Private Drama to Public Healing | UNFINISHED19

hello welcome everyone my name is Patricia Cohen I'm with the New York Times and I'm particularly happy to introduce this session not only because of the professional accomplishments of Jack Saul and STR Burrell but also because they are two of my closest and dearest friends and we've known each other for many decades first STL as you know is a best-selling author and therapist her TED Talks have been seen by 27 million people she's an organizational consultant for fortune 500 companies and she has two best-selling books meeting in captivity which has been translated into 25 languages and the state of affairs and both of those books in Romanian will be available for purchase afterwards and then the podcast where would she begin which is going to start its next season very soon Jack Saul is a psychologist and Family Therapist in New York he's director of the International trauma Studies Program which works with people on domestic and political violence in war conflict natural disasters and he's taken his work into many different mediums in terms of theater performance art using testimony and narrative and we're you're all incredibly fortunate because the art installation next door moral injury is up and it's really an absolute must not miss which integrates testimony and narratives from veterans from war correspondents and the impact and then afterwards to make sure we want people afterwards to come there'll be a assistance there to record your responses to the installation which then will in fact become part of it for the next time at the art project is shown so after you go into it please make sure you stop so anyway these these two have worked and played together for a long time and so it's my pleasure to introduce you both thank you [Applause] so Jack I think it would be a wonderful place to start to actually connect this project with unfinished with last year and with Christian just to to orient all of you many of you may have been here when I spoke last year and and basically what I talked about was how do big cultural changes like you have had in Romania communism and post communism how do collective cultural changes directly affect your bedrooms your intimate relationships your overall relational lives and as I was talking with Christian at one point he began telling me about his coverage as a war photographer in Afghanistan and I said you know jack is doing a project he's worked extensively with were correspondents for many years and he's doing this whole project where he's interviewing correspondents about their experiences two months after I was here Christian came to New York and and Jack interviewed him and then Jack began talking about the idea of an installation of really turning this into an experiential piece not just for the people who are doing the interviews but for society at large and Christian said let's do it at unfinished next year and here we are so this is just to give you the background of how how this project unfolded and you will be sitting in that room in a quite riveted way so I just want to ask you a question first why did you want to do this project it's like don't you have enough listening to drama don't you want to break do you have done your work why did you want to do more with actually so yeah I listen I do therapy with people who have been in traumatic situations and actually one of the things that helps me deal with it is by working in the arts by having these projects where I'm not just working with patients but also working collaboratively with the people who have been through these experiences and creating something together with them and this started a number of years ago when I was running a program for torture survivors in New York City and we were seeing them in the clinic but we were also hearing that many of these torture survivors from different countries around the world we're not just warning there they were they didn't actually want therapy they didn't they often didn't know what therapy was from the countries that they were coming from but they were seeking some kind of public forum to talk about what they had been through and that started to think maybe this is something that would be more helpful to them so I got together a theater ensemble and Esther was in the ensemble I don't know if every people know that Esther has a acting background before she went and became a therapist she was on the stage and I thought ok I'll create a stage for Esther also in the context of creating this project in which we would meet with this theater ensemble and invite refugees and others who had been through very difficult experiences and they would tell their story to the theatre act actors and the actors these were professional actors would take the story's work improvisationally with the stories and then bring them back to these refugees and the refugees would comment on them and revise them and really became a creative collaborative process to create a theater play out of their stories and what we found was that it was not only helpful for we're therapists who worked on this and also the artists who were working to be involved in the arts but that the people who participated began to take their stories to their children who they had never spoken to before about what their they had experienced and then other members of their community and then it culminated in a performance to New York City honoring torture survivors and we saw that the rippling effects of doing this kind of artistic work were tremendous and it made me kind of interested in this idea that healing doesn't just take place in the privacy of the office of the therapeutic office but there are powerful healing forces that take place in public spaces in artistic spaces in this theatre space and it also affects the public and the public it's very important for the public to be able to share in these experiences with