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Ep. 5: Stages, Pages, and Sessions: My Journey to a Therapy Career · Wellness in Today's World

• 0:06
  Welcome to Wellness in Today's World with Dr.
• 0:09
  Debra Kawahara, a space where we discuss the latest insights in psychology, wellness, and everything in between.
• 0:17
  Hello, I'm Dr.
• 0:17
  Debra Kawahara.
• 0:19
  Thank you for joining me today.
• 0:21
  Today's conversation is a really special one, personal, philosophical, and deeply human.
• 0:27
  I'm joined by Ben Yalom, doctor almost, right?
• 0:31
  Psychotherapist, theater maker, and writer.
• 0:34
  He practices narrative and existential therapy, focusing on aligning one's values with one's way of living and unlocking creative approaches to work and life.
• 0:47
  Prior to his PhD work in marriage and family therapy, Ben was the visionary force behind Fool's Fury, an influential experimental theater group,
• 0:59
  which helped transform San Francisco's performing arts scene between 1998 and 2020.
• 1:06
  He is a longtime writing collaborator with his father, famed psychotherapist Irvin D.
• 1:12
  Yalom.
• 1:13
  Together, they recently wrote Hour of the Heart.
• 1:16
  Welcome, Ben!
• 1:17
  It is such a pleasure to talk to you today.
• 1:19
  I'm so happy to be here speaking with you.
• 1:21
  Wonderful.
• 1:22
  Well, what I'd like to do is start off talking about the book and you co-authoring Hour of the Heart with your father.
• 1:30
  Describe to me kind of how the book came to be, you know, what was the process of you and your father kind of co-constructing this journey together?
• 1:42
  Sure, thank you for asking.
• 1:44
  The story briefly is that my father, as he was getting into what he likes to call "seriously old age," that is his late 80s, he started to notice that his memory was
• 1:58
  beginning to slip, as is pretty normal for people in these very ripe years.
• 2:04
  But at a certain point, he felt that he could not maintain ethically seeing therapy patients for extended periods of time.
• 2:13
  He just simply couldn't remember all the details that we, as therapists, carry in our minds from week to week.
• 2:19
  Things about maybe a patient's past or a patient's history and desires, but also
• 2:28
  what happened in last week's session?
• 2:29
  What were the moments that we shared?
• 2:31
  Or what happened a couple of sessions ago?
• 2:33
  So faced with this, rather than sort of call it a day and turn in his badge and hang up his shingle, as he has often said, he decided to run a little experiment that would be
• 2:45
  helpful to him and hopefully helpful to the field as well, which was to begin.
• 2:50
  doing sessions, single sessions with patients, consultations in which people could come to him, present what was going on for them, have some sort of therapeutic experience, but not
• 3:04
  with the intent that this single hour would be a full course of therapy for anyone.
• 3:09
  He's always been a very philosophical therapist and one who
• 3:14
  doesn't really believe in short-term quick fixes.
• 3:17
  So this was so foreign to his generally his way of doing therapy, but he felt that he still had a lot to offer.
• 3:25
  And he also, I think, would freely admit that he was fearful of the identity question of who would he be if he were not a therapist.
• 3:34
  So this experiment served purposes both for
• 3:38
  the potential patients or consultees and for him.
• 3:41
  And he didn't know how this would go.
• 3:43
  It really was an experiment.
• 3:45
  But throughout his career, he has always kept notes on the most interesting or helpful clients, patients, or at least the ones for whom he thought the stories of how he worked
• 3:57
  with them might be helpful for other therapists in training
• 4:01
  or other humans in training.
• 4:02
  And this is where many of his books in the past have come from, has been writing up these stories heavily disguised, but in a way that is intended to be what he calls "teaching
• 4:13
  stories." So he went ahead and did this for a period of three years.
• 4:17
  He saw about 300 consultees, for lack of a better word,
• 4:22
  and he wrote up about 40 or 50 of them into very short stories.
• 4:26
  The ones that were the most compelling in terms of the narrative and that he thought might offer something to teach.
• 4:39
  I got involved at this point because what happened, both maybe sad and also serendipitous, is that his memory deterioration had continued to the point that when he was around 90, he
• 4:51
  thought, "Well, I need to stop this experiment as well." And he had this stack of stories, somewhere between 40 and 50 stories
• 5:01
  of a manuscript, and he gave them to his agent and his editor, who read them.
• 5:06
  The problem was, there were some very beautiful gems and narratives within that, but as a book, it just didn't hold together.
• 5:13
  And so logically the next step would be weaving thoughts and ideas about therapy and about life through
• 5:20
  many of these stories, but he was no longer in a place where he could do that in terms of his memory.
• 5:25
  He just couldn't hold 20, 30, 40 stories in his mind at one time.
• 5:30
  So at that point, he and I sat down and said, well, you know, the best way to finish this book would be for me to come in and work on it with him.
• 5:39
  We have done
• 5:40
  a decent amount of work together in the past, but usually with me in the role of editor, not in the role of author.
• 5:46
  So I know his work very well.
• 5:48
  I've given him countless hours of feedback and suggestions.
• 5:53
  And in a couple of cases, we have actually co-written things in the past.
• 5:57
  We did an article, a column for a magazine for several years.
• 6:01
  It was a very long time ago.
• 6:02
  In any case, what transpired was that I took over
• 6:06
  the big stack of stories and over the course of a couple of years, wove those into a book of stories that also told the story of his aging and gave all the sort of theoretical
• 6:18
  background of how he's doing therapy, the questions he's asking of himself and of the patients in the moment, and also questions he's asking about the field.
