When Richard Brockman was seven years old his mother died by suicide. He went on to become an expert in trauma and suicide, and is now a Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia, Psychoanalyst, Playwright, Author and my mentor and friend. He recently published his memoir, Life After Death: Surviving Suicide, which tells his story of loss and healing from both a first person and a neuroscience perspective.
In this conversation you will learn much about how to heal trauma from perspectives of story, neuroscience, and meaning.
Theme music by The Thrashing Skumz
Produced by Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff
Timestamps
0:17 - Healing Trauma and Surviving Suicide
10:43 - Personal Connection's Impact in Psychiatry
25:29 - Questioning Freud's Theories in Therapy
30:15 - Understanding Meaning and Story in Psychology
42:04 - Trauma, Story, and Healing
50:31 - Healing Trauma Through Love and Storytelling
1:04:03 - Healing Trauma and Finding Gratitude
1:10:45 - Taking Steps Towards Healing and Recovery
1:17:38 - Healing and the Meaning of Life
1:26:28 - Appreciation, Friendship, and Future Plans
When Richard Brockman was seven years old his mother died by suicide. He went on to become an expert in trauma and suicide, and is now a Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia, Psychoanalyst, Playwright, Author and my mentor and friend. He recently published his memoir, Life After Death: Surviving Suicide, which tells his story of loss and healing from both a first person and a neuroscience perspective.
In this conversation you will learn much about how to heal trauma from perspectives of story, neuroscience, and meaning.
Theme music by The Thrashing Skumz
Produced by Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff
Timestamps
0:17 - Healing Trauma and Surviving Suicide
10:43 - Personal Connection's Impact in Psychiatry
25:29 - Questioning Freud's Theories in Therapy
30:15 - Understanding Meaning and Story in Psychology
42:04 - Trauma, Story, and Healing
50:31 - Healing Trauma Through Love and Storytelling
1:04:03 - Healing Trauma and Finding Gratitude
1:10:45 - Taking Steps Towards Healing and Recovery
1:17:38 - Healing and the Meaning of Life
1:26:28 - Appreciation, Friendship, and Future Plans
Hello, welcome back to Developing Meaning. I am so glad to have you here. I am really excited about this episode with Dr Richard Brockman, my friend, colleague, author, playwright, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist. This is in some ways, a very sad and serious topic and yet I feel like it is not, overall, a dark episode. There are a bunch of different storylines here and we are going to weave in and out and weave a lot of different things together. Recently Dr Richard Brockman has come out with a book, life After Death Surviving Suicide that tells his own personal story of how he found, when he was seven years old, found his mom after she had ended her life by suicide, which there is no words right.
Speaker 1:It is devastating, and so he survived this. So this is a story about healing trauma, floundering after this horrible event and then really gradually finding himself becoming a wonderful psychiatrist who has helped many, many people now, including me. And I came to him and he helped me with a very traumatic situation for myself, which was that a client of mine committed suicide very soon after I met them for the first time in my private practice when I was newly out of residency, and this is not something that is really supposed to happen. There are a lot of intense feelings. There were, and a lot of intense feelings I had many intense feelings of I messed up, I'm no good.
Speaker 1:There's a whole prevalent perspective maybe less so now, but at the time it seemed prominent that there was this perspective amongst psychiatrists that if somebody kills themselves, we shouldn't talk about it. Don't talk about that. You will be tainted by this. I know a colleague of mine who got that message after a patient of his had suicide and one of his colleagues and supervisor said don't mention this, you're a good psychiatrist, you don't want people to know this.
Speaker 1:And so this is an intense experience to go through and it was not easy to find the right person to help me heal and learn and recover from this. At that point I had been working for years with a fairly classic or pretty classically oriented psychoanalyst psychiatrist, a training analyst in one of the institutes in New York, and it had been interesting and helpful in many ways. But there was a lot of me that just did not feel comfortable going back to that person, who I think was a very nice person, but I didn't know anything about them. They were, that person was anonymous. They were following the anonymous analytic model where the analyst is an expert and the I project my thoughts onto them and they don't say anything about themselves and they just sort of reflect back and interpret. And even though he was kind, he seemed kind I just didn't seem like the right relationship for me to feel comfortable and heal.
Speaker 1:And at that time a very great supervisor of mine, deborah Cabanus, suggested I work with Dr Richard Brockman, who she knew and who other people knew had survived this horrible tragedy in childhood and he survived his mom's suicide and then he became an expert in trauma and suicide and he wrote a book about neuroscience and psychotherapy called a map of the mind toward a science of psychotherapy, looking at the therapeutic principles that happen in dynamic and other kinds of therapy from a science perspective. And then he was also a playwright and a published author and so I came to him and he treated me very differently. He offered me water pretty soon, he made me cups of coffee and we really developed a deep friendship and he really helped me switch out of and recover from that traditional psychoanalytic blank slate model and become more of a real person type of healer. My child psychiatry training also helped a lot with this, because kids really won't stand for that kind of blank slate approach when you're deflecting questions. And so his book Life After Death is a story talking about his experiences, his memories as a boy and then having his world shattered and then floundering and then healing.
Speaker 1:And in this book he uses a narrative approach of telling his story from the first person perspective and then switching into a neuroscience perspective and saying here I am as a little boy and this is what's going on and I'm having so much fun with my mom. And then the neuroscience here's the attachment biology, here's what's happening in the brain and the different brain structures at different stages of development. And here's my first person story of the trauma and then here's the brain story, and so he toggles back and forth between this very intense first person storyline and then the science, which for many trauma treatments is a treatment approach, sort of a dual attention point approach of associating into trauma, getting into the felt sense, the right brain, the body based felt sense experience of a trauma, and then shifting to a more relaxed, calm perspective which then enables the trauma memories to be reconsolidated with less intense emotional components, and that can be very healing.
Speaker 1:And so he does this in the storytelling approach of his memoir by switching from the first person storyline to the more detached storyline. There's this shift back and forth which allows us to move through this story in a gentle way. Part of this story also is him learning how to become the type of therapist that he is and telling the story of different therapeutic models, starting with being a boy and visiting his mom's therapist at his office, where this therapist seems to be kind of a cold, classical type of therapist, and then having some different therapy experiences and really being impacted and changed when in college, while really floundering, he went to Austin Riggs, the famous psychiatric treatment center in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts, seeing an outpatient psychiatrist there, and after this wild hitchhiking adventure, getting to her office late, he was greeted by this warm person who asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee. And so we talk about that, the meaning of a cup of coffee and a more caring, loving relationship between therapist and patient or client. So here's a story of horrible, unimaginably horrible trauma. A boy who survived and went on to become a great healer and, after healing himself, healed many, many other people and developed a really special style of healing. This is a little bit reflected in his answer to. I ask him what is he most excited about in the future, in the current landscape of psychiatry, what's truly innovative and new? And his answer is the grandmother bench, which, if you stick around to the end, you will find out what the grandmother bench is. I'll give you a hint. It's not a transcranial magnet that shoots electricity into our head. It has to do with healing through love, and this is a person who heals through love.
