Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
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Want to know what it takes to Restore Your Life? We are Chris and Beth Bruno and we lead a team of brilliant story work counselors around the country all committed to helping you come alive. We call it the Restorey Approach. So if you're a story explorer, kingdom seeker, or just a day-to-dayer, you've come to the right place. Welcome to the Restorey Podcast.
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So we've all been listening to the rise and fall of Mars Hill, and it's a fascinating podcast series. And they're in a delay. And so their bonus episode that they've just released is kind of the myth of the origin story that Mark Driscoll has shared over and over again. And here's what I find so fascinating about that.
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So they've gone back into archives and records to find contradictions in the origin story. And, you know, we could talk about the integrity of that. And, you know, that's for another time, another conversation. I think what's fascinating to me is kind of what Mike Cosper came to what I understood him to be saying is that the experience that Mark Driscoll had.
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became his truth. That details aside, the story he began to believe and tell over and over and over again in a very liturgical way. I mean, it became doxology of his story of the birth of Mars Hill story. The way he came to tell that became his truth. It became the story that he
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there are details that are actually wrong in it. And so I want to talk a little bit about that because I have seen that even in my life lately. You know, we had dinner with a friend from elementary school last week, and she is convinced that I am her long lost best friend from fourth grade. And I know for a fact, I did not go to her school and meet her until fifth grade.
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Now, I didn't bother to correct her, because it doesn't matter, who cares? But it's interesting that she has constructed this memory of our friendship that, you know, on paper is technically wrong. And she posted it on Facebook, a picture of us, she tagged me, and so all these elementary school friends started responding, and there was one in particular who I was confused why she knew both of us, because in my memory,
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I knew her from a school before fifth grade, before fourth grade even, that my memories of her belong to this entirely other place and other people, and come to find out I was wrong. That memory is completely wrong. And I just think it's, let's talk about that. Like what?
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What does that mean for the way that we come to believe the stories that we're living and telling and those are small they don't really matter in the big scheme of things but there are bigger stories that were telling ourselves and living out of that. That do matter and what's going on in our memory and our psyche that.
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that this is happening and how does it play into this concept of re story that we talk about here? Mm hmm. Yeah, this is so great. And the rise and fall of Mars Hill, that podcast has been so great to listen to. And we're both just fascinated by what is coming out of it. And this episode in particular, where they do go into the origin story and share some of these things, it is, it is a fascinating study. And just to think about.
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The stories that begin to be told begin to be the way that we not only remember it happening, but find and locate ourselves in the...
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in the current of memory that we have, it's where we locate ourselves. And I think the first thing I wanna just say is, memory is a tricky thing. It is a really tricky thing because our memories are not recorded in this linear fashion. That memory is actually recorded in story form.
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in our minds. And when we shape up our stories, what we're actually doing is we're making meaning of our experiences, and that meaning is what gets recorded into our minds. And so as Mark Driscoll is telling the origin story, he's not telling the kind of lineup of facts and events that happened over the course of time. He's telling us about his meaning.
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and how that was shaped over the course of time, and therefore how the memory of the origin of Mars Hill, or in your case, with your friends, where you located yourself in relation to these people and the meaning that you made in the midst of that. So as we think about memory, I think one of the things we assume is that we can pop in the VHS tape, or we can pop in the DVD, or we can pop in this.
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old record, whatever it might be from our childhood, that actually has the truth of what happened, then this happened, then that happened. But that's not how memory is encoded into our brains. It's actually what meaning I was able to make of the experience at the time.
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not even now as an adult, at the time that I had the experience, is the meaning that gets encoded. And so, my memories are all over the place. The people that I know are all over the place from my childhood. My experiences are all over the place. And they often get conflated with one another because it wasn't the actual thing that happened, it was the meaning that was made at the moment. Mm-hmm.
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Yeah, well, I just think that's, that adds a whole another layer of complexity. When we're talking about restoring our narratives, because there's this element of, of maybe some hard facts, and we could call it truth, in the way that we would understand truth, this should be recorded somewhere kind of truth that we want to parse out and name.
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and see for what it was. But then there's that other, this other element you're describing that is also our truth, because it's the memory that's encoded at the time of our experience. How do we like combine those two things and really see it all through God's eyes and begin to think about it differently? Like how does that play into that process? Well, I think we have to stop looking at it from a hard facts truth.
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element. Yes, we have to have some mile markers or some way to orient ourselves to, like you said, fourth grade versus fifth grade, and you were in this house versus that house, or you know, that school versus that school. So there does need to be some anchoring elements to the memory. But the Restory process is not about the true hard facts.
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The Restory Process is about the meaning that you made in the moment as a child and what you came to understand. Or in a previous episode, we just talked about the interpretations that we had at the moment. The interpretations is what we hold onto and live out of. And it's those interpretations that have become our truth for what that experience was. And so when we're, we're doing the Restory Process, when we're getting into people's stories,
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What we're wanting is not only some of those general hard facts, but we want far more than that. What is the experience that you had? What is the encoded meaning that you made? And is that meaning coming from a mature and processed place? Because what happens is, when we experience trauma, trauma also gets encoded in a different way.
