Therapist Confidential BONUS pt 2
00:00:00 Unknown: Welcome to the Therapist Confidential Podcast, everyone. I'm your host, Travis Heath, and today I'm going to present the second part of my conversation I recently had with Sanni Paljakka and Tom Stone Carlson, where they discuss their new book, So You Want to Do Narrative Therapy. In this second part of the conversation, they'll actually share a piece of Sanni's work that she did with one of her clients that you can find in the book. It's a rare look at the actual process of narrative therapy. So without further ado, let's listen to part two. Okay. You tried to be quick. I tried to. I tried. Because then you will spark me to say things and then we'll talk with Travis. Okay, so I'll share the screen. Um, this is a, this is a first session, so you don't need to know too much about it. You'll just jump right in. It's a, but you'll see how far it can go. By becoming interested in people's actual experience and not the labels, even a dramatic label like trauma. So, here we go. Do you want me to be Maddie? Uh. Sure. I can, I can be myself. Okay. Exceptionally once. Okay. Be myself. I use, I usually read Sanni in the workshops we do. Okay, you do the little preamble. All right, so this is Maddie coming into the session. Had shaky hands when, she and Sanni began speaking. When I asked her what mattered to her above all else that night, she exhaled shakily and hesitated. Into the silence in her visible struggle, I said, Hey, it's okay. Take the time that you need. Um, I could probably also ask you a question that's like not super in your case. Uh, no, no, that's not it. I'm just trying to catch my breath. Right. Okay. Well, you find yourself in good company here with lots of people sitting here on the couch before you, uh, trying to breathe, including me, uh, no worries. Um, Uh, so I'm, I'll, I'll just explain a little bit. She, uh, I'm, she's shaking so much she can't hold a cup, right? And I'm, I'm a little bit, I've. Experienced this before where it can be very nerve-wracking to come to therapy, right? Like, so I don't want to start anything in her face. Like, as she's shaking, I don't know. I don't know what's happening, right? She's a stranger. I know nothing about her. And so sometimes in a moment like this, if a person really is visibly distraught or shaking, sometimes what works for me, what works for different people is different. Not a lot of narrative therapy happens when a person is freaking out, right, about talking with you. So what I often do is I talk, you know, like, so I offer to talk, um. Well, just thinking back on it now, I could tell you a bit about the very good reason some of the people who have sat here have had a hard time breathing when they first arrived. Would that be good? This is something that people take me up on sometimes, that they want to hear me talk. You know, like just tell, uh, tell, yeah, well, whom I've been meeting with or what people have been struggling with. It, yeah, it helps them find their feet with me, I suppose. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, but I can do this. This is just big for me, but I promised myself I would do this. I can do this. So Maddy, not so much wanting to, wanting me to. Okay, Maddie, whatever this is, I promise I'm here with you. I won't just let you crash and burn. But help me out real quick. Why did you promise yourself to do this? Why is it so important to do this? I'm not so sure all the time that coming to therapy is such a thing. Such a great idea. Why would you, why, yes, why would you do this? Well, my girlfriend and I decided that I should probably talk about this. And do you agree with your girlfriend about that, that you should talk? I don't, yeah, I don't see mandated clients, so when As in, sometimes people are mandated as in they're sent to me by somebody, but when they're sent to me by somebody, I don't care, partner, mother, psychiatrist, parole officer, whoever, I want to say, well, do you agree, right? Yeah. Okay, I don't have time to do as much talking. Yeah. Uh, okay. Yes, I love her so much. Uh, she's the reason I'm here. She's like the best person I've ever met. She's so supportive of me. I feel safe for the first time in my life. We almost came together, you know, because you said on the phone that it's okay to bring someone, but then she thought she'd give me space to talk about it however I wanted first. She might still come after another time, though. She's more than welcome. I just gotta remember to welcome her properly as, how did you say it? The best person Maddie has ever met. What's her name? Her name is Mia. All right, welcome Mia. You know, I'm tempted to ask why Mia is the best person you've ever met. Should I ask you that? Or shall I tend to add to your promise with you? Yeah, the promise. She's undeterred, isn't she? Okay, does Mia know you made this promise to do this tonight with me? Yeah, she knows. And Mia, she cares about whatever the this is she's tending to do? Yeah, she's so supportive of me. Okay, Maddie, I might not be at all on the