the survivors and and their the public is transformed when they're able to listen and in here you know here these are projects so I think that it would be fair to say that one of the things that we share we are both psychotherapists we work in our office but we often feel the possibilities of what can happen in this most exquisite human experience called therapy but also the limitations of an office especially when we have the feeling that people are bringing in issues where they think that they're the only ones or where they carry the sense of responsibility as if it's a private problem a personal problem when in fact it's a collective problem it's a societal issue and we refuse to collaborate with that idea that wants to isolate people as if there's something wrong with them when sometimes there's something wrong with us do you follow me and I think that this theater of witness that we have done my podcast your installation which we're going to play a few pieces of really is part of this way of thinking especially today in our atomized Society it's very easy for us to think what's wrong with me and everything about consumer capitalist society encourages that it's a very interesting thing that when they look at post communist societies people used to feel bad about a lot of things they've always feel bad about a lot of things but they didn't necessarily think there was something wrong with them actually they often thought there was something wrong with the system with the others and this personalization you see everywhere so you wanted to say something so the next edition of our work was you know we had the terrorist attacks in New York City took place in our neighborhood and our children who were five and seven eight at the time were in the school two blocks north of the World Trade Center and they as the other kids in that school saw many of the events that happened that day they saw the planes go into the center they into the hat towers they saw people jumping or falling from the towers and we we were faced as a school community to address how this impacted our kids ourselves how the teachers were impacted by this and to decide how we're going to approach this and the the main way of approaching from a mental health perspective is usually screen people for problems and then send them to a therapist and we know that this is not the the most effective way of dealing with the disaster the most effective way is to mobilize the families and the community to be active in their recovery and to look at this not as just an individual problem but as a collective problem a collective trauma and collective traumas require collective responses so we with the other parents in the community organized community forums to talk about what what were we facing what what were the problems that we were seeing in kids what should we do to address those problems and we we as a community decided we were going to go to get mental health funding and not just let the mental health professionals come in and just provide services from the outside people who didn't really know the community as well and we applied for funding for community resilience project which means mobilizing the resources in your own community and and then to fund projects that we would run that would be really helpful to the members of the community based on what we knew were the real needs so one of the things that we were able to get funding for was developing a theater project that would give voice to the different experiences that people had in lower Manhattan we basically wanted to interview all the people that were not on the front page of the newspaper which meant not every fireman but the doorman the chaplain who picked up the pieces of the bodies the people in Chinatown which is a neighborhood nobody ever mentioned those those people and we created a theater of witness basically that was called the play was called everything is back to normal in New York City I don't know if you remember but it was Bush mayor wanted to get people back in buying things and back into the financial district so they were trying to push people back there even though the buildings were still burning and it was highly polluted and they were pretending as if nothing you know we're getting back to normal but people were not normal and they were needing places to talk about what they had just been through and so this process this collective process of coming together and talking about what has just happened to us and what do we need to do it's really an important part of the process of collective recovery after that after disaster so when we would perform the audience was making comments and then they we would incorporate the comments into the next performances but disaster in terms of relationships has a very interesting effect in the aftermath of disaster or terrorist attacks Awards people either get married or divorce they either decide life is short I should get married or they say life is short I should get the hell out just like you experience things at extreme you know and then from there and these disasters affect relationships but also people have conflict it's very stressful in in the context of a disaster like that and people really you know they'll I think one of the major problems was couple conflict and family tension and and these are the things that make people less resilient after a disaster so it's really important to help strengthen families strengthen the community so that they can mobilize their collective resources they people come together and work together are much better able to resolve the problems in front of them so in this play we did this play and played it to people in New York and it was one of the few performances that happened just after 9/11 so to move on well I want to actually ask you something else yes I want to move too because I'm looking at this do you well I want you to talk about the installation