PhilosophyPodcasts.Org

Jun 10, 2022

Brad Reedy (Evoke Therapy Programs)

The audacity to be you: learning to love your horrible, rotten self

Expanding on his first book (The journey of the heroic parent) Reedy discusses how all our relationships are connected to the relationship we have with ourselves. He shows how the foundation for intimacy with partners, our ability to parent effectively, and the meaningfulness of our lives can be tied to how well we have unraveled our unique childhood history.

The audacity to be you: Learning to love your horrible, rotten self is a simple but bold exploration into what makes us human and why happiness and connection are elusive for so many.

Reedy's work is counter-intuitive, but readers will often have the experience of being found--and understood--as they make their way through his work. Many readers say that reading Brad's work is like hearing something for the first time that you already knew but just didn't have the words for it.

Dr. Reedy is a renowned author, therapist, podcaster, and public speaker.  His approach is accessible and non-threatening. He is a prolific keynote speaker, T.V. and radio guest, and he travels the world presenting to audiences and training therapists.

Through stories gathered from decades as a therapist, co-founder, and clinical director of Evoke Therapy Programs, Reedy gives the reader an intimate picture of mental health and healing. The audacity to be you explains how our personalities are built, brick by brick. From what it means to be a Self, we learn how to authentically love others. Readers will learn the essence of mental health, and, with that, the stigma of mental illness evaporates.

Reedy debunks toxic myths so common in our culture, including: "You are only as happy as your least happy child." He shows how good psychotherapy goes beyond problem solving. Reedy teaches, "In this way of thinking, you don't get to be right anymore. But you get to be a Self. And that is so much better. That is 'The Audacity to Be You.'"

To learn more about his work go to evoketherapy.com or drbradreedy.com. You can find his podcast "Finding You: An Evoke Therapy Podcast" on your favorite podcast app or by going to soundcloud.com.

transcript

August: Welcome. I'm August Baker, and welcome to the podcast today. I've recently been working with parents of children who have been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, and I've also had a chance to work with some adolescents directly in a locked psychiatric hospital. And in the course of that work, I came to hear about a program called Evoke Therapy in Utah and are very good things about it. And in the course of my puzzles, I decided to go to the website, it's evoketherapy.com and see what was there. And I found a book. And today we're going to be talking about that book. It's called The Audacity to Be You Learning to Love Your Horrible Rotten Self. It's 2020, and the author is Brad Reedy, who is a co-founder of Evoke Therapy Programs and the clinical director, he's also the author of The Journey of the Heroic Parent, and he's the host of Finding You an Evoke Therapy podcast. Welcome Dr. Reedy.

Dr. Reedy: Very happy to be here. Honored. Thank you for having me.

August: Oh, thanks. I tell you one of the first things that parents say is that when their kid is in a psychiatric hospital or they're adolescent, it's very different. The reaction you get with the community is very different than if your child was in the hospital for a broken leg or a tumor. And that's what part of what makes it so terrifying. Can you speak to that?

Dr. Reedy: That's a great beginning question. I have a lot of compassion for that. Sometimes doing this work. I forget how tight that the stigma and the shame of mental health grips people because talk about it, I talk about my own work and, and my own personal therapy over the years. And so I, I sometimes forget that. So it's nice to be reminded. For me, it comes back to maybe the simplest illustration of that kind of shame and stigma that I think about. I talk about this idea that if I were to say to you, my brother had a good baby that he has , they just had gave birth my brother and sister-in-law and said that, that the baby's a good baby. You would know that the baby has no needs. It's not crying, not sleeping, sleeping throughout the night probably that, that all of its needs and feelings are contained in a tight little box that makes them easier.

So I think from birth, we learned that our emotional needs are so taxing to the people who care about us and love us, that we learn that good is to not have needs. Good is to not struggle, good is to not feel big feelings. And implied in that we don't say this ever, of course, but bad is to have all of those things. And that's what these psychiatric hospitals and programs like mine are doing. They're holding on to people whose feelings are spilling out in their symptoms and their behaviors. They'll self harm, their self-medicating habits. And so I think it goes back to that, that that human idea that good is to not have needs and not to be messy, and the implication that bad. And so I think when people respond with that way in contrast to like a broken leg, or if you're having problems with your with your heart, I think we just go to that young place that the best way to stay safe and to not be abandoned is to stay quiet and not make waves and not be a mess and not need things at an emotional level, interestingly.