Speaker 1:I'm really pleased to present my conversation with my friend and colleague, dr Richard Brockman. By his book it's called Life After Death Surviving Suicide, and so glad to have you with us. Please enjoy. Here we go. I wanted to maybe start with how you and I are connected, and I came to you because I had a patient who committed suicide in my private practice and Deborah Cabanus thought that you would be a helpful supervisor and has really turned out to be. I remember it was amazing to get your help in that moment of crisis and then since then, we've developed a friendship and want to talk more about that. But along those lines I also wanted to ask, just sort of, the meaning of a cup of coffee, and you've made me a cup of coffee now, and you've done that before, and it comes up in your book. And let me just start with coffee and the meaning of coffee.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting question and, yes, you and I have had an interesting journey, just the journey that you and I have taken as supervisor and as friends and as colleagues.
Speaker 2:Margaret Brenman was a psychiatrist.
Speaker 2:She was the first woman to be named a full professor at Harvard, a full professor in psychiatry at Harvard, and was a history making, groundbreaking person in the world of psychiatry.
Speaker 2:And I was fortunate enough to have had her as my psychiatrist when I was really flailing I wasn't struggling, I was flailing at college and when I walked into her office and that's sort of an interesting story but when I walked into her office there was a table with fruit and with coffee and she offered me. She asked if I wanted a cup of coffee and it struck me as the most preposterous question I'd ever heard from a psychiatrist and one of the best starts to just a relationship I mean a patient doctor-patient relationship. But it indicated something about her generosity and her sense of what her role was and her sense of self and her sense of self in relationship to me and just holding that warm cup of coffee in my hands when I had expected something like what are you thinking or what are you feeling, and a long period of silence from her was a huge input into my thinking about her. It was very quick.
Speaker 1:It's a radical move and especially I must have been at that time and maybe I know you paint this picture in your book, but can you say kind of where you were in your life when she offered you that cup of coffee?
Speaker 2:I was falling apart and I was sort of a rebel without a cause. I mean, to a certain degree Vietnam War was a cause, but the truth was the Vietnam War and protesting the Vietnam War was a cover for the fact that I was protesting everything. And I didn't really know, I had no idea of what I was for, I just knew that I was against everything, and that just driven by confusion.
Speaker 2:So, arriving in her office and to have this person calmly feed, me and I think it was that sense of being fed and it really was in my mind not so much a warm cup of coffee as a nourishing bowl of soup which it was a cup of coffee, but it just felt nourishing was a radical beginning to a therapeutic relationship. It was a radical way to begin, especially it was like in the 1970s, and it was at Austin Riggs. I wasn't an inpatient, I was an outpatient. I was her outpatient at Austin Riggs.
Speaker 1:Were you in school at the time.
Speaker 2:I was at Williams, so I would hitchhike or get down from Williamstown to Pittsfield and then to Stockbridge where Austin Riggs was. So I'd have to win my way these 30 miles. So I'd have 30 miles there and 30 miles back, sort of to think about where I was going and think about where I had just been. So it was really a journey and a very literal as well as symbolic sense.
Speaker 1:And so for me I feel like the coffee ties in. I think the first time we met, I think you offered me water and you had water bottles. It wasn't a cup of coffee at that time, but there was. I was out of residency, I was a new attending, I had a small private practice and one of my patients had committed suicide. After I'd met with them just sort of came in in crisis and it's that sort of a shocking experience and I remember being shaken and having people treat me, I think, very nicely in the program.
Speaker 1:I think there had been an element in the residency before of oh, if somebody committed suicide, you made a mistake. There's means, there's something wrong with you and it's very unsettling. But there were also a bunch of people who said no, there's a whole. You know we're treating the sickest of the sick.
Speaker 1:This doesn't mean I'm a bad doctor and I had done several years of work with a training analyst who seems like a, seemed like a very nice guy, but I didn't know anything about him.
Speaker 1:I don't know if he's married, I don't know if he's kids, I don't. I know he was Jewish he mentioned that but I and and that just didn't make me feel comfortable to, to build a real therapeutic. I'm not being articulate now, but the contrast of coming to you knowing something about your past, that you've had, that you survived your mom's suicide and so you know about this topic on a personal level, there's a felt sense of and you're a real person. And then that really was sort of a starting point for me to start being more of a real person in my own therapy with my own patients. Not before that I was always sort of saying things like I think a therapist should say and oh, my goodness, did I say too much? And it just really sort of opened things up to have you as a role model and have you be there in that moment and also you putting it, giving me a cup of your water bottle or coffee.
Speaker 2:Really I think a lot of this work as a psychiatrist and learning one's role has a great, a lot of role modeling. It's kind of one of the last of the great apprenticeships that's left in the world. And, as you were talking about the cup of coffee and just being open with who you are, I had a very rough time in analytics school and as I went through in the book I basically quit. But when I applied to analytics school I had two interviews. One was with Lionel Oversee. Lionel Oversee was a terrific gentleman and his office reflected him. There was a table with nothing but small statues of lions and he had, like his hair was long, like a lion's mane, and he really had this presence of not a lion with huge teeth but a strong man with a gentle soul and he was very welcoming and very gracious and he kind of just welcoming, was welcoming to me as a human being. And that was one interview I had before I went in the application process to analytics school.
Speaker 2:The second interview was with an analyst whose name I don't remember. The lights in the office were all very low, the office was dark, you almost couldn't see anything and he was one of those analysts that sort of, and this was an interview for analytics school. He wasn't interviewing me as a patient, but as a potential candidate, and he said nothing. He just sort of sat there and stared at me and I decided the hell with you, I'm just going to lie.
Speaker 2:Whatever you asked me, I'm just not going to tell you anything about myself because I can't stand you. So he asked me about myself and I started lying, and one of the problems with telling lies is you have to keep track of the. I mean, you can't say one thing and then say something 10 minutes later that contradicts it. So I was very, very careful about what I said, but I was going to be damned if I was going to tell, if I was going to expose anything about myself or my background or my mother or her suicide or my raw internal state. I just told lies and I and I think I and then I got.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know how I got in, but anyway they accepted my application.