right track here, please correct me if I'm wrong, but did you make this promise to do this because of your love for Mia? Yes, that's such a nice way of saying it. Okay, I'm doing this for me. Okay, for love or nothing then. Yeah. Okay, here's what happened. Mia and I, the reason I called you was because me and I had a bad moment. We're in bed and all of a sudden I just freaked out, you know, I freaked out and I jumped out of bed and I was crying and yelling and I didn't even understand what was happening. I couldn't calm down and Mia, she just, uh, she was just asking me what was wrong and, and I don't know. I've never loved anyone like her. She makes me feel so safe. So why is this happening? All right, so here you were all safe in bed and in love with the best person and the next thing you know you're freaking out yelling and everyone is confused like what's happening? Do you remember what you were yelling? I yelled, no, don't do that. I don't want that. I don't want that. All right. Was that in response to something that Mia was doing at the time or something else that you were just remembering or protesting? Yeah, I'll just comment now. The, the question here, this is an important question, narrative therapy question, is, Sanni's asking not like what you do, could do is uh-oh trauma. Here, but Sanni's question is, no, the assumption is clients are always responding. And the question here is, were you responding to something? We need more of the story before making a conclusion here about what the problem is, right? In old-fashioned ways, it's logical. If someone freaks out and yells, no, don't do that. I don't want that. I don't want that. Uh, logically you would think they're responding to something as in somebody is doing something that they don't want. And maybe it was Mia or maybe it's something like that. She's remembering she's responding to something. No, I don't want that. Yeah. Okay. I don't know. No, I do know. It's just hard to say. Mia wasn't doing anything wrong. She was just touching my belly. Okay, well, before I ask anything else, how did the story go on, Maddie? You jumped out of bed like, no, I don't want that! And Mia is all shocked and so are you, so then what happens? I got dressed as quickly as I could and then I went to the living room and just, I broke down on the couch just, just crying. And then what happened? Narrative therapy questions, this is brilliant, takes a long time, and then what? You need to know the story. Yeah, I mean, part of this is you're gathering the story because sometimes you need to put the story, the pieces of the story together back for the person. Well, this is for me to end the arc of the story, like the story until the scene changes, just as a movie scene would change. So I want to know how it ended before, um, you start doing, yeah, before I start any other kind of work. Just to finish the story, the arc of it. So Mia came out and sat with me and helped me. She did, hey? And then how did the night end for you two on the couch? She did. We just talked and she held me. She was so good and we figured out that I need some help. That it's probably related to the trauma of my first relationship and that I've been broken for a long time now. Is this the this that you promised to talk about tonight? The trauma of your first relationship? Yeah. And we'd be betraying your promise if I say, asked a bunch of questions now about you and Mia's love instead. You can tell what I want to say. Like, you'd be super disappointed in me for being a traitor to your promise. Like, why the fuck did she not help me to talk about it when I asked her to? Yeah. Yeah. Maddie, I'm here. I'm here for whatever it is, but we have many ways to talk about it. Do you want to look at some ways to talk together with me first and then decide how you want to go about the talking, all of which still fulfill your promise? Or do you want to let what happened to you just tumble out however it wants to and we hold it together? Maybe think about it first. I like that. Thank you. So say we did talk tonight. I wish I could ask you both about the worst and the best of what could happen to you then. But maybe I'll start with the best. Say your best hope came true after talking like you kept your promise and the universe decided not to ignore you this time but to repay you. Like that girl in the tail when the gold came raining down on her underneath the castle arch afterwards. What will happen to you? What's the best thing that will happen to you if you did keep your promise? What would come down on you like raining gold under the castle arch? Is that a nice way to ask that question rather than what are your goals for therapy? As I've been reading fair tales to the children. Yeah. Ah, I'd be free. I'd confront it and process it and be free and I know the worst too. You do? What's the worst? That I'll be so embarrassed and it won't help. So embarrassment is now my sworn enemy in this talk. And we are still doing this for love and now for freedom then. All right, here's something else. But anyway, what does it