The Human Experience · Episode
Episode 51 – Lewis Mehl-Madrona M.D. Ph.D
A conversation with Lewis Mehl-Madrona M.D. Ph.D
Lewis E. Mehl-Madrona, MD, PhD, (born January 26, 1954, Berea, Kentucky) is the author of the Coyote trilogy. His work discusses healing practices from Lakota, Cherokee and Cree traditions, and how they…
The full conversation continues here.
Episode field notes
Show notes
Lewis E. Mehl-Madrona, MD, PhD, (born January 26, 1954, Berea, Kentucky) is the author of the Coyote trilogy. His work discusses healing practices from Lakota, Cherokee and Cree traditions, and how they intersect with conventional medicine (via a social constructionist model). Mehl-Madrona has been writing about the use of imagery and narrative in healing since the 1980s. Mehl-Madrona is certified in psychiatry, geriatrics and family medicine.
His research collaborations include work on various psychological conditions, issues of psychology during birthing, nutritional approaches to autism and diabetes, and the use of healing circles to improve overall health outcomes.
Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and trained in family medicine, psychiatry, and clinical psychology. He completed his r
click to purchase
esidencies in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He has been on the faculties of several medical schools, most recently as associate professor of family medicine at the University of New England. He continues to work with aboriginal communities to develop uniquely aboriginal styles of healing and health care for use in those communities. He is interested in the relation of healing through dialogue in community and psychosis. He is the author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, and Coyote Wisdom, a trilogy of books on what Native culture has to offer the modern world. He has also written Narrative Medicine, Healing the Mind through the Power of Story: the Promise of Narrative
click to purchase
Psychiatry, and, his most recent book with Barbara Mainguy, Remapping Your Mind: the Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story.
Lewis currently teaches with the family medicine residency at Eastern Maine Medical Center (EMMC) in Bangor, where he does inpatient medicine, outpatient precepting, and obstetrics. He works in consultation-liaison psychiatry at EMMC and also
at Acadia Hospital. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation.
Lewis has been studying traditional healing and healers since his early days and has written about their work and the process of healing. His primary focus has been upon Cherokee and Lakota traditions, though he has also explored other Plains Cultures and those of Northeastern North America. His goal is to bring the wisdom of indigenous peoples about healing back into mainstream medicine and to transform medicine and psychology through this wisdom coupled with more European derived narrative traditions. He has written scientific papers in these areas and continues to do research. He writes a weekly (almost) blog on health and mental health for www.futurehealth.org. His current interests center around psychosis and its treatment within community and with non-pharmacological means, narrative approaches to chronic pain and its use in primary care, and further developing healing paradigms within a narrative/indigenous framework.
Barbara Mainguy, M.A., is a psychotherapist and education director for the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation. She lives in Orono, Maine.
How Do We Understand Stories?
When we hear or read a story, our minds actively start recognizing words, parsing sentences, accessing our memory for all possible meanings of each word (semantic memory), understanding the meaning of the word (semantic comprehension), generating all possible associations we might have to what we are hearing/reading, making inferences regarding character intentions, interpreting the intentions of the teller, deciding on the overall meaning, eliminating extraneous information, and more.
The brain processes required for understanding story have been separated into three broad categories: (1) memory encoding and retrieval, (2) integration, and (3) elaboration or simulation. Memory is required to achieve an overall sense of coherence for a story, at least in part by allowing us to track the relations between near and distant clauses within that story. The same neurons associated with hearing a story continue to be active for a time after the story ends, supporting the idea that we hold the story in working memory. The frontal lobe is the brain region that best performs this function (Rolls 2000). Neuroimaging studies coupled with studies of brain-damaged people help us better localize the parts of the brain necessary for a given function (Cabeza & Nyberg 2000).
Retrieving personal memories that occur as associations to a story is important. These memories tend to be more actively self-oriented when elicited by what we consider to be fiction as compared to what we consider to be news (Larsen & Seilman 1988).
Why Do We Need to Understand Stories?