Speaker 1:So I had an application story with one of the RMS and that was by far the most unsettling and upsetting, really the only upsetting interview that I had. I applied to all the main psychiatry programs, was treated very well, and this person started off very nice and was saying oh, you've you really publish in really prestigious journals? And I had just. I had a middle author science paper and I had a couple of first author current biology papers and a first author PNAS paper and so I thought, oh, this guy really likes me. And then he went into sort of the details of some of my evaluations which I had never really looked at carefully and started asking it was just a. It ended up feeling really unsettled and upset and so I was happy for you to kind of stick it to the RMS a little bit in your book.
Speaker 2:Well, I have another RMS story, if I can. Yeah, of course, the boards and psychiatries you know your audience may or may not know there's. You interview a patient. I mean it's a live interview. You interview a real patient with two psychiatrists evaluating you for your interview, and this was in Chicago and I was in this in this hospital I don't know I remember which hospital, it was at a hospital and this patient is brought in and then the interviewers I don't maybe.
Speaker 2:I came in and the interviewer was there and one of the interviewers was one of the RMS and we already knew each other. We already knew that we hated each other. We already knew that nothing I was going to say would this RMS was going to contradict it, and we just stared at each other for about five or eight minutes. I knew he was going to fail me and I just looked at him and he looked at me and then I turned to the patient and just just talked to the patient and I knew I knew how to pass the boards.
Speaker 2:I knew you had to do a mental status. I knew you had to make a diagnostic formulation. I knew if she talked about depression and that and that, and if and if she talked strangely, I'd have to ask about psychosis. I knew exactly what I was supposed to do and I just talked to her about her life and of course I failed. And of course I knew I was going to fail and I didn't give a damn. And I took it again a year later and the RMS weren't in the room and I passed but that's crazy that you had an RM after.
Speaker 2:I don't. I mean, I think it was the luck, the luck or the bad luck of the draw. I don't think he. I'm sure he didn't ask for me, yeah.
Speaker 1:But still that's quite a quite an unlucky situation. So just to sort of stay with your psychoanalytic experience and I think we both value psychoanalysis and the insights from it but part of what I'm doing, I'm realizing, is motivated by almost a punk rock mentality against therapeutic anonymity, and I want to know who people are and use their real experiences. If I'm seeing a pediatrician, I want to know or I don't want them to be critic about whether they have kids. It's fine if the pediatrician doesn't have their own kids, but I just, I just want a real human relationship.
Speaker 1:And there are a couple of things that I think are concerning to me about the structure of psychoanalytic institutes and the model One is. I mean, one is the anonymity and the patient says everything that comes to mind and the analyst says nothing, so that creates a power imbalance. There's also the pyramid structure of analytic institutes that there's a bunch of candidates and then there's the supervisors and then there's the training people, and so that creates a potential for misuse of power at least. And then there's also financial incentives of if I'm an analyst, is it my interest to get somebody better in two sessions and send them out, or do I want to have heard sort of this phrase of good patients are made. You turn somebody into a good patient and then they get a lot. I see a lot of. I'm a therapist, I value therapy, but I think these aspects of the power relationship I think are important to at least think about, and so I was curious about your experience.
Speaker 2:I think you're right that analytic schools, as I've experienced them, almost generate power dynamic and inequalities of power and the abuse of power and scapegoating. And this is one of the reasons why I will never forgive the RMS, either one of them, because they're very comfortable with the use of power dynamics and scapegoating. And I was for each of them for different reasons and I think, but hardly because I just was moving in a different direction. You weren't buying their model or aspects of it, exactly.
Speaker 2:I wasn't buying aspects of the model. I didn't believe in anonymity. I didn't believe in just saying what are you thinking and remaining silent. I didn't believe in not giving someone a cup of coffee. I didn't believe in not sharing who I was and not answering If someone asked me a personal question. I'll answer the personal question so long as I think it's reasonable.
Speaker 1:In your book you talk about giving somebody money for a taxi.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when she didn't have money and she needed to get home and I said, here, here's five bucks, go get a taxi, and it was analyzed as my granting her edible wishes or something like that. And I think more than anything it was about scapegoating that the teaching that was done, as I experienced it in much of my analytic training not all of it, but in much of it was someone in the class would be scapegoated, and that someone was often me, and it was often by one or the other or both of the RMS, and it put me in a war footing with analytic treatment, with not so much analytic treatment but with analytic school, and with the analytic psychoanalytic establishment and the psychoanalytic system. And there's this arrogance that I found of you can hide behind silence and you can hide behind this curtain and present yourself as if you're omniscient. And that just pissed me off and I just didn't buy it.
Speaker 1:Here's this I read this book Awe I forget who wrote it, but the neuroscience of awe. It's a Berkeley professor and he quotes somebody talking about Freud as being arrogantly unfalsifiable and I think there's a lot of value in opening up the unconscious and he's a giant. But you had some ideas about I think you said some Anna Freud had some information that Freud was ignoring some of his own data in order to promote his sexuality.
Speaker 2:Well, anna, I believe the quote is that Freud had to believe and buy into the Oedipus complex and that if he didn't, psychoanalysis wouldn't exist. I might be wrong about that, but something like that and that basically the Oedipus complex is, it's an idea, it's not a thing, it's not a fact, it's just someone's idea about how the unconscious or how child development may or may not work, and that Freud had to accept it in order for psychoanalysis to be generated. And the implication was that it was a theory that she, as well as a lot of other people, just went along with because Freud valued it so highly, and that she questioned it but accepted it because of his authority. And the implication again was that a lot of the people that went along with Freud for all the years, especially the early years of psychoanalysis, went along with it because of his authority and I, very early on, didn't buy it and that started my difficult road through and then escape from analytic school. And it was kind of an escape. I don't think I left, I think I escaped.
Speaker 1:Did you end up getting your analytic, whatever degree I?
Speaker 2:got my analytic whatever, but I'd never completed the coursework. Well, I'd completed the coursework because I loved the courses. I thought I loved Freud's writing. I thought it was great literature. I really enjoyed it. I gobbled it up, but I didn't think it was science. I thought it was great writing. And Freud received the Goethe Award, which was the German Award for writing, for creative writing. He never received the Nobel Prize for scientific work and he was always pissed about that, but I thought it was incredibly wise of those, the powers that be, that his creative writing was recognized as creative writing, not as scientific writing.