• 6:27
  So in a sense, as time went on, more and more of it was handed over to me.
• 6:31
  He and I would get together on a call like this once a week or maybe once every two weeks towards the end and go over ideas.
• 6:38
  And so I got to learn from him while we were finishing the manuscript.
• 6:43
  You know, as you were talking, what came to my mind is how, you know, because you came in afterwards after he wrote all the stories.
• 6:52
  And I know when you're writing things, it's like, how do you make it so it sounds fluid, so that the voice stays there, and that it's not disjointed?
• 7:04
  So what was that process for you that
• 7:07
  you know, keeping the voice of your father, but also weaving all of it together?
• 7:12
  I guess I see you as this craftsman, kind of putting this all together, but also not losing kind of the spirit of your dad, you know, as he was rewriting these experiences
• 7:26
  that he had.
• 7:27
  Yeah, well, a couple of thoughts come to mind.
• 7:29
  One, I'm fortunate enough to be a pretty good writer.
• 7:33
  And I did my first graduate school many years ago at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
• 7:38
  So, I have a background there.
• 7:41
  In an interesting way, Iowa trained me to be a fiction writer.
• 7:45
  And while this book is not a work of fiction,
• 7:48
  at times writing from my father's voice, even if I knew concretely what was going through his mind, I was almost writing a character at times.
• 7:57
  So having that relationship to the text and to the characters in the story was very interesting.
• 8:04
  And at first, maybe a little disorienting, but I found that I had the tools
• 8:08
  to do it very well.
• 8:09
  I both know his voice as a human, it's in my mind, it's probably as much as anywhere else.
• 8:15
  And also as a writer, I know his voice very well.
• 8:19
  So taking on recreating or continuing to create his voice came pretty easily to me.
• 8:25
  And then I guess the other thing that comes to mind from that question is the stories themselves were, as you say, potentially very disjointed, but my job was to find what are
• 8:36
  the themes and ideas that run through them all and then sort of weave that into the events of the specific therapy sessions, so that a reader coming to this book,
• 8:47
  possibly as their first encounter with my father's writing, doesn't have to know all the theory that you might have if you'd read five of his textbooks, you know, over the last
• 8:56
  six decades.
• 8:57
  I didn't want to repeat everything he'd written in the past, but my editor, the publisher kept encouraging me to think of these as new readers.
• 9:04
  As I began to think about it, here I am at the PhD program here at Alliant, and my cohort and people are coming through, they're new to all of this.
• 9:12
  Why wouldn't they want to understand the background?
• 9:15
  That then tasked me with weaving in
• 9:18
  background information, if you will, the theory, if you will, but making it as accessible as possible in the stories
• 9:25
  as opposed to saying, now we're going to talk about the theory behind this.
• 9:29
  You didn't want to write a therapeutic book, right?
• 9:32
  And I got that sense as I was reading through the book.
• 9:35
  I felt like, someone could pick up this book and not need to read all of your father's work prior to this to understand how he was approaching the work and how he was doing
• 9:47
  these consultative sessions.
• 9:49
  So I think
• 9:50
  the two of you have done that beautifully, that you could really take gems from the different stories and understand where he was working from, you know, when he was doing
• 10:02
  these sessions with what he calls "travelers."
• 10:05
  Yeah, fellow travelers.
• 10:06
  He does not like referring to his people as patients.
• 10:09
  I do not like referring to my people as clients.
• 10:12
  Fellow travelers is quite good, but you'd have to explain it to every person who might want to come see you, which might be odd.
• 10:19
  As you were talking and one of the things you know when I was still training students I would actually talk a little bit about when you're taking the stance of empathy it is
• 10:30
  almost like trying to get into the mind and the life of your client or your traveler, you know?
• 10:39
  In that way, it's almost like you really have to study them to understand not only kind of what they're telling you in that therapy room, but the context that they live in, what
• 10:50
  they bring with them historically and from societal events.
• 10:55
  And so what I want to ask you, because I know you have that theater background, how did your own therapeutic and artistic sensibilities help
• 11:06
  with you writing kind of this book and trying to give voice to these people that came to see your father?
• 11:14
  Well, it's an interesting question.
• 11:16
  In my years in the theater, I worked primarily as a director, but sometimes as an actor.
• 11:22
  Even when working as a director, one has to ask these questions, which are about how do you embody another character?
• 11:30
  There are many ways that one can go about it, many acting approaches, just as there are many therapeutic approaches.
• 11:36
  But at
• 11:37
  heart, the job of the actor is to be able to embody another character, whether that's psychologically or emotionally, and to be able to be real and present in that character on
• 11:51
  stage for those moments.
• 11:53
  So I feel like a lot of the training that I have behind me
• 11:57
  translates very nicely from theater to therapy in being able to put myself in the position of a number of characters;
• 12:07
  get to some core emotional experience from which one can write; my character is feeling this way, they might say this.
• 12:15
  And they're not going to say it in this way, they're gonna say it in this way.
• 12:18
  We often call it in theater world, the "what if, the magic if." If I were in this position, how might I feel?
• 12:24
  And one learns,
• 12:26
  as an artist and as a writer or a therapist, hopefully, to substitute one's own feelings for an imagined other character's feelings, but they have to be real.
• 12:39
  You have to be able to evoke the real feeling in yourself.
• 12:43
  I might be taking a big jump here, but it's a bit analogous to, I think for many therapists and particularly for my father's work therapeutically,
• 12:52
  he has to gauge, we have to gauge what we're feeling in response to the fellow traveler in the room and know that our feeling is not the product of our own neuroses or our
• 13:05
  irrational state, but that it's actually telling us something about the encounter that we're having with the other person.