Human experience is embedded in stories, which we understand and produce through our brains (Mar 2008). We are insatiable consumers of stories. We find the personal stories of others absolutely compelling, whether as anecdotes or gossip, and spend considerable time engaged with novels, plays, films, and television shows. Our affinity for story emerges at a very young age, when we develop deep and long-lasting emotional attachments to the storybooks and movies that surround us. These fictional stories are not frivolous; stories have the power to change our beliefs about the world, whether or not they “really” happened. They do “really happen” in the telling. Readers’ attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a narrative after exposure to fiction (Prentice, Gerrig & Bailis 1997; Strange & Leung 1999; Wheeler, Green & Brock 1999).
British neuroscientist Mark Turner situates the roots of human mental functioning in story. The way we think is based upon story devices, including metaphor and parable. “We organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative.” We even create stories to explain the unusual experiences we have in states of psychosis, which then become delusions. We need to understand story, because story is what we use to explain our world. Story is what we use to create identity. Story lies behind our beliefs about the world.
There is no single way to understand a story. When we hear a story we look for the many possible beliefs inherent in that story. We find these beliefs by sorting through the beliefs we already have. We are not as concerned with what we are hearing as we are with finding what we already know that is relevant. Picture it this way: We have a list of beliefs, indexed by type of experience and meaning. When a new story appears, we attempt to find a belief that relates to it. When we do, we find a story attached to that belief and compare the story in memory to the one being processed. Our understanding of the new story is a function of the old story. Once we find a belief and connected story, we need do no further processing; the search for other beliefs is co-opted. We rarely look to understand a story in more than one way. The mind does not easily pursue multiple paths.
Telling Stories Back Implies Understanding
We tell stories for many reasons, one of which is to indicate to our listener that we have understood what we have heard. Our only choice for assessing how well we have been understood as storytellers may be to compare the story that occurs in response to the story we told.
We are always looking for stories to tell back to show that we have understood. When we find them, processing stops, and we wait to tell our story. We only incorporate what we have heard into memory when we feel that our own stories are inadequate in some way, for example, if our story is missing a piece. Such pieces can be supplied by other people’s stories. We may find a story inadequate when we use it to exemplify a belief that we are not quite sure we hold. We are willing to consider new stories as evidence for or against those beliefs and, therefore, to record and to remember better the stories of others.
The Paradox of Understanding
The odd paradox to all this is that we are less likely to learn directly from someone else’s story than we are to modify our own memories to incorporate aspects of those stories we are hearing. When we hear a story, we are reminded of our own similar stories. The story we heard is recalled in terms of the story of which we were reminded. Thus, we rarely recall the stories of others easily. Generally, other people’s stories don’t have the richness of detail and emotional impact that allows them to be stored in multiple ways in our memories. They do, however, provide enough details and emotions to allow them to be more easily stored than if the teller had simply told us his belief.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“In this superb contribution to the field of self-transformation through story, Dr. Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy present important scientific research in approachable language as they demonstrate the intrinsic therapeutic value of story at all levels of our being. The authors have all the qualities of true ‘medicine’ people–they heal, they bless, they give thanks, they teach, they respect those who approach them for help–and so join the ancient lineage of storytellers who ensure the continuity of life giving, universal healing wisdom.” (Jack Angelo, author of Self-Healing with Breathwork: Using the Power of Breath to Increase Energy an)
“Our life is a storied life. Where we may have been thrown into an unhappy or even hostile story, we have ways to remap and re-story our lives. I have read each of Dr. Mehl-Madrona’s books, shared them with clients and students, and witnessed how his words help transform the inner and outer landscapes of our lives. He shows us how we can experience transformation and transcendence by being able to story our life differently. Remapping Your Mind satisfies in every way.” (Julie Tallard Johnson, author of The Zero Point Agreement: How to Be Who You Already Are)
Find Lewis here: http://www.mehl-madrona.com/
This episode is brought to you by Find Mindfulness:
Become a member
Ideas worth returning to
Quotes
Five substantial excerpts from the published transcript, lightly edited for clarity without changing their meaning.
“We move among different identities and usually navigate them smoothly. When the self and world no longer fit together, friction appears, and people may be labeled, diagnosed, or treated. Narrative medicine asks which stories organize that friction. A simple family belief such as ‘ladies do not sweat’ can shape bodily experience and behavior for decades.”
