🎙️ Episode Transcript
[0:00 - Intro Music]
Matthew Grimm: Hello, and welcome back to The Unlicensed Therapist. For those of you who are joining us again and have been following our journey, thank you for your support. And for those of you who are finding us for the first time, welcome! Pull up a seat and join us as we delve into the world of counseling.
Just a note for everyone to be aware of: we now have a presence on social media. We can be found on Facebook and LinkedIn under The Unlicensed Therapist Podcast. Both have pages and are a great place to communicate with other listeners or myself. So if you have ideas, topics that you'd like to hear about, or if you're a potential guest and would like to maybe guest on the podcast, it's a great way to reach out. Here soon, I will be listing the email address that we've created for the podcast as well, so that's all coming.
Today, we're going to do things a little bit differently. Since we don't have a guest lined up and I'm going to be away for vacation next week, I didn't want to leave things just sort of hanging for a long period of time. So, I'm going to invite you all to look at counseling—look at your counseling skills—through a different lens. Through the lens of another part of yourself.
Now, when I say that, I'm talking about the idea that there is a part of us that is the therapist, a part of us that is the partner, a part of us that is the child, maybe the parent. But we also have other occupations that we've had, other hobbies that we've had, and I'm inviting you to pull from those things to see how they may have enriched or already prepared you for that real therapy room. And today, we're going to explore how theater may have prepared me for the therapy room.
So sit back, relax, and I'll be right back.
[2:17 - Music Interlude]
Matthew Grimm: Picture it: The auditorium has filled with an audience. You can hear their low conversations under the music that is playing—that is a signal for you to get into your place for the beginning of the show. You're standing in the wings and waiting for the lights to go down. You're filled with a feeling of anticipation, excitement, and absolute terror, all in one. It's got your nervous system on a high. You're about to walk out on stage and become someone totally different for the next two hours, and it's freeing. It's so wonderful.
What I just described is how I feel before stepping out onto the stage to perform, as well as how I feel opening that therapy room door and inviting a client into that space. Because both the stage and that therapy room space are my safe spaces. And it is my role to bring other people into that space and have them experience that same feeling of safety.
What you learn as an actor—when it comes to just being an actor, let's start there. I think the best thing I ever learned was from my very first acting teacher who said: "Anyone can be an actor. Some people just need to work a little harder at it than others." And I think the same is 100% true with a therapist. Anyone can be a therapist. Some people just have to work a little bit harder at it than others. It doesn't mean that you can't develop certain qualities or skills, or that you just won't find the niche where your type of therapist 100% belongs.
When you're on stage and you're performing—be it rehearsal, be it an actual performance production—you're obviously not alone. There are other individuals typically on that stage with you. And while your script is sort of the treatment plan that that team of actors is using, the dialogue, for some people, may think is just as easy as rote memorization and just listening for the cue word, and then responding with what is on the page.
The reality is, you have to feel something. You have to be engaged. You have to be listening.
So how does that happen? Well, number one, how do you feel something? There is an acting technique called "acting from dark places," where you're going into your mind and you're thinking about a time where you felt a certain emotion that you're trying to bring up in that character, so that there's not only you feeling a certain way, but you're bringing it into that character.
There's also the idea that while you're on stage, if you're just listening for that cue word—if you're not actively listening—then you can run into absolute catastrophe. Actors aren't perfect. They forget lines, they flub, they mess things up. And you need to cover each other; you need to make sure that things make sense to the audience.
I can remember going out on stage for a production of The Miser, and it was myself and two other actors. One that I'd gone to college with and was so confident with that I felt so safe, and another that I didn't know as well, but I felt safe with that actor. And I went to give a line, and my mind went blank. And it's not just that it went blank on what I should say; the thoughts I were having were things that my character was thinking, but really was not appropriate to be said out loud.
And my eyes were screaming, "Help me!" And thankfully, the other actors saw that and swooped in and helped bring me back to where I needed to be to push the story forward.
When I am the therapist, and I'm in the room with a client who may be telling me the same story for the umpteenth time, it is still my responsibility to be actively listening—not just be listening for that cue word at the end of the story or do the "aha, mm-hmm" and let them continue on. Because they're telling me that story for a reason.
So, number one: I'm listening to see what's different this time, or what is it that you keep pressing on that we haven't come to that gives you the need to talk about this particular scenario again, and again, and again?
Also, I'm listening for what happens if the story changes. If I'm not actively listening and actively engaged, and the story changes, and I just throw out my normal comment, that could be severely damaging to the therapeutic relationship. Because there it becomes evident that I haven't been listening to you, and the message it sends is that you're not very important to me. And if I'm coming into the therapy room—a place where I'm going to preach to you is a safe place, a place free of judgment—then I also feel that I should be the number one priority. And if you're not listening to me, and you're not thinking about what I have to say, then why am I here?
Theater taught the act of listening—the being very aware of an individual, not only what they said, but how they said it, and that those changes truly meant something. And that those changes that meant something were clues to me to put the puzzle together that would lead towards an intervention or a breakthrough.
Now, one of the other things as an actor that I recall learning was in a class called Movement for the Actor. You may see or have a favorite actor who's in several different roles, and you may notice that their movement changes depending on what character or type of character that they're playing. Someone who is playing a character with an injured leg may drag that leg to show that the leg is injured. They may hunch over if they have an injured back, or if maybe it's more of a Gothic type of character that they're playing that's similar to Igor.
What I was trained to do was to watch other people in that class and in my college community and learn to mimic them. Now, when I say mimic them, I'm not saying that I was doing it in a harsh, rude way. I was learning how to verbalize how someone moved, how their movements changed, observe little parts of their movements and copy them, and then bring those new movements that were foreign to me into a character.
When I started in mental health, I did not have any background. So when it came to talking to my supervisors, I very much had discussions with them when it came to those that I was working with about what I physically saw and what I verbally heard people saying and doing, and I could describe those things in detail.
I didn't know at the time what they meant, but my supervisors did. They could take that information and tie it to different meanings that I would learn later down the line.
And now, as a therapist, I sit in my room. I wait for the person to come in. They come in. I watch how they walk, how they sit, how they lean forward, what happens with their hands—what's changed from a previous visit? What that person looking comfortable looks like, what that person looking anxious looks like, what that person looking sad looks like. And I begin to question things and point out to the person what I see as a difference in their physicality or their vocalization, with the hopes of learning from them the meanings of those differences, and teaching them in turn that their body is giving off signals about how they're feeling, and that they can become aware of them just as much as I can.
Using the skills of active listening and observation that I learned as an actor to bring a character to life, in the therapy room, makes me more attentive and in the moment, more observational of the person I'm with, and more aware...
[11:21 - Music Interlude]
Matthew Grimm: Now that we're more actively listening, we're more present and more aware of what's going on, we can take a look at another skill that I learned as an actor, and that's improvisation.
Improvisation is a time in which an actor is given a character and a location, but no lines, and asked to make the scene up as they go along with another actor. And this means sharing that space with someone. This means, to keep that scene going as long as possible, you have to relinquish control and power. You can't be the one in charge, and the other actor—your scene partner—can't be the one in charge. It has to be a give and take.
And when you take that idea into the therapy room—that we're going to relinquish power over the client, we're going to allow this to be as simple as a give and take—that heightens the idea of this being a judgment-free zone. It allows you to be more spontaneous with your responses. Now when I say that, we're obviously going to have clients who may say things that we're not expecting...
[13:20 - Outro Music Fades Out]
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