• 13:10
  It might be the product of our neuroses or our panic or our stress.
• 13:14
  We're probably not going to stop that, but if it is we need to be able to identify it and I'm getting a little far afield here, but I think hopefully that makes sense.
• 13:23
  I think you are really talking about being able to identify the emotions coming up for a therapist, maybe in response to how that interaction with your client and when it's not,
• 13:37
  when it's your own stuff and being very clear when it is, you know, that that's really important, but that you need to be in touch with,
• 13:46
  "Okay, I'm feeling this way and where is it coming from" is what I hear from you.
• 13:51
  Yeah.
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  I think that's true for all of us.
• 13:54
  We might call that kind of self-knowledge many different things.
• 13:58
  In the MFT world, we seem to call it "self of the therapist." Often it's understanding what's coloring our feelings.
• 14:05
  The other aspect of it, well, simply put, so my father, there's a story in the book in which
• 14:10
  there's a therapist who comes to my father with lots of questions and concerns.
• 14:14
  And it turns out that this person has never been in therapy.
• 14:17
  You have to do therapy as a therapist, both because you have to understand what it's like to sit in the other person's chair, but also you have to understand your own stuff, your
• 14:29
  own distortions, if you will.
• 14:31
  Because if you don't, how can you yourself be a good barometer
• 14:34
  of what's going on with your patient and what's going on between you?
• 14:37
  I know that there's differences of opinion about that, but I also think, you know, that piece about being able to know yourself well, so that you actually are kind of the tool
• 14:51
  that you're working with.
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  And if you don't understand that tool well, you're not going to be able to understand how to use that tool or how that tool is impacting
• 15:01
  the work that you're doing.
• 15:02
  So I just, I agree, I guess, in that whole philosophy about working on yourself because that's what you're gonna be doing with your fellow travelers and they need you to actually
• 15:15
  have done that work.
• 15:17
  One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is your relationship with your dad.
• 15:23
  I find it amazing, you know, that you kind of took on the, the baton as we will call it.
• 15:30
  It sounds like over the years you've done writing collaborations and this book is the first one that I guess you're saying, "Okay, I'll be a co-author."
• 15:41
  Given that you are co-author in this book, and it sounds like was very integral in what ended up being the finished product of this book, were there moments that deepened your
• 15:54
  understanding of your father?
• 15:55
  You know, because you were taking his work, not just as a professional, you know, as a psychotherapist, but as a human.
• 16:03
  Hmm.
• 16:04
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 16:05
  I'm trying to put my finger on a specific moment, but I'm not sure I can.
• 16:09
  But what I would say is that a few things happened.
• 16:13
  One is when I decided to put aside my theater career and pick up the family business, if you will, part of
• 16:22
  the dynamic that was happening was that I had spent 30 years very much avoiding being in my father's shadow.
• 16:28
  I wanted to have my own career, do my own work.
• 16:31
  I was very lucky to be able to do so, to have a wonderful career in theater arts.
• 16:36
  But for any number of reasons, which we could go into another time, it turned out that running a theater was not a great thing to do with small children at my age.
• 16:46
  It doesn't work very well in terms of time and money and all of that.
• 16:50
  And I wonder if it was that brief moment in time between when the first vaccines for COVID had come out and it felt like we could actually be together in the same space.
• 17:00
  So I went up to visit my father for his birthday.
• 17:03
  This is his 90th birthday, perhaps.
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  And I saw him
• 17:08
  looking much-reduced as a figure.
• 17:11
  I hadn't seen him in person for a couple of years thanks to COVID.
• 17:15
  He looked a little frail and a little saddened after my mother had passed.
• 17:20
  Very happy to see all his friends on that day, but I guess the point is that he looked much less imposing to me, probably a combination of what was going on with him and what
• 17:29
  was going on with me.
• 17:30
  And that was a moment in which I decided, okay, I'm gonna go in this direction with my life because I no longer felt the need to avoid his massive shadow.
• 17:40
  And it was not long after that that we began working on the book together.
• 17:45
  And this really gave me an inside view of, I think the amount of care
• 17:51
  that he gave to his individual clients.
• 17:54
  As a child, I often felt like, well, you might be a little bit more engaged with your work than you are with us.
• 18:00
  He was always a very wonderful and warm father, but he was very focused often on thinking about his work and thinking about, I didn't know what at the time he was thinking about.
• 18:10
  But now being able to start to see both how curious he was about the lives of his patients and about what was working in therapy and what wasn't.
• 18:19
  It wasn't like he came home at the end of the day, shut the door and didn't think about work until seven o'clock the next day.
• 18:24
  He always very deeply in thought, deep in thought about his patients' lives, the challenges they were presenting, trying to understand what was working and what wasn't,
• 18:33
  philosophy, literature, and tying all these things together.
• 18:37
  And so working on the book with him here allowed me to see him, maybe what was going on in his mind and how important this was to him in a different light, which made me feel closer
• 18:48
  to him and better understanding of him as a sort of this being his mission in life.
• 18:55
  How wonderful that must have been for you and for him to have this opportunity to do that.
• 19:02
  I think a curiosity that people would have is, you know, people in the field know how
• 19:09
  large of a figure and impact that your father has made in terms of all the books that he has written, existential psychology, group psychotherapy.
• 19:19
  And so I guess I was wondering, you kind of talked about this, seeing him in this light, but I was wondering like, when did you find out who your father was
• 19:31
  as a professional?