From the conversation“We live by stories about virtue, sacrifice, and what a good life should look like. Those stories influence ordinary choices. A student may know exercise improves mood and schoolwork yet remain inactive because another story—about identity, effort, or what is possible—has more emotional force than the information alone.”
From the conversation“In a group for people with chronic illness, one woman described moving from extreme instability with an infant to employment, a home, three children, and school over five years. Her story was not a miracle detached from circumstance. It was a discovery of agency made possible in part by meeting people who believed she could change.”
From the conversation“When we vividly imagine a story, the brain recruits many of the systems used in direct experience: visual areas construct scenes, memory networks assemble felt context, and motor regions simulate movement. Narrative is not processed as detached language alone. The body and brain participate in making an imagined event present.”
From the conversation“A threatening story can activate catecholamines, the sympathetic fight-or-flight system, stress hormones, and metabolic changes that prepare the body to run. Because memory is dynamic, revisiting an event and changing its frame can alter the present physiological response. Reframing does not erase what happened; it changes how the experience continues to live in the body.”
From the conversation
About the guest
Lewis Mehl-Madrona M.D. Ph.D
Lewis E. Mehl-Madrona, MD, PhD, (born January 26, 1954, Berea, Kentucky) is the author of the Coyote trilogy. His work discusses healing practices from Lakota, Cherokee and Cree traditions, and how they intersect with conventional medicine (via a social constructionist model). Mehl-Madrona has been writing about the use of imagery and narrative in healing since the 1980s. Mehl-Madrona is certified in psychiatry, geriatrics and family medicine.
Beyond the conversation
Selected work
Official sites, books, research, and institutional pages verified for this guest.
The complete conversation
Transcript
Archival transcript · Published on the canonical episode page
This archival source does not include reliable passage timestamps or consistent speaker attribution. The wording and any labels below are preserved from the original transcript page; no speakers or timing have been inferred.
this episode of the human experience podcast is brought to you by fine mindfulness mindfulness these days is huge mass media is starting to understand the benefits of taking time to pause and reflect have you ever been interested in mindfulness and meditation have you ever wanted to create a practice but you just fall off track well this is where fine mindfulness comes in they offer a community that will help you create those powerful
lasting habits that keep you training your mind whether you are the CEO of a fortune 500 company or a college student running a startup fine mindfulness can help you find mindfulness is a 30 day program how often are you looking at your cell phone just ask yourself how often you look at your cell phone and then tell yourself that you need to take this course mention the human experience go and sign up right now at WWF einde mindfulness calm
what’s up folks this is our episode with dr. Lewis Mel madrone he is a neuroscientist and they are doing a lot of really groundbreaking work on how the idea of creating stories affects how you deal and cope and heal with trauma so I think you guys will enjoy this episode it’s an interesting one please make sure that you sign up for a contest if you haven’t done that already check us out on Facebook Twitter YouTube thank you guys so much for listening
[Music]the human experience is remapping the neural networks in your brain as we speak to my desk Lois Mel madrone Lois welcome to hxp thank you thank you for having me so Lois if we could just start this conversation by kind of getting into your background your education how you got into this work I think that would help lay the foundation sure I attended medical school at Stanford and got a PhD in neuropsychology did residences and
family medicine geriatrics and psychiatry and then got a master’s degree in narrative studies and on the one hand on the other hand I grew up in a indigenous context so I grew up surrounded by stories and it was amazing when the two threads converged when I discovered that there was a neuroscience of story and that academics and scholars were talking about story in the same way that elders and Indians talk about story so that was pretty exciting and and that
really led to this book remapping your mind yeah if I could just read a passage from the book here we are born into a world of stories that quickly shapes our behavior and development without our conscious awareness by retelling our personal family and cultural narratives we can form the patterns of our own lives as well as the patterns that shape our communities and the larger social worlds in which we interact I mean why why is this so important in
in the way we interact and I mean how does it affect our learning so much what have you discovered so our culture turns everything into nouns we give people labels we say okay you’re a bipolar you’re a PTSD you’re an anxiety disorder you’re schizophrenic and going back to Story returns everything to verbs so that you’re embodying the experience of being anxious or you’re embodying the experience being fearful and it’s much easier to envision change when you’re