August: That's right. Yeah. It seems like maybe there's a, the community wants to say, not me. I'm not that person. I'm not infected by that. That's not spilling onto me.

So you're talking about parents and you're dealing with teens in your program and yet the book does not have that in its title. And I think that's because parents and teens are humans. the idea of my horrible rotten self. I was thinking it's a ancient idea, really. And job in the Book of Job, it's says first of humans before God as maggots or worms. And there is this sense that one can have that I'm not unfamiliar with. That there's a, there's something that I is bad that I don't, that I want to hide for whatever reason. I don't even know what it is. But I need to hide

Dr. Reedy: . I love that you bring up Job in the journey of the heroic parent. I go back to the first story in the Bible in Genesis. The first thing that happened when they broke the rules aid of the tree that they weren't supposed to eat, of whatever that metaphor means to you, they did wrong. The devil always speaks in half truth, right? He tells part truths and part lie. That's what makes it so insidious. And so what he said was right after they woke up, he said, cover yourselves up and you're naked and go hide from God when he comes back looking for you. And so I call that the first real sin of shame. I think about it in that way, that the shame is that experience that who our nakedness, who we are, is not going to be acceptable before God.

And we learn that again, because in our context, when we are children, this happened to me when my needs exceeded the bandwidth and the capacity that my mother had, she took that inadequacy that she felt, and she put it back on me. And said, something's wrong with you. You're being too sense. She called me melodramatic. That was the phrase that I remember as a child. And it's just another way of saying, you're too sensitive. You're overreacting, you're making mountains out of molehills. And what she was trying to do was take the inadequacy that she felt of not being able to soothe me and attend to me and put it back on me. So I felt bad and I got smaller. So I think that idea of being, being naked before God, being who we are before God is the spiritual dilemma of our lives. Can we nietzche said that after we battle the dragon of should and should not, that if we complete that battle that we turn back into ourselves. He said, as naked children, that we become who we are. And I really do think that that's the goal of therapy. The goal of therapy is to become who we are. We fear that because we had such bad experiences with being ourselves and being punished for it when we were growing up.

August: Right. One of the things I was very impressed by in your book is that in the right up front, you dedicate the book for my therapist, Dr. Jamie Gill, who showed me what it means to be a self and love another. So I'm 58 years old, and I've, as you note in your book, you've, I've been in a lot of therapy over your life. I've, I think I've been in therapy half my adult life, probably. And I've been interested in it and interested in how it works or why it works. And I've read a lot of books and a lot of, I think this is the first time I can remember reading a book written by a therapist who actually says, oh, by the way, my therapy really worked. . Often the people writing the books will say, this is the way I do it. This is the way it should be done. But they may even say, but my analyst was terrible and but they don't really point to that. The therapy process is being really important to their lives. And it was really nice to see you doing that here,

Dr. Reedy: Thank you for that. I, I have a lot of clients and people that follow me or read my work or listen to my podcast, who reach out to me because the message is resonating. I want to be clear. I'm not presenting something wholly unique. It's out there. I'm just, I've synthesized it and given my version of it to the world, it's, it w you know, DW Winnicott, it's started with Sigmund Freud and Carl Young. It's, it's Melanie Klein. You know, this stuff is out there, but I'm just putting it in my modern context. My modern life. But when people say to me, why doesn't my family therapist at home, my counselor at home, why aren't they talking about this? Why didn't I learn some of this in school? My best guess August is that they haven't done the work. I mean, when you do the work when you get seen, Carl Roger said it.

When you get seen, it's as if you can relax. And it's as if tears, the tears that come into your eyes are saying, finally, thank God somebody saw me. It's what happened when, in Victor Hugo's story, when the bishop gave the candlesticks back to Jean, Val Jean, he showed him grace, and he saw him and all he said was, take this love that I've given you. You can feel it in the story. You can feel it when you're watching it, and now give it to everybody else, which is what you want to do when you feel it. The minute you experience that kind of grace. And I don't mean from a religious context in my context, it came from a human being sitting across from me for 23 years. Once you feel that the only thing you want to do is give it to other people and say, who you are is, I know you've hurt people.

