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Tell Me About Your Tattoo with Calvin Armerding · The Trauma Therapist

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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Trauma Theriver's podcast.
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Speaker 2: My name is Guimingferson, and I interview incredible people who
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Speaker 2: share the story of how trauma has shaped their lives.
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Speaker 2: And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes
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Speaker 2: to my guest and our sponsors. So five four, three,
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Speaker 2: two and one, our folks, welcome back to the podcast.
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Speaker 2: Very excited to have as my guest today. Calvin Armadine
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Speaker 2: Calvin welcome.
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Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me.
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Speaker 1: I appreciate it awesome. So.
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Speaker 2: Calvin is a licensed professional counselor supervisor based in South Carolina,
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Speaker 2: specializing in Adlerian psychology. He regularly leads workshops, offers retreats,
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Speaker 2: and gives keynotes on topics such as grief, couples, counseling,
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Speaker 2: and trauma. His recent work explores trauma as what Alfred
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Speaker 2: Adler described as an exogenous factor, an external event that
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Speaker 2: collides with an individual's internal narrative, purpose, and movement. Calvin
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Speaker 2: teaches a model that integrates trauma with Adleyrian lifestyle investigation.
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Speaker 2: Trauma not as a fixed, defining event, but as a
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Speaker 2: disruption that can reveal or amplify a client's core convictions.
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Speaker 2: Compensations and private logic. Oh got through that all.
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Speaker 1: Right, Calvin.
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Speaker 2: Before you go in here, share with our listeners where
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Speaker 2: you're from originally and where you are currently, and then
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Speaker 2: we'll get going.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: So I grew up in the beautiful city of Albuquerque,
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Speaker 3: New Mexico. I lived there until I was about eighteen,
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Speaker 3: and then came out to South Carolina for college. Really
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Speaker 3: fell in love with just the geography, the landscape, the
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Speaker 3: environment out here. Met a lot of of course, good
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Speaker 3: people as well. Left for a few years for graduate school,
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Speaker 3: but then moved back here in twenty thirteen and have
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Speaker 3: been here since.
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Speaker 2: Okay, so let's before we get into Adler and every thing.
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Speaker 2: How did this start for you? How did your passion
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Speaker 2: the poll begin for you? Yeah?
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Speaker 3: So, honestly, when I was a very young child, I
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Speaker 3: was always fascinated by human behavior, just asking why, questions
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Speaker 3: of why people do that and what, and just always
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Speaker 3: has kind of this endless curiosity about people's behavior. And
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Speaker 3: then fast forward a little bit. I was a junior
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Speaker 3: in high school and my English teacher assigned a short
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Speaker 3: story that was a psychotherapy session, and I remember reading
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Speaker 3: that thinking to myself, there is no way people get
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Speaker 3: paid to do this. There's no way that people have
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Speaker 3: a career that's fun. You just get to sit in
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Speaker 3: a room have a helpful and interesting conversation about what
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Speaker 3: on earth, trying to make sense of what on earth
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Speaker 3: is going on in somebody's life. That was very compelling
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Speaker 3: for me, and really from that moment forward, I wanted
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Speaker 3: to be a therapist and stuck with it. And it
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Speaker 3: was exciting, you know, to go to university and to
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Speaker 3: spend my time to get course credit thinking about stuff
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Speaker 3: that I would have wanted to be thinking about anyway.
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Speaker 3: And so that's where everything started. Really was just this
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Speaker 3: fundamental curiosity in people and their behavior.
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Speaker 2: How do you well when you when you got into school,
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Speaker 2: when you started studying, of all the modalities of all
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Speaker 2: the people you could have read and studied, what spoke
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Speaker 2: to you? Who spoke to you?
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Speaker 3: What a great question. So I think I think a
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Speaker 3: few things. I was really drawn to the work of
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Speaker 3: Alfred Adler in part because I had a professor who
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Speaker 3: who is now my friend, who is a brilliant at
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Speaker 3: larian and also a really gifted educator. And so there
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Speaker 3: is a reality of of just bias when you are
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Speaker 3: around a great educator, and they have a certain perspective.
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Speaker 3: It's really hard not to be won over by that perspective.
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Speaker 3: But then I would say, also within Adler's theory, there
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Speaker 3: is a lot that speaks to me personally, that resonates
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Speaker 3: with my story, that helps me to make sense of myself.
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Speaker 3: I think that really really helped me be drawn to that.