that is here but I also have an interesting question for me I started where should we begin and we've been listening to these sessions driving in the car you know and and listening to something I've always said which was couples therapy is the best theater in town you know it's gripping but you cannot go outside your office to tell stories we have a profession where we are constantly unable to speak about what we do and and so it's it creates silence for us with our friends with with with the people around us and by the way where should we begin season 3 comes out October 5 for those of you who like it do you think that listening to how I took work outside of the office not with patients so that I could finally let people hear it and experience the idea that couples do want to know what goes on in the lives of other people so that they can listen deeply to others and in fact see themselves in their own mirror do you think that that may have given you an idea of the power of sound and voice I've actually never asked you that yes but I thought I gave you the idea of taking things I would say I think the most important thing I often talk when we not together and I describe why was I thinking about erotic intelligence in the first from the first book from mating in captivity because when we when you were working with the the torture survivors and I remember asking you when do you know when a victim of trauma re-engages with life how do you know that they're back in the world of the living and you told me it's when they are able to play because in order to play you can't be vigilant and anxious you have to be in the states of unselfconsciousness or you cannot play so you have to feel safe a minimum of safety and when they take risks again because when you take risks you basically it's kind of when when it's another form of play it's dealing it's an active engagement with the unknown and and I remember keeping that as an idea for working with couples because I thought I see couples who survived and I see couples who drive and many of the ones who come to us are stuck surviving barely but they would like to drive more and I remember including the notions of playfulness and risk as essential to the concept of erotic intelligence that people they sometimes they always may want my name put it like this they sometimes may want more sex but they always want better sex and that better is the difference between sex and eroticism the erotic is the poetics of it the meaning you give to it the renewal the connection the unit the playfulness all of that so this is where I really think that I do pleasure you do pain your work on pain influenced my work on pleasure so so playing is one of the components of art and what we've been involved in the arts and psychotherapy for since we began doing this work yes there's also an expressive art therapist that's what she did or early work on and we taught in that field but some of the things that are important about an art perspective as it intersects with a therapeutic perspective is that it also provides a place for people to be less constricted to move to use different senses especially in the trauma field people get stuck in their bodies and they need to be able to move to recapture the energy that they need for healing and then people need to be able to speak about the difficult stories that they've been through and not become isolated it was difficult by these stories and they stay kind of frozen in time but as when you communicate your stories to others then you are engaging in a dynamic ron was talking about yesterday about memory memory is not a static thing when you speak about it you're always creating new memories and when you when you so one of the things that happens in our theater work is that when people talk about these difficult memories they're opening up the conversation to include more aspects of their experience and the memory start to change and they start to realize that I wasn't such a victim there were things that I was doing that were actually really important and expressed my sense of agency and power in response to these difficult to the difficult situation and this can lead to a process of recovering more positive sense of self so a piece so they need to talk about this piece this project that I'm working on now that in an installation here called morale injuries of war your is based on the work that I've been doing over the past 15 years with war correspondents and other witnesses of war humanitarian workers human rights workers and veterans talking about an aspect of trauma that is usually not encompassed by post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD post-traumatic stress is really a problem of due to threat anxiety fear of fear-based response but there are other responses to being in traumatic circumstances that are problems of conscience where people feel shame and guilt for what they've seen for what they've done for what they were not able to prevent for what they would have liked to have done and for the people who they had to leave behind for the people that didn't survive there's a whole number of different kinds of experiences that can leave people plagued by guilt and this guilt has been identified with veterans and referred to as moral injury and veterans who in the u.s. killed themselves at a rate of more than 20 per day is due a lot to struggling with these problems of conscience and so there have not been any really adequate treatments for it most of the approaches have been more individually focused and focus on self forgiveness but it's very hard to focus on self forgiveness when the burden of your guilt maybe shouldn't be you maybe shouldn't be taking on the burden about all that guilt maybe it should be shared by the rest of society because it was the rest of society that sent you there to fight these wars and so and there are other people who are accountable for some it's