• 19:32
  Kind of fully realizing the influence that he had on the field.
• 19:38
  You know, was it in public?
• 19:39
  Was it a certain event?
• 19:40
  Was it, you know, from school, like from classmates?
• 19:44
  I guess I was wondering what that moment was.
• 19:47
  oh
• 19:48
  couple of moments come to mind.
• 19:50
  The youngest of them, the first was well, so, a tiny bit of background.
• 19:55
  He used to go to conferences and give presentations.
• 19:59
  I'm thinking way back in the 70s here.
• 20:01
  And they would sell books.
• 20:02
  He would bring somebody with him to sell books and set up one of the tables and sell books.
• 20:06
  And then he would come home and he would have a stack of checks because that's how people paid for books at the time.
• 20:11
  And so we would go through them and I would have, you know, $13, $12, $9, $14, $27 and stamp and stamp and then write them all down.
• 20:19
  It was like a little family accounting process.
• 20:21
  But it was still, it was fun.
• 20:23
  It was like a little game, but it was still very abstract to me.
• 20:26
  And we had books all over the house always, as long as I can remember his and my mother's and then all the literature.
• 20:32
  But it was just sort of like some books would disappear, some checks would come in.
• 20:36
  I didn't know; it was kind of a fun
• 20:38
  little game.
• 20:38
  And then one day he was doing a conference in San Francisco.
• 20:43
  I couldn't tell you what it was.
• 20:44
  I must've been eight years old, something like that.
• 20:47
  I remember it was kind of a rainy day and we were driving up somewhere in Daly City maybe, outside this conference hall and we drove in and there was nowhere to park.
• 20:55
  And then sort of right in front of the building, there was a spot with a cone
• 21:00
  in it and my dad got out and he picked up the cone.
• 21:02
  I said, "Dad, you can't!
• 21:03
  Somebody's reserved the spot." He's like, "That's for me." Never crossed my mind that this was actually the reserved spot for the speaker.
• 21:11
  So that was, at a very young age, that was like, "you get that spot?"
• 21:14
  They saved a parking spot for you!
• 21:17
  yeah, very strange.
• 21:19
  And then I would say that over the years, I grew up in this very strange environment in many ways, but my mother was a well-known author as well.
• 21:28
  And so throughout my childhood and my early adulthood, whenever I was at my parents' house, there was always this sort of rotating
• 21:36
  party of intellectuals and writers who would come through for dinner or parties.
• 21:41
  My mother loved to throw a party.
• 21:42
  So, you know, I just saw that the circle that they traveled in and people were always quite deferential to my father, which was sort of notable.
• 21:50
  And then we would go to readings where they would be reading, my mother and my father in various places.
• 21:55
  And this was sort of part of the life of our family.
• 21:57
  It was very festive.
• 21:58
  It always felt a little special.
• 22:00
  I started to become aware, wow, people buy a lot of books.
• 22:03
  A lot of these books do pretty well.
• 22:05
  And often much better abroad than they do in the US.
• 22:09
  My father's a much bigger name in a handful of countries abroad than he is here.
• 22:15
  Quite a celebrity.
• 22:16
  He is, but you would be surprised, I mean, in our field he is known here.
• 22:21
  If you go to Israel or Greece,
• 22:23
  or Germany, he is feted like a celebrity, which is very strange, very strange.
• 22:28
  So this was just sort of the air we breathed on some level.
• 22:33
  But I will say that beginning to study professionally or study academically in the field opened up a whole 'nother tier of eye-opening.
• 22:42
  In part because so many young students and therapists who I spoke to would have this moment of realization where the penny dropped and they're like, "Oh, you're Irv Yalom's
• 22:54
  son?" And the reason that it was compelling was not, oh he's very famous.
• 22:59
  It was, "I read Love's Executioner and that's why I want to be a therapist." Or "I read The Gift of Therapy and that opened my eyes to what a
• 23:09
  great thing being a therapist could be." And just over and over again.
• 23:13
  You know, last week, this was an encounter I had.
• 23:16
  And so that started to let me see that in our world, in our rarefied world of therapists and would-be therapists, even though people are maybe not studying his techniques always,
• 23:28
  maybe not practicing his techniques, that his spirit as a writer,
• 23:32
  and communicator and an empathic person have been incredibly influential.
• 23:38
  Yeah, and I would say in his past works, but even in this one, you really see the impact on people that he had.
• 23:46
  You didn't need to be a therapist or a professional and you still would get something out of these stories that he's telling.
• 23:55
  So, I want to switch to your journey,
• 23:58
  I know you kind of talked about
• 24:01
  you know, that you kind of stayed away from kind of the family business of psychotherapy.
• 24:07
  So kind of tell me how you carved out your life journey to end up now studying and becoming a marriage and family therapist.
• 24:18
  Well, for one, I want to say it absolutely was not, you know, I could not have foreseen this.
• 24:22
  And if you'd asked me even five years ago or six years ago, I would have thought, no, that's not, that's not where I'm headed to.
• 24:28
  But here I am and quite happy to be here.
• 24:31
  So I'll go back in time and I'll tell you a bit about my journey.
• 24:35
  I'm going to try to walk the fine line between not too much self-criticism
• 24:41
  and not too much self-aggrandizement.
• 24:43
  And I'm going to ask you to help me walk that line if I stray too far one way or the other.
• 24:48
  So I grew up, as I said, my parents' child.
• 24:51
  I have three siblings, but they're all quite a bit older than I am.
• 24:54
  So I have the benefit of having siblings and the benefit of being sort of an only child in the day to day.
