- So we have 20 minutes for questions
or discussion about this.
- Some of the directness of the questions and the leading,
you led her into these scenarios.
You didn't let her come up with them on her own.
- Right.
- And I was thinking,
I'm not sure if I feel skilled
or qualified quite how to go about that.
And I remember you said the same thing
when you were asked to do this on some level.
So how did you,
what helped you make that turn?
- Yeah,
there's a way of thinking about,
in therapy, in the world of therapy,
There's a way of thinking about trauma,
there's a way of thinking about difficult life experiences.
And there are a fair amount of therapists who are taught,
I don't wanna make the patient feel,
or the client feel uncomfortable.
And so the idea is, therefore,
you say, "Well, you know,
we've got all these things in your past,
you've got all these issues in your life
that might need some realignment,
might need some repair,
might need some action.
Is that something you want to talk about?"
No, I'd rather not.
It's uncomfortable to talk about that.
Okay, let's talk about something else.
That is common.
And so our view is like,
if we show that we're afraid to talk about these things,
then we're modelling fear of dealing with these issues.
So our model is to support and push,
push and support, push and support.
And sometimes what'll happen is you're pushing
and the client or the patient is like,
"Wait, whoa, that's too much.
Stop that," right?
Which is really great when that happens.
When that happens,
you don't keep pushing.
That would be wrong.
But you don't have to totally back off and say,
"Okay, forget it.
We won't deal with it."
There's a great practise
that my colleague Mark Lemley taught me in relation to this.
When that happens,
when there's this conflict,
you can say,
"Oh, I just evoked, you know, I'm sorry,
I just evoked some feelings in you toward me, right?
I was pushing and you felt what?
What did you feel as I was pushing?
Tell me what you're feeling right now as you see me pushing.
What's that feeling? Good.
Now you can evoke feelings right in the room
between the two of you.
It's great.
Yeah, I didn't like when you did that.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have pushed you that way.
What do you wanna say to me?
What would the words be that you would want to say to me
if you wanted me?
Please tell me, be assertive,
realign our relationship right now in the room.
It's awesome.
Back off. Good.
Give me more.
Back off, you asshole.
Who do you think you are?
Good.
Anything else?
And how does it feel to say that?
It feels good to be able to assert myself.
So now we're modelling
and helping this person realign their own relationship.
And then you can begin to repair it right there in the room.
And then as you repair it,
then usually you can go forward,
'cause you've developed some trust as opposed to separation.
So that's a really cool thing when that happens.
We always look for that.
It's great when that happens.
A lot of times when someone asks a question,
the questions is, you know,
the providers usually, you know,
if someone asks me a question, what do I do?
Answer the question.
But what if there's something underlying the question?
You know, have you ever dealt
with this kind of thing before?
Oh yeah, I've seen this lots of times before.
But is there another meaning to that question?
Have you ever dealt with this before?
Could there be another meaning to that?
Do you really know what you're doing?
Do you really know what you're talking about?
"I don't feel comfortable with you.
Maybe, you know? Right?
So we're looking for that kind of thing.
It's pretty, it can really work to solidify trust
in a relationship when you do that.
- In management theory,
we would sooner use the word nudge.
- Use the word what? - Nudge.
Nudge instead of push.
- Nudge. Okay, yeah.
- Push seems against the person.
But nudge is guiding with support
and it's far more kind.
You're guiding with support into and exploring the feelings.
- Yeah.
That's what we're doing. - Exactly.
- Yeah. Exactly.
And we're doing it with love
and the belief that the model works
and you can actually help people,
and they do feel better when they go through it,
even though it's hard.
The overarching work of this work
that I've been presenting to you for the last five,
four and a half days is extremely simple.
I mean, it's really simple,
but it's not always easy to do.
It's not always easy because you're asking people
to take their overwhelming anxiety or fatigue or pain
and think about it in a totally different way,
relate to it in a totally different way.
We're asking them to approach feelings of emotions
that are uncomfortable and giving them the container
that it's gonna be okay.
They can do it.
- Could you please explain the expression higher self?
- Higher self?
Yeah, that's the part of us
that is the part of us that is kind and caring,
courageous, confident, clear, powerful, assertive,
and loving toward ourselves.
And sometimes,
and the view is that everyone has that.
You just have to look for it.
But oftentimes, it gets covered up
because when people think about themselves,
they're thinking like,
"I'm not good enough.