the thing that you told me that I think is really important for most of history when there was war ninety percent of the deaths where soldiers in modern more 90 percent of the death so it's modern warfare is filled with atrocities it's unavoidable horrible atrocities happen people without people wanting to commit them but civilians are the brunt take the brunt of all the the violence and so in these recent Wars there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties of civilians and and we've spent trillions of dollars and we need to look at this as a major collective catastrophe so when people feel guilt or shame it's sometimes it's the most healthy part of them well they're feeling guilt because they're content they have a conscience and unfortunately a lot of the practices in the military are about trying to suppress that conscious making people morally disengaged so that they can kill and so and by dehumanizing the others so you can kill them and these processes actually harm people so there been there's been a whole movement in the VA hospital now too and mainly among clergy who have seen that it's not therapy you're gonna help people who have moral injury its moral repair it's clarifying values again helping people to find ways of making reparation to those who they feel guilty to to be considering the casualties of civilians and to finding some way out of this collectively with society and breaking down the barrier between the veteran and the rest of the and the civilian population which is usually that's a very rigid boundary so I want to play some clips to give you an idea of some of the yeah can we play the first clip please there's three room that you need to follow in order to survive and the first thing you need to do is you need to do what you're told the second thing you need is you need to do what you're told and the third the most important thing out of all of these that you need to do do it youto I with witness of something really terrible I saw a convoy and I saw old woman a little bit outside Kabul and she was shot but she was not near the convoy at all like really big distance and was shot by this guy and then I tried to follow and understand why he did it he said very sorry I killed her because she crossed in front of us but I said yes but she was far enough to have time to cause him to not be in danger the convoy yeah but it happens it's Cottrill direction like very normal do you understand that that woman probably is a mother of collateral damage sorry and I realized that he came in Afghanistan just with few weeks before you can even see it in their eyes or talking with them they are there so they're prepared to shoot whatever they're ready to shoot something [Music] no matter what now I always think that there's room for diplomacy I think that war altogether is absolutely unnecessary so I've just become more cynical about all the conflict around the world the cynical part of me wants to on wants the public to understand that it's your fault we are all complicit in all of this horror I don't need other people to experience my pain I need other people to understand that they are complicit in my pain I can hold my pain myself but other people need to understand that they had a part in causing [Music] you also see immense acts of courage compassion you always find them you know to make myself feel better I sometimes lip print so for example in Iraq on one reporting trip Isis was killing any Christians or Shias and in one village I had found a Sunni Imam but the village itself was majority Shia and Isis near that and when Isis came in he very quickly started teaching villagers how to pray like a spinning to hide the fact that they were Chia and Isis figured out that something was up and so they started bringing him in for questioning and they they would say to him we we believe that there are she ended her trying to hide us and is that he would put his hand up the air and say I swear on God's name there are absolutely no she hasn't my mother also needs I know them I've known him forever and he had and of course it would have been horribly killed had he been found out but he managed to hide a large number of people it's pretty incredible [Music] sorry for the echo in this room it sounds much better insulation it's a sixth track in insulation there Elise Blennerhassett is here with me who did the soundtrack music soundtrack and and the editing which is much better in the space than the way you just heard now but these are these are just some of the voices we have a loop of a number of people that have been interviewed mainly veterans and some war correspondents speaking about their experience and what caused them to have such moral anguish in their experience in war and what the effects have been on them and what's been helpful for them to try to overcome some of this the difficulty that they experienced so this project is an ongoing project it's a reason it's a research project as well and it's on we're on it will be ongoing collecting different testimonies and bringing back the responses to the people who have given those testimonies and then looking at bringing it out to communities where we can play it with veterans and and communities so that they can engage in conversation about some of the realities of war I think you'll feel here if you when you go to the installation that when you hear people talking about their moral struggles with war it's different than what you normally hear when people are have PTSD but you know you hear a more humane side of people's experience no but I think what I began to think about when I listen is that you know this fundamental question can you be a good person who does bad things and you know or when you have done these bad do you you know it's like what is the connection between the person and the behavior it's a question that is asked in couples all the time you know what what your last person says