I know you've made mistakes. We all have, and I've made more than my share, but you're worthy of recovery. You're worthy of love, you're worthy of belonging. You're worthy, you matter. And that idea, that dedication is just to say, look, I'm not on some pedestal. I haven't, I'm not inventing a theory by any means. I'm just sharing with you the gift. Every time I thank Jamie every so often, I still see her. I saw her this morning. Every time I see her, or on occasion when I tell her thank you with tears in eyes, thank you for saving my life. She'll say, I'm just doing to you what somebody did for me. And that's all it is. It's just, it's the Jean Val jean story. It's like, once the bishop showed him that what the, that kind of loving grace was, all he wanted to do was spend his life helping people. And that was the rest of the story.

August: Right? Yeah. I, it's interesting that you mentioned Carl Rogers. I I've read some Carl Rogers and yeah. His idea was, as I understand it, people thought, if you're not giving advice to the your patients, then people are bad. And so you're just going to be creating these beasts. And he said, I don't know my recollection, he said, I don't really know why. It's not like it has to be this way. But the fact of the matter is, the empirical fact is that when people see themselves, they tend to move towards this more mutual position or this more, once they accept themselves, it just so happens that they often move towards being kinder to other people. Not like it has to be that way. Just that was his empirical experience.

Dr. Reedy: Hey, it is. It's what happens. You're right. He said specifically his quote that relates and teaches that story. He said, the great paradox is that it's only when I accept myself that I can change. But we're terrified of acceptance. We're terrified to not greet the tantruming child with anger and rage and punishment because we're living within the world of Darth Vader. That's what that story was about. Darth Vader's solution to the world was control and power and aggression and hate, hate for symptoms, hate for the parts of us that cause problems. And you contrast that with Yoda, who's really the model of a Buddhist monk. And his idea was, we embrace it. We listen to the crying child, because it's telling us something that we can't otherwise hear. If we learn to develop new ears and new eyes, we can hear and find the child.

And when you soothe the child, the tantrum a true modern day philosopher that talks about global warming in a philosophical and spiritual context. And he said, remember that evil is not the cause. It's the result. And so that terrifies us. We have to live then with uncertainty. We have to live with what the Buddhist would call a lack of attachment. Darth Vader didn't want to suffer again. And so he gripped on tightly to life to control it. And Yoda felt it and let the emotions and the pain and the grief pass through him. And he didn't retreat as he teaches. He didn't retreat to anger and rage and hate to control and prevent his authentic suffering.

August: Right. I really appreciated also when you mentioned Star Wars in the book in terms of, the way people, we keep having these, school shootings or whatever and everyone always acts shocked, like how

Dr. Reedy: Right.

August: Happen as though to say, I am so different

Dr. Reedy: Right.

August: From other people. And I think you were saying that we see these, these things on Star War. We're fascinated by these things.

Dr. Reedy: A child that feels alone and on the outside and powerless and disenfranchised with access to weapons of max destruction, the recipe. We go to Star Wars and droves and we understand the story. And then when we come out into the world and see the atrocity play out in real life, we are intellectually dumbfounded because we've lost contact with the parts of ourselves that when we get cut off on the street, we flip the middle finger. That's the same rage. It's not as harmful and destructive of course. But that's what Yoda was trying to teach is he said, look, if you want to understand darkness, you have to know yourself. That's what learning to love the horrible rotten self is when you come to understand not just the good and pretty and smart parts, but all of you, then you can approach the person struggling with more harmful and dangerous behaviors.

You can treat them with the compassion that heals instead of the rage and the hate and the anger that, caused the problem in the first place. So yeah, I think the story is by coincidence, there's no way you could have known this, but my family's been watching the Star Wars series, the original movie series in the last week. We watched four in a row, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Six was last night. And we watch it as a therapy family because we have four therapists in our family. And so we pause and we talk about how this motif, this myth illustrates life over and over again. You either gravitate toward hate and fear and rage and control, or you surrender to love, which comes with it pain and sadness and sorrow and loss and all of the feelings that we, that we struggle to feel, that we struggle to sit with.

August: And I think, I mean it was, I should, first of all, you're right. You're not saying, oh, I had this new method or anything. In fact, I think you say you don't like to give advice, what you really do is just say what worked for you. And I appreciate, it sounded to me like, first of all, it's facing yourself, seeing yourself . And then it's being honest towards the outside world also. Being, having one, one person that you can be honest with and you realize you not get left. And then it sounds like you then took the next step to be honest with as many people as possible. And they hesitatingly maybe see where the chips fall. And it turned out not everybody leaves when you're just honest.