I'm never good enough.
I'm a loser. I can't do anything right."
Things that they hear.
And what I'm saying to them is,
whose voice is that?
'Cause that's not your voice.
Your voice is your higher self.
'Cause you can't erase that.
You know, it's there.
You just have to look for it.
And it's a theory and it's a practise and I like it.
Most people can identify that part of themselves.
If they can't, there's more work we need to do.
But you know, like I say,
when someone's beating themselves up verbally,
usually what we're saying is that's a voice
that's like your danger signal voice.
And where did you learn that voice?
Going back in your in your life,
somebody was saying that to you.
'Cause otherwise you, kids don't learn to hate themselves
unless people are critical of them or whatever.
So we're kind of working with whose voice it is,
looking for your authentic or higher self.
Yeah. - I wonder if you're also
thinking while you're doing this
in terms of the stages of grief,
processing through anger to get in the end to acceptance
and able to move on.
- Yeah, I'm mainly looking for the stages of anger,
guilt, sadness, and compassion.
To me, those are the stages that I think about
in doing this work.
And sometimes the hurt,
when someone goes to the situation,
they think of the situation,
they may go right to anger.
Then we go anger, look for guilt,
look for hurt and sadness.
Go move through that to compassion,
letting go, action.
But when they go to the situation at the start,
if the first thing that comes up is fear,
then we're saying, "Oh yeah,
of course you're afraid of this.
This is a fearful situation.
You were made to feel afraid.
Anyone who's hurt is gonna be afraid of that."
But we're not gonna really,
that's not what we wanna focus on here
because we want to begin to change the situation
rather than relive it.
If you're going to the fear of the situation,
that's reliving it.
So we're jus kinda setting that fear aside,
saying we're not gonna relive it.
That wouldn't be good.
We're gonna change it and let's look for the feelings
and how we can change it.
And if then they go to the hurt instead of the anger,
that's fine.
You go to the hurt first.
If they go to the hurt, you follow them.
Go to the hurt.
Feeling compassion, giving compassion to themselves,
working on that.
And then eventually, I think I said yesterday,
eventually you wanna ask the question,
did that person, did you,
did your younger self deserve to be treated that way?
Chances are no.
And then you can begin to just to circle back
to get around to the resentment, annoyance, anger,
rage, fury.
And then you're going down the path again.
It's a pretty simple model.
Even I can understand it.
- In the conversation with her,
you are kind of inducing a lot.
You will say,
"You probably feel some resentment.
You probably can understand them.
You probably have compassion with them."
So is it to go faster to where you wanna go,
where you want to go,
or is it because you think the person itself
maybe can't find the words for it?
You seem to go like really.
- Yeah. Yeah.
I think over the years,
I've become more confident
and more understanding and knowing,
and kind of understanding that,
yo, you probably, I don't even hear me saying that.
I probably do. You heard it.
If I were thinking about it, I might say,
"Well, you might have these feelings,
you might have anger,
you might have resentment."
That might be a better word or better verb than,
or I don't know if it's a verb or whatever it is.
And I'm not good at grammar instead of probably,
but I don't worry too much about the words,
I guess, because really, it's all about the feeling.
And if you say something that doesn't fit with them,
they'll tell you.
They'll say, "No, that's not it.
It's this.
Then you go, oh yeah, okay, fine.
- But you do go always in the direction of anger,
guilt, hurt.
I mean, you do bring it there quite.
- Absolutely. Always looking for those emotions.
Anger, guilt, sadness, and hurt, compassion,
often in that order.
It doesn't have to be in that order.
It doesn't matter.
But I'm always aware of those four emotions.
Those are the primary emotions that people feel.
And they're all good.
You know, anger is good.
When you have anger, good,
it's justified anger.
If you have guilt,
guilt is not good if you're just being guilty
because you're angry.
So we're trying to help people let that guilt go.
But if you feel guilty like she did about her mom,
because she cares about her mom so much,
that guilt is used,
you can use that guilt to go to repair.
- So if there's the anger towards oneself,
you would bring that more towards guilt.
- Yeah. Anger.
Yeah, we're never looking for anger toward yourself.
- But it comes out, like somebody might say,
- It does come out. - "Yes, I'm angry,
but about myself. - Right, I'm angry at myself.
When people are angry at themselves,
that's actually guilt.
And if you're guilty,
then the question is,
is it deserved guilt?