mean though to like confront it and process it? Is this the work you gotta do before freedom? You know, lots of women have puzzled here about those very words. Yeah, so you see some more un-stories here, confront it, process it, that's what you're supposed to do with trauma, right? So Sanni's asking about that. Yeah. You know, I don't really know what it means. I was in this women's studies class and that's what they kept saying. You have to process it. And they spoke about it so easily. And I sat there thinking, oh my God, this is me and I was so embarrassed. Like, how is this the first time I'm hearing the words like consent and stuff? And they're talking about it so easily. Like they were self-assured and I, you know, I knew it was rape. My aunt was raped when I was a teenager and there was a, uh, a court case and all that and it happened, you know, it was a stranger in a parking lot. So I knew what, I knew that that was rape, but how could I have been so stupid? I didn't, it didn't even occur to me that I could happen in a relationship, you know, boyfriend, girlfriend. I realized that it happened to me and I felt so stupid. What if, Maddie, what if we could speak differently, somewhere beyond the self-assurance of those words like consent and rape and advice to you to process it? What if we could attempt to not care about those words right now at all and everything that they mean and who's stupid when they don't know the right meanings? What if we spoke just you and me in your own words and who cares if they're the right ones about what hurt you then and what hurts you now? Just that and only in words that you know. Yeah, here's uh, the attempt to of narrative therapy to decolonize. People, um, people have been colonized by psychologizing ways of thinking, right? Colonized by process it or whatever. And Sanni's like, I don't give a shit about those words. I care about your words only. Let's set them aside. Here, in favor of your, in favor of your words, your experience, we'll work there. Darling, tell me what is it, what is it that is upsetting? In your own words, right? Okay, Maddie, yeah. What hurt you then, Maddie? Or what hurts you now, thinking of it? Or what hurts you in your relationship with Mia? What do you wish to be free of? That I took whatever was coming at me in relationships that I didn't know I could say no. I didn't even know how to stop to ask whether I'm ready. I just laid there. I didn't do anything. I just laid there. He was my first boyfriend and I still cringe thinking about it. He did whatever and he was mean. He laughed about my weight. He was awful. The commas here, I redacted some of the descriptions of what happened and that's not what the purpose of this is, the details of awful things. Okay, alright. As you laid there, Maddie, all silent, what was going on in your mind, your body, your soul? So here you see this question. It's a simple question, but here's the agent of turn in the question. I didn't do anything. Maddie's saying, I just laid there. I didn't do anything. And Sanni's question is inviting... How did you respond even if you laid there? What was going on in your mind, your body, your soul? Looking for a response. A protagonist was there too. And what did she do? People are always responding. Right. Narrative therapists believe this and clients come to therapy because they only have the half side of the story. They only have the story of what happened to them. We must give them back. The story, uh, of how they responded, what they did. Uh, and here's the, the, the shift, the turn of this conversation. A response that is silent in one's body or mind or soul. Um, I don't know who, uh, made the rule that that's not a response. Right, right. Yeah. So what was going on in your mind, she says, I was, I don't know, I was revulsed. That's the word. But I didn't even know to take that seriously. You lay there in a state of revulsion, noting him and his meanness and his jokes and everything went, if this is what they call love, then ew. Yeah, it's weird. Sounds better when you say it. See, I'm, um, I'm witnessing the agentive response to lay there in a state of revulsion. Noting him and his meanness. I already know she noted him and the meanness because she could tell the jokes he made about her weight. Um, and yeah, if this is what they call love, then ew, I'm trying to put revulsion into dialogue format. We don't. Work enough with dialogue, like trying to say what it would sound like if, if, if a person were revulsed, if this is what they call love, then ew, like I'm trying to just give revulsion and dialogue. