Next Level Practitioner

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1 Next Level Practitioner - Biggest Mistakes Week 82 - Critical Insights - Transcript - pg. 1 Next Level Practitioner Week 82: Mistakes That Led to Breakthroughs Day 5: Critical Insights with Ruth Buczynski, PhD; Ron Siegel, PsyD; and Kelly McGonigal, PhD

2 Next Level Practitioner - Biggest Mistakes Week 82 - Critical Insights - Transcript - pg. 2 Week 82, Day 5: Ron Siegel, PsyD and Kelly McGonigal, PhD Critical Insights Dr. Buczynski: Hello everyone we re back. This is the part of the week where we re going to synthesize all the ideas from this week. I m joined, as I always am, by my two good buddies, Dr. Ron Siegel and Dr. Kelly McGonigal. We re going to start by talking about what stood out to each of you this week. Let s start with you, Kelly, and then we ll go to you, Ron. Dr. McGonigal: What stood out to me was something very specific. Stephen was describing how the contraction of muscles in the inner ear can promote social engagement and connection and safety, and how it s a biological process that people rarely explore. We re so used to talking about working with the breath and with posture, and maybe people think about working with heart rate but, oh, what an amazingly complex biological system we are! How many avenues it opens up if you think about one channel that you can work with as being the contraction of muscles in your middle ear that can be stimulated by the vocal tone of the therapist or by listening to certain types of music. My hunch is probably poetry if you listen to someone read poetry, they re probably going to use phrasing and vocal tones, and even just the words themselves might stimulate that same kind of contraction that promotes social connection and safety. Even just the words themselves might stimulate that same kind of contraction that promotes social connection and safety. Even things like massaging the face which we know can connect to the muscles of the inner ear might alter people s ability to engage and feel safe. I thought it was wonderful. Stephen is always talking about lots of avenues, but what a beautiful articulation of another channel that we can work with and think about, and how many avenues there are in the body to allow people to be in a state that promotes connection and healing. Dr. Siegel: Kelly, since, cross-culturally, spiritual traditions usually discovered these different avenues, I wonder if there are some chanting traditions or singing traditions, that if you were to somehow I don't

3 Next Level Practitioner - Biggest Mistakes Week 82 - Critical Insights - Transcript - pg. 3 know if you can do an EMG on the muscles that he s talking about see them responding. Singing together in groups promotes social connection and bonding in the same way that moving together in groups does. Dr. McGonigal: Absolutely. There s research showing that singing together in groups promotes social connection and bonding in the same way that moving together in groups does. So there really should be song therapy is that a thing? Music therapy... Dr. Siegel: There is music therapy. Dr. McGonigal: Where people get together like at a club? Dr. Buczynski: But the music therapy is, generally speaking, a listening experience. Dr. Siegel: Yes. Dr. Buczynski: I know of it from dying well, I don't know personally but we ve got the group of folks who will pair that with hospice and so forth, which I can imagine could be very profound and very soothing. But it s not the same as what Kelly s talking about. Dr. Siegel: Yes. Right. What occurred to me this week was how many of the dynamic and pioneering and helpful approaches to therapy we have in the world grew out of therapeutic mistakes. We heard about many of those this week. Many of the dynamic and helpful approaches to therapy we have in the world grew out of therapeutic mistakes. Michael Yapko saying that he developed his critique of the recovered-memory movement really after feeling badly that he had encouraged a client to find this repressed memory, which was probably at the very least suggested and encouraged by the therapist. And as a result, he later got interested in the research showing that hypnotherapy doesn t so much uncover as it does implant memories. Dick Schwartz developed internal family systems of which arguably one of the most important components is you ve got to talk to the protector parts before you go for the exile; you ve got to talk to the parts of us that don t want to get vulnerable before you go through vulnerability. And having discovered that by going through vulnerability and having it blow up in his face.

