Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
00:09
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.
00:37
I just wrote about my grandmother because of this picture that I have posted of her in our bedroom on that huge frame of all the old black and white pictures. I love it. I see in her face the woman I came to know even though I didn't know the woman in that picture because it was from the 40s.
00:59
And I just, I love that board of old pictures. I don't know most of the people in them. They're just all family. And, you know, they're a collection that have been handed down to us and it actually, it actually creeps out our kids, right? Cause there's some pretty scary looking old people in our family tree. Especially your grandmother and her twin sister when they're three in that white little, I mean, it's the shining. It looks like the shining picture for sure.
01:28
But old pictures are so fun and in most ways because of I don't know they just are right and even of us it's funny that now it's trendy to actually create film looking.
01:42
filters because that's what we grew up with. But just the other day I was changing my profile pic on your phone and you had some, some pictures of me as a little girl. And it was, I chose one. It was just fun to see myself even as a five year old. And I totally see my niece in that picture, which is funny, but what now every time you call.
02:08
This five-year-old Beth shows up on my screen. It's so great. Isn't that cute? It's so cute. My little bowl haircut. I love the picture of you when you are six months old, eight months old. I think it's eight. You're in a box with your dad, who is like Chevy Chase from 30 years ago, and your sister, who at that point would have been five and a half. And...
02:36
There's delight on all of your faces, but you're definitely in a box and you're in a backyard. And I love it because I know what happened in boxes in your backyard. It's a picture that says a thousand things without saying anything. And I wanna talk, we're gonna talk about that, about what you remember of that box, even though you were six months old.
03:03
Yeah, so my dad would take old refrigerator boxes and moving boxes and all that and create kind of this maze in our backyard. And so as little kids, we would crawl through the maze and he would be in there with my sister and myself and it was super fun. And my sister, kind of some of the context is my sister being five years older than I am.
03:29
She has a pretty significant mental disability to where in those first years of her life, they didn't know would she ever be verbal? Would she ever be able to walk? Would she ever be able to you know to do any of that feed herself those kinds of things? And so there was this whole program that they did with her to develop her muscles and coordination and all those kinds of things to
04:00
to get her to crawl and be able to move along the way. And that's the context into which I was born. And so that picture that's taken, I'm sure my mom is the one that took the picture, is of all three of us, my sister, myself, and my dad, inside the boxes doing this crawling thing. And there I am at six months old, eight months old, however long, however old I was, just being there. And that is...
04:27
That is, like I said, the context into which I was born, but I actually have no explicit memory of those boxes. I have the picture, but I don't have the actual, like I can't tell you this is what it was. And that's what you mean by explicit memory. Right, where somewhere I can actually remember the experience that I had, the events that occurred.
04:53
Now, a couple episodes ago, we talked about memory in a different way, and so my memory of those experiences versus my dad's memory of those experiences kind of thing, that would be a comparison, and neither one is the actual true right memory because it was our perspective on that experience. But explicit memory is when I can actually sit down and I can say, yes, I remember when, fill in the blank. I don't remember when I was ever in those boxes. I only have...
05:23
Evidence of it from that picture. Mm-hmm, right, but I do remember other things I remember Inside my body what it feels like to be leading my sister Teaching my sister Being in the space where the focus is on her and the work that I am about as a
05:52
as a being on this earth is to assist her to move through life. And so implicitly, something inside of me knows from those first pre-verbal months of my life that I exist in order for her well-being. And what do you mean by your body remembers that? Well like I said, I can't, I can't.
06:22
remember the actual experience.
06:24
But I, there's kind of a shift that happens within me that whenever she's involved or whenever my family dynamic, even to this day as a grown adult, when the family dynamic starts to move towards what is it like for us to take care of her, there's a gear that my heart drops into. It's something that begins to be activated in me like, oh, here I am. I am, this is my role, this is my job, this is what I'm supposed to do.