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and this is really important in the agent of term narrative therapy uses the grammar of agency. The agency has a particular grammar to it and we're telling people back their actions in terms of what they did, even though Maddie was saying he was mean. Sunny said, you noticed his meanness. You noted it, right? That's the action of a protagonist, right? Okay. And now she feels like that sounds way better when you say it this way, when you put and putting things in agentive terms does sound way better. Because people yearn for stories in which they are acting on the scene as protagonists with their ethics intact, with their soul intact, that is what people long for, right? And the half stories of what happened to us where we supposedly did nothing. Okay. Very demoralizing. Yeah. Why do you think Maddie? What did I say differently? No, it's like, it doesn't feel as much like I did. Nothing. Then what else, Maddie? What else did you think or feel? No, that's it. I really did nothing. Said nothing. I was so stupid. Oh, it came back for him. Came back, yeah. Well, this may be a weird question, Maddie, and maybe not interesting to you, but how did you get out of that relationship with him? This is me looking for responses, taking real Sherlock here, as in she's with Mia now. So I already know she's not with the dude anymore. Ha ha. But this is a response. Yeah, very clever. Takes a lot of years for that one. Well, I broke up with him, but I stayed for far too long. That was also the stupidity of it. I stayed for two years. And after two years, what then? Well, it wasn't a traumatic breakup, you know, if that's what you're looking for. I just started to not have as much time for him and we went our separate ways. And after it ended, were you all broken up for a while? Did you cry a lot? Or were you so relieved? Like, thank God that's over. Or what happened? I got into another relationship. Oh, sheesh. So you broke all the rules of the rule book that we say we have to stay single for this many months and lick all our wounds and process shit and whatever before we're allowed to smile. And hope and flirt and reach for a person. I did. What kind of relationship did that one turn out to be? It was fine. It was the only thing I knew then was that I wanted what I wanted was someone sweet. That's the word. You want it. Sweet. What all does this word mean to you, Maddie? I wanna know I'm flooded with the imagination of sweet as accounted to mean and revolting And someone who didn't even stop to ask and wonder where you had gone and how you were in such a vulnerable, intimate moment. Maddie, did you somehow know to seek the counter to revolting? Even when you were young and didn't know the supposed right words for it. You hear now the counter, huh? The response was to see sweet and Maddie's cry. What are the tears trying to tell? That maybe, maybe I, maybe I wasn't so stupid. Holy crap, so maybe. Well, alright, so say you were me and you heard this story about a young fifteen to seventeen year old with her first boyfriend and the awful meanness of their most intimate moments. And her frozen revulsion and how he did not attend to her in those moments. And she told you that she didn't know how to make any sense of it, uh, of any of that at the time and all the words for it had been hidden to her. But the one thing. The one thing she knew for sure and she could say the one thing was no to this mean, awful, frozen, revolting thing and yes to something sweet. And this she knew without any doubt and at all of seventeen with all the pressures to be some good girl or something. In her whole body she knew this and sought to shape this knowing forward in stepping towards a sweet person. What say you? What kind of universe would you, as me, think, well, she's stupid. I wouldn't. Yeah, well, even if you were a dumbass like me. So this you would know. All right. So Maddie, shall we keep on talking about you at age seventeen and what you knew to do in response to awfulness that wasn't stupid at all, but actually probably really interesting? See, the thing is, I am still holding Mia close to us. So the other option is that we talk about your lack of stupidity now and look at you jumping out of bed and crying and yelling, I don't want that. With her and assume that it's probably for interesting reason you did that. Which option would be more interesting to you? I think I'd really like to talk about what happened with Mia and me. No more, no more trauma story. Well done with that here. Well, no, it's the, it's the story, but it's set in, in, in this loving. Relationship with Mia and what's upsetting and hurtful to Maddie now in the context of this rather than this idea that she's too broken for Mia. Yeah. Uh, to talk about, well, well, what, what, what's hard with someone who loves you? What, what ghosts of old do you meet there? We have to, we have to tell you what happened though. At the end. So, setting in motion a story where a person responded, Maddie responded, and she was able to say, no, I wasn't stupid, this was smart, right? It sets her in motion now as a protagonist in her life. When you set a person in a place of a protagonism, they start doing things on purpose now. And, uh, do you have that? Yeah. So we'll just read really quickly to you what happened that night after this conversation with Maddie and Mia. That's the end. So, so what did Maddie invent from this place of protagonism? Maddie and Mia held each other after our conversation on that