4 Next Level Practitioner - Biggest Mistakes Week 82 - Critical Insights - Transcript - pg. 4 Stan Tatkin, who s so eloquent and elegant about the way that he attends to microscopic shifts in the relationship, talking about how he came to that basically by blowing it, by being inattentive to those shifts and then wanting to attune even more. And Stephen Porges even talking about the importance of mechanisms like the one that Kelly was talking about these kind of hardwired physiological mammalian mechanisms and seeing them as mechanisms after kind of blaming his own son for being a little bit disconnected in the social and emotional realm. Honoring our mistakes not only helps us to make micro adjustments, but if we re really curious about them, it may help us to extend our whole models of psychotherapy. It s very interesting to think that and I was thinking of others, too: Jung in response to things that went wrong during Freudian therapy honoring our mistakes not only helps us to make micro adjustments, but if we re really curious about them, it may help us to extend our whole models of psychotherapy, our whole understanding of what we re doing. That would probably be more fruitful than just wallowing in a lot of self-criticism about what a bad therapist I am, which is I think our first instinct most of the time when things go wrong. Dr. McGonigal: Yes. Dr. Buczynski: Okay. Kelly; Stan Tatkin records video of his sessions in order to be able to use it as a tool to monitor his work, and also to monitor his clients experiences. If you don t want court sessions, what are some other ways to gather this kind of information? Dr. McGonigal: Yes; you know, I was thinking about this because of course we have this actual video recording, and then there s what the mind does and how it like continues to process something and it recreates something that s not exactly accurate. One of the questions that I thought might be useful is asking yourself, and also asking the client Was there anything from last week that you found yourself replaying in your mind? Is there anything that happened or that we talked about that you found yourself going back to, replaying, rehashing, working out? Try to figure out what the highlights reel is. I certainly I would do this as an instructor to try to figure out what those moments were that felt like really

5 Next Level Practitioner - Biggest Mistakes Week 82 - Critical Insights - Transcript - pg. 5 important moments, and allow myself to replay them and come back to them. But I haven t actually tried that. I m thinking now it might be useful to ask students when we have these weekly sessions, What did you come back and replay in your mind from last week? And let s come back to that again. I think what s interesting is it s almost exactly the opposite of using real video you re basically acknowledging and then exploiting the mind s tendency to recreate the experience of what happened actively, and then actually do it on purpose rather than let it happen kind of out of conscious awareness. Dr. Siegel: It s a very interesting idea because so often what therapists report is the person comes in next week and says, That was really interesting, really useful what you said last week, and the therapist has no idea what it might be, and then the process is, Oh, well tell me what stood out most for you, and getting to that material. But, it s very interesting to think of actively soliciting that. Dr. Buczynski: Yes. Okay. Ron; Stan also talked about the importance of repairing with clients immediately after a mistake or a misunderstanding. How do you suggest going about doing this, especially when emotions can start to run pretty high? Dr. Siegel: Right, well, Stan I thought made a couple of very important points regarding emotions running high and the importance of working in real time and doing things, addressing things pretty immediately. He first made the point which I started really reflecting on this that short-term memory really is very short-term. And he was saying after, oh, around 15 minutes or so, it s hard for us to recall the state of mind-body we were in It s hard for us to recall the state of mind-body we were in when we re involved in a heated interaction. when we re involved in a heated interaction. And I find that s quite true; I can have an argument or an altercation or something I think of run-of-the-mill marital arguments that I get into with my wife and at the moment it all feels very alive. If I were to go back two hours later, it s like I can t really remember why it was so important. So, part of it is it s really important to work in the short run, in part because we re made up of so many different selves, and the self that s active at a particularly intense emotional moment may not be the self that

6 Next Level Practitioner - Biggest Mistakes Week 82 - Critical Insights - Transcript - pg. 6 We don t like to think of us as having dissociative identity disorder, but we all have a bit of it, and it shows up. we re talking to a little bit while later. We don t like to think of us as having dissociative identity disorder, and we don t all fit the DSM criteria, but we all have a bit of it, and it shows up. And, as Stan pointed out, looking at the interaction including playing the video back from the point of view of a different self can actually feel shaming or humiliating because when we re not in the emotional thick of things, we kind of don t like the person who was in the emotional thick of things. But then of course we have to balance this. There s the other side of this, which is when we are in a different self-state when we re no longer so emotionally aroused and we ve got more perspective and more capacity to see things from the other person s point of view. There s certainly value to going back and looking at the thing from this new self-state because a little bit more frontal lobes are online, and a little bit more capacity for reflection is there. I think the critical observation is that short-term memory, being very short-term, is quite linked to how fluid we are as people and how differently we feel about things in different moments. Short-term memory is linked to how fluid we are as people and how differently we feel about things in different moments. Now, his second point, which was that it s really important to repair things quickly he said this almost in passing so that it doesn t go from short-term memory into long-term memory. There s so many situations that are like this, where we might have a reaction which is a kind of state reaction in the moment that, if it isn t repaired, it ll become a trait reaction. Let s say you and I are having a misunderstanding. If we just let it sit, it s going to linger as Ruth thinking, Ron s a jerk, or Ron thinking something not so wonderful about Ruth as a lingering trait whereas if we repair it quickly, it won t get encoded in that way and we ll just experience it as, Oh, yeah, we had this thing happen and this is what it was all about. I felt that that was a really important perspective as well, as to why it s helpful to work with these things as close to real time as we can.