• 25:00
  I think I had a very, very high opinion of myself or at least a high opinion of what I was, assumption of what I was supposed to do with my life.
• 25:10
  And I looked for instance at my father and I thought, well, here's a person who is a famous writer.
• 25:16
  And he had begun to write the stories of Love's Executioner and then the novel When Nietzsche Wept by the time I was 20.
• 25:25
  18, 20, and I thought, well, of course I should be a creative, unique voice in the world in some way or another, without realizing that my father had gone to medical school and
• 25:36
  worked for 20 years or so doing all the things one has to do to, in his case, rise out of poverty and become established in his field.
• 25:45
  I was aware that that was part of his narrative, but I thought...
• 25:48
  I don't need to go to medical school and have a craft, have a traditional career.
• 25:53
  I should be able to jump straight to be a creative, imaginative genius, as it were.
• 25:58
  And so I went to college at Stanford.
• 26:01
  I moved all of three miles from my parents' house.
• 26:04
  And I thought I'm gonna study theater.
• 26:06
  The first thing that the theater professor told me was, "Well, if you really want to become a theater maker, you should go study something else.
• 26:13
  Learn how to live, have a life, so that you have something to say." I, of course, heard the don't study theater as a horrible criticism, when in fact, later in life, that turned
• 26:23
  out to be amazing advice.
• 26:24
  Do other things as well.
• 26:26
  In any case,
• 26:26
  I avoided anything that smacked of a career path throughout college and then graduated from college thinking I have no idea what to do with myself.
• 26:37
  I went and lived in France and studied theater for a year.
• 26:40
  And I ended up applying to graduate school in creative writing, which had also always been something I pursued.
• 26:47
  And I got in,
• 26:48
  sort of against my desires.
• 26:50
  I was very ambivalent about it, but I got into the Iowa Writers Workshop, which is the top writing program, first writing program, and the top writing program in the country.
• 26:59
  And as I say, I was very ambivalent about it.
• 27:01
  I think I was maybe in existential terms, still in the process of avoiding the loan of life so as not to repay the debt of death; and here death being simply having to actually
• 27:16
  choose a
• 27:18
  path of life and thus excluding all the other paths.
• 27:21
  In any case, I went to visit Iowa and I said, "Maybe you should take somebody else." They said, "We don't want anybody else.
• 27:26
  We want you." Okay.
• 27:29
  And then I said, "Well, I really don't want to pay.
• 27:32
  I don't want to go into debt to get a master's in fine arts." And they said, "Okay, hold on a second." They made a couple of phone calls, this wonderful woman, Connie Brothers,
• 27:40
  and she called me back into her office 10 minutes later and she said, "I have a scholarship for you."
• 27:44
  And at that point I was like, okay, my defenses are gone.
• 27:47
  I will come to your wonderful program, which I did.
• 27:51
  And I spent two amazing formative years in Iowa.
• 27:54
  But when I got home, I quickly learned that I didn't like sitting in a room alone writing all day.
• 28:01
  Something both my mother and father love to do, mind you, but
• 28:04
  outside of the very supportive context of Iowa, I just, I was much too social and insecure a person to sit alone in the room and write all day.
• 28:13
  And I also knew that what I really had always loved doing was making theater and being with other theater makers.
• 28:20
  It seemed so impossibly difficult to do that I said, well, maybe I can write because you do that by yourself.
• 28:26
  But in fact, I knew this was where my passion, if you will, was.
• 28:30
  I don't always love that term, but okay.
• 28:33
  And little by little, I started working with some other theater companies in the Bay Area, big and small.
• 28:38
  And a very wonderful man named Paul Walsh took me under his wing and finally gave me some guidance as to how I might go about this.
• 28:47
  He was at American Conservatory Theater, which is the biggest theater in the region.
• 28:51
  He was a literary manager there.
• 28:53
  And he just sort of said, you're going to come with me.
• 28:55
  And for the next three years, he sort of mentored me in all things theatrical and also many things about life.
• 29:01
  I'm forever grateful to him.
• 29:03
  And I started working with a number of small theater groups.
• 29:07
  I began to see what was possible in the theater world.
• 29:11
  I also began to develop some very strong opinions about what people should be doing in the theater world, which didn't match very well most of what I saw, which meant I had a
• 29:21
  mission to go and make
• 29:22
  the work that I felt was necessary.
• 29:24
  And then I quickly realized even though people were hiring me to assist and do work on plays, that nobody was going to hire me to direct the play that I wanted to make, which
• 29:37
  was on the experimental edge, certainly was seen as such in San Francisco, the style I wanted to work in.
• 29:44
  So Paul, after a year of looking for this, Paul said to me, "Okay, now it's the time to go start your theater company
• 29:50
  because nobody else is going to direct you to do the work you want to do." So I began a theater company with the intention of putting up this one play.
• 29:56
  And then 20 years later, I was still running this theater company, really.
• 30:00
  But it was not your standard theater company.
• 30:03
  We didn't just sort of pick plays and put up a season and that sort of thing.
• 30:06
  It was much more like a laboratory of experimentation with
• 30:11
  new plays with the form, with how people, very much focused on the body, how actors can develop from the body.
• 30:18
  How to develop characters and ideas based less in the more traditional, particularly in America, the more traditional model of acting, which is you read about a character, you
• 30:33
  come up with ideas about how that character is, and then you speak and embody the role.
• 30:38
  And mine was much more from how does this character move or how do you feel internally in your body?
• 30:45
  You develop the character that way, we would say from the ground up, the bottom up, finally arriving at the mind.