couch of theirs as Maddie recounted our conversation to Mia. Somehow, somewhere, an interesting queer woman laughed. The night ended with melted chocolate streaked on both of their bellies. That's all I'll say. There's lots of appreciation going on in the chat. I'm, I, I feel moved since I have to facilitate. I'm trying not to like start crying, you know, too much. Cause that's a, that's bad form when you're the facilitator. That's something that always happens. Um, you know, for me always when I interact with your work, uh, it's really beautiful. There's. I, we have a little bit of time for questions. We have way too many questions, um, than ability to, uh, you know, respond to them right now, but I'm trying to take some patterns that I'm seeing and one, uh, One question that's coming up that I think both of you can really speak to because I've heard you do it before. You know, earlier you were talking some about neoliberalism and neoliberalism's effect on people. And I'm wondering if you can talk about maybe even in that, um, Story with Maddie and Mia and, um, how you notice neoliberalism creeping in and what it does, what it does, how it functions in people's lives, um, and how you might seek to address that in contemporary narrative work. Yeah, just for sake of brevity, simply, neoliberalism is a huge ideology we don't have time to get into based on Market capitalism and everything, radical capitalism. But it turns people into objects. Yeah, the idea, what it does is it turns people into products. And it encourages people to uh, to step away from stories of lived experience and embrace labels or brands. Of identity, right? And to think of themselves as a product, a company, a brand rather than a person. So, um. Maddie here, I mean, anytime a person is embracing a label over their lived experience, that's the effect of neoliberalism and also the medicalization of human suffering, but just briefly. Uh, that happens. Anytime people are talking about anything that sounds like common sense in this world that people have unquestioned and I should be this kind of person. That's also neoliberalism at play, right? Um, I don't know if I say this here, um, but, um, at the risk of many of the ideas in psychology are prompted by Neoliberalism, the idea of being a more productive, happy person in life, to seek success in life, and it helps us seek shallow Things instead of meaningful things in life. And so just for the sake of time. No, but I will now expand all the limits of time. I shall read to you. I shall read to you. I didn't. He was going to forbid this. I want to read a poem. This will tell you everything you need to know about neoliberalism. You won't have any questions after this. It's called The Great Forgetters. And it says, always, Mark Strand, sorry, the poet. And always so late in the day in their rumpled clothes, sitting around a table lit by a single bulb, the great forgetters. were hard at work. They tilted their heads to one side, closing their eyes. Then a house disappeared and a man in his yard with all his flowers in a row. The great forgetters wrinkled their brows. Then Florida went, and San Francisco, where tugs and barges leave small gleaming scars across the bay. One of the great forgetters struck a match. Gone were the harps of beaded light that walled the rivers of New York. Another filled his glass, and that was it for crowds at evening. Under sulfur yellow street lamps coming on and afterward Bulgaria was gone and then Japan. Where will it stop? One of them said. Such difficult work pursuing the fate of everything known, said another. Down to the last stone, said a third, and only the cold zero of perfection left for the imagination. And gone where North and South America, and gone as well the moon, another yawned, another gazed at the window, no grass, no trees, but the blaze of promise. Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, yes. And I do think it is the, it operates as the great forgetter. For all of us, it steals our stories away and encourages to focus us more and more on our own selves only. So that we will step over the very things. That neoliberalism is promoting, which is the interests of those in power only, or corporations and profits. While all of us are distracted by focusing on being more, a better self, self-improvement, uh, so much so that we can step over the person on the street who is suffering. Or you don't have to go that far. We can also step over and look totally like an alligator at the person we're supposed to love our child or our lover in the bed right next to us. That we're human beings who have souls and who have very real questions about living, moral questions about living. Right? This is who we are and neoliberalism wants to take us, strip that from us. Anyway, that's the response to that. That was too long. Three minutes. We have time. Three minutes. More questions. I'll give you one more that got a lot of thumbs up quick. I'm shortening it. How do you help people see that they're having a human experience without it coming across as minimizing