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Speaker 3: And then I would say that also the work of
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Speaker 3: Victor Frankel was really compelling to me. Will probably end
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Speaker 3: up talking about this a bit today in our conversation.
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Speaker 3: There's a lot of overlap between Frankel and Adler's work.
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Speaker 3: They were colleagues in Vienna for a time and certainly
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Speaker 3: knew each other. And then I just want to mention
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Speaker 3: one other modality, and that is Fritz Pearl's and his
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Speaker 3: gestalt work. I always found that it was really compelling
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Speaker 3: to see how much he engaged the body and in
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Speaker 3: metaphor and in things that kind of escaped rationality and logic.
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Speaker 3: No disrespect to the cognitive behavioral folks out there, but
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Speaker 3: I never found that stuff particularly compelling to me personally.
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Speaker 3: I'm glad that it works for other people, but yeah.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So all right, let's get let's get into Adler,
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Speaker 2: give us a little primmer on Adlerian psychology.
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Speaker 3: Sure, so Adler, you know he was a He also
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Speaker 3: was a colleague of Freud's in Vienna and was a
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Speaker 3: part of his psychoanalytics society for a time as a
5:21
Speaker 3: whole bunch of drama behind that, but Adler eventually ended
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Speaker 3: up going his own way. It was a big split
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Speaker 3: between the two of them, and so much of that
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Speaker 3: had to do with the fact that Adler wanted to
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Speaker 3: look past the sexual dynamics between people, not that he
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Speaker 3: diminished the importance of sexuality, but that he wanted to
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Speaker 3: look past that and he understood people really in terms
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Speaker 3: of a state of movement. There's something called the law
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Speaker 3: of movement in Adlerian thinking, that people are always moving
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Speaker 3: away from a a felt inferiority, or sometimes that we
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Speaker 3: refer to it as a felt minus and towards a
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Speaker 3: felt plus. And those are two things that we construct,
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Speaker 3: and this is certainly an idea of Addlers, that we
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Speaker 3: construct our sense of reality. We develop it. It's a
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Speaker 3: very phenomenological approach to understanding people. And so we develop
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Speaker 3: for ourselves a goal and that felt plus something where
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Speaker 3: we say that is how I want life to be,
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Speaker 3: and that we also develop a strategy for trying to
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Speaker 3: reach that goal, and that those two things together, a
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Speaker 3: goal and a strategy for reaching that goal, become what
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Speaker 3: he called a lifestyle, a style of living. And so
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Speaker 3: then our symptoms and our strengths, and our behavior and
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Speaker 3: our emotions and all of those, all these little facets
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Speaker 3: of who we are in our experience of life, fit
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Speaker 3: inside that lifestyle. There are predictable results of our goal
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Speaker 3: that we have set out in front of us, in
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Speaker 3: the strategy that we've developed in order to reach it.
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Speaker 3: That's a very quick snapshot of a very complex theory.
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Speaker 3: That's my two minute version, and.
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Speaker 2: It's a it's a very neat description.
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Speaker 1: Belus.
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Speaker 2: I'm imagining that someone's goal and how they get there
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Speaker 2: can often be get odds. Hence all of our little
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Speaker 2: idiosyncrasies and symptoms, et cetera, et cetera.
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Speaker 1: So what speaks to you in terms of the work
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Speaker 1: that you do?
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Speaker 2: What what's your passionate.
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Speaker 1: About all this?
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Speaker 3: Well? I think that one of the hard things about
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Speaker 3: life is that we get locked into a particular way
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Speaker 3: of perceiving things. And I think that you know, certainly
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Speaker 3: this has been true for me personally, and then I've
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Speaker 3: watched it be true for my clients as well. When
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Speaker 3: we are able to see that we have to some
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Speaker 3: degree the keys to the all the locks that keep
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Speaker 3: us inside of a certain kind of experien that is
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Speaker 3: so deeply empowering. And it's heavy too, because there's responsibility
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Speaker 3: that comes along with that power. But it is so
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Speaker 3: cool to watch folks as we talk through their story
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Speaker 3: and their experiences, help them see that oh, my gosh,
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Speaker 3: this happened, and that you can't change, but you can
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Speaker 3: change the meaning that you give to what happened. And
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Speaker 3: we can look at it from this angle, not even
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Speaker 3: in a cheery or overly positive way. I'm not trying
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Speaker 3: to sew in cheap silver linings into people's stories, but
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Speaker 3: to see it from a different angle such that you
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Speaker 3: are aware that, oh, I have more choices than what
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Speaker 3: I thought I had. And I think that's a really
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Speaker 3: special thing to watch. People sometimes ask I don't know
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Speaker 3: if you've had this experience before, But people say, oh,
8:52
Speaker 3: what do you do? And I say, oh, I'm a
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Speaker 3: mental health counselor offer psychotherapy. They say, oh, that must
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Speaker 3: be so hard, and it is hard, and people get better,
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Speaker 3: and that is that it is that really does get
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Speaker 3: me going to watch people. I mean, it's an inspiring
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Speaker 3: thing to watch, for one, but then also to be
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Speaker 3: a part of it, and even sometimes a kind of
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Speaker 3: important part, I think is a really special experience and
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Speaker 3: and livens me up.