here I try to find the good in those people who it because if but at the same time I have seen people who can be perfectly nice here and quite awful there so they can split and I think this whole question all the time about the evil inside of us about how we redeem ourselves about what it means to say I'm sorry about what it means to say I take responsibility which I do on a micro level and which you do on a macro level would you say you could say that I can say that let me ask you so I said how I am influenced in major parts by your work how would you say that you are influenced by what I do approached it well if there is very unconventional so it's good to have an unconventional partner to inspire you to do innovative things so that's probably the main way that you've influenced me in life in life and work and probably the other way that you've influenced me most is as an American we are really kind of suffer from this individual individualism that it's very hard to get out and take a different perspective and there's always been very critical of this kind of over individualized perspective I think from a European perspective you know it manifests itself in different ways in the United States it's like self-reliance you've got to do things on your own you know reach out to other you don't focus you don't practice interdependence that's really influenced me a lot in my approach but I don't think it comes from my being a European I think it comes from my being the child of my parents like two parents are polish for that matter and and I think that as Holocaust survivors something in that community after the war coming from wherever concentration comes they were coming from never went to therapy first of all you never went to therapy and did everything collectively and they did it in two ways they planted trees or they had parties and gatherings of the people from this village and that town or they have commemorations in which they put all kinds of names they name trees they name buildings they named they named in order to create a link with the past that had been destroyed and they did it all on their own it was completely grassroots it was worldwide because they were a completely spread group of people so one could meet somebody in Sydney Australia and they had done the same rituals and I think I really understood the the informality that is necessary in in in dealing with the difficult issues in life and and I think paradoxically modern coupledom creates the opposite modern coupledom and nuclear family reinforces separation and silence and and hiding of a lot of things particularly issues of abuse you know and the more people actually know that it's a bad thing the more they hide if it's actually happening to them because they're too embarrassed to even bring it outside so it's it's you know knowing that it's not a good thing doesn't mean that you have that you don't live with it and when you then live with it then you have a struggle between how can this be happening to me you know I want to let you hear the two clips actually one from season 3 which is the trailer and what I did in that sequence how many of you know where should we begin then I don't have to say anything more okay where should we begin is a podcast of life couples therapy that I record in my office with couples for three hours one session it's unedited unscripted raw it just cut for length and they're not my patients they're people who apply from all over the world you can too and because I wanted to take things from the private space into the public square and I wanted to create a virtual village and on top of it with social media people I like they've never lied it's fake news all over the place you know everybody is happy everybody has the greatest love story you know everybody had the most fabulous weekend you know it just is unbearable and and there is nothing more unbearable than to look at somebody else's happiness and wonder what's wrong with you so this season I wanted to do a tracking it's called the arc of love and it starts with a young couple in their early 20s and it ends with a couple after divorce so I go to six seven stages like this so just to give you a taste the trailer season three please none of the couple's featured our ongoing clients of Esther Perel for the purposes of maintaining their confidentiality names and some identifiable characteristics have been removed but their voices and their stories are real and we kissed and it was just like that was it and for the next nine months really having sex everywhere that summer was like we felt like we were in high school this season I will be tracking a series of couples at different stages of development in their relationship and in their life from young and just forming to dissolving watching her fall in love with someone else was about the most painful thing that I've experienced and I don't want to do that again we will hear from couples as they mature into stable long-term relationships who are struggling with the degradation of the erotic life if you compared three years before that it will doesn't even feel like single sexual as in better as in no way worse and couples that confront loss suicide is like the earthquake the initial earthquake there's damage but there's actually more destruction that comes in the aftershock divorce and endings that sometimes leads to completely new beginnings and with the same partners marriage was hard because it was a show yeah don't you didn't want to play yeah this I like we also meet other relationships that are part of the family system not just a couple but parent children I tell you that I'm sad and then your go-to is well don't focus on I am an optimist but then that makes me feel like I have to hold all the sad feelings like I'm the gatekeeper I'm gonna get keeper of all the pain and they get keeper of all the sadness join me for the final season of where should we begin it's