Speaker 1:What are your favorite ideas from him or favorite aspects of Freud?
Speaker 2:My favorite aspects of Freud have to do with his sense of the transference, that there is something very powerful that occurs in human bonds between two people and that one, to a certain degree, shapes the other in ways that reflect one's sense of the world. So I value his sense of the transference. I think it was a very astute and insightful observation.
Speaker 1:Can you just say what is transference for people who may not know?
Speaker 2:Transference is the way one looks at someone else and incorporates certain distortions into the relationship that parallel, if you will, one's sense of one's world, whether it's strengths or it's unfairness, but that there is a slight distortion, or either slight or lesser or not distortion, in the way you see a bond.
Speaker 1:So aspects of our relationship might remind me of my father, and I might interact with you based on that?
Speaker 2:I think, yes, but again, freud always thought of it in terms of a sexual distortion, in terms of the Oedipal complex that I'm going to distort you, in terms of my father, I'm competitive with you, I see you as getting the woman that I really want, and it was always about the Oedipus complex and it was like, well, okay, that's one aspect of life, but it's one of an infinite number of aspects of life, I think, and so it's a distortion.
Speaker 2:I think, and it doesn't have to be that much of a distortion it's just how I tend to see the world, how I tend to see my place in it, how I tend to see other people's reactions to me, and I see it as a distortion that reflects one's basic story, and my belief is it's not an Oedipal distortion.
Speaker 2:It's that people have a certain sense of life and a certain sense of a story as we go through life, and it's a way of organizing incoming data. The story helps you to organize it. There's millions of pieces, or infinite number of pieces, of sensory data that we're always collecting every split second, and in order to make sense of that, you have to start integrating it into one's frame of reference, into one's memory, into one's sense of how the world works, how people react to you, how you react to them. I see that as integrating it into one's story and I think the transference is a piece of that. So my sense is it's not a sexual necessarily piece of it. It may or may not be, as I see my father, but it's how I get through life.
Speaker 1:It's getting a better understanding of story and meaning. So I've become obsessed a little bit with this idea of meaning and so, since starting this podcast, I'm trying to understand that more. And so from a biology perspective, from a story perspective and Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winning biologist who figured out the structure of DNA, apparently was fascinated that he said meaning is the main question, that he had the meaning written on his white board and there's all this incoming sensory information. It turns into electrical impulses in our skull and somehow certain things are meaningful. And how does that happen? And then from a story perspective, I've recently gotten interested in George Saunders, who's a short story writer and a master teacher, and he has.
Speaker 1:I was struggling to define meaning, but he really defines meaning in the context of short story writing as its causality. There's connection and impact, and that's what meaning is. And when he talks about a Russian masterpiece and the math, every little piece in that story, if the cloud is shaped a certain way, if somebody pulls up next to you carrying an umbrella why is it an umbrella? There's some kind of a connection and impact to the main idea. And so I think those two approaches the biology of meaning and then the narrative idea of meaning are fascinating.
Speaker 1:And then, just also from a therapy perspective, there's Victor Frankel, and he's sort of the third school of psychoanalysis, first being Freud's, and Pleasure, pleasure, pain is the central human drive. And then he said Adler, the second one is drive for power. And then Victor Frankel said no, it's meaning. And I really I agree with Victor Frankel. And then I also just wanted to throw in there, there's a Tosk-Doi quote which I came across recently, where he says the biggest fear of man is not death but meaninglessness. And so I just wanted to get your take on meaning from a perspective of biology or story. Do you think about this? How do you think about it?
Speaker 2:It's a huge question and I think the people that you've referenced are major, major players in the struggle for meaning, or the search for meaning, and certainly in terms of Sanders and Saunders, in terms of every short story, every piece of a short story, if it's in the story, it has to somehow be causally connected to the progress of the story and therefore to the road to meaning, to the journey to meaning, and I think our lives are constructed in that causal pursuit of meaning and that one starts to formulate a certain sense of cause and effect and where the story is going and where meaning is coming from and where story is coming from.
Speaker 2:And obviously a lot of that comes from memory and, as I'm sure you know, that if, when there's hippocampal damage, not only do you have trouble remembering the past but you also have trouble imagining the future, which I thought was like wow, that's huge, it's basically it's saying that the past, really the biology of memory, is what allows mammals, us to start thinking about what was going to happen next or what might happen next, which is a cause and effect.
Speaker 2:I have these pieces of the past, I put them together and then the next piece of it is going to follow, because I have this progression of past meaning and that there's a biology to that, integrated into the hippocampus, into one's projection of what will come next, which, as far as I'm concerned, is meaning, but it's also story, and that the hippocampus is a huge player in constructing the architecture of story, the armature of what will be next before it's there. And I think it also gets back to the transference that you have a sense of who this person is before. They've quite fully shown you that it's always a little bit into the future and that that is a critical part of survival, is just knowing slightly ahead of your time. I mean to quote Panasonic, to paraphrase Panasonic's ad campaign from 15 years ago that story is slightly ahead of where you are.
Speaker 2:And it's the capacity for story, the mammalian sense of story gives you the capacity for prediction and the sense of the future.
Speaker 1:And so yeah, so right now you and I are talking and I can hear a little bit of noise outside or feel how the chair feels under my butt, but I know to pay attention to you and what you're saying. I'm putting into a context that my hippocampus is bringing all kinds of past associations and I'm spinning it and thinking what question to ask next. And right now we're connected and just as you're, what question to ask next?
Speaker 2:you're also, as you said, you're hearing things from outside. You're feeling the pressure of the chair because of one sense of meaning and what's important. You can exclude huge amounts of data that are there for the asking and or for the taking, and it becomes critical that the brain can can pick and choose what it feels is relevant and therefore what's part of the story and what really isn't part of the story, and and to follow it and to stick with it and to select and discard, to make those decisions. And I think those are meaning based or story based. And I'm using story rather than meaning because I think story implies cause and effect and what happens next. Meaning is where is? Where does logic or meaning come from, which implies, to a certain degree, more about the past. And I'm more interested in understanding story as and then and then and then, as opposed to where it comes from.
Speaker 2:And in my clinical work I'm really, you know, pay a lot of patients sort of want to talk about their mother and their father and their, when they're three years old, and I get say, okay, fine, but let's, let's talk about how we're going to deal with what happens today and what you plan to do tomorrow and what we can, how we can get to where we want to get to in the future. And I use story as if one's expectation story is my father's not going to pay any attention to me, he's not going to be proud of me. That that's a hindrance to where we want to go. But I'm not really like I'll use that. You know you had a bad relationship with your father. Okay, I get it, but let's not focus on that because that's just going to get you in trouble.