Dr. Reedy: I think John Lennon said it at one point, if you just tell the truth, the people that'll be left standing around you are your people

August: Right.

Dr. Reedy: It's kind of simple. And I'll tell you the truth is, I've been a liar most of my life. I wouldn't have called it that. If you had told me that 15, 20 years ago, I would've thought you were crazy. because I see myself as having integrity and trying to do the right thing when I failed, when my marriage, the marriage that I'm still in when I thought it was over, which is what, what needs to happen to the narcissistic wound, to the narcissistic person. They have to experience failure and oftentimes go through a period of humiliation. It was either kill myself because I wasn't worth it. That was, I considered it a lot , or it was keep going and keep walking through this and you'll find something on the other side, which is what I hope for.

I was going to Jamie see Jamie all along. And so, what I'm trying to do is encourage people to find a safe place to find themselves. And then when they do that, see if they can find the people around them to tell that truth. You know, it's just, it's not like a big philosophical mystery. It's like, what do you want to eat today? Do you want to go to church with me on Sunday or Saturday? Do you like pickles with your sandwich? it's everything. And when you start to learn to tell the truth, then you find your connections. But like I said most of us spend our time this and Brine Brown, I mean, everybody talks about this. Most of us are so in need of connection that we never had. That we will fit ourselves. We will change ourselves into we, we'll, I said something to my wife last night, she asked me something and I answered, and then a minute later I said, actually that's not true,

August: .

Dr. Reedy: She said, were you lying? I said to both of us. Yes. . And I just, I said it, I tried it on for size and I sat with her for a minute and it didn't fit. And now here's what I want, here's what I need, here's what I feel. That's what we're doing. We're just trying to help people find out who they are.

August: Right. No, I got to. So in the first chapter you have, yeah. A young woman that says to you, it's so scary to stand in my own opinion.

Dr. Reedy: Right.

August: And you say it takes a rare kind of courage or audacity. I wanted to give you a quotation and see what your reaction is. Just talk about how scary it is to stand in your own opinion. This is from Robert Bal, who you quote in the book. This is from a gathering of men. The Bill Moyer's thing. Bal says, if I go into a store, if I go in, for example, with my wife into a store, and there's two sweaters. One is green and the other is blue. I can't decide. And I say to her, what do you think? She says, oh, the blue is beautiful. Immediately the green fades into some hideous color .

Dr. Reedy: Yeah.

August: Which I've had that experience so often where suddenly someone else says something and then you just adopt that.

Dr. Reedy: Yeah.

August: And so, I don't know, we just seem to be so, we're so social. That it's very difficult to, as your client said, stand in your own opinion.

Dr. Reedy: For a lot of us, the way out of childhood, the way to survive it was to do just what blinds describing. I did that. The other way is to burn the house down. The, the other day is to, to rebel. There are more than just two ways, but that's another way of doing it. And I kind of did that one also. I've done that one when things when not deciding which color sweater I liked went on long enough. And I couldn't stand at the pressure build up until I exploded. And I've exploded at several times throughout my life in big ways, kind of had these midlife crises. And, and so most of us will struggle with what I call in the book, the gravitational pull of the other, and will feel the need to unconsciously all of this is unconsciously sacrifice, dismiss, ignore, not even know what we like.

Because we need to fit in. We need to belong. We need that, what we think is connection, but it's not really connection. It's really a loss of self and an integration into somebody else's self. It's so powerful for, for us, sensitive people. I consider myself , I mean, I was called too sensitive when I was for us sensitive people. I was, my, we walk into an elevator and we know how everybody feels. And it's not an asset. It's a liability. We can feel the wants and the needs of other people. And we use that to survive childhood. That's what the drama of the gifted child is about. The most important book, in my opinion, that's ever been written about children is the gifted child was the child who could perceive what somebody else wants or needs and give it to them at the cost of the real self is what she describes. So Bal is Right. Right. Sensitively on to, to himself there.

August: So let's talk about projective identification, which I've heard a lot about, but I thought your discussion was very clear. When I first heard it, I said, oh, oh, well I do that all the time.

Dr. Reedy: Yeah. Yeah.

August:: . If the idea is if I get an email that's upsetting or something and I'm angry, I might go into the next room and pick a fight with my wife. It just seems like for some reason, something that happens or in the business setting, the client gets mad at the owner. The owner is agitated at having been lectured to. So the owner goes and talks to the middle management and agitate to them, and then the middle management goes home and pisses off their kids. And it's just like, I've heard it described also this idea of pain passing, tossing the pain. Why is it that we think it will be a, I don't know why, but I don't know if there's this sense that I'm agitated and so I'm just going to go and piss somebody else off. I don't know where that comes from. But that is the idea, right. Of projecting.