because clients know all the terms of like invalidating them, minimizing their feelings, et cetera. The first part of it, how do you. How do you help people see that they're having a human experience without it coming across as minimizing? So like, I think that's in response to maybe there's a label, you know, of ADHD and you're trying to tell them it's not ADHD or it's not depression or it's not this or that. It's a human experience. How do you do that in a way that doesn't feel minimizing or invalidating? So really wonderful. Um, I'm actually. I'm, uh, I'm, um, I live for intrigue and I'm very interested in struggles, uh, like, like inordinately, absurdly interested in struggles. And so that's what frustrates me about labels is that they don't give me enough info about even struggles. So for example, uh, pretty much, um, Let's not other all the clients, let's leave this among us as gathered therapists here. Pretty much all of my students in the past five years Have had, uh, some sort of diagnosis. Sometimes it is, it has been just because you named it, uh, ADHD. Uh, uh, and they come to me and say, well, okay, I have this, uh, issue, Sunny, you know, like just so you know. And, ta-da, what is the question? The question is, well, all right, I want to know, dear, what's shitty for you? In life or in work, like, like ADHD, what does it mean? Tell me what's shitty for you about. That might, and that if I understand what's shitty for a person, as in, as in they come to me and they want to warn me about an ADHD thing. That's gonna maybe affect our work. I want to know what she did for them, what's hard, what's, what, what, what, where, where they might struggle with. Not in general, but. So that I can also respond back to it. Like, do you, like, you need more time for something or, or, or in meetings, like, what does it mean? What's shitty for you? And people are like, Thank you. No one ever asked me that. And I'm like, well, yes, but I do want to know. Yeah. I know it's, I know it's 1230, but just super quick. It's, uh, that, um, We're not arguing with people about their labels. We're not saying, no, as a narrative therapist, I don't believe in labels. What we're doing is asking them, what does it look like? What is it like inside your real life? And that is honoring. If you want to talk about validating a person, don't validate their labels. Validate their human experience and ask them, what is it like for you? If ADHD, the word, maybe denotes something. Be interested in what it denotes. It denotes something. A human struggling for something. Yeah, and they're wanting to tell me about something. What is that? And show all of your affection and curiosity for that. And I promise you, no one will call you dismissive as in, holy fuck, no one ever asked. Yeah. You're the first person to ask. Yeah. So I want to, I want to say a couple of things here in closing. One, I want to thank you both, um, I really appreciate the way both of you show up and you say things with such curiosity and grace and you say it with your full chest and I always love that about our conversations and in some ways. This feels like conversations we would have anyways that now we get to share with others, which is really, really beautiful. I also want to say for the participants, if this work interests you and the chat's just full of, um, Um, just people's experience, wonderful experiences with, with what you shared today, but Tom and Sonny have, have agreed to do some videos, uh, for us at psychotherapy.net. So we're in the early stages of very early stages of planning that out. So. If you'd actually like to see some of their work in action, we're going to have a way to do that here in the not too distant future, which is, which is amazing. And I guess the last thing I want to say is, um, thanks for bringing stories back. Not just to narrative therapy, but to all of us, you know, I am. Uh, I'm really contemplating this idea of un-stories and all the un-stories that I see in my own experience, right? As a therapist and beyond, just as a human being, the un-stories and the way, um, Those make me feel stuck or they make me feel, uh, small or frustrated or whatever it might be. So thanks for bringing, uh, stories back for ninety minutes or so today and, and, and thanks for your time and thanks for everyone for attending. Y'all were amazing. We appreciate it. I'm reading all the comments. They're coming in much faster than I can possibly tend to them, but thank you. Thank you, Travis. It's, it's a, it's a pleasure as always. Thank you for what you do. Yes. Yeah, thank you. Thanks to everyone else out there who we, we couldn't see, but thank you for your engagement. I could tell you're involved with all the All the chats that were going on, thank you so much to give us a chance to share, to share what's, what matters to us. Thank you. And my poem, I got it in this time. Yeah, that's right. You got poem in. Good job. I snuck in it. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Travis. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, everybody.