• 30:50
  There are analogies, of course, in our work.
• 30:53
  You do highly cognitive therapy?
• 30:55
  Do you do somatic therapy?
• 30:57
  Where are you starting?
• 31:00
  Yeah.
• 31:01
  Yeah.
• 31:02
  Yeah.
• 31:03
  great thing in all of this is there are so many analogies.
• 31:05
  Just to talk about theater for a few more minutes, we would bring master teachers in from all over the country and the world to teach these types of physically oriented techniques
• 31:14
  because everybody was getting great training in the psychologically based work, but not in the physical work.
• 31:20
  And what I really wanted from my actors for the plays I was making was to be able to go back and forth and do both.
• 31:26
  So we were quite
• 31:29
  influential for a tiny, tiny company with a tiny budget, because I am quite mediocre at raising money, I learned.
• 31:37
  But we had a very outsized footprint, if you will.
• 31:41
  We ran a festival for 15 years where I would bring people in, companies in from all over the country.
• 31:47
  It was always very focused on the group, companies that work together over time, not just we're going to put up a play, hire a bunch of people.
• 31:54
  So my company was called Fool's Fury, and we had this festival called the Fury Factory and hosted about 100 companies over a number of years.
• 32:04
  We put on maybe one, sometimes two productions a year because they're very rich and detailed.
• 32:09
  We would tour to New York often.
• 32:12
  Well, towards the end it was often, but we went a few times, let us say.
• 32:16
  And we made a number of original works where we would bring in a playwright and work with them to develop the work for characters in ways that I am now applying to a therapeutic
• 32:27
  context.
• 32:27
  So that's, for me, what's exciting in my life right now is marrying some of these artistic creative techniques with more therapeutic techniques.
• 32:37
  That was my journey
• 32:38
  up to that point.
• 32:39
  At a certain point, I started going back and forth from New York, as I mentioned.
• 32:42
  And then I fell in love and had children and suddenly traveling all over the place all the time for next to nothing and financially it just didn't work anymore.
• 32:53
  And we also had, I think, the ongoing fantasy that we were going to end up back in the Bay Area and I could just sort of pick up where I had left off.
• 32:59
  And that didn't happen.
• 33:00
  We ended up in San Diego and said, okay, we're going to really
• 33:05
  work here.
• 33:06
  And that caused me to do a couple of adventures where I was flying up and down a whole lot and trying to direct shows and also be present here.
• 33:14
  And that didn't work out very well over time.
• 33:17
  And then something strange happened.
• 33:18
  Well, I should say that if we want to talk about psychology, I was really deeply attached to my identity as a theater maker
• 33:25
  as a theater maker with a national reputation, at least among those little fringe experimental companies.
• 33:31
  And having that platform and that identity of who I was in the world.
• 33:36
  And so even as I started to know that it was time to change something, I could not let go of that identity.
• 33:43
  And I started to think about change.
• 33:46
  When we got here, I met with all the directors of the major theaters here, very well-received.
• 33:51
  Didn't know what a life though would look like.
• 33:53
  And I didn't have that youthful energy to restart another company.
• 33:59
  And then the sort of magical thing in retrospect happened, which is that they shut down every theater in the world.
• 34:04
  COVID happened and that actually was critical
• 34:08
  for me in terms of my identity of being able to step back and say, well, there's nothing I can do in the theater right now.
• 34:15
  Okay, I have a little breathing room.
• 34:17
  Could I do something else with my life?
• 34:19
  That coincided with talking to my brother and my sister-in-law who are both therapists.
• 34:24
  My brother attended CSPP in the Bay Area 25, 30 years ago.
• 34:29
  And he put me in touch with Scott Woolley here at the MFT program in San Diego.
• 34:34
  And quite literally within a number of days, I had put together an application
• 34:41
  to the program.
• 34:41
  Scott sold me very well on being in MFT as opposed to clinical psych.
• 34:46
  It felt a little bit more like theater to me, which was understandable, processable in my brain for where I was.
• 34:52
  And then within a couple of months, classes started.
• 34:55
  So here we are.
• 34:57
  What a wonderful journey that you've had.
• 35:00
  So I know that now you're almost done with the program in getting your PhD in marriage and family therapy, and you have this wonderful history in the theater, as I introduced you,
• 35:14
  you do narrative and existential therapy.
• 35:19
  And you talked about marrying the arts with therapy.
• 35:22
  And so I kind of wanted to ask from you, as these two intersect for you, how has it influenced you in your way of being as a therapist and the way that you approach therapy?
• 35:36
  Well, let me talk first a little bit about existential and narrative therapy.
• 35:40
  So very early on in our program, and I suspect in the clinical psych programs as well, the question started to come up, what is your theory of change and how people change, how we
• 35:51
  can help clients change, what actually causes change?
• 35:54
  I would give two answers to this question.
• 35:56
  One is, how the hell should I know?
• 35:59
  I've just started doing this.
• 36:00
  I haven't seen any clients.
• 36:02
  I'm 55 years old now, or 50 years old when I started, old enough to know that I don't really know all that much.
• 36:08
  So ask me again in 10 years when I've been practicing for a while and maybe I'll have a decent answer.
• 36:13
  That was not helpful to my professors.
• 36:15
  The other thing that I knew though, looking at my own life and the lives of people I've encountered was that at least for me, there was something very important about people's
• 36:25
  values.
• 36:26
  And I hadn't articulated it much better than that, but I knew really from my own life before I started my theater company, how miserable I felt.
• 36:35
  And a lot of that had to do with
• 36:38
  there being something that I cared about and valued deeply in life and I wasn't doing it.