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Speaker 2: In the bio it I read that your model integrates
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Speaker 2: trauma with uh AT therin lifetile investigation, framing trauma not
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Speaker 2: as a fixed, defining event, but at a disruption that
9:41
Speaker 2: can reveal or amplify a client's core convictions, compensations, and
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Speaker 2: private logic. Let's get if let's let's get if we
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Speaker 2: can a little more specific. Obviously we're not using names,
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Speaker 2: but let's dial this and give us an example of
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Speaker 2: what this might look like. Granted everyone's different, but how
10:01
Speaker 2: much look.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So I'll give you actually kind of a
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Speaker 3: classic example of this. So I was working at several
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Speaker 3: years ago. I worked for the Department of Mental at
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Speaker 3: the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, and I had
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Speaker 3: these two clients start therapy with me, probably within weeks
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Speaker 3: of each other. Eerily similar cases in many kinds of ways.
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Speaker 3: Came from very similar family backgrounds, similar place in their
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Speaker 3: birth order, similar socio economic status, They even kind of
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Speaker 3: looked the same, and they just experienced nearly similar sexual assaults.
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Speaker 3: I mean, the stories were the similarities were just uncanny.
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Speaker 3: And but what I noticed is that the symptomology of
10:47
Speaker 3: you know, I think sometimes we talk about PTSD is
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Speaker 3: if it's this monolithic thing, and of course it's not.
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Speaker 3: You know, it can look very very differently from person
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Speaker 3: to person. What PTSD is yet meet certain criteria, but
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Speaker 3: it can have a different kind of flavor. So one
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Speaker 3: client was extremely angry and had been getting in trouble
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Speaker 3: for getting in fights and yelling and becoming aggressive with people.
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Speaker 3: The other person had become intensely sexually promiscuous, and this
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Speaker 3: was a kind of the primary symptom that was sitting
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Speaker 3: way out in front is this kind of compulsive engagement
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Speaker 3: and really risky sexual behavior. So we break this down
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Speaker 3: and fundamentally, they had given two very different meanings to
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Speaker 3: the assaults. One person had given this meaning of there
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Speaker 3: are bad people out there and we need to protect
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Speaker 3: the good people from the bad people. And so all
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Speaker 3: these aggressive instances, all this conflict that this client was
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Speaker 3: getting into, what would happen is that they would get
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Speaker 3: triggered in this way where there was some kind of
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Speaker 3: cue that said, oh, we've got a bad person trying
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Speaker 3: to do something to a good person, and somebody has
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Speaker 3: to protect and that's going to be me. So they
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Speaker 3: rise up, they call upon their anger to overpower this person.
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Speaker 3: And so that was a meaning that they gave. This
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Speaker 3: other person gave this meaning of there is great power
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Speaker 3: in the person who initiates. They have incredible whoever initiates
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Speaker 3: has the power in the situation. This of course mirrored
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Speaker 3: some of the story of the sexual assault, and so
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Speaker 3: there was this thing of I can have sexual power
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Speaker 3: if I'm always the one choosing to engage sexually, and
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Speaker 3: so I'm going to do that as often as i can,
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Speaker 3: with whomever I can, in whatever instance I can. I
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Speaker 3: Am going to claim my sexual power. And so then
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Speaker 3: you look a little bit further, and what you find
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Speaker 3: out is that those ideas got mapped onto the trauma
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Speaker 3: because they were already there. These were already ideas is
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Speaker 3: that these people had in their lives from early early
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Speaker 3: childhood experiences, family system kinds of stuff. All of that.
