"Fathers Day Special" Larry Wilson Shares Family Communication Story

On this Special Episode, our Host Larry Wilson gets a little personal, and shares stories and information about his successful Psychoanalysis Father and how his style of communication made him a great doctor. Literally saving lives through quality listening skills. There is an example using a scene from the movie 'Saturday Night Fever"....so interesting!

Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method

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Transcript

Larry Wilson 0:00

Hi, this is Larry Wilson, and this is how to talk to humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have fun for you and alluded you so far? I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires and zombies and exports, this is not the show for you. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned in 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world. And their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. This is going to be a very special Father's Day episode of this podcast. I don't think I speak very often about my father on this podcast. He's uh my parents are both no longer with us. Both of them lived long, long fruitful lives. And my father's a very unusual guy. My father was a very uh renowned, uh, esteemed, successful psychoanalyst. I as I'm telling you this, I feel like I must have related this information some other time during this podcast. I think he was very successful as a psychoanalyst because of certain limitations he had as a person. I had a lovely childhood growing up, but as with everything else in my life, I had nothing else to compare it to. So I didn't really know what uh fathers were supposed to be like. My father was very nice, but there was a funny feeling about him, like he couldn't quite connect. He he could pay attention to you and he could talk to you, but I think there was some problem with him, for whatever reason, with his ability to really connect with people, maybe emotionally, maybe that's what it is. And it's it's odd and it's paradoxical. My mother, of course, was the opposite. I'm sure that's what sort of drew them together. Everyone uh respected my father, but they loved my mother. So it's interesting that I'm sort of a melange of the two of them. In fact, I thought as this is a special Father's Day broadcast, uh, I'd tell you a little bit. I I hate for anyone to hear this and think I'm saying he was a terrible father. He wasn't a terrible father. It's just odd in some ways. And I realize that it may also have uh propelled me as I grew up in admiring people who were able to connect with other people and to see the power that they had in those skills. I I am not making an excuse for my father. I truly think it may have been the seed of why he was so successful, so respected, so highly regarded amongst people in the psychoanalytic community. I think it's because, and I'm just guessing, I mean, he never talked about his work, never talked about his patients. I grew up in Los Angeles, and so I simply assumed, I never discussed this with him, but I assumed that a number of his patients were probably famous people, people on television or movies or things like that, but he never ever, he was a highly, highly ethical guy. That's funny. I remember around the period of the Watergate break-in, and I I apologize if I have the timeline on this wrong. I can't remember if it's before the Watergate break-in or after when they uh evidence came out that I guess Watergate burglars, or I think they were referring to them colloquialistically as plumbers from the White House, had uh burgled the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, and had stolen the psychiatrist's handwritten notes about sessions with Ellsberg. And I presume it was, you know, uh some kind of intel job. They were wanted to find out everything they could about him. When my father heard about this in his own very low-key, detached kind of way, I remember he was he was genuinely outraged. He wasn't unsophisticated. It's not like he couldn't conceive of people doing this, but to him, that was uh patient therapist relationship confidentiality was akin to, you know, priest penitent confidentiality, or maybe more so. Maybe it was supposed to be even more private than that. And my father never spoke, not a word, about any of the patients he had, any of the work that he did. And I remember, it's so funny, I remember this day, he very quietly, he wasn't the kind of guy to shout or yell or get all worked up. But I remember he was genuinely outraged by it. It it kind of blew his mind, like he thought everyone should understand this is a line you don't cross. You do not burgle a psychiatrist's office and steal the notes from sessions with a patient. You just you just don't do that. Uh even right now, as I'm telling you, I'm more exercised than he was. He didn't get loud, he didn't get worked up. I just remember him shaking his head in really in disbelief. How could someone violate the sanctity of patient therapist relationships? And so I it's funny when I think back on those things, I don't have any firsthand knowledge. Uh I take that back. I take that back. I have partial firsthand knowledge, but it's because a couple of times I would meet people in Los Angeles through uh business or uh one thing or another, and it would come out that they had been uh a patient of my father's at one time or another. And I never, you know, I was always just going to be diplomatic and say, oh, well, you know. But on more than one occasion, they were very emphatic that he had saved their life. And I remember growing up, I can't remember the first time I heard it maybe was when I was like ten years old. A guy came to our house during the holidays, I think, and he had a gift for my folks, and it was an odd gift. It was a decorative candle of some kind, and I mean it was very nice, but it was just a peculiar gift. And I would never have said anything, my father would never have said anything, but at some point he turned to me, I think he had dinner with us, and he he said, you know, your father is a great, great doctor. And I was like, Oh, really? He said, Yes, he saved my life. I thought, hmm. And that's all he said, didn't give me any more details about that. But years later, I had a couple of other experiences, and the most detailed and involved was with uh another psychiatrist who had been a patient of my father's. And I won't go into more of the details because I don't really have uh that permission to discuss that here. But she was enormously successful as a psychiatrist and did a lot of great things, except according to her, for those times when she would go into the closet at home and bang her head on the wall until it was bloody. Then she'd come out and wipe it off and go back to being perfect. Everything was fine. Except for those intermittent times, she wanted to