dealing with a verb than it is when you’re dealing with a noun so so by turning things back into stories which they were in the first place then we can imagine change much more readily we don’t feel stuck we feel like we have some capacity for action some sense of agency that we can do something to alter our lives and the world that we live in that we can have an impact on the world what is what is the identity of narrative that you speak about in your
book that’s the story that we tell ourselves and other people about who we are so if I ask you hey who are you anyway then the story you tell me is your identity narrative and of course it varies depending on the context in the audience you’ll tell a different story if you’re applying for a job then if you’re on a first date so we have a repertoire we have a stockpile of vignettes that we pull out to create an identity narrative
and they differ so so we try to match who we are to the context so that we’re who the audience wants us to D where who the other person expects us to be you know and the more skill you have in doing that the more your social relationships tend to go well tend to go smoothly so but from this perspective there is not a fixed self there’s there are multiple self that can be created in any given moment for any given situation based on
all the vignettes of our lives so then would you say that each person has a different story that we tell ourselves based on the context of any given situation so the way that I see myself in a personal way is different than the way that I would construct myself in the external world right right right when you’re when you’re sitting at home with your partner you’re a different you have a different sense of yourself than when you’re on the radio or at a bank or
at a professional conference that we we pull out stories to support the identity that we’re expected to be the role that were expected to perform and and and we tie them together to create an identity in that context so we have an identity as parent we have an identity as child as co-worker and so you know there’s the federal differences sometimes large differences and in these identities and and mostly we navigate through them in
seamless fashion when we don’t then we have self world’s friction self world interface friction sparks fly and things don’t go so well and sometimes people get labeled they get diagnosed and get told that they need treatment we use this narrative to address healing and to address illness so in its most simplistic form I’ll give you an example from my mother my mother has a story that says ladies don’t sweat now my mother was born into poverty coal mining
country of southeastern Kentucky and it was her dream to become a lady and thanks to Berea College which gives free education to Appalachian youth she got to do that so once he was graduated from college it was her steadfast desire to never sweat again she could go but she would not sweat so fast-forward sixty years later my mother has to have her aortic valve her place and she sent home with a piece of paper that says come to
cardio pulmonary rehab we will make you sweat so what does my mother do the first thing when she gets home is to hide that piece of paper and the bottom of her cabinet no one’s going to see that no one is going to make her sweat so I happen to find it and I showed it to her and and it led to an intense case of the vapors I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the vapors but it’s a southern illness in which the person puts their arm to their forehead and says oh my I
feel things I must go to bed so so consequently my mother didn’t have as good an outcome from her aortic valve surgery as she could have because she would never go to rehab and and simplistically again people have stories about food and some of those stories don’t work really well if you’re a diabetic I’ve met people they there will not change how they eat because it’s more important to them to eat with their family and to eat what their family’s
eating then to die of diabetes so our stories are powerful in our health and I think we you know Barbara and I and my co-author in the book we we take it further and we play with this story that the illness would tell about the person is living within because we think that it generates metaphors that help us to understand the illness so so let’s say that you have hip pain so here’s somebody I worked with recently and so we got hip pain to talk and hip pain
turned out to be a grumpy woodchuck grumpy old woodchuck and the squirrel vo which accent you’re just always driving me you’re just always making me work they’re just always pushing me to the limit you never take care of me you never get any pampering for me I want some pampering give me some pampering you know stop trying to force me to get better so so the question you know to the client was well so that make any sense and he said well yeah you know I I
really haven’t been going for any kind of treatment I’ve just been trying to ignore my pain and just push through it and visualize getting better and and and so I said well what about you know making an appointment with an osteopath he said well I guess I could try that so so once he started getting work done he started getting better but he but so his his pain had a story about him that was quite accurate and annoying to his pay
and he had a story about his pain that was quite accurate for him and annoying to his pain which was you know by God if you’ve got a pain you just pushed through it and tell it to get better and pretend that that it’s not there so it took negotiating that story with both the pain and him for him to go get help and for the pain to start improving so if I’m understanding this correctly so that the narrative that I tell myself through a story can determine whether I