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Speaker 3: It's not to say that the trauma didn't matter. Of course,
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Speaker 3: it had this incredibly powerful impact on them, and there
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Speaker 3: was a lot of work to be done there, but
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Speaker 3: it mirrored how they already saw the world and how
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Speaker 3: they were choosing to make their way through the world,
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Speaker 3: and that called upon certain kinds of symptomology, certain kind
13:24
Speaker 3: of a flavor of a diagnosis, if that makes sense.
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Speaker 2: So, now during this time were you approached were you
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Speaker 2: utilizing a Larrian psychology?
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Speaker 1: I was, yeah, yeah, okay.
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Speaker 2: So how are you thinking about this within that framework? Yeah?
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Speaker 3: I mean I think part of what is really fun
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Speaker 3: for me about an ad learn approaches that it gets
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Speaker 3: to be very creative and so yeah, okay, I can
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Speaker 3: diagnose PTSD certainly, and that's that's the least interesting part
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Speaker 3: of my work to me. Now I get to let's
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Speaker 3: go past that and to say, well, what does this
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Speaker 3: look like and what are the symptoms and what are
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Speaker 3: the function what are the purpose of those symptoms for
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Speaker 3: this person as they're trying to, you know, trying to
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Speaker 3: move through life, try to make life go well and
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Speaker 3: to keep it from going terribly. And so I think
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Speaker 3: so much of how I was thinking about it is
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Speaker 3: a much more metaphorical way of just saying what does
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Speaker 3: it Okay, you snuck out of your house for the
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Speaker 3: third time this week to go have sex with this
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Speaker 3: guy that you don't know.
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Speaker 1: What was it?
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Speaker 3: What was that about for you? You know, what does
14:45
Speaker 3: that mean to you? What did you feel like as
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Speaker 3: you're making this choice to do this? What felt good
14:52
Speaker 3: about it? What didn't feel good about it? Rather than
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Speaker 3: trying to say, oh, okay, well, this is yet another
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Speaker 3: symptom that I can log in my book to go
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Speaker 3: a little bit deeper, to say, what's the function, what
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Speaker 3: is the purpose, what is the usefulness? These are all
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Speaker 3: profoundly at Larrying ideas. We want to understand symptoms as solutions,
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Speaker 3: not as diseases, and that to me, they've become a
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Speaker 3: lot more interesting, and also think it really helps me
15:18
Speaker 3: to be a little bit less judgmental. Where there just
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Speaker 3: wasn't an inkling of oh my gosh, you know, look
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Speaker 3: at the sexual behavior, It just it just wasn't there
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Speaker 3: because it was so much It was so much more
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Speaker 3: interesting to me than that. So I think that's kind
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Speaker 3: of how I how I was handling those cases is
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Speaker 3: looking for the purpose of the symptoms that were presenting.
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Speaker 2: And and if we kind of follow that thread further,
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Speaker 2: how did that person respond what? How where does that go?
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Speaker 2: Once you discover that once that purpose, once that person
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Speaker 2: maybe they don't even know, but share with us how
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Speaker 2: that unfolded.
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Speaker 3: So I think a few things. So at Larian's we
16:05
Speaker 3: do we have these methods for investigating the lifestyle, and
16:09
Speaker 3: one of those would be we asked people about their
16:11
Speaker 3: earliest recollections of life. There's a really rich literature out
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Speaker 3: there in the Adlerian world about how to work with
16:19
Speaker 3: early what we call early recollections. We'll also ask people
16:23
Speaker 3: about their family of origin. Adler called this working discovering
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Speaker 3: the family constellation. We have a few other methods as well,
16:32
Speaker 3: but those were our family constellation and early recollections. Those
16:35
Speaker 3: are kind of our our go to's. And part of
16:40
Speaker 3: what was nice for my clients about this is that
16:43
Speaker 3: rather than asking them about the trauma, I'm asking them about,
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Speaker 3: Oh yeah, tell me about that time you were three
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Speaker 3: and you're riding around in your backyard with your bike.
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Speaker 3: By the way, I'm pulling this out of the air,
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Speaker 3: I don't remember what the early recollections were, but so
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Speaker 3: I'm not taking it head on. But then what's cool
16:58
Speaker 3: is that we're talking about that memory of them riding
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Speaker 3: around in the backyard on their bike and we're talking
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Speaker 3: about the trauma because the lifestyle is consistent both in
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Speaker 3: that early recollection and then that is exactly what maps
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Speaker 3: onto the trauma. So there was this I think relief
17:15
Speaker 3: of not having to come to session every single day
17:19
Speaker 3: and just hammer out this intense trauma narrative. We did
17:23
Speaker 3: that work too, but it wasn't there wasn't this pressure
17:26
Speaker 3: to do that. I also think that they liked seeing
17:29
Speaker 3: a through line and to understand.