kill herself. And uh she, according to her, uh I spoke to her, I met her several times. She thought my father walked on water. She had nothing but the highest praise. And what was so interesting from the little bit she told me, uh she experienced some horrific childhood trauma. And as this began to be unspooled in treatment with my father, she said that my father would say, said my father's comment when he would hear about some of these horrific things was, how unfortunate. Now you might think, oh God, that's not very empathetic, you know. That's that's not very compassionate. But of course, that wasn't his job. He wasn't being paid to be compassionate. His job was to help them learn to process what experiences they'd had that were affecting their lives in a negative way. And I think in, well, I'm making a broad sweeping generalization. I could be completely wrong here, but I would think that a lot of it had to do with childhood trauma. I'm just painting that in a broad brush stroke. But she was so impressed by that, uh, in a positive way. In other words, she did not think that was a negative feature of my father lacking empathy or an emotional reaction, which was why she felt so comfortable to relay this information and discuss these most deeply held secrets and fears and uh traumatic events, because it was so clear that my father's uh inability to connect with people in that way made him extremely effective. So I thought Father's Day is as good a time as any to paint that image. And also, I'll share something else with you. I remember one time some SmartyPants character sometime who wanted to show me, I have a feeling this is when I was in my late teens, early twenties, wanted to show me how sophisticated he was. He said, So what kind of a psychoanalyst is your father, Freudian or Jungian? And I really didn't know enough about it at the time. I said, I don't really know. And so then I asked my father about it later. And my father said, Oh, that's kind of old-fashioned, thinking you have to be either Freudian or Jungian. He said, I'm really Cohattian. Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, Yeah, he said, I'm sort of a big believer in this guy, Heinz Cohutt, who was a psychoanalyst, who promulgated the ideas that a lot of mental illness or neurosis stemmed from lack of self-esteem, and that people who had a sense of self-worth and had self-esteem were less likely to have that emotional trauma or difficulty. And I thought that was so interesting. And I remember I began this episode telling you my father never spoke about this. Now I can think of one time he did briefly. But it wasn't really about his practice, it wasn't how he treated people, it wasn't about any of his patients. He just said, and this should maybe tell you what year it was. Now I can't remember. It was whatever year the film Saturday Night Fever was released. Because I remember my father, and well, now I realize that may be inaccurate, because I'm sure my father didn't go to the movie theater to see Saturday Night Fever. It must have been on cable television, must have been, you know, playing on HBO or something like that. Because somehow my father had seen it, to my surprise. And as always, he saw the most unusual things through his peculiar viewpoint. He would see stuff that would really surprise and amaze you. And he said, you know, there's a really great example in that film of what I'm talking about. And I said, What scene could you possibly be referring to? And he said, Well, there's a scene when the John Travolta character comes back to his family's house for dinner or something, and he has a younger brother, and the younger brother wants to show him a drawing that he's done of some kind. And he said, when the Travolta character looks at the drawing, he goes, Oh, that's fantastic. He goes, This is so great, and he's talking with him. And he said, whether it just happened naturally with the actress, or whether the director crafted this or the actor, he said, the younger actor playing his younger brother seemed so filled with pleasure at being admired for something he's done, and clearly seems so proud and so pleased with the praise he's receiving from someone he respects and looks up to. And I thought that's a great example. It's a great demonstration, as opposed to what eventually became very fashionable, which was this, I think, very pseudo-scientific idea of, oh, self-esteem can be instilled in everyone just by saying, yeah, you're great. Oh, why am I great? No reason, you're just great. Well, that doesn't have the same benefits for your mental health. But if you do something that you've invested your time and energy in, and that you have a feeling about, and someone you respect sees it and is able to communicate, how astonishing that I always come back to this. If you are able to connect with someone and communicate that idea, do you see it's never about the specifics? It's never about, oh, I'm an art professor, and so when I say this, it carries more weight. It's not what it's about. It's never about you being able to quantify or you being able to insist or show certain awards or acclamations you've had. It's not about that. It's about making an authentic connection with someone and then communicating your appreciation of something they've done. It could be a song they sing, it could be a picture they've drawn, it could be a meal they've cooked, it could be, it could be the way they've addressed themselves, you know, and all of this, of course, is you know, it's a wide, wide uh range of ages and things that are age appropriate, age specific. But when somebody else feels that you really see them, that may be more powerful than anything else you can do in your day. Doesn't mean you have to do it, but it means if you want to, for example, have better relationships with people in your family or friends, this is one way to achieve that. And it's just in how you communicate. It doesn't mean blowing smoke up their ass, it doesn't mean exaggerating or lying or idle flattery. It means genuinely seeing something they've done or they are working on or they're involved with or that's important to them. Maybe they want to tell you about an idea they have about something, listening to them and then responding in a way that makes it absolutely clear you really see them, has a profound and Lasting effect on your relationship and especially on the recipient's mental health. And I wish my father were alive today. I'd be so interested to hear his reaction to this podcast. I don't know if he'd agree with me. I don't know if he'd disagree. I don't know if he'd be amused. I don't know if he'd be confused. It's an important lesson also to remember that you should be using your communication skills to communicate with people while they're still here. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. In fact, if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Humans.