Dr. Reedy: Yeah. And working with, I have a colleague that worked with borderlines at a, at a hospital for a long time, ran borderline groups. And, and he said, they had a saying for it that they would put their stink on you. That you'd walk into the group having a typical day, and by the end of the group you'd be feeling powerless and frustrated and agitated. And then, like you said, you, if you're not aware of it and don't digest and metabolize it, you'll go home and take it on on your kids. Your kids will then kick the dog. And the dog siting, then the dog sits in the living room. The whole thing is complete. I think it's because again, it's about sitting with the feeling, digesting it, owning it, know embracing it. We want it out of us and onto the other person.

It's so, and when I'm in a therapy session and I'm starting to feel frustrated, I always ask myself, now, is this what they're feeling? Oftentimes the the obvious answer is yes. And so then I have insight into how they're, we can use, in other words, we use projective identification when it's happening to us. To understand the other, yeah. So when your child comes to you and says, you never listened to me. You're a jerk. You're an idiot, I hate you. And you have a feeling of inadequacy or you're feeling attacked. , just ask yourself, is this what the child is feeling? And you will be absolutely amazed to find out so often that's what they're feeling. , then you know how to connect to them. Then you know how to respond to them. Because now you can use that, that thing, that projective identification, that that stink, that pain passing to understand the other.

But that takes a chain breaker. That takes somebody who's going to take responsibility and say, I'm going to take this feeling. I'm not going to act it out from my own satisfaction. I'm not going to be self-indulgent in that way and go kick the dog. I'm going to sit with it, feel it. That's going to build up an empathy for me and an understanding of the other person. And I'm going to metabolize, I'm going to move through that, and then I'm going to go back to the person who gave it to me and say, in whatever way we can probably with our hearts, I see you. I get it. Now I know what you're feeling.

August: Right. One of the great things about this book is that you have cases where you talk about where they don't end pretty bow around them. And for example, I don't know if this is on top of your head, but the, you have the case where you call the the clinician Melissa and the patient.

Dr. Reedy: Oh, I know what it is. Yeah.

August: Could you tell our audience about that?

Dr. Reedy: Melissa the therapist. I was part of my job is I go around and I supervise therapist. I teach in-services. I'll go out and spend time with them, with their clients, watch their sessions, give my thoughts and insights. Maybe even model. So I'm sitting with Melissa, she's talking to this young child in our program, a teenage child who's lost parents has obvious attachment wounds that are explicit Big T trauma. And what Melissa's trying to do is she's trying to make this girl feel better. This, and this girl is accusing Melissa of not caring. She's saying, you left before we could talk last week. And Melissa's saying, wait, I talked to you twice. I had two sessions with you. I only had one session with everybody else, but I had two with you.

August: Yeah. And she says, and I saw you laughing with...

Dr. Reedy: I saw you laughing with the staff. You were, I know you were laughing about me. And I just saw Melissa wanting to make this young girl feel happy and okay and loved, which most people would say that sounds like a wonderful virtuous attempt, virtuous effort. But I had the advantage of sitting outside of that pair and watching. And I said, can I try it? And that's when I said, I think this, this young person, this young girl, I think she needs to be heard and seen and to know that yeah, you might love her for two months, three months while she's here. But she has some deep wounds that can't be fixed really easily. She has the loss of her caregivers. One is dead, one is in prison, or whatever the case is. And I think she just needs you to hear and sit with that.

And clinically speaking, what Melissa needed to, to, to allow is she needs to be the villain. Her gift would have been, my daughter has written about this, she's also a therapist. She said The greatest gift that a parent can give is to allow the child to cast them as a villain in the story. Because Melissa was unwilling to be the villain and had to be a good therapist and a good person. That's her wounding. She couldn't hold it. She had no place for it. And so she kept on trying to solve both of their, their problems. And she was causing it to escalate. So I just said this young to the young woman, I said, you're in pain, you're alone. And I hear it.