Did you actually do something wrong
that you need to apologise and atone for?
Or is it the kind of guilt you're feeling
just because you're such a kind and caring person
and you feel guilty because you have some anger?
So that kind of undeserved guilt,
we're helping people to really kind of let that go.
It's not necessary.
It's not helpful.
If you have guilt because you care about the person,
You know, I just imagine yelling at somebody.
I just imagine saying,
"Mom, you should have protected me."
I feel really guilty about saying that
because I really love my mom.
Now you have the opportunity for repair.
So the guilt is, Alan Abba says, "Guilt is golden.
He always says that because you just reach some gold,
a gold that's part of repair
and repair is being able to move on.
- So in a way, the process,
when you think of one event or one situation
that you go back,
you've repaired and so on.
But what if the person has kind of been through
a whole series events in life,
and then you just take them one by one or it's--
- Yeah, you take whichever one that comes up first,
whichever one they want to do.
Often when you're starting,
you would take a smaller one,
not the biggest one.
Often you take one that's more recent
as opposed to the oldest one.
But anytime you're working on any one of those,
you're actually working on all of them,
because the emotions are the same,
the feelings are the same.
So it's helpful.
And what I do is I teach people to say,
"You can do this for yourself," right?
All the examples I gave with myself doing this work
when I got, when the hospital let me go,
when the guy yelled at me in the meeting,
when my wife called me.
All those were demonstrations of me doing this work
just for myself.
And that's what I love to teach people to do.
You can do this for yourself.
Here's the model,
here's the method, step one, step two, step three.
It's right in the book.
We did it together,
and now you did it for this situation.
Oh, you got another situation that needs doing?
Good deal with that.
You can do it or take the one that we did and do it again.
Do it a couple more times on your own
because it maybe isn't finished,
or maybe there's more anger,
or maybe there's more repair or whatever.
What's interesting is also that the idea
is not to live without any of those emotions,
or there's always gonna be situations that occur,
but it should you become more and more efficient in a way
at going through those stages or understanding yourself
and not being stuck in that process.
- Right, and not being fearful of emotions.
There's no such thing as bad emotions.
There's no such thing.
You'll see in some of the literature,
new agey literature, whatever, it's like,
"Don't have negative emotions."
I was telling somebody, I think it,
who was it I was telling yesterday?
I was at a meditation retreat a long time ago,
and there was this monk from Sri Lanka,
and he was really great, but he said,
pardon my accent, but I love doing it.
He said, "Don't think bad thoughts,
only think good thoughts."
Like, how can I only think good thoughts?
Are you nuts? That's not possible.
That's not human.
Don't have negative emotions.
All emotions are healthy and helpful.
You just have to know how to use them.
Know how to use them in this way.
Know how to use the emotions to free yourself
as opposed to imprison yourself
by holding in the emotions you can't feel.
And they're too dangerous,
you're too afraid, you're just holding them in.
It's hurting you.
Or if you let 'em out in public,
in violence, for example,
it's hurting everybody.
It's hurting the world.
- Have you ever experienced a person who is depressed
and has anxiety, panic attacks
- Yeah. - and suddenly had
one panic attack during the session?
- Yeah. - Or what will you do
if something like this happened?
- I can't recall anyone having a panic attack
when they're in the room with me.
But it certainly could occur.
You know, a panic attack is fear.
And then the fear of whatever it is that's causing the fear
in their life.
And then the feeling of being out of control,
of being anxious and very uncomfortable,
and then fear of that feeling,
which leads to a vicious cycle
and it can get worse and worse.
So, you know, what we wanna do is we wanna help people
to teach them to feel the feelings,
to be in touch with the feeling
and see if we can calm them in relation
to the feeling that's happening there.
To feel their hand, to feel their finger,
to feel their chest, to feel just kind of going into kind of
a meditative place to begin to lower the reactivity
to the physical sensations.
I remember one time I was giving a lecture,
it's actually not on topic totally, but I was going,
starting a lecture and I had the clicker right in my hand
and I was feeling good.
I like lecturing, I love, you know,
I never met a microphone I didn't like,
and I was looking down,
my hand was shaking like this, like, you know,
obviously at some level some part of my brain
was fearful and afraid and my hand was shaking
and I just had to go, oh, hello.
I said to have an interaction and a connection to my hand,
to my brain, to whatever, however you think of it.
It was funny.