06:54
some of the other jobs of my life go offline because now this thing has come online. And like I said, it's a gear that kind of just shift into and that that's that implicit memory. I I don't remember it, but I remember it. It's it's not I can't verbalize it even right now. I'm having a hard time verbalizing what it is that it actually is. But I just I just know. I think that's fascinating that that is true for all of us.
07:24
it doesn't have to be traumatic. Right. And so how do our bodies shift into, oh, I know how to protect you right now. I know how to get you out of this situation right now. Or I know how to respond, right? Like our body takes over in this implicit memory sort of way. What's going on internally? How does that happen?
07:53
as children. Well, like I said, it's in those pre-verbal, you know, probably first, you know, 18 months of life and where it's our neural pathways are, God has so beautifully designed our brains to be developing at such a fast pace, especially in those first two years of life, because we don't come into the world with a template of what it means to be in relationship. We don't come into the world with a template of
08:18
of what it means to be comforted or fed or taken care of or anything. We learn those things, we absorb those things from other people. And so we're relationally created after we are kind of born into the world. And so those implicit memories get locked into and coded into our brain's neuro pathways and into our bodies. I say brain because we have neurology throughout our entire body.
08:49
And so it sits within our gut, it sits within our mind, it sits within our body, our spine. Like all throughout our body, we have these neuro pathways that are being formed in those first 18 months of life that then just get encoded and locked in. That's the, and there's no words for it. There's only experience for it. Because as an 18 month old, you don't have words. You just have the experience of it. And so for me, the experience was
09:18
I exist in order for my sister to learn how to be in the world. And all throughout my life, it was like, haha, Chris, you taught your sister how to crawl. And it was this story that got told. I don't remember it, but I know it. I don't remember anything about it, but there's something internally in me that still to this day shifts into that gear.
09:42
of I exist in order for her wellbeing to be established. So that's what actually happens. And Daniel Siegel, he talks a lot about internal or implicit memory and explicit memory, these internal places within us that still as our experience is, so will we continue to live. And that's how, that's where in the Reef Story journey, it's not just about the explicit memories.
10:10
It's not just about the things that I can actually tell you and recount to you. I remember when this experience happened. It's also the implicit memories of what you experienced as a preverbal child. And how did those still to this day impact your understanding of all the rest of the stories? Where your body can tell you far more.
10:38
Then your your concrete ability, you know to tell a story and that's worse you know as a in the Restory Practitioner world we do a lot of bodywork and It's and when I say bodywork, I mean it's check in with how where are you? What's going on inside of you? How will you find how do you how do you feel rather than just say it like let's check into that internal space What is your experience right now?
11:06
And then when we start to talk about your mother, your father, your sister, whatever, what begins to happen inside of you? What gears do you find activated within you as we're talking about the explicit memories? What are the implicit memories that come with them? It's yeah, I think about somebody reading a story, which we do a lot of, and that, you know, they're, they've written it, they're telling us a version of it. And as they're reading it, tears come and
11:34
It is in that moment, right, that we're activating more of an implicit memory where the body is telling us something. Yes. Far more than the words on paper. Yeah. And in the famous, you know, Vander Kolk book called The Body Keeps the Score, the body does keep the score. It keeps with us those memories when we can't even process what they've been.
12:00
And Daniel Siegel's book, are you referring to Mindsight? Yes, Mindsight. And many of his other books. I mean, he's got several, but that is definitely one of them. Yeah. So it's important when we begin to think about our memories that we not only think about what is it that we remember, but it's also what do we remember feeling. What still sits within us that when we start to talk about these other things, what starts to come out?
12:30
and maybe we don't even have words for it. And that's the hard part because a lot of the work that we do in Restory is to help give words where words were not ever given. But we just have the sense, we just feel, we know that gear. And we need to start giving words and meaning to what happens so that we can process our way through that and begin to extricate ourselves out of it and offer a new alternative story.
12:56
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, refer to it all as the ReStory universe. Doesn't that sound interesting?
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Well, if you want to learn more, just head over to RestoreUniverse.com to see what we're up to. And we'll see you same time, same place, next week.