August: You say in the text, there's often no solution to these situations except to listen. In other words, hearing and sitting with someone's painful story is the solution. I have had the experience of an adolescent boy crying and saying, I just really miss my mom. She died two years ago. I really don't like being here. What are you going to say to that? I mean, I think you talk about those situations very well here about how if you're trying to accomplish something, you say, any attempt to try to get her to feel something other than what she currently felt only reinforced her feelings of aloneness. And any attempt to solve it would trivialize the immense pain and sadness that she felt.

Dr. Reedy: It's funny that you share that story in my, in the journey of the parent. That's the first story is a young man whose mother had died. Oh really? And he snapped at somebody in a group therapy session, which my old mother tongue was. I kind of punished him. And I said, go sit by yourself. because that was my training growing up. I paused after the group was over and I went over and sat with him and I said, at that time I'd gathered myself and I said, what were you doing in group? You were snapping at people. And then he started to cry. It started to rain. I remember it, this is 24 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember where we were sitting. He, it started to rain lightly. He started to cry and started to talk about his mother.

He said, I love my dad, but it's not the same. And all I did was cry with him. I didn't have a look on the bright side. I didn't say this will make you stronger. I didn't, I couldn't solve his unsolvable problem. I cried with him in his grief. And it was that moment, August that I had that glimpse of what I wrote about many years later, which is, that's the gift that we give, is we can sit with somebody in their unsolvable problems and cry with them. And the only thing you know, when I got MS when I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2015, I think I talked about it in the second book also. And I called a friend of a friend not knowing why I called him first, the first person, except for that he had family members that had the disease. He's an Osman and his father's Allen Osman, the oldest Osman brother. Oh, yeah. And his brother David also has MS. And they're big spokespeople for the disease. I called Tyler this friend of a friend, and I'd said, Tyler, I just got diagnosed with MS. And this 20 something year old young man said, you're not alone. I love you and I'll always be there for you. That's all he said. And I didn't even know I needed that. But what else could he say? There's a cure on the horizon or you can make,

August: You may not have the worst kind and Yeah,

Dr. Reedy: Yeah. Just, I'll be with you. And that's so hard and requires great capacity. That's why the great, I wrote about this on my social media today. The great masters of compassion, like the Buddha Clint, spent plenty of time in self care and self-reflection and meditation because they knew that kind of energy. To be there for people that are suffering requires a lot of spiritual food, a lot of, a lot of self care, a lot of time sitting and quietly meditating. So yeah, it is the, the gift of being a therapist to do it. But it asks a lot of us who have what I call empathic misery. Where we're connected to people's pain. It asks a lot. So we have to practice a lot of self-care and a lot of clear boundaries to do it Well.

August: One of the things that I think you use the word a lot, understand you want to understand the person, and I looked it up. Because I'm, we, but First of all, I thought it was interesting, the etymology, the word understand it means literally to stand among to be around. Wow. It has these two meanings. One is, has a lot of different meanings. But the two that I think might get confused, the first definition is to get the meaning of, to comprehend, to know or graph what is meant by. And to me, that has a very cognitive feeling to it not affective. There's another definition, which is number seven, which is to have a sympathetic rapport with like, no one understands me. And so, I don't know, for me, maybe it's just my own associations with the word understand. A lot of times you're saying you want your clinicians to understand, to just understand. I think to me, that means, well does that mean like figure out what happened in their background to cause this? Is it like some little theory or is it more that kind of, unconditional positive regard, I guess that more of a, it has, it's not just cognitive, it's also evaluating or . What do you think.

Dr. Reedy: I love this interview so much. This is the first time I've met you. Understanding is a shallow word. It doesn't completely communicate the robustness of the tasks that you're talking about. It comes up short for sure. Although the etymology actually kind of leans toward it.

August: Right. Yeah.

Dr. Reedy: But it is, I might get this wrong, so people are going to have to look this up, but my therapist taught me years ago that the German word for empathy was, I think it was Mitgefuhi or something like that. I can't remember. And she said it meant to sit with somebody in it. Sit with somebody. And so I think it's about just being with them at a deep level. who's the master? If, if people are wondering what we're talking about, again, since I didn't invent any of this watch, Mr. Rogers watch Fred Rogers watch the documentary that happened in 2018, 19. And the movie that came out around the same time with Tom Hanks playing the character, you will then see, he asks questions. He's curious, he, but you can sense his compassion and his feeling. He never tried to get a kid not to be scared, not to be angry. He simply listened to their fear and their anger and they were then allowed to move through it. But when it doesn't get listened to and heard and understood, then it remains fixated in the person. They remain stuck in it, they act it out. It becomes a complex for them. And so, if you want to know what I'm trying to say when I use the word understand, because it is more than an intellectual exercise, Mr. Fred Rogers is the best popular example I've ever seen of a master therapist.