am healing or not healing yes because it reflects the stories that you live by so we tell ourselves stories about how to live what are the virtues that we should follow what is a good life looked like anyway and what am I willing to sacrifice for a good life so I have a I have a nephew who’s visiting right now and he’s in college and he’s not exercising and it’s not very good for him and he knows if he exercises he’ll stop feeling depressed and he’ll get his work
will improve and everything will go better but his notion of exercising is that he should run ten kilometers in the freezing cold outside in Montreal where he goes to college so well that doesn’t sound like fun so but that’s his story about what exercises so my wife has been saying to him well why don’t you go to the gym and like in the warmth in the nice warm gym why don’t you walk on a treadmill and watch TV while you’re doing it
or read one of your books for school that could be exercise you see and and so he because he has an extreme story that only running outside in the middle of winter in in cold Montreal qualifies as exercise he’s not doing any so so he needs he needs a kinder gentler story about exercise than the one he has and you know it in in in psychiatric conditions which I work with to a to some degree we have stories about how to get what we want from the world and you
could you could think of them as strategies for how to move around in the world if your strategy is to throw a tantrum that might always work in might backfire if your strategy is to never say directly what you want but to make hints you might never get what you want it might be really frustrating so though so this this seems like something that is pretty cutting edge I mean has cognitive neuroscience kind of picked up on what you guys are doing or our people
still oh yeah understanding this know there’s a whole there’s a journal even causing the neuroscience of fiction and it’s published out of the University of Toronto and neuroscientists are really excited by this whole idea of narrative it turns out that there’s a circuitry in the brain that does nothing but produce stories it’s the story brain and you know it it runs along the midline from front to back and it’s what we do on idle it’s also called default mode
Network so when our brain is on idle we sit around making up stories about other people and what they want what we want from them and how to get what we want from them and how to talk to them to get what we want from them and I know that anyone listening was ever commuted can relate to this so if you’re if you’re going home on a train or if you’re driving home in a car or walking home riding the subway you’re thinking about who’s at
home and what the condition was of the relationship when you left home and you’re fantasizing what you should say when you go home maybe you’re trying to decide whether to pick up flowers Chinese takeout chocolate or to stop off at the pub for a pint before you brace the slings and arrows at home right so but we’re all doing that that’s what our brain does on idle it turns out that the turn off story brain and to turn on say meditation brain burns more glucose
involves spending more energy than just sitting around making up stories I mean um the the event indexing model and that you mentioned this in your book I mean it from what I understand that it it kind of indexes all incoming actions into five indexes can you get into that a little bit yeah and and people are thinking that there’s probably more or less than five you know it is probably unique to each person but you know when when things come in we need to quickly
sort them we need and we need to compare them with experiences we’ve had before and how those experiences have turned out and so I mean the the obvious example is if if you’re standing on a hilltop and you see someone on the next hilltop you need to quickly figure out if if their friend or foe are they Fermi or again me because if they’re against you you might want to run and if their friend you might want to walk over and shake their hand and so so you know
that’s a really basic category friend or foe and we can sort events into and we we can sort events into probably Pleasant probably unpleasant probably neutral we can we can sort of isn’t of interest to me of no interest to me you know so we we do this kind of glossing really quickly because we have to make quick decisions and we have this this sort of storehouse of well I would call them stories I mean some people call them you know memories but their
memories that are stored memories that exist as stories and and we know how things turned out so if it looks like a particular event that’s already happened if it’s starting to look like that event then we jump to conclusions and say well that’s how it’s going to turn out so I better run away know sometimes we’re wrong and we miss out on great opportunities and there’s you know there’s stories about that it’s a classic movie plot right is is romance
boy boy likes girl girl jumps to conclusions that boys no good boy fights to convince girls that he’s really good girl changes might and marries boy I you know I just saw that the other night in Bollywood it was a great Bollywood movie called Bride & Prejudice which was a Hindu remake of Pride and Prejudice you know it was it was just fabulous you know the whole village is dancing and singing you know it’s like musical comedy at its best but that was the plot