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Speaker 1: Let me just eyelash in my eye. I just want to.
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Speaker 3: Oh no, yeah, okay, acknowledge that.
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Speaker 1: So I don't think, all right, go ahead, I'm sorry.
17:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I think they appreciated just seeing a through
17:49
Speaker 3: line where oh, I can make sense of this now,
17:52
Speaker 3: I can make sense of how I experienced this because
17:56
Speaker 3: I see that this. Wouldn't it make sense that I
17:58
Speaker 3: experienced it that way? And wouldn't it make sense that
18:01
Speaker 3: I respond in this way with my anger or with
18:04
Speaker 3: all this sexual initiative, And so it destigmatized I think
18:09
Speaker 3: a fair bit. And then also I think it was
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Speaker 3: a lot more fun then my client's thought therapy was
18:16
Speaker 3: going to be of just oh, I'm gonna have to
18:17
Speaker 3: go in and talk about this horrible, horrible thing, and
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Speaker 3: instead it was this. We got to smile and chuckle
18:24
Speaker 3: and laugh, and of course we had our cries too,
18:27
Speaker 3: but there was this real sense of discovery and fun
18:31
Speaker 3: that went along with it as well.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean what really, I guess, I don't know
18:38
Speaker 2: want to say excites me about that, But that approach
18:43
Speaker 2: and the destigmatization, the ability to sit there as I'm
18:51
Speaker 2: sure you did, with a certain amount of presence and
18:56
Speaker 2: willingness to meet that client where they're at within within
19:01
Speaker 2: the wake of this circumstance is very powerful and can
19:04
Speaker 2: be very empowering for the client. Right they're meeting you,
19:08
Speaker 2: they're seeing you, they're with you. Oh my god. This
19:11
Speaker 2: person can can hold the space in a sense and
19:19
Speaker 2: to provide a forum for that client to hopefully discover
19:27
Speaker 2: and recognize, oh my god, this is how I got
19:32
Speaker 2: to this place.
19:33
Speaker 1: You know.
19:36
Speaker 2: That's a very I think powerful way of working with trauma.
19:45
Speaker 1: Yeah.
19:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have this rule, and this is a rule
19:49
Speaker 3: for me, not for my clients. But unless there is
19:54
Speaker 3: a very significant safety concern in which case will go
19:57
Speaker 3: down a different route, I ever want to try to
20:01
Speaker 3: get rid of a symptom until I can until it
20:05
Speaker 3: makes sense to me, and I think, yeah, so like
20:11
Speaker 3: let's say, okay, let's even say that we've got some
20:16
Speaker 3: I don't know, sixteen year old kid who's who's smoking
20:19
Speaker 3: weed all the time, rather than getting him in here
20:23
Speaker 3: and saying, okay, you got to stop, you gotta stop smoking,
20:26
Speaker 3: you know, how can we get you to stop smoking?
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Speaker 3: And coming up with strategy after strategy after strategy to say,
20:32
Speaker 3: I don't know, like, let's sort out how it's working
20:35
Speaker 3: for you first, and then maybe let's sort out what
20:39
Speaker 3: we want to do about that. It's not that I
20:40
Speaker 3: want to encourage, you know, maladaptive behavior, but I want
20:45
Speaker 3: it's it's maladaptive behavior, not non adaptive behavior, and so
20:50
Speaker 3: I want to understand in what way is this adaptive?
20:53
Speaker 3: And that also allows me to really target my treatment interventions.
20:58
Speaker 1: You know, it was hold there for so.
21:01
Speaker 2: They might answer what that person might say.
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Speaker 3: What, well, yeah, let's say that they say, oh my gosh,
21:08
Speaker 3: well I'm just so stressed and so when I smoke,
21:11
Speaker 3: I feel so calm. Okay, well now I'm now we've
21:14
Speaker 3: got coping.
21:15
Speaker 1: Skills to do.
21:16
Speaker 3: Or it's well I'm not going to be the only
21:19
Speaker 3: person who's who's not doing this and all my friends.