August: I've often liked that. interesting thing that, Carl Rogers and Mr. Rogers had the same name. Which one are you talking about?

Dr. Reedy: They're synonymous. Right.

August: You're also, your team, I guess it seems is very, creative. It seemed. I I thought that the one example, which was quite interesting was when, well there were several. One was the example of Nick who was resistant to therapy and the parents had his brain scanned.

Dr. Reedy: Oh, yes. Yes.

August: I can tell the story. I guess from my understanding, they were trying to get understand him, get in his head. And you guys were trying to do it at a certain point. You said you realized that he was tired of people trying to poke in there.

Dr. Reedy: Yeah.

August: That was my.

Dr. Reedy: I picked up the baton of the intrusive pattern and just went along route. It was really the first really big moment where I realized what it meant to be an adult in the room and to apologize and to realize that he had a good reason for the defense. I grossly misunderstood him. And I perceived his resistance as, I didn't think of this word, but just badness, just evil. He was just being a jerk.

August: Right. He had laughed at someone had said they had gotten so drunk there, had a blackout and he laughed. Right. That was the sort of thing that a teenager would do. Yeah.

Dr. Reedy: And so I saw that as cruel because this, this boy that he was laughing with or at had almost died from alcohol poisoning.

And then I went, went to Jamie and I tell her this story. I used her as my supervisor and she's like, you could just go back out and apologize for missing him. And she walked me through what I ended up writing about, which I did. In fact, I reached out to the character that's based on, because it was too, I told this story too precisely accurate that no one would know who he is. But if he read it, I would, he might recognize it. So I asked for permission, sent him the story, and he asked me to be his therapist. And I've been his therapist since. So it made a big impact on him. When I apologized for the intrusion, when I recognized it, when I was an adult enough to say, I don't care if I want to paint myself in the light of being a good therapist and a loving person doing the right thing, the fact of the matter is I screwed up. I misunderstood. I made the mistake and I was being cruel. And when I did that for the first time, I think he started to feel that there could be somebody in his life that could understand him, somebody that could be safe. Because everybody else has been trying to drill through his defenses, which by the way, he built to protect himself from the drilling in the first place.

August: That's so profound. The other thing that, another example that was really, I thought very creative was, the one where you tell the staff he had lost both his parents, he had a significant growth in the program and then left and then came back and you say, I reflected on the job of the therapist. It wasn't to fix this young man, it was to find him. I said, rather than fixing him, and there's a lot of pressure on you to do that. You're speaking to the clinician, let's talk about what you can do. I think it is your job to find his story and tell it for him. Tell it to the staff, to his peers. Which were, that was a very interesting, just trying to do whatever out there. Can you talk a bit about, about that?

Dr. Reedy: It reminds me of the quote that I use. I think I probably mentioned someone in the book from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who says, if we could read the secret histories of our enemies, we would find in each man's story suffering sufficient to disarm all hostility. Or as Abraham Lincoln said it more succinctly, I do not like that man. I must get to know him. Once you find somebody in their context, everything that seems irrational about their behavior, self-sabotaging about their behavior, crazy pathological about their behavior makes perfect sense. So that's the job. And by telling it, I mean to the client, you reflect it back. You say, it sounds like this is what you've needed to do to survive. And you're, you're fighting the client. Then the client, again, the nervous system, the defense relaxes because they've been seen. Then they can start to deal with the trauma and the pain that's been unprocessed with the staff and the grandparents and the other professionals.

You tell this story to them so that you alchemize, if that's okay to use that there their rage and judgment and anger and impatience into compassion and love and understanding and tolerance. That's what finding the context does for the client. And that's what finding the contact can do for the treatment team, in this case, the peers and the people at home who are just wanting this child to be Okay. And so. It's something that as a supervisor is a wonderful opportunity to try to teach therapists that the goal is to find instead of fix.