not gonna be the final because I started to record season four and not only bad but I decided that if this was going to be a series for anybody who has ever loved I wanted to have another one for anybody who's ever had a job and so we're coming up with a completely new podcast it's called has work and it basically looks at all the hidden dynamics the invisible forces that play in relationships in the workplace between co-workers colleagues family business co-founders and it's endlessly fascinating this woman by the way the young girl when she says I am the carrier of all the pain in this family I'm the one who gets to be sad and you keep saying be an optimist this notion that people become carriers of the stuff that others do not want to see inside themselves it happens in a family it happens in a couple and it happens in a society would you say so I think we should open maybe a little bit have a conversation with all of you and know we can move around yes so aspect hello thank you for being here sharing with us your work and time and energy can I ask you something yeah so my question is related more to pain and suffering and I'm just curious if in your work and in your research would you say that there were example when people they turn after pain and suffering thinking that that was a gift yeah I mean I mean pain and suffering it's thank you God for making me suffer I'm sorry thank you God for making me suffer no not this way you know I mean you have the experience you had the pain you have the suffering right lay later I mean the process does people bring bring them to this idea that maybe was a gift one of the truths in the trauma field is that trauma which brings a lot of pain to people also has the possibility of opening up new possibilities for people and people endorse a lot of suffering but can discover new parts of themselves new new relationships they can be displaced to new places where they have lost and are dealing with the pain of loss of what they had before but they have they've gone to new life they build new lives for themselves which they may have never had the possibility of having before so we call this post-traumatic growth that aspects abuse a traumatic post-traumatic growth certain aspects of yourself which were dormant can become alive when you've gone through real difficult experiences to the cameras we need to switch back I think but we'll still take questions from this side and I think actually what would be good is if we take three questions yes it's exactly okay so here and please a brief question so we can get as many people in as possible hello thank you for being here [Music] I have a question related to caring pain with you I have long history in my family and we had some family members being in Samaria and into what you say asked the question is I sometimes feel like I'm carrying the pain that they had being through those experiences and I know that focusing on my life and not thinking that it should happen the same for me especially the time certchange but how I sometimes feel hooked how do I get through this great question anybody hear me closer to you okay actually I have a question divided into so the first part is most of the people who refuse help actually needed the most so from from an ethical point of view should we help them should we intervene oh great question and we have social responsibility to help others however what do you think do we have this responsibility to make them aware or to support them because if no I okay yeah thank you so much for being here sure knowledge I just wanted to ask whether if somebody can be happy based on somebody else's pain and how do you feel that should be described great these are questions that you can have begin a seminar it's I'm gonna take this one you can take you go first okay intergeneration but we call intergenerational trauma it's referred to the difficulties that previous generations have been through and people can continue to feel like there's some connection with those struggles and with that pain [Laughter] I knew I was gonna have to deal with this being on the stage with this so I mean this is this is something that comes up in therapy quite often that people have basically unresolved relationships with the people from the past maybe even people from the past who when never has met it's like the ghosts of the past and one way of starting to work on that is by trying to enter into some kind of dialogue with those people you know even though it's as dialogue that you can't really happen but the imaginary dialogue of what do you feel like they're saying to you about what you should know what what are the lessons that they have in life that you could be taking from them or what are the things that you know you should be avoiding but I mean that's one starting place but these kind of experiences that happen in families in previous generations do have an impact and it's part of family therapy practice to look at these transgenerational processes by going doing family trees and sitting down and trying to understand from generation to generation what the impact has been what are the dynamics that have been affected by the events that have happened so it is something that we do it's very important process that takes place in therapy but I think that those two questions are very related you know one of the questions here is how much responsibility do you have for the stories that and the experiences and the miseries that happened before you and and you were allowed to not think about them every day the way that the people who actually experienced them think about it every day and you're allowed to have a life that except and to what degree can it be separate from everything that you carry sometimes you know I'm named after my grandmother who I've never known everybody in my community we're all named after dead people and we have been told a lot of things about these dead people