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Speaker 3: This is what it means to connect with my friends. Okay, well,
21:26
Speaker 3: now we're going to take a completely different approach. I
21:28
Speaker 3: can hammer away at let's you know, reduce your stress
21:31
Speaker 3: with coping skills, and that's not speaking to what the
21:36
Speaker 3: the marijuana is doing for them. The marijuana is this
21:39
Speaker 3: connecting tool for them, and Okay, maybe we can help
21:42
Speaker 3: them find a different connecting tool or understand some of
21:45
Speaker 3: the things about it, but to understand the usefulness that
21:50
Speaker 3: helps me to know how I can encourage them and
21:54
Speaker 3: where they're really struggling, where they're discouraged.
21:59
Speaker 2: Kind Of going back to your bio, because I found
22:02
Speaker 2: it very interesting how.
22:05
Speaker 1: You well in the bio it was at Larry and.
22:09
Speaker 2: Lifestyle investigating fram me trauma not as a fixed, defining event,
22:12
Speaker 2: but as a disruption that can reveal or amplify.
22:19
Speaker 1: Talk more about that.
22:22
Speaker 3: So I'm thinking about my friend Jim Bidter, who, as
22:28
Speaker 3: he trained me in many ways in at Larry and Psychology,
22:32
Speaker 3: I'm thankful to kind of a friend now. He told
22:34
Speaker 3: me a fascinating story about learning that he was adopted,
22:38
Speaker 3: which I think for many people can really constitute a
22:41
Speaker 3: trauma for them of just understanding whoa nothing is what
22:48
Speaker 3: I thought it was, and what does this mean about
22:50
Speaker 3: me and my belonging and whatever. Well, he tells the
22:54
Speaker 3: story that he was I don't know, six years old,
22:56
Speaker 3: and his mother calls more and says, okay, well, Jimmy,
22:58
Speaker 3: it's time for us to tell you something. We think
23:01
Speaker 3: you're old enough to know. You know how you know
23:05
Speaker 3: your siblings they came.
23:06
Speaker 1: Out of me.
23:07
Speaker 3: Well, you didn't come out of me. We adopted you.
23:10
Speaker 3: And the meaning that he gave to that was well,
23:14
Speaker 3: isn't that awesome? She has no choice to love my siblings,
23:19
Speaker 3: but she chose to love me. Now, that is so?
23:23
Speaker 3: I think that's that illustrates the point so dramatically, you know,
23:28
Speaker 3: I mean, and jim is a very positive kind of person,
23:31
Speaker 3: as you might imagine from that story. But we sometimes
23:35
Speaker 3: we talk about things in this kind of deterministic way
23:38
Speaker 3: of well, this happens, and that means this to someone,
23:43
Speaker 3: and we don't know that. What I want to know
23:45
Speaker 3: if somebody says, oh, I was sexually assaulted, Okay, what
23:48
Speaker 3: did that? I'm not going to ask it this way
23:51
Speaker 3: to them, but I want to know what did that
23:53
Speaker 3: mean to them? That could mean, Wow, I'm powerless. It
23:57
Speaker 3: could mean, oh I'm bad. It could mean, oh I'm defiled.
24:02
Speaker 3: It could mean aren't other people bad? It could mean
24:05
Speaker 3: aren't men bad? It could it could mean all of
24:08
Speaker 3: these different things. And the mean those meanings that we
24:12
Speaker 3: give that really is what's going to frame our experience
24:15
Speaker 3: of life and how we're going to relate to other
24:17
Speaker 3: people and the kinds of emotions that we're going to
24:20
Speaker 3: call upon to safeguard. So that's I guess. What I
24:24
Speaker 3: mean is that there is this meaning, this kind of
24:26
Speaker 3: existential and here's the intersection with Frankel, I think is
24:30
Speaker 3: that there's this existential peace to our experience where yeah,
24:33
Speaker 3: there's objectively what happens, but we to put it in
24:36
Speaker 3: Adther's language, we self determine by the meaning that we
24:40
Speaker 3: give to our experiences.
24:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that that's really powerful and it's also
24:49
Speaker 2: very inspiring to me. I'm curious, though, Calvin. You know,
24:54
Speaker 2: you sit here and you're speaking as someone will a
25:00
Speaker 2: lot of experience with a lot of uh what seasoned clinician.
25:10
Speaker 1: My question is, did you just pop out like this?
25:14
Speaker 1: Did you just jump on. Did you just jump.
25:17
Speaker 2: On the therapy wag the therapy horse, let's go.
25:22
Speaker 1: How did you.