August: I think also you're dealing with situations which are not long horizon situations. I mean, these are kids who could really, with their impulsivity and their amount of pain, they could die by suicide or o something. And so there's a sense that also I think to be able to verbalize feelings is very difficult. I'm almost 60 and I'm struggling with it. And to ask a teen to be able to verbalize what's going on, I just thought it was really interesting that, let's try some stories out there and see how they resonate with you. But I don't know why we would expect a teen not to act out in a way, because it's, if you're in a lot of pain and adolescent, how are you really going to be? So I have to keep, when I'm reading the book, I'm reminding myself, okay, they're not, these are not intellectual discussions here when we talk about the understanding. We're talking about building a rapport or something because it's very difficult to put these things into words for anybody.

Dr. Reedy: It is, that's why I'm drawn to myth, poetry and art, music because music, I don't use dance in my work, but a lot of people can use body movement is because these expressions are the closest we can it, it's the Star Wars motif is a better explanation than an intellectual one. You could feel it by, you watch Superman and you walk out of there feeling like a superhero because you've connected to the character. It's Deepak Chopra said, when you watch an iconic movie like that, it plants a seed of a hero inside of you and you know what it's like to transcend and become all that you are. And so I think it's really hard to describe some of these things. That's why even though this theory is out there already, I'm not writing it for the first time.

I'm telling it from my vantage point from the things that I've seen. So people have more examples, they have more mythologies, if you will. They have more stories where, oh, that's what it looks like when you see somebody hear somebody and this is what they do now I understand. And so I'm just, just telling my version of Superman, my version of the Matrix, my version of Star Wars in the life that I've lived, because that's all I can do. All I can tell is the story that I've lived and the meaning that it has given me in my life.

August: And I think, there's also some lines in here that are, unsettling or they're, they kind of shake things. For example, I've often liked the saying, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly because it kind of shocks you. And it's great for perfectionists. And one of yours is, or one of the ones in here is, strike while the iron is cold.

Dr. Reedy: Right. Right.

August: And the one about that was really striking was, this is from Jamie Gill. It took me a while to figure out the difference between the staff and the patients in a mental hospital I worked in. And then it came to me, the staff have keys.

Dr. Reedy: Right, right.

August: I think that's also kind of a myth or a different way of looking at something just to kind of flip it. And that can be helpful.

Dr. Reedy: What I'm trying to do, well one tries to do is create a shift where people can see more clearly. The fish can't see water; the fish is the last to discover water because it's, you have to, you have to know not water.

August: Right.

Dr. Reedy: To be able to see water. And so I think those clever little sayings that we have, the one that you had, the ones that I've used are you create a shift for the person. They're expecting it to end differently and they're like, oh, I have to think the quote causes me to think and see things from a, from a different perspective. And I think that's what I'm trying to accomplish is that with the keys example, I, I gave this in a speech in Nashville two weeks ago and I tell people, if you don't know that you're as sick as your clients, you're in trouble. And so are they. If you think that you've transcended everything, first of all, if you had transcended everything, you'd have only empathy and you would see yourself in them. But if you think you've trans, if you've, if you've imagined, if you've adopted the fantasy psychosis that you are above it all and that you don't have the same issues that they have, you'll never make contact with them and they'll never trust you.

It can't happen that way. And so you will laugh because you'll think I'm saying this just for this interview, but I watched The Matrix two nights ago because we took a break from Star Wars for one Night. . I haven't watched it in 10 years. And The Matrix is a metaphor for the common culture for what we've been taught as children. Part of what I'm trying to do in my books is I'm trying to speak to the part of you that knows most people when they read my stuff, say, I already believed this. I just didn't have the words for it or nobody had said it quite this way. That's what I think those sayings are trying to reach. I'm trying to reach that part of you that knows this already, but had to give it up and lose it to survive your childhood.

August: I'm, we're past time now, but I I wanted to just ask you one more question. I don't know when I read your title for the first time, learning to the Audacity to be You Learning to love your horrible Rotten Self, I immediately associated to the book Alexander and the Terrible, horrible, no. Good, good. Very bad Day. I don't know if you, I don't know if that is.

Dr. Reedy: It's one of my wife's favorite childhood books.

August: Isn't it a great book? I just, the, just the God guess because of the word horrible in there. That is a great book. And it ends with Yeah. Some days are like that . Yeah. Some days are like no solution offered. Just That does happen sometimes. Well, Dr. Brad Reedy, thank you so much for, for joining me. It's been a pleasure to speak to you and thank you for Absolutely Work and your book and for sharing all these ideas and your, authenticity and vulnerability. Thank you very much.

Dr. Reedy: Absolutely. Honestly, my pleasure.

[END]