presentation up front for this And he had this terrific speech and this big PowerPoint, and it was all set as special forces like military and special tactics and elite military and da da da. And we're making you an elite sales team with special forces tactics and da da da da da da. And I was sitting in the back and I I stood up.
Speaker 2:I was walking around because it really wasn't sitting well with me. And it wasn't sitting standing in the back. And finally, we said, like, the let's just we're just gonna leave. So I followed him out, and I was talking to him outside. And I looked at the guy and I said, yeah.
Speaker 2:So what'd you think of the special forces thing that the sales guy was doing? And he looks at me and said, yeah. But I went through airborne school, ranger school, and serves two tours in Vietnam and special forces. Yep. You can't just put a bunch of PowerPoint slides up there and tell people they're gonna be some elite special force.
Speaker 2:You gotta go through the initiation. And it's hard. And that's part of the deal that it's hard and that you survive it and you triumph, that's how you get to be a hero. You don't just get to buy the sticker or the button and wear it on your coat. I never ended up going back into that presentation, by the way, so I don't know how it ended.
Speaker 2:So if you're a client or if you are a counselor, the thing that I know is that my clients' hero selves are coming into the Counseling Room looking for a powerful ally, and they're calling on my hero self to be there. See, heroes like to work with heroes. And if I want my client to make it through their adventure, they need to be a hero, and to help them be a hero, my hero has to show up. I have to believe truly that my actions make a difference in the world and that the world is worth making a difference in, and that I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to succeed all the time.
Speaker 2:But I have to believe it, I have to be committed to it. Because there's a hero part in each of my clients that walks in that wants to know if I brought mine into the therapy room too. Now I could bring my skeptical part, I could bring my critical part, I could bring my jaded part, I could bring my cynical part, I could bring all sorts of parts in there. My client's hero part is not interested in those parts. Matter of fact, kinda irritated by those parts.
Speaker 2:If you want a client to move through the adventure story of their lives, they need to connect to You have to show up as a hero, as a therapist. It's part of the deal.
Speaker 1:Bill's presentation will be continued on the next episode. Thank you for listening. Your support really helps us feel less alone while we sort through all of this and learn together. Maybe it will help you in some ways too. You can connect with us on Patreon by going to our website at www.systemspeak.org.
Speaker 1:If there's anything we've learned, it's that connection brings healing. We look forward to connecting with you.