• 36:44
  I was trying to do many other things and that, you know, I can mirror this many times throughout my life in other scenarios, but this one was the clearest.
• 36:52
  There just was not alignment between what I valued, what if you had asked me, I would have said was important for me to do in the world and what I was actually doing.
• 37:00
  So I knew that was at some core what I thought was helpful to help people change.
• 37:05
  And it turns out that that's really at the core, I think, of narrative therapy.
• 37:10
  As I've encountered it through Tom Carlson here and others, that may not be the single thing they would highlight, but
• 37:17
  in narrative therapy, it's more often referred to as ethics and values, but I think very similar, relational versus maybe more individual.
• 37:26
  But understanding what you really care about and learning how to live that way.
• 37:30
  And boy, if I say it in those terms, well, that sounds like existential therapy also.
• 37:36
  Know what's important to you and do that before you die.
• 37:39
  So that's kind of at the core of these things.
• 37:41
  My father's work and my father's way of being in the world are always a lens that I'm going to see things through whether I want to or not.
• 37:50
  And I do, usually.
• 37:52
  So all my early understanding of what psychology is and philosophy and what is a good way of living in the world is very, very colored by my father as a human and as a thinker.
• 38:03
  So I think I couldn't have, I couldn't not have some existential lens on my work.
• 38:09
  You know, I was raised in the existential laboratory, if you will.
• 38:14
  So those two things go together in that way.
• 38:16
  And I think in many ways they fit together very, very well.
• 38:19
  So that's how the philosophical maybe nature in which I was raised intersects with some technique.
• 38:26
  I guess the one other thing to say is working in literature and working in theater is all working in story on some level.
• 38:32
  So that leads me to the narrative.
• 38:35
  That makes a lot of sense of how they are kind of weaving themselves together.
• 38:40
  As far as theater goes, on the one hand, there's something that Tom Carlson and Sonny, his partner, do.
• 38:48
  And I've certainly read about other narrative therapists doing
• 38:51
  that gets at something deep for me, which is this idea of maybe you're working with a couple and you ask one person to take on the perspective of the other.
• 38:59
  Can you speak about what happens between the two of you in first person, but as your partner?
• 39:05
  And then maybe you have the other person switch or you give feedback and then you switch.
• 39:09
  That kind of let's take on roles, let's try to be really honest with
• 39:14
  your understanding of the other person.
• 39:16
  How did that work?
• 39:17
  Great, let's try it again, or let's try something different.
• 39:19
  This is like directing theater to me in a way.
• 39:23
  It's like, I'll work with actors.
• 39:24
  I'll say, try this, try this.
• 39:26
  What if it's a little bit more like this?
• 39:27
  So that felt compelling and familiar in a way that helped.
• 39:32
  The other thing that's happening, very surprisingly, the work that I'm doing for my dissertation
• 39:37
  is around using some theatrical tools, particularly these sort of physical tools for storytelling or story development that I developed for 20 years with my company, but
• 39:49
  applying that to narrative therapy as sort of a series of adjunct interventions.
• 39:56
  I don't think that's quite the right term.
• 39:57
  Practices that may be helpful.
• 39:59
  Is it helpful if I give an example of that?
• 40:02
  First of all, I give you the proposition that a problem with talk therapy is that it's so reliant on talking.
• 40:09
  That it's not this sort of conversational,
• 40:12
  we could call it analytic, we could call it expositional talk that's generally rational; I'm trying to articulate how I feel or what I'm thinking is not the best modality for some
• 40:24
  people.
• 40:25
  Some people it's great.
• 40:26
  And I personally do really pretty well.
• 40:28
  I'm pretty articulate.
• 40:29
  I feel like if I have a thought, I can express it well.
• 40:32
  But there are many people for whom that's not true
• 40:35
  that have a different way of exploring and expressing, they might have different ideas that come up.
• 40:41
  This is not a brilliant statement on my part.
• 40:44
  This is why we have somatic therapy.
• 40:46
  It's why we have creative arts therapies of all sorts.
• 40:49
  But it's an important thought.
• 40:51
  And very much part of my theatrical practice with my company Fool's Fury was
• 40:56
  starting from the body, starting from maybe an image or a movement or an idea, and only gradually getting to language.
• 41:05
  So to use this type of work in an example with narrative therapy,
• 41:10
  there's an idea called re-authoring, which might get a client and a therapist away from the idea that they have somehow failed in some area of their life because they haven't
• 41:22
  accomplished what the dominant narrative or the dominant structures in the world would tell them they should do.
• 41:27
  By the time you're 26, you should be an accountant earning X amount of money, let's say.
• 41:33
  Or working with Tom, he did a nice interview with me and we realized that one of my problems, as I saw it, was that I tend to shy away from competition.
• 41:42
  People who are too competitive or fields that are too competitive have been very scary to me in some ways.
• 41:49
  It's quite possibly why I ended up doing theater instead of film.
• 41:52
  And working over time, you can take that away from, I'm a failure because I don't compete better, to, well, maybe you were following a different goal or a different value, which I
• 42:04
  think is very true.
• 42:05
  And Tom nicely put that value for me as being not against competition, but being for collaboration,
• 42:13
  which very much is the history of my company.
• 42:15
  It's been like bring people together, et cetera, for many years.
• 42:18
  Do I know that that's at the core of my being?
• 42:19
  I don't know, but it was a helpful reauthoring or way of then I could think about events in my life from the positive value of building community and collaboration as opposed to I
• 42:31
  only did that because I was afraid of competing.