Speaker 2:And I want, I want us to change your story. I want us to change your sense of where this story can go, not where it comes from. I know where it comes from. I've got that, I've heard it, you've told me. Now it's steer it in a slightly different direction, not a radically different direction. But if we can change the story two or three or 4% change its course, then we're doing major, major work. And indeed that's. I mean I'm segueing a bit, but that's what writing this book did for me.
Speaker 1:So you start off with saying that biologically your story started at birth, then narratively your story started when found your mom.
Speaker 2:And well, my I, biologically, you know, I make the argument that my story began to a certain degree. I mean to continue with Francis Crick. I mean, you know, I have a certain DNA was handed or given to me long before that conception. And then other factors happened in utero and then I started developing a story, I think in utero not one that I particularly remember, obviously, but I think it was. It was happening, and that story progressed until I was seven years, two months and two days old, when my mother killed herself, and then everything that I had thought was crushed and and so my narrative ended. My biology didn't end, my mother's biology ended, but mine.
Speaker 2:But my biology continued, but my narrative died because she was such a critical piece of the structure and I didn't think of her that way. I didn't think of she was the glue that held me together, but when she was gone, I you know, retrospectively, everything collapsed. So I had to start to a certain degree, start all over again and build a new story with new mothers, in sort of figuratively, but also sort of literate, not sort of, but literally. So that had to start all over again, and creating a new story is, I mean, that's what overwhelming trauma. Does You'd asked earlier about?
Speaker 1:Biology of trauma Biology of trauma.
Speaker 2:It crushes story, overwhelming trauma and traumatic memory, and I think other people have said this. It has to be overwhelming. It can't be you had a frightening day or something. It has to be overwhelming. And it's where you have absolutely no control over the outcome and it's no longer, it's not in your hands. And one of the things that that does, I think, is that it stops story. It stops narrative, narrative collapses. A new, a totally different direction, a different biological direction, happens that those traumatic memories are so powerful and so, biologically, there are so many synapses directing towards the trauma. Quote unquote supporting the trauma, defining the trauma as you, defining yourself as this traumatic moment as giving you no other choices other than this is what happened, this is your fate, this is you and everything that was there before is overwhelmed, and it's biologically as well as psychologically overwhelmed. You don't have any choice but to follow that path. It's the biologically primed and synapsed path.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I mean first of all I mean what I think to go through, and then we were talking about that from a narrative perspective and a biology perspective.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I'm just kind of pausing for a minute but staying with the trauma and sort of the memory perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, trauma memories are different kinds of memories, that there's evidence that we remember traumas better, like normal things what I ate for lunch or something that happened.
Speaker 1:It just kind of becomes integrated in this way and there's sort of a gestalt memory of that and it's quite inaccurate in a literal sense over time, whereas trauma memories lose the time component and they are more more accurate. They're just sort of frozen, and so where I'm going is sort of how to heal from those memories a little bit. But then another aspect of trauma which I think apply to your book in Bessel Vander Koch talks about this is certain things when we're not allowed to really tell the story of it. Like it sounded, like your dad didn't want you to talk about it and went, for example, 9-11 collective trauma and everybody was able to talk about it and it didn't end up having as horrible an impact as a sexual trauma or something that people are then not allowed to talk, that people have to sort of suppress the memory in a way, and so how do you think about healing from these traumas?
Speaker 2:Well, I think 9-11 is a little bit unique in that everyone who was overwhelmingly traumatized I think almost everyone who was overwhelmingly traumatized by 9-11 is dead was killed, died, they were burned or they jumped or they were crushed. And those of us who lost loved ones or who were around or who were victims of it, it was a different kind of victimization. None of us who survived 9-11 actually were in that building, because everyone who was in that building either got out, which is a certain healing aspect of it. I got back in control, I ran down the stairs, I got away, Taking some action that led to safety.
Speaker 2:Which is a huge aspect of whether trauma is going to be devastating or not or they didn't. And those that didn't, I imagine if they had survived, well, they didn't survive. So their memories are dead. They're dead. And those of us who did survive again, either they got out and therefore have a different form of traumatic memory, or those of us who witnessed it, we have a collective memory of it. It's very much a group solidarity which that group solidarity is strengthening, and again, we weren't subjected to the kind of biological traumatic memory that is. The definite is, if you're raped, or as if you're held a gunpoint, you're taken hostage. Obviously, what's happening now in Israel, that kind of traumatic memory is. That's the biology of traumatic memory. Where you're in that situation, you have no control of it, you have no idea what's going to happen, and you're in a state of terror and it lasts, and it lasts, and it lasts.
Speaker 1:That's what creates the imprint and creates the trauma memory. One thing that you do in your book is you tell this story, which has this huge trauma in it, and you go back and forth between the scientific explanation and the narrative continuously, and it sort of reminded me of people who treat trauma. There's this word, pendulation, that in hypnosis you go in, you go out and EMDR, you go into the memory, then you trigger relaxation and so I wonder if you're sort of doing that consciously and feel like you're bringing us into it in a really compelling narrative way. But it's also always sort of going into it and then backing out of it and sort of pulling back into more intellectual perspective.
Speaker 2:When I began the book I was aware that I was going to tell a story and then tell the biology of the story and get back in the story and tell the biology of the story.
Speaker 2:I wasn't aware of how critical that was going to be for me as the storyteller to get into it and then give myself breathing space by this breathing space being science and the scientific explanation of what I was going through, and then get back into it and then go back to the science. So I had that in mind as just a technical way to approach what I was going to write. But I didn't realize how emotionally critical it was going to be until I was in it. And then it became clear that I needed, as the writer, breathing room every five or ten pages or whatever it was, just to pull back and to recompose and then get back to the story. Not that the writing, it was traumatic, but I was reliving in a way that I hadn't anticipated and it was powerful in a way that the science just gave me a parallax to think about it and to actually see things that I would not have seen if I just stayed in the emotional moment from start to finish.
Speaker 1:And what you're doing is you're connecting the trauma memory to all the other parts of the brain, sort of back and forth, in a way that then, at least theoretically, can lead to sort of this healing. Or basically people talk about what we want to do with trauma memory is connect them and turn them into sort of more normal memories.