in all kinds of ways and we have all kinds of invisible loyalties and responsibilities of how we have to to be make these people proud who we've never known existence and it's a very powerful web the intergenerational legacy and to know to what extent you were allowed to transcend it without being accused of forgetting it or betraying it it's a whole very intense set of threads and I think it connects with what you're asking if I heard you well the first part of your question is how do you help somebody now he said the people who need help the most often getting the least I think there is a dynamic which I want to just quickly and a highlight for you and it's this when you are trying to help somebody who doesn't want to help themselves or who is self-destructive or who drinks or who can't get a job or who gets ten different jobs and wastes all their money or all kinds of things like this I think as a partner a sibling a friend you know a parent you go back and forth between two places place number one is you are resourceful you want to tell them all the things that they can do you have so many good ideas for them which of course they're not going to do and the less they do those ideas and the more angry you become at them for making you feel so helpless for trying so hard to make them do something which they don't do and you go back and forth between more resentment and more helplessness and in the end you feel as income as incompetent as they are and it's one of the most difficult dances you have to understand where this goes and it you can have it as a friend with somebody who's in a shitty relationship you can have it as a sibling with the start that brother or a sister who get their act together it goes on like this and the interesting thing is to understand that power can come from above but power can also come from below a depressed person or a self-destructive person runs the system because while they may feel helpless and weak and all of that on the inside they activate the entire social system around them to become advice givers which the only thing they can do is defeat the good advice and with that they have power so that's in a nutshell about this question you want to take that ok can you be happy on the yes sadism it's a question about sadism basically right yeah more or less but it has that in the question now we can't hear you till here so we're going to try to think that makes you happy makes somebody else unhappy so you kind of take advantage of the unhappiness of somebody else happens all the time I mean I mean part of that is a fact of life that some things make some people happy to make other people unhappy no but I people who do derive pleasure from seeing other people and unhappy as well no but there is the question I would like to ask we have people who come into our office and their partner tells you everything that they're unhappy about and the other one says I'm very happy and I think to myself how can that be how can you continue to think everything is fine and you're good and the only thing that should change is that your partner should stop complaining you know when your partner is actually I think that's more interesting piece to this question and and can you know if you continue to be happy next to somebody who clearly is not you're not in touch with reality on some level something eludes you you're like in your own world you know it's like he would be standing next to me and crying and I would be continuing to go like this you would think it's weird at some point you turn to the person and if they're upset it has to do something to you and if it doesn't do anything to you meaning it can do nice things to you which means you want to come close and it can do things that frees you and you say I want nothing to do with this but generally it does something to you one way or another if you stand next to the feeling of the emotion of another person so that's the thing it's but we do we live in an age now where there are people there's a lot being done that leads to the unhappiness and pain and suffering of others and it's done by people who really don't care and when we see that in our political system all the time in our country and it's as if there is the lack of empathy and so and I think that's really a problem so I do think that there are people who don't care about other people's unhappiness or pain one of the reasons that I'm interested in this project about moral entry because this this has to do with people being distressed by that those the difficult you know the that situation when we live in the United States now and we see some of the things that have been going on recently with immigrants I mean this is horrible and we're disturbed by it and so this idea of moral injury and moral distress that I'm studying and writing about and having the installation is about something that we all feel in response to certain things that happen in the world these days so I do think that we have to take this very seriously that people do suffer quite a bit and there are a lot of people who don't really care yes hello it's a question for Jack during your project what was the variance across various religions or cultures in the perception of trauma and in the healing process of trauma I mean we are evolving in a mostly Christian moral set of values how is this how are different sets of values influencing these aspects thank you okay so if you can single out one behavior that is most destructive for relationships and one that is most constructive or healthy any type of relationship great is okay great so my question sort of relates to culture what do you do when your family comes from a different culture that you were then you were brought in and you're trying to form your own self-identity and there is this great cultural clash give me one sentence about the divided religious hour versus Western Lansing and the the family's background if you