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into our memories. That trauma is held in our bodies. It's held in different parts of our bodies. It's held in different ways of understanding and how it's stored in our brains. And so trauma actually creates an even more conflated notion of what happened to us in the experience. So the Restory process is getting into not only just what happened, but how do we experience what happened.
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other possibilities, what other interpretations might be possible. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I think about, you know, just in that friendship of elementary school, we might have both experienced the same events, but we had different emotional responses and therefore different interpretations. And so what's encoded in our memory during those years that we were together looks really different and we've held it really differently.
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And I think of siblings in the same family who might be walking through on the outside, the same things are going on, but each child's emotional response to those same events and then a different interpretation based on the kid and the personality and all these things, they end up with an entirely different story that they live out. Let me give you an example to this. And obviously in sharing the story, I'm changing a lot of the details.
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for our listeners, but you can just imagine in a general sense growing up in a violent home where dad is a violent man and there are two two brothers, two of the dad's sons that live in this home and then mom. And so when dad would come home from work and go straight to the refrigerator and grab a beer and then over the course of the next you know several hours would consume close to six, eight, ten beers he would you know become uh
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drunk and enraged. And so the older brother would have one experience of the drunken and enraged father and the younger brother would have a different experience even though they were in the same house because the younger brother took the role.
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of protector. He would take the younger brother, the older older brother would protect, he would take the younger brother and hide him away in a different room in the house and say stay here. And then the older brother would go back out and confront the father to protect the younger. So the same event is happening, but both of those boys are growing up with different traumas of the same experience and different interpretations or different stories of that same experience.
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And so to re-story that for each of them is gonna be different because one boy is going to feel alone and afraid in the closet and another boy is going to feel anger and enraged and wounded by a direct confrontation with the dad. Okay? Same event, different experiences. And...
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And to understand a process through that is going to require something very different. Are you talking about Jack and Nikki on This Is Us? That's no, I'm not talking about them, but very close to that. Yes, very close to that. Well, I just think it's just so interesting what our young minds do to protect us and take care of us. And I'm not saying going back to Mark Driscoll that this is the story of a young mind, but
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But just that idea of the memories that we make becoming the stories that we tell, which become the truth that we live out of is interesting. It is really interesting.
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And in many ways, you know, going back to Mark Driscoll, the evolutionary change of the story that he would tell from one moment to another moment to another moment, and then it becomes locked into this liturgical retelling of the story. Now that liturgy that he's come up with is the story of the origin, when in actuality it's not. It's the real question we need to be asking is, what meaning did he need to make in the process? What story did he need to tell?
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about the people that he was with or the people that left him or how he felt in the midst of it or the people that, you know, quote unquote betrayed him or the people that were quote unquote loyal to him. What story did he meet? What meaning did he need to make through that journey and through that process to where it now became codified as the origin story of Mars Hill? And that's as an adult, right? That's as someone that happens. But can you just imagine what happens? What meaning did we need to make about our childhood stories?
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in order for us to survive and have some sense of who our parents were or weren't, who our brother or sister was or wasn't, all of that. What meaning did we make? And the Restory approach has a very kind and generous posture towards those little parts of us. Because it's not coming against the younger part of us that says, you made the wrong meaning, you decided on the wrong thing. It was more this generous understanding of,
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Why did you need to make that meaning? What was it about that meaning that you needed to make in order to survive what you were walking through? Yeah. Well, on the podcast, Mike Cosper goes on to talk about the garage origin stories of Hewlett Packard and Microsoft and Apple. Like there's all these. Amazon. There's all these Silicon Valley, you know, it started in our garage kind of origin stories and many of those have been.
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debunked as well. Like some of the founders have actually said, yeah, that's largely untrue. But I think what you just said, what in those times and places did those founders need to believe and what element of, yeah, we started in the garage, we started basic and simple, did they need to...
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fuel themselves give themselves enough courage and audacity and gumption to go forth and entrepreneur a whole new thing what did they need and then how did it become the story that. Let the fire to this new business it's let me to ask that same question of the stories we tell of our early days you know in the same way like what did we need and i think that's what you're saying is that we do that.
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our psyche does that, like what do we need to be true? And our mind will often make meaning around that. And fill in the gaps with.
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false facts quote-unquote right the things that are not actually the true hard facts of things But our mind fills those in and it becomes the story or maybe it's a little embellished and then the embellishment is embellished And then it's now the actual thing. Yeah, what kind of you know heroic overcoming did all of those or you know founders or people need to write into the narrative in order to have a sense of we did something amazing and big and awesome and And the reality is maybe it wasn't quite like
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that but they needed that to be part of the story. Yeah, fascinating. Yeah. Alright friends, thanks for listening. If you haven't left a rating on iTunes, we'd love for you to do that real quick. And here's the thing with our name change. We're trying to offer more cohesion to all the things we do with restoration. We've got counseling and stuff for marriages and dads and moms and the list goes on and on. One of the ways we started talking about it recently is to rather humorously and affectionately
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refer to it all as the ReStory Universe. Doesn't that sound interesting? Well, if you wanna learn more, just head over to restoryuniverse.com to see what we're up to. And we'll see you same time, same place, next week.