Speaker 2:Well, I think I mean you mentioned Vanderkalk and his work as well, as Judith Herman is kind of critical in all this. But yes, eventually and eventually, not right away. Eventually healing is going to be in the prefrontal cortex, parasympathetic nervous system, the brainstem, the amygdala, all that has got to be sort of softened and soothed, but the final healing is in the prefrontal cortex and you cannot jump to the prefrontal cortex and starts like in drag net saying the facts. Just I want the facts, just the facts tell me what happened. If one does that, you're just damaging your patient, whoever it is you're talking to, because they're not there and things as basic as the brainstem and the HPA system and very basic physiology has got to be connected before you can start asking for a cognitive reappraisal and control of what happened, because otherwise it's just re traumatizing.
Speaker 2:And one of the lessons I think of Judith Herman, bessel, Vanderkalk, trauma is it takes time. This is not something that you can do. You know in three sessions and you know, slam bam, everything's back together and fine, it isn't. It really is a journey to get back to health and to get back to a place where one can think about it, when the prefrontal cortex can come back online and tell the story without awakening or stimulating all the subcortical stuff. That is terrifying and that takes time.
Speaker 1:It's a whole brain adjustment and rewiring that has to happen, and it happens by sort of gently as possible touching the memory and then backing away from it.
Speaker 2:And it really is about understanding this. It kind of begins in the brainstem and the autonomic nervous system and you're talking about very primitive, basic biological systems that are disrupted and traumatized. And healing those systems is gentle and slow and loving and tender. It's not someone sitting there silently saying you know, tell me what you're thinking.
Speaker 1:It's not surgery, going in doing doing surgery and being tough with somebody.
Speaker 2:It's not surgical, but it's also not that distance, it's close, it's human, it's a cup of coffee and it's patience. It's not you give someone a cup of coffee or a bottle of water and say, okay, tell me what happened. It's like, tell me how the coffee tastes, do you like it? We're on very basic human biological interactions for a long time before that kind of healing can even begin to happen. And I think it requires respect of how basic these biological systems are and that you can't just go to someone and say let your parasympathetic nervous system give it more power. I mean, it's like you've got. One has to be creative in terms of how does one help someone to calm down so that their parasympathetic nervous system can be a little bit more dominant over their brain.
Speaker 1:You have to really join as a real human being with the person.
Speaker 2:And I keep coming back to it, but it takes time and it takes patience and you really have to forget the author's name. Jonathan Lear talks about love and it's Love takes time and it really does involve love. I mean, I kind of fall in love with my patients, and I say that quite comfortably and any patient that I really feel I can't fall in love with, this patient usually either the treatment doesn't work, they leave or I refer them to someone else, but that I'm aware. That that's and again I'm talking well, I think all patients, not just the more the sicker, more traumatized patient, but anyone. It is about the healing power of love.
Speaker 2:When you're talking about the parasympathetic nervous system, the brainstem, primitive, basic, human, mammalian, it's not human but mammalian stuff and I'm not talking about touching or holding or that sort of stuff. I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about one can sense when there is a component of love in the narrative, in the bond there has to be, I think that kind of a bond and it has nothing to do with sex and that's where Freud and I just really part ways, because once Freud started talking about the dangers of the sexual stuff and I had to be like a surgeon. You have to be a mirror. It was because patients started doctors, his colleagues started sleeping and having sex with their patients, and that's how I think Freud got to this the mirror and the surgeon and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:I have to be comfortable with loving someone where it has nothing to do about. Am I sexually turned on by them? Or am I sexually turned on to the point where I'm sort of afraid of what I'm gonna do, or something like that? That's not the kind of love I'm talking about and it's not sex and that's, I think, freud just impeded the healing of someone who's been traumatized by making love such a and sex such a dangerous territory in psychotherapy. It made psychotherapy thin ice. So what is?
Speaker 1:love.
Speaker 2:I mean.
Speaker 1:I feel it's a feeling in your heart of warmth towards your patients. It's caring about them as a real person and being real, being warm, being open. This is sort of a felt sense. It's hard to sort of put this into words, but there's sort of this feeling of caring that it has to be real.
Speaker 2:The feeling of caring has to be real. And again I go back to story. I start to understand someone's story and anticipate where it's going and sense of do I think that's a good place it's heading or it's a bad place? Or how do I help steer this story in a slightly different direction? Or how do I become a part of the story to steer it in a slightly different direction? And it's not passive, I mean. I think love is not in this therapeutic context, it's not a passively sitting back and loving someone. It's actively being engaged in their story and that I can merge to a certain degree in their story.
Speaker 1:What would you say you've learned either about meaning or about story, about your own story, from your clinical work and from your connecting with patients and having patients open up and building this relationship.
Speaker 1:Are there things that sort of change how you live day to day or change how you see your own story? I feel like I went into therapy largely because I wanted to sort of figure out how to build meaning and a sense of purpose and satisfaction and felt like being present with people in their big moment of crisis and trying to be helpful, that that would be a way, sort of a pathway, for me to resolve my own stresses or uncertainty about my place in the world. You've spent a lot of time talking to people I'm sure the only person that you've mentored, I think probably a lot of people who have had the patients, or maybe other people who have gone through suicide and family members, and I mean you've been able to really connect in this unique way with a lot of people. I wonder how that has. I don't know. I'm having a trouble finding a good question. So anyway, you wanna take that.
Speaker 2:I think when one has suffered a significant trauma, one gets stuck there, that you get stuck. It becomes very hard to grow to leave that, to get unstuck. And I think for a long period of time I was a seven year old boy. I mean I just couldn't grow. I mean I got bigger, I got stronger, I got smarter in certain ways, but I was always seven years old.
Speaker 2:I was always sort of looking for my mother or just not understanding what happened to her, where she went. So I mean I think a lot of the reason I went into psychiatry I thought I was looking for her. But I really think I was looking for myself. And I think to a certain degree, at a certain point in time I recognized that people were looking to me the way I had been looking for her. And there was that certain period of time I don't know exactly when it was, I don't know if it was 50 years ago or five days ago, I mean it's a little bit of both where I started seeing myself as someone who could help someone else as opposed to someone who was looking for help. And it was a little bit odd to see myself as someone who could be a mentor that someone would even look to me for wisdom or help or strength or advice. And then it began to become clear that I was letting go of being a seven-year-old kid who was devastated and that I could let that go. And it actually I mean, writing the book had a lot to do with not that it all happened a year ago, I mean when I sort of said the end on the book.