• 42:33
  Once a client has the understanding of some value that they've been pursuing, collaboration, community building, et cetera, I could then ask them to embody, get in
• 42:45
  touch with their body.
• 42:45
  This is work that might take, depending upon who they are, half an hour or five days, who knows?
• 42:51
  Five sessions, who knows?
• 42:52
  I like to do this work in groups.
• 42:53
  How do we become aware of what's going on in our body?
• 42:56
  Start to work with it a bit, because I don't assume anybody's a dancer.
• 42:59
  They don't have to be.
• 43:01
  But eventually, what kind of movements might come out of your body related to the idea of collaboration?
• 43:07
  What kind of emotion or feelings come up physically for you when you think about collaboration, when you focus on it?
• 43:14
  And then often, people's stories may come up from that.
• 43:18
  And then you can do things like, for instance, build a little sequence of gestures that become sort of a personal choreography.
• 43:24
  And these are just ways of exploring the connection between the feeling in my body, emotions that might go with that, and narratives or stories or thoughts or words that may
• 43:36
  come up related to it.
• 43:38
  And so language can be a part of this, but it
• 43:41
  doesn't have to be that sort of explanatory expositional language.
• 43:45
  It's more poetic.
• 43:47
  It's more metaphoric.
• 43:48
  So I think this potentially gives people a very different type of experience of an idea or of an identity.
• 43:54
  And so this is some of the kind of work that I'm really trying to do more of.
• 43:58
  It doesn't quite fit a one-on-one clinical hour very well, but I'm exploring ways of making this happen,
• 44:05
  largely in groups.
• 44:06
  That's really, I mean, fascinating; will be interesting to see how you're able to develop it more as time goes on.
• 44:14
  So I want to ask you one last question.
• 44:17
  You know, you talked about values and
• 44:20
  even early on, you knew that that was really important.
• 44:24
  And I guess you've talked about values that you hold and things that are important to you.
• 44:30
  So as we end, what would you want your legacy to be now, now that you've gone through this whole life journey and you're on the cusp of now on your way to being a marriage and
• 44:45
  family therapist?
• 44:47
  As you think about that, what is that legacy now that you would like to leave?
• 44:52
  Well, it's hard for me to speak in terms of legacy because I'm just feeling like I'm just getting launched in this new phase of my life.
• 45:00
  Ask me again in 20 years, we'll look back.
• 45:02
  But what I'm very excited about is that
• 45:05
  in a way, theater for me has become...
• 45:08
  over the years, it's about performance and the beauty in the moment, but as much as that, it's about what are the journeys that we're on as people, for the artists, for the
• 45:17
  audiences, et cetera?
• 45:19
  And that therapy is also about what are the journeys we're on as people.
• 45:24
  And hopefully through both modalities, we can
• 45:27
  help people become richer and fuller and more aligned with what they care about.
• 45:36
  So that's one real thrust.
• 45:38
  for me, in part coming out of this book, is the idea that now at this age, I actually have some things to say.
• 45:48
  I have enough experience
• 45:50
  in some areas that maybe what I have to say is valuable to some other people.
• 45:55
  Whereas when I was just out of grad school and sitting in the room alone writing, part of the reason it wasn't going well for me was I realized I was 26.
• 46:02
  What did I have to say that was actually helpful to anybody?
• 46:05
  I needed to go out and live for a bit.
• 46:08
  So what I'm really excited about is finding ways of bringing all these things together to some sort of integration or synthesis.
• 46:17
  Mm-hmm.
• 46:18
  And that's being able to have the therapeutic conversations.
• 46:21
  It's being able to bring the physical theatrical work in.
• 46:24
  It's being able to bring writing in, in the service of helping others and also helping myself have an interesting life.
• 46:32
  Because if any of us as therapists are not engaged in our own lives, we're not going to be helpful therapists for others.
• 46:38
  But I'm realizing that everything that I have done in my life is part of what I bring into the room.
• 46:45
  And I'm hopeful for other therapists; I think part of what my father's legacy hopefully will be is this constant exhortation for us as therapists to be more open, to share more
• 46:57
  of ourselves with our clients or patients or fellow travelers.
• 47:01
  He's very much.
• 47:02
  on the side of self-disclosure and of being authentic.
• 47:05
  And I think that I'm hoping to continue that, but also with the version of saying, I bring in knowledge from here, the theater world.
• 47:14
  I bring in knowledge from literature.
• 47:16
  And you, whoever you are as a therapist, bring in this and this and this.
• 47:20
  These are all the things that are part of you.
• 47:22
  And I do think we have a side of our field
• 47:25
  that says who you are as a human being, as a therapist, doesn't matter, shouldn't matter.
• 47:29
  Don't bring you into the room.
• 47:31
  Bring your expertise and sometimes manualized, often not manualized way of being with your client, but it doesn't include sharing of your own authentic person very much.
• 47:42
  Following my father's footsteps on this one, I very much want to be able to bring all of me in a way that is helpful to the client, obviously,
• 47:49
  but as a fellow traveler, I want to be a honest, open, authentic person sharing of my experience in the world in a way that is helpful for my client to have their experience of
• 48:03
  the world.
• 48:03
  Ben, just thank you for being so open and honest and genuine in terms of your sharing today.
• 48:10
  I really appreciate it.
• 48:12
  And I thank everyone for joining us today.
• 48:15
  I'm going to end with: Remember that wellness is not a destination, it is a journey.
• 48:23
  I thank you for being with us and see you next time.
• 48:26
  Thank you.
• 48:27
  My pleasure.
• 48:28
  Thank you for having me.