Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
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We are Chris and Beth Bruno, and this is the Walking With Podcast.
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A team of brave and brilliant story work counselors and coaches around the country, all committed to helping you come alive. Join us as we explore the sacred landscape of the human heart at the intersection of theology, psychology, and ministry.
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So I get an email a week lately from all over the world. I've gotten emails from China and Brazil and France, from lawyers. What? Who have downloaded our trademark application. They're in the United States US Patent and Trademark Office and they've seen we've applied. And so they want to offer their services to us to make sure that we are covered in those places as well. Oh my goodness, I had no idea. Yeah, it's like weekly.
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some other new country, some lawyer there is offering their help. Isn't that kind? Oh, so great that all the lawyers want to take our money. It's so fun though. I mean, we are in the process of trademarking the name ReStory. And I just think that's that's fun, right? Like, it's great. But you know, it's one thing to work on that and to brand ourselves. And that's another thing to constantly explain.
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What do we mean by Restory? What is this? Is it unique? How is it different? What do we mean? So why don't you explain to everybody what it is we mean? Well, the challenge is really explaining it because there's so many different facets to what the Restory approach, the Restory process really is. But if I were to summarize it into kind of a, boil it down as basic as I can, I would say that
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There is a first story and a second story. And what I mean by that is that there is a first story, a design of God that he had in mind when he created each and every one of us. That the scriptures tell us that the image of God is in us as humans and that image is emblazoned onto us to reflect who God is in the world. That's the first story.
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and how you do that and how I do that, how you reflect God and how I reflect God and let the world know who he is, that's gonna be different between the two of us. That is who we were designed to be. And in Ephesians, it talks about the masterpiece of God, the poetry of God that he wrote into each and every one of us. That's the first story. However, most of us don't live as if that first story is the ruling narrative, as if that first story is really true.
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because something else has begun to be told in our lives, a second story. And the second story is all about how evil has been at work to steal, kill, and destroy that first reflective story of who God is. And so we live according to our second story. We live as if that second story, the story of our pain, our trauma, our childhood trauma, our family of origin, how we came to understand our styles of relating, all of those things that
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that were shaped into us as little kids and then have continued to be cemented into us as adults, that we live as if those are the ruling narratives of our lives. And so to re-story is to explore both the second narrative and the first narrative and begin to unpack and come back to, to...
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to revitalize and renew that first story and bring that into the place of where the ruling narrative of God is actually where we live out of in our lives. Okay. So for those who are familiar with counseling, either personally have been to counseling or are a counselor, how is that different than you mentioned the word narrative several times and narrative therapy is a modality?
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How is this different? Well, narrative therapy is something that we do borrow from a lot, so I do want to say that. But narrative therapy kind of stops at the place of identity. It stops at the stories that I tell about myself over the course of my life. It doesn't have much to do either with a biblical God perspective, nor does it have to do with really coming back to who I was designed to be.
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it's more who do I want to be. And so if I start to tell a story, a narrative about myself in a certain way, I can then become, I can live into that. It's almost this idea that if I can name it, I can become it. And I'm gonna write a different story about who I want to be versus all of the things that I just said a moment ago about who did God design me to be and how do I actually bring forth a reflection of God into the world. And then how...
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Is that, how are both of these then connected to story work? Or is that the same thing? Yeah, so story work is more of an umbrella over a variety of approaches doing, using story in the process of uncovering some of the things in our lives. So story work, definitely the restory process is a part of story work. And others that do story work have some similar approaches.
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And yet there's not as much of the integration of all of the different things that we bring to bear with it, of understanding the biblical nature of it, or some of the psychodynamic or the interpersonal relational styles that go into that, which I could explore that if you wanted to, and really understanding some of how the story and kindness, which we'll get into in a couple of episodes, how kindness is...
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such a key element to combat evil's story that evil wants to tell versus the story that God wants to tell. So story work is more of a general overarching umbrella and the restory process is part of that. One of the things I hear a lot from clients is that they'll come to restoration counseling and the experience that they have from the moment they make the first phone call or the first inquiry all the way into their first, you know,
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two, three, four, six sessions is very different than from another therapist. And, you know, we're often the third or fourth or fifth therapist or counselor that a client will try because it just hasn't worked so far. And I think some of the reason for that is that much of the world of therapy is all about helping you change your behavior or helping you change your mindset.
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And those are both good things, right? When you have a bad habit, you wanna change your habit behavior. And when you have a mindset that says that you are a worthless individual or you don't have as much worth as another person, you wanna change that mindset for sure. But a lot of the therapies really stay more on the surface. They don't dive into the depths of what it actually, where those stories, those beliefs actually got formed. And
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recognize that it's at the depth that the change needs to happen, not on the surface. And so really an analogy that I often use is we talk about coming into the emergency room when you have an issue, when you're going to go to counseling, you have something you want to address, you go into the emergency room and they do some basic assessments of what's going on for you in the emergency room and they might, you know, give you some morphine or for pain or some...
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Tylenol or something like that to treat some of the symptoms that you're having. Then really to get to the root of the issue, you might need to go to the operating room to go from the emergency room to the operating room. And it's in the operating room that the doctor actually does the surgical procedures to get to the root of what is happening for you. So it's in the operating room that you can address the cancers. It's in the operating room that you can address what's going on with with the heart and the bypass surgery and whatever.
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And you don't do that in the emergency room. And what I'm afraid of is that so much of these other types of therapies stay in the emergency room. And people end up feeling better for a time to where they can be discharged from the emergency room, but never actually get admitted into the operating room. So they come back to the emergency room. And then six months later, they come back to the emergency room. They come back to the emergency room. And things just continue to be systemically wrong because they're not addressing the depth.
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of the core of where those stories got formed, where depression, anxiety, there's ways to manage the symptoms of depression and anxiety or addiction. But unless we actually know where they come from and how they were formed and how they got rooted into the story of my survival, the story of who I was designed to be, the story of...
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what evil was trying to do to steal, kill, and destroy the goodness that was within us. If we don't get to those depths, it will just return and we'll find ourselves coming back over and over and over again to the emergency room. And so that's really what the ReStory process is all about is getting into the depths of the story with a person and not just, and I don't wanna say that's bad to help people with some symptom management and behavior change and those kinds of things, but to not just do those things,
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but to really get into how do we help you recover or re-story who you were designed to be so that that's the person that you live out of today. And so in the next couple of episodes, we'll dive into more specifics, the role of evil, you alluded to the role of kindness, and we'll talk about more of what this really looks like in a counseling room. Yes. Thanks for listening to The Walking With Podcast.
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where we've spent the last year bringing you conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. As a part of our Restory focus, we're changing the name this fall to the Restory podcast. It will more broadly encompass what we're trying to do at Restoration and bring under one umbrella our work in the Counseling Center, in our digital laboratory, and with our brother and sister organizations, Restoration Project and Fierce and Lovely. You can find us in the exact same place, so don't go anywhere.
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The big shift comes on September 1st. Until then, join us next week as we continue to explore the Restorey approach. See you then.