Speaker 2:But there was a certain point in time in writing the book where I recognized that I was grateful to my mother. She had given me a lot. I had six great years with her, which was when she had postpartum depression and then she had ECT, like when I was three months old, and then she got really better. I mean, she was sort of I think, probably hypomanic, but she was, or maybe just healthy. So I had six great years and then she got terminally depressed. But I began to recognize that I really had a good mother, I mean, and it's like I accepted that that was like that was great, that was terrific. She gave me a lot and I stopped being angry, I stopped needing more, I stopped being a kid and I could be, I could help someone else.
Speaker 1:And you dedicated your book to her.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was also a big moment when I and I don't know exactly, it was somewhere in the writing of it I realized I was gonna dedicate the book to Ruth, to my mother, and that was a big like oh my God, moment of discovery, cause I didn't intend to do that. It was like I was thinking of the, I was thinking a little bit of who I was gonna dedicate this to cause one sort of does that?
Speaker 1:So you really got to a place of feeling compassion and gratitude and also understanding of how somebody could get to the point that she got to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it was a huge point of gratitude towards her, despite and I think that was transitional for me and that's that changed my story, which I think is changing. A traumatic story takes time. I mean, I'm not saying you have to write a book to change your story, but it's a big process and when I could genuinely feel gratitude and love for her, I could change my story. And no one I think could have no one was gonna say this is what has to happen. There wasn't a guide, there wasn't a plan, there wasn't a map. I don't think there is.
Speaker 2:The person who is in it has to discover it. So it's not as if therapist or a partner or a friend or whomever can say this is what you have to do. It's sort of like you really have to figure it out yourself. It's just that if you have some distance, you can sort of see we got to go sort of a little bit to the east or in some direction, and I think that's something that, in terms of my helping others, I can begin to see a little bit the kind of the direction where the story has to go. I'm not saying exactly I know where we're heading, but it's kind of a little bit more this way and let's go a little bit this way and I can sort of help, and being able to do that is a big deal.
Speaker 1:Well, you've really created an amazing story and you've been helpful to so many people and hesitating a little bit to ask this. I don't want this to be sort of flip or, but this is just sort of getting back to sort of story arcs and I wonder if you think about this. But a lot of kids stories or great stories, start with parents dying for a Harry Potter or Treasure Island or Oliver Twist or on and on and on. There's sort of at least from like a writing perspective, from a storytelling perspective, you kind of set the kid free of expectations and then the sort of adventures ensue. But I don't know if that's at all relevant to you, but you sort of say this is when your story started and now you've built this story. I don't know what you think of your story at this point, point or.
Speaker 2:Well, in terms of George Saunders, go back to that. I mean, something starts a story. It's like once upon a time there was a princess or something, and then something happens that starts the story, and the death of a parent, my mother's death. Either you pick up the story from the ashes, from you pick up the fragments of the story that you find or have left and you start on a journey to recreate yours, or you don't. It's like, if you don't, that's a problem. That's a really big problem.
Speaker 2:And I think there are certain aspects and examples of trauma where people just don't pick up the pieces. And so I think all these great storytellers that you've mentioned, the characters, they pick up the pieces and then they have to improvise and come up with what am I going to do? And that question is always it's what happens next? What do I do next? What do I do now? I mean next becomes now, when the parent dies.
Speaker 2:It's like now I have to do something now, because there is no next until I decide to take a step, and that step becomes the powerful merger of now and next. And the death of a parent for a child is that merger of now is endlessly dead, endlessly repetitive. There are time stops, everything is dead until I decide that there's a next, and then I take that step and then story gets started again and a lot of storytellers begin with the death of a parent because it forces that moment and it's a powerful moment. It's a powerful moment when and if it happens, if it doesn't happen, then it's devastating. It's devastating, but it's doubly devastating if next is dead.
Speaker 1:Do you have advice for people who survive, or is that kind of the?
Speaker 2:I think the main advice is that it's a journey and it takes time. And don't be impatient. And hopefully there are helpers that you can turn to, just to get you through the moment, not to solve it, not to give you an answer, not to direct you, just to get you through the moment until the point where you can say, okay, next, I'm taking this step. And it could be in the wrong direction. It doesn't have to be the right step. It gets back to 9-11. Those that got out took steps and were able to get out. Well, again, 9-11's not the right answer, because those that didn't get out died, but it's the ability to take a step and mobilize for yourself.
Speaker 2:Even if it doesn't lead to a great moment of discovery, it's critical that you take a step. It's the belief of okay, I'm going this way. It's that belief. It doesn't have to be the correct choice, but that you make a choice and you say, okay, I'm going to survive and I'm going to take this choice. And it's not whether you feel you're in. Terror is never about whether you feel, whether you're really in a doomsday situation. If you feel you have no way out, that's the disaster. If you feel like I can deal with this, I can make a step, I can get out of here. That's critical, even if you're walking into an inferno. The biology is such that I mean, it's unfortunate if you're walking into an inferno, but in terms of your brain, it's if you feel I can get out of here, I can deal with this, that's everything. And it's getting to that point where you say, okay, I'm going to take a step in one direction or another.
Speaker 1:And you having done it, gives you the ability to, in a convincing way, speak to other people and hopefully nudge them to take that step.
Speaker 2:To nudge them, but I think it's also about allowing them to find safety, or helping them to find that it's safe enough to take a step. Not that I'm going to find an answer, but just I can take a step now. Okay, wonderful, let's take a step. And it's re-establishing a little. Just enough safety to take a step, just enough parasympathetic nervous system just quieting the amygdala, just enough so that, okay, I'm going to go this way. And it seems like very little. It's huge to get the parasympathetic nervous system back online and say, okay, get to Vegas. Okay, to pump out a little bit. It's like all those biological systems. They just need to come back a little bit. And how, as one outside of that helps someone else do that? I'm not 100% sure.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so we've talked a lot about, covered a lot of ground. I'm just thinking how to best land this plane. What are you, I guess, most excited about in terms of mental health field these days, and are there any dogmas that I guess we've already talked about, stuff that may be outdated.
Speaker 2:This may seem a little like Adelaide field, but there's a movement in Africa and a little bit in the UK also, but in Africa where mental health resources or it's a joke there are no resources for mental health. I mean, they're so minimal it's frightening. But there's a movement, it's called the friendship bench and sometimes it's called the grandmother bench, where it's just someone. There's a bench in the shade in Piccassiti and Sub-Saharan Africa where mostly women, but where grandmothers are there and you can go there and sit down and just talk to them and they get a little bit of training and there's a little bit of psychiatric backup. And there's a little bit of this in India in shame and belief and demonic possession, which is a whole other story, but where people can just go and tell their story and someone listens to them and that's it, and they can come back.