25:24
Speaker 2: I don't want to say, buy into this? How were
25:27
Speaker 2: you able to to utilize this theory, this knowledge.
25:34
Speaker 1: In your work?
25:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think a few things. One I do, I
25:41
Speaker 3: did pop out of the womb with a deep interest
25:46
Speaker 3: and curiosity. And I think if if I could bottle
25:51
Speaker 3: one characteristic that I think really helps people to do
25:54
Speaker 3: good psychotherapeutic work, it would be curiosity. So I will
25:58
Speaker 3: say I do think I popped out of the one
26:00
Speaker 3: with that, but so many of these other things. I
26:05
Speaker 3: was trained by true masters. And what I mean by
26:10
Speaker 3: training and what I mean I want to say what
26:12
Speaker 3: I mean by training, and I want to say what
26:13
Speaker 3: I mean by masters. Let's start with masters. I think
26:17
Speaker 3: people who really on a foundational level understand that they
26:23
Speaker 3: don't know. They don't just know what to do. They
26:26
Speaker 3: know why to do those things? As a clinician. Why
26:31
Speaker 3: to shut your mouth, why to open your mouth and
26:33
Speaker 3: say something? Why to confront? Why not to confront? Why
26:38
Speaker 3: to ask this question as opposed to this one? Why
26:41
Speaker 3: to phrase it in this way? Why to sit in
26:42
Speaker 3: a certain posture? All those things I think that when
26:46
Speaker 3: people don't just know what to do, they're not just
26:49
Speaker 3: an assemblage of skills, but they they have an awareness
26:54
Speaker 3: of what it is actually that they're doing when they
26:57
Speaker 3: use those skills. I think that learning from people who
27:01
Speaker 3: knew that stuff so well was a really big help
27:05
Speaker 3: to me and encourage me to do the same. And
27:07
Speaker 3: then in terms of training, I do want to say
27:09
Speaker 3: one other thing here that one thing that Edlarian's do well,
27:13
Speaker 3: and there are many things that we don't, by the way,
27:15
Speaker 3: but one of the things that we do really well
27:17
Speaker 3: is that when we teach, we demonstrate. So then by
27:24
Speaker 3: the time that I was I don't know, five years
27:27
Speaker 3: into practicing, I had seen true masters do work in
27:33
Speaker 3: front of me probably thirty five times, and like for
27:37
Speaker 3: extended period of time, I'd watched that happen, not seeing
27:40
Speaker 3: them flip through a PowerPoint telling me a story about
27:43
Speaker 3: doing it, but doing it in front of me. And
27:47
Speaker 3: I think that those things dramatically accelerated my ability to
27:53
Speaker 3: help other people because I didn't just I wasn't trying
27:55
Speaker 3: to remember, oh, what was that third bullet point on
27:57
Speaker 3: that slide, because I had, oh, God, bodily experience this stuff.
28:02
Speaker 2: You know.
28:03
Speaker 3: I think that's really important.
28:05
Speaker 2: I love that, And I could as you're speaking and
28:09
Speaker 2: sharing about that, I could think back to moments. Can
28:12
Speaker 2: you share one or two of those moments? I mean,
28:15
Speaker 2: there's got to be some indelibly placed.
28:19
Speaker 1: In your mind. We're like, oh my god, you go
28:21
Speaker 1: whoa see me? Give us something?
28:24
Speaker 2: Well.
28:25
Speaker 3: I remember I volunteered for a demonstration when I was
28:29
Speaker 3: in a workshop with this amazing at larian therapist named
28:32
Speaker 3: Wes Winet. He's from Nebraska. And I get up there
28:36
Speaker 3: and he could have asked me anything, but he saw
28:38
Speaker 3: that I had this little tattoo and he said, well,
28:40
Speaker 3: tell me about your tattoo. So I tell him, and
28:43
Speaker 3: it's from this John Steinbeck book. And I said, oh yeah,
28:45
Speaker 3: and I love John Steinbeck. He's my favorite author. Well, Cavin,
28:49
Speaker 3: what do you like about John Steinbeck? So I went
28:51
Speaker 3: on this paragraph saying a few things, but it basically
28:55
Speaker 3: boiled down to this that I really do feel that
28:57
Speaker 3: Steinbeck has an immense amount of empathy for his characters,
29:04
Speaker 3: including the villains. And so Wes looks back at me,
29:08
Speaker 3: He takes a moment, looks down, looks back up, and
29:10
Speaker 3: he says, Calvin, I think if you were to wear
29:14
Speaker 3: a shirt that would tell us all something really accurate
29:17
Speaker 3: about yourself. It would say I have empathy for all characters.