and you know it’s um it’s leads into my next question how does I mean how does as a casual observer how I mean how do we when we look at narrative based entertainment in our culture I mean it’s obviously based on store so I mean how how would you say that are you know media and culture are either helping or detracting from this sense of identification within ourselves well I think that we’re surrounded with stories good and bad we’re surrounded by stories
that are uplifting and positive and we’re surrounded by stories of war and and and you know there’s the whole rhetoric of hate that we’re hearing now on the campaign trail and so I think that the media has every option for us and we have to decide what stories will pay attention to that that you know that it’s up to us to tell good stories and I I do a group for people with chronic disease and this morning a couple people in the group one woman was telling about
how she got from living in a van with her ten month old baby to being employed having a home having three children and having it and going to school which is an amazing shift she accomplished that over the course of five years and I was a really uplifting story it was a really inspiring story about the discovery of self agency and about meeting people who believed in her and listening to them and taking their help and running with
it and and we know you know so many stories that that if one is in medicine one gets to hear so many stories that aren’t that inspiring in the emergency department for example and and then the person immediately who came after her was a young man who told an amazing story about sitting around with nothing to do drunk on there was a reservation and somebody sent him a plane ticket to come here to Maine and and he did and he got here in a
snowstorm it came from a warm climate he got here in a snowstorm with shorts sandals and a t-shirt and since then he started he taught himself how to design websites he’s making YouTube videos he’s being really successful as a dancer he’s he’s gotten married he has two children he’s turned his life around and that’s really inspiring yeah it is it is really intriguing Turner sorry to interrupt you there yeah I just I mean if we could
just get into the science of it I mean what is happening in the brain what parts of the brain are being activated as we access these stories in our minds well you know we’re when we visualize the story we’re using of course visual cortex and visual association or cortex and we’re we’re using the posterior cingulate and the pre cuneus put together you know kinesthetic memories with the story and and feelings in essence we’re using our motor cortex to
imagine moving as we would move in in this story we’re using our temporal opposed to to give other people beliefs and intentions desires and you know we’re monitoring the the are our gut you know our brain is sending the whole package to our God which is monitoring the whole story and giving us feedback through his reactions to this story so when we say that something is got wrenching we really mean it or that something makes us sick to our
stomachs we really mean it so and and so positive stories are sending back happy hormones you know to simplify you know in tasty endorphins and and endocannabinoids and and traumatic stories are sending back you know catecholamines activating the sympathetic nervous system fight-or-flight nervous system they’re you know producing corticosteroids the the stress response hormones they’re giving us extra insulin so we can run so it’s quite a different experience you
know so I mean it seems like a lot of this is incredibly dynamic in the sense that we can go back into our minds and change the way that our memory exists about an event or an experience to reframe it into a sort of positive context and thereby institute a sort of healing mechanism absolutely and and we do that quite naturally and I have an example of a friend who did that she’s a comedian and a storyteller and to her chagrin and embarrassment she got taken
in by one of those Nigerian scams and since money to the wire that they give you you know my send yes mortified when she found out what she’d done just felt like she was the stupidest person on the planet and so she kept telling the story and and making it funnier and funnier and funnier until she finally performed it as a storyteller at a storytelling event and the audience was in stitches the audience couldn’t stop laughing every
other line was a punch line and and everyone was laughing with her and it was such a beautiful example I mean a simple example a lot you know but but similar to what people do for for more severe trauma maybe they don’t make quite as funny but but you know she had metabolized her shame and her embarrassment into humor and it was just incredible to see her a week later performing this story that was so incredibly funny about you know the
money that she gave away to the Nigerians and so you know people who have been terribly traumatized saying war you know there’s something called narrative exposure therapy where we’re up here listens to them tell the story until it triggers it doesn’t trigger anything anymore it’s just a story so they just keep telling it and telling it and telling it until the the emotional component is gone it’s just it’s just a boring story and then they can move on
so I mean I really want to ask this question and I think this is important you know there’s there’s a lot of research right now that is kind of coming out with the use of psychedelics psilocybin and I you asked to kind of treat PTSD mdma-assisted therapy what is what is your opinion on that and what is your stance on that in regards to the research that you’re doing well I’ve read some of this work and I think that it’s potentially positive in the sense