had a cartoon above their head what would it say very are very Christian okay and if you had a cartoon above your head modern today Romania not that very spiritual but not that great okay do different religions approach probably the problem differently or how do they approach them with oh well okay deaf definitely different cultures perceived trauma differently to give you having worked in this clinic where we had over 50 different countries and different cultures it was really hard to even predict how some people would approach the the suffering that they had been through and give you kind of one eight one example my thing that really stands out that we were working with a quite a quite a few Tibetan Buddhist who had been tortured by the Chinese and they have a very interesting idea about how do you approach this kind of suffering and they have a different idea about what is resilience in their in their culture than many Westerners think so for them first of all the Buddhist perspective is that suffering is inevitable it's nothing you know it's it's a fact of life and the ones that went through this particularly horrible torture what what they would do was practice compassion toward the perpetrator because for them the perpetrator was going to be worse off than them because of what the perpetrator did in the karmic in their karmic philosophy so you understand so this kind of shaped the the whole way that they would deal with their suffering and their trauma so when they would come to the clinic they didn't want to see they didn't want to see individual therapists they wanted me to help them form a nonprofit organization so that they could help other Tibetan refugees and that because for them healing is about helping others and they're they're very adaptive because of these kind of you know in empathy you know Pro empathic kinds of responses they tend to make friends very easily and connect with people and get tremendous resources to help them then you have other groups I mean that approach things very differently I mean in African cultures you have a whole spiritual way of understanding suffering I mean it just don't mean I could go on and on and on but I've seen it's very interesting to look at how the different cultures approach it so for them they have to satisfy the spirits if the spirits are coming but the suffering has been caused by something that has been upset or something has not been resolved and they have to engage in some kind of ritual to resolve it so often you would see people from those cultures before they could get any kind of help they would have to perform some kind of purification rituals or some kind of ritual to honor the dead before they would allow themselves any kind of process of personal recovery so it just it's just it's very different we tend to in the West think that the way that we conceptualize suffering from a judeo-christian perspective is the way other people do and it's really not the case in most parts of the world people are looking at these things very differently and and I've actually I work with the United Nations on global mental health approaches and one of the things that we are careful not to do is to impose our Western assumptions about suffering and distress and the possibilities for healing one to non-western populations that really think of these things very differently and usually thinking very collectively about how to approach promoting recovery and healing and we need to basically help them tap in to their own beliefs and resources and support them to do it the way that they see is going to be most most helpful so I can go on and on about this it's one way I try to very very quickly probably the most destructive dynamic in a couple this is according to the work of researcher John Gottman but I think he's onto something is contempt contempt it's not just disrespect it's not just degradation contempt because it is the complete sense that that the other person has no value no meaning to you whatsoever and neither is what they experience or feel or want or think so that's one what is probably the dynamic that is most enhancing that one I will give you some of mine but there is this is not a scientific cutting this is my experience I think it goes in two directions one is admiration because admiration but implies a form of idealization and it implies curiosity it implies that this person that is living next to you for decades is still somewhat mysterious and unknown and elusive and there is still something to discover and as long as you can continue to experience that sense of discovery and exploration you stay curious and you stay engaged I could say freedom I could say a few others but I think the admiration is an undervalued one that I actually think goes a long way and in terms of what you're asking I would ask you to sue this and this is a question you can all take with you well you raised for loyalty or when you raised for autonomy well you raised for self-reliance or when you raised for interdependence and I think the gap it I'm assuming that's part of what you're experiencing when you come from it's more Arabic than Christian the Christian PC R is less relevant and I don't know where Arabic but is that generally it is a culture that is interdependent and India and you never alone you always owed to others and others will always be there for you but therefore you get a lot of certainty a lot of roots and very little freedom and self-expression your tendency toward modern Romania modern Romania not the one of when I was here in the 70s is a tendency towards less certainty more confusion more self doubt but unprecedented choice and option and self-expression and that is the tension that you probably experienced in your family as well ladies and gentlemen time is up [Applause]

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Length: 64min 44sec (3884 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020