7 Next Level Practitioner - Biggest Mistakes Week 82 - Critical Insights - Transcript - pg. 7 Dr. Buczynski: Kelly; Michael Yapko shared that he once felt that he had to unconditionally believe a client but then he came to see it as a bit more complicated after making a mistake with that client. Is there something that you once viewed as universally true and then later came to see it in a bit more of a nuanced way? Dr. McGonigal: Yes. I was thinking there are so many things that that would be true for! When I was thinking about whether I could think of an example that was related to the process of working with individuals, the one that came to my mind was about the use of a privileged environment when working with groups. This is something that I have been taught as a group facilitator and really appreciated as a group participant: the idea that in these group interactions, the privileged environment, when it s very strictly held, means that the individual participants don t interact with one another much, except in very structured ways even to A privileged environment allows the individual to really share in their own way and not feel that the point that when someone in a group is talking, rules about not having 20 people turn around and look at the person who s speaking. A privileged environment would mean you d keep your eyes to yourself and just listen with your ears, as a way of allowing the individual to really share in their own way and not feel that spotlight. And I so appreciated it as a participant and I understood the reasons for it in creating a safe space. But as I taught more and more groups, I came to realize that there was a craving for social interaction in so many of the groups that I was working with. It also was not allowing me to fully take advantage of some of the healing benefits of social interaction and the way that personal transformation is so often relational. So over the years, I started to peel away at some of that privileged environment and find ways to be looser but that still felt safe. And that has been very useful in my own teaching. Dr. Buczynski: Thank you. Ron, let s go to Stephen Porges now. He said we often make the mistake of thinking that a person is acting in a way that we don t like and that he s doing that on purpose. How can we get better at identifying the times when unwanted behavior is intended, and when it s just that person reacting to feeling unsafe? Dr. Siegel: It s such a fascinating question because it really raises what do we mean when we say somebody s doing it on purpose? We use that phrase all the time and it has a lot of emotional meaning for us, but I think examining what s

8 Next Level Practitioner - Biggest Mistakes Week 82 - Critical Insights - Transcript - pg. 8 that actually about? can be useful because it s really very close to this whole idea of what does it mean for something to be intentional? -which is quite linked to whether we blame somebody for something or not. If somebody steps on my toe inadvertently, I m going to blame them much less than if they walk up to me and stamp on my toe because they re mad at me right? So, I was very happy to hear him bring this up. When we talked about shame we talked a bit about blame, quite a few weeks ago, and I may have raised this idea of, what development step do we start to blame somebody? If a six-month-old is fussy, well, we don t blame the six-month-old; we say, Well, are they wet, or are they cold, or are they hungry? A six-year-old: Well, maybe they re having trouble at school or they need more attention or there s a new sibling but maybe they re beginning to get to be a kind of a difficult or rotten kid. And by the time they re sixteen, it s like, What a jerky teenager right? We have no problem at all seeing the behavior as being intentional or on purpose. So, in some ways, it gets to an interesting question that if a person has an inner narrative, words that say, I really am mad at you, before stomping on my toe, then we say they did it on purpose. But if it just happened reactively or inadvertently, we say, It s not on purpose. And it s interesting, you know what are we looking for? Are we looking for the narrative element? Are we looking for some other motive, like anger or fear or something like this going on? It just started making me think that when somebody has a hardwired mammalian response, like they feel threatened and they react with anger or they react with recoiling, is that on purpose or isn t it on purpose? Certainly, a sea slug (I looked this up they have 18,000 neurons; they re one of the simpler creatures that you can completely condition with learning principles reward and punishment and this kind of thing) has been taught to not like blue light, are they avoiding blue light on purpose? It s really quite, quite interesting to me. And, you know, when somebody s hyperaroused because they re threatened and they do something, do we say that When somebody s hyperaroused because they re threatened and they do something, do we say that that s on purpose or not?

9 Next Level Practitioner - Biggest Mistakes Week 82 - Critical Insights - Transcript - pg. 9 that s on purpose or not? I think it really gets into the whole question of our tendency to blame versus understand. It s very useful because I think it can help us to be compassionate toward others and realize that, Well, at some level we re all sea slugs and we do everything out of our conditioning and our DNA. Maybe the legal system has to figure out what s on purpose, but maybe we don t exactly, in the same way. Dr. Buczynski: Thank you. That s it for us for this week. Now we d like to hear from you: how are you going to use these ideas in your work and what have you tried, and how did it turn out? We d like to hear from you - and maybe take some time to go back and read other people s comments as well. We ll be back again next week. Take good care, everyone. Bye-bye.