that what it seems to do is that it jars people loose from the story that they’ve grown accustomed to that they’ve grown attached to and I have a colleague at the University of Arizona who studies psilocybin for obsessive-compulsive disorder and when I read the descriptions of some of his subjects it sounds like what the psilocybin does is it completely shifts their point of view and they they exit this rigid mindset and can see things from another
framework and I think if you’re working with a skillful therapist who’s I think that can be positive I I think it could be dangerous if you’re doing it on your own because we need a scaffolding if we’re changing stories typically we need a scaffolding to hold us up during the transition and without that scaffolding things could fall apart and come undone I think but and I remember reading some of the early LSD research and it was
certainly promising as a possibility though it quickly got shut down and never to see the light of day again but you know there there are these possibilities and I I think ketamine may do some of that it’s a intravenous treatment for a severe depression that’s being done in some hospitals and my sense is that when it works it dissociates people from their habitual stories long enough that they can see the world differently Wow
and then when it’s over they can they’ve had the experience of having seen themselves from a different lens from a different standpoint right we’ve established that a narrative our unconscious and conscious narrative is completely essential to our healing and how we progress through you know our psychological disorders our physiological disorders I mean in your opinion what what can a person do that is perhaps listening to this show right
now – with a problem that they may be struggling with to kind of help themselves or a short technique that you could give someone one of my favorites is to take a problematic situation and write about it with but in the third person so we get stuck Lumi journal in the first person and we say I think this and I think that they did this to me and etc etc but it all in the third person once upon a time there was a man who worked in a hospital and had an argument
with the cafeteria you know about not having gluten-free bread or you know and and so when we when we write it down in the third person lots of times we can we can see things that we couldn’t see when we were just thinking about it in the first person and and there’s another technique that that is rampant in children’s literature which all which gives us even more distance and perspective which is to turn all the characters into animals and so make the
grumpy cafeteria worker into a hard harness I have the Potamus absolutely you know and and what do you want your character to be you know are you a coyote or a woodchuck are you a raccoon what what jumps out for you today and and sometimes that’s just amazingly illuminating in terms of on seeing it differently you know stepping out of the rat and taking a different look at this situation you mentioned heroes the hero of a story why is that so important to
the story well the the hero’s journey just usable but Joseph Campbell it’s it’s thought by some neuroscientists to be a metaphor for adaptation and so in the hero’s journey think things are going along fine everybody’s happy you know nothing much is going on to anyone’s feathers and and suddenly things change you know Gandalf shows up to talk about horrible things to come or Luke Skywalker’s parents are murdered by stormtroopers or
white people show up on the coast of Maine or something changes Captain Cook appears and and so then the hero’s journey is about how the hero responds to that event and restores harmony to the world to the world around him or her and and so the the key the key element in the hero’s journey is that the hero has to do something the hero has it has to have agency an agency is incredibly correlated with mental health and with physical health so when we have agency
we take action because we believe that our actions will improve things and when we don’t have agency we tend not to do anything because nothing matters anyway and whatever we do it will help so why bother and and and he wrote the hero’s story also the first action doesn’t always succeed so sometimes we have to try try and try again sometimes we have to go get help like Luke Skywalker goes to Dagobah to study with Yoda we have to
do something to strengthen our position and all of these things are about adapting to adverse circumstances that have suddenly appeared whether it be adapting to an illness or overcoming a problem at work or you know suddenly you’re given a disability and you have to make the most of it so you know these heroes stories explain to us how to do it and and we we need that in order to go make change for ourselves and for our world yeah it’s I
mean I find this work utterly fascinating and I’m truly perplexed and I mean in a good way by how powerful this seems and how much what we tell ourselves can affect you know what we’re thinking how we’re thinking and the way in which we think it I just want to thank you for your time where can people find your work your website my website is www.antakungfu.com institute us and i can be googled I’m a Nora no main and happy to dialogue with people great dr.
Lewis thank you so much for being here thank you for having me this is the human experience we are gonna get out of here we will see you guys next week
Independent conversations
Help make the next one possible.
Membership sustains ambitious, unhurried interviews and keeps the complete archive open to curious listeners everywhere.
Become a member