29:23
Speaker 3: And I remember in that moment just feeling like, there
29:27
Speaker 3: is no way that this guy understands me that well.
29:31
Speaker 3: When he's asked me all of three questions and it
29:34
Speaker 3: was so deeply rooted in what I was, what I
29:38
Speaker 3: had volunteered to go and talk with him about. So
29:42
Speaker 3: then he does this incredible job of connecting that to
29:45
Speaker 3: this challenge that I'm facing, And I thought to myself,
29:49
Speaker 3: you know, it's really not that complicated if you understand
29:54
Speaker 3: what to listen for when somebody talks.
29:57
Speaker 2: That's such a great example, right, because it's this the
30:00
Speaker 2: way you described that. He could have gone any direction, right,
30:06
Speaker 2: could have asked you about your shirt, could have asked
30:08
Speaker 2: you about whatever.
30:09
Speaker 1: But he asked you about your tea too. For a reason.
30:13
Speaker 1: That's so awesome. Oh my god, that that is amazing.
30:18
Speaker 2: It's it's Do you have any idea of the state
30:27
Speaker 2: of education now for therapists? Uh?
30:34
Speaker 3: Well I don't. I don't want to be too dour,
30:37
Speaker 3: but yes, unfortunately, yes, I do some supervision for counselors
30:44
Speaker 3: and training and I'm I love my supervisors, and also
30:48
Speaker 3: sometimes when they come to me and we're doing some
30:52
Speaker 3: supervisory work, I'm recognizing how it's not even that I'm
30:57
Speaker 3: trying to cast dispersions on their training programs, but there's
31:00
Speaker 3: a lot of stuff that they never learned that's really
31:04
Speaker 3: important stuff. I mean to some degrees, like really basic stuff.
31:07
Speaker 3: So it can get it can feel a little discouraging sometimes.
31:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, Uh, let me just remind everyone. I'm
31:15
Speaker 2: speaking with Calvin Armandine Calvin. What's the best way for
31:19
Speaker 2: people to reach out learn more about incredible work you're doing.
31:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, the best way is Travelers rest Counseling dot com
31:28
Speaker 3: and if there's anybody in the UK listening, that's Travelers
31:31
Speaker 3: with one L and Counseling with one L. And on
31:36
Speaker 3: that page, of course, it's like a normal private practice
31:40
Speaker 3: website and s there's stuff about how to reach out
31:41
Speaker 3: for therapy, but also there's a resources page that will
31:44
Speaker 3: connect you to all kinds of things. There's books, there's
31:47
Speaker 3: an online program that I developed for UH self discovery
31:52
Speaker 3: and self empowerment. There's a training fellowship that we've established
31:57
Speaker 3: my business partner and I here in South Carolina, and
32:00
Speaker 3: so I mean there's just a whole bunch of stuff there.
32:02
Speaker 3: So that resources page at Travelersrestcounseling.
32:05
Speaker 1: Dot com and that.
32:08
Speaker 2: Training fellowship, what does that look like?
32:10
Speaker 1: What is that?
32:12
Speaker 2: Yeah?
32:13
Speaker 3: So what we do we do in person workshops. We'll
32:17
Speaker 3: be starting a new cohort in twenty twenty six. It
32:21
Speaker 3: will involve a few training residencies. Will be three training
32:24
Speaker 3: residencies where just clinicians will come together, will connect as
32:30
Speaker 3: just as human beings. But then also it's a systematic
32:34
Speaker 3: procedural training in at larian psychology. Again very demonstration based,
32:38
Speaker 3: so it will not be lecture. It's highly experiential. And
32:42
Speaker 3: then we have some curated reading and writing assignments in
32:45
Speaker 3: between those residencies that are built for people who are
32:48
Speaker 3: working full time, very low pressure, but just to make
32:50
Speaker 3: sure that our minds are still working.
32:53
Speaker 2: Awesome, awesome, Okay, we'll have that linked up here the
32:55
Speaker 2: show notes page at the Trauma Therapist podcast dot com. Kevin, awesome,
33:02
Speaker 2: super inspiring.
33:03
Speaker 1: Love talking with you. I appreciate you.
33:05
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation today.
33:09
Speaker 1: All right, we'll be in touch to take care alright,
33:11
Speaker 1: bye now