Speaker 2:And if you wanna bring the grandmother on the bench, a chicken or some rice or whatever form of payment you can muster you do, otherwise you don't, and I think that's kind of important.
Speaker 1:I think how did you come?
Speaker 2:across this Two ways. One I've spent time teaching in Africa the University of Namibia and Windhook, namibia. I've spent some time in India, in rural India, where these demonic people are got to these places, spots where they feel they've been possessed by the devil. Or they bring their child who they feel has been possessed by a spirit because it has colic or it has diarrhea, and the person exercises. I've watched these exorcisms where they take the devil out of the child and so I've seen it. I've seen them functioning or whatever they're doing.
Speaker 2:And also a friend of mine named Graham Leder has just made a film. I think it's called the Friendship Bench, but I've also known it as the Grandmother Bench, but about this is in Zimbabwe, where a psychiatrist who's Zimbabwe and has established clinics and sort of a training program for these again mostly women, in terms of when can you just counsel these people or just listen to them and when is it of concern that you really need to refer them for more advanced psychiatric help. So I see that as hopeful and again, it's a very different model from everyone who suffers from the Netapo complex.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one thing that's really exciting is sort of connecting all the ancient traditions and people have been healing trauma for thousands of years and through movement and rhythm and storytelling and getting community building things and breathing and so and psychedelics too, and so now I think there's a lot of room to look at those approaches and see what's most helpful.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a huge opening in terms of what is the path towards healing and the psychoanalytic model that had dominated the 20th century until 1970, 1980, I don't know exactly when, but dominated the 20th century, where there was one road to healing. That's been challenged and it's been changed and there are different possible. There are many different roads, many different paths, and that's a really good thing.
Speaker 1:It's exciting to really open it up and have an open mind approach it in a humble way. So yeah, I think just wanna ask you some sort of rapid fire questions and then maybe finish. But getting back to meaning, if you were to sort of complete the sentence, according to me, richard Rockman, the meaning of life is how would you finish that?
Speaker 2:Okay, according to me, richard Brockman, the meaning of life is a good cup of coffee.
Speaker 1:Nice and the most meaning. Do you want to elaborate? Please elaborate, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm actually plagiarizing a good friend of mine, gretchen Peters, who's a songwriter, who used a line in one of his songs that's something like the meaning of life is a good cup of coffee. And then she changes it to the meaning of life is that there's no meaning at all. And I don't quite. I liked it when just meaning of life is a good cup of coffee.
Speaker 1:It can be a lot of meaning in a cup of coffee.
Speaker 2:It can be a lot of meaning in a cup of coffee, and for me there was a lot of meaning in a good, and there still is a lot of meaning in a good cup of coffee.
Speaker 1:Especially shared, especially shared yeah.
Speaker 2:And also the idea of giving someone something that you feel is valuable.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:And then seeing just moving from there.
Speaker 1:Well, it makes it. There's connectedness, there's impact and that fits the George Saunders criteria. Most meaningful thing that I did yesterday.
Speaker 2:Most meaningful thing I did yesterday was I went to a patient's performance at a theater and how was? That His performance was great. The overall performance was really mediocre and it wasn't his, he wasn't in charge of it, but I really saw how important in his eyes, how important it was for him that I was there and I really just felt so good about that.
Speaker 1:That really mattered.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and because it mattered to him so much the fact that the whole performance not his but the other just was mediocre. It was just totally overshadowed by the fact that I saw how important it was for him for me to be there.
Speaker 1:And that's a way to show love, which is the healing energy, according to our conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm not shy about that, I'm happy to do that, and it's like again, it's like my giving this woman $5 because she didn't have money to get home for her taxi was gratifying some edible wish. I mean it's like fuck that really.
Speaker 1:So if somebody comes to you with a, if I come to you with a crisis and meaning and feel like my life doesn't matter, it doesn't mean anything, I feel like there's sort of a biology, there's a story to that. What sort of your main approach or advice at that point?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I'm going to consider hospitalization, I'm going to consider ketamine, I'm going to worry, but if I can get past that, I'll. I think one of the things that sometimes happens in good treatment, in a good bond, is that a story develops in the bond. It's not just that one person changes their story, it's that together we form a new story that's partly ours, mostly yours, but partly ours. And then I'm a character in it, a minor character. I'm not the major character, but I'm a minor character, and I'm happy to be a minor character in someone else's story and I'm not worried that they're going to become so dependent that they can't live without me as that character. I think that's reason that's been used as a reason to withhold one's generosity and involvement and engagement and advice giving, and it's like that's all about engaging and forming a shared story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and not being afraid of helping someone write their story or shape it.
Speaker 1:But if there was a bigger message that you had a chance to get out there to the world, or therapeutic community or just people in general, is there-?
Speaker 2:Yes, by my book.
Speaker 1:So the book's called Surviving Suicide.
Speaker 2:Life After Death. Life After Death Surviving Suicide.
Speaker 1:Life After Death, surviving Suicide, and certainly mention that, all right. Well, anything else that we haven't covered that you want to touch on now, are we ready to-.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the other thing we haven't touched on that I think we should cover is how much I've enjoyed knowing you and working with you and our friendship, how it's developed its own really lovely story together with you and I really appreciate that and really value it.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that so much and I feel like I came to you in a crisis and you were incredibly helpful then and then you were incredibly helpful in just helping me become more authentic and connecting with patients in an authentic way and then also being supportive with-. I have a lot of crazy ideas and creative projects and this is one of them, and helping some of those become a reality is a big deal, and having somebody who just sort of gives a nod of encouragement and a cup of coffee at the right moment is a big deal, and then being able to actually make things happen and change my own story and now we get to create a shared story. So, yeah, I really share that and appreciate you all along the way.
Speaker 2:It's been a very mutual undertaking.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thanks.
Speaker 1:So I really enjoyed that. I hope you did too. I hope you join us next time when we travel into the land of EMDR with Dr April Menjaris. And if you want to support the show, share it with a friend, hit, subscribe, leave a rating and, as always, I hope you have a meaningful and meaningful month and if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know.
Speaker 2:The pumpkin's to come in the east, but my pretty side and what she thinks she says as she turns on campus no particular tone of voice.
Speaker 1:So on and on and on baseball, no particular goal. So please would have read, or read as you.