In this episode of the Crossroads Psychology Podcast I discuss with Dr. Dan Guerra, a psychologist and psychotherapist based in New York, the impact of positive psychology on mental health. We cover several topics relating to self, empathy, positive psychology, mind-body, meditation, breathing, yoga, and stress management.
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Dr. Dan Guerra is a psychologist and psychotherapist based in New York with over 18 years experience in helping clients increase their wellness and mental health. Apart from his private practice, Dr. Guerra is also a mindfulness meditation teacher, an educator, an executive coach, a playback theatre actor, an author, and a public speaker.
00:15 Who is Dr. Dan Guerra?
01:12 What is Positive Psychology?
02:02 What is the importance of focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses?
06:11 How teenagers and young adults can build self-esteem?
09:49 How to deal with stress in uncertain times?
12:09 What is the importance of mindset in stress management?
13:29 What are some tips one can use to tackle stress?
17:32 What is the importance of growth mindset?
20:22 How to deal with grief and emotional suffering?
22:20 How to combine Western and Eastern approaches to achieve wellness?
24:25 What are some of the benefits of yoga?
30:25 What is the importance of mindfulness these days?
35:58 What is the connection between mind-body and physical illness?
40:45 How can theatre become a cathartic experience?
45:31 Advice for young people who want to study psychology.
49:21 What positive psychology book do you recommend?
Connect with Dr. Dan Guerra:
Website: www.dan-guerra.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/danielguerrapsyd/
YouTube: Dan Guerra Psy.D.
Twitter: @DanGuerraPsyD
Book: https://amzn.to/3fsowVk
Insight Timer: insig.ht/danguerra
Facebook: StressDoc
Watch the video-podcast below:
Get in touch: YouTube | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email
Transcript of interview with Dr. Dan Guerra
Voicu Mihnea: I am joined today by Dr. Dan Guerra a psychologist and psychotherapist based in New York with over 18 years’ experience in helping clients increase their wellness and mental health. Apart from his private practice, Dr. Guerra is also a mindfulness meditation teacher, an educator, an executive coach, a playback theatre actor, an author, and a public speaker.
Thank you so much for taking the time to join me today, here on this podcast.
Dan Guerra: You’re very welcome, Voicu, thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be here.
VM: And I’m very excited to have this conversation together with you although you’re 12 hours ahead of Beijing time and I think that it’s amazing that we can connect today like this.
DG: It is amazing. It’s a little bit late for you over here.
VM: 8 pm… it’s okay.
DG: Okay, good.
VM: So, to begin with, I want to ask you what is positive psychology to you and how do you to “translate” that to your clients?
DG: That’s a good question. Positive psychology to me is really based on the idea that there is really much more right with us than there is wrong. So positive psychology says, let’s find out what your strengths are and what’s working well for you and enhance and emphasize and refine those things. So positive psychology is facilitator rather than prescriptive. And based on those strengths, then we build on a psychology of wellness and helping the client reach their goals.
VM: So, I suppose in your practice, you focus a lot on building strengths. But my question is, why do you think people focus so much on their weaknesses as opposed to their strengths? And when we make them aware that strengths are more important, how can one build upon his or her own strengths to improve their wellbeing?
DG: I think I’m up the belief Voicu that many of us are raised with a great deal of criticism combined with living in a society, at least here in America – I’m sure there’s other societies like this too – that just so values high and pushing to be the best in everything.
Now, of course, there’s nothing wrong with trying to achieve and to do well, but it does begin to create a self that becomes a bit an anesthetized or numb to tuning into the experience of joy and success and letting happiness and strengths be experienced. We’re sort of onto the next thing right away. We’re more concerned with self-critical and self-blaming parts as a way for like continuous improvement.
So I think it’s about balance. I’m not suggesting at all that we throw away high achievement or we’re trying to drive hard to reach our goals, but we might incorporate in just a tuning in to successes and strengths. For instance, we can build on our strengths first, I think by identifying and recognizing them in ourselves; we can learn to cultivate them and then leverage them for the situations that we’re in.
For example, it might take a while, I’m just thinking of an example for you to know that you can sing. You might’ve had someone tell you that you’re really bad at singing, or maybe you were teased about your voice or something. So you begin to speak negatively about yourself for a long time. And you begin to develop kind of strong belief systems around that. Let’s say by accident one day you might unconsciously be singing in the shower or somebody overhears you and says, “Hey, you have a great voice.” Right? So you’ve got to take that seriously. And maybe the next step, maybe you’re at a family party and you do a karaoke and you test it out and you develop your talent and your interest.
VM: Speaking of which, karaoke is such a big thing here in Asia, especially in East Asia and not everyone who picks up the mic can sing, but they do sing.
DG: That’s wonderful. You know, not everybody is a singer, let’s face it too. But I just use that as an example of just being able to sort of not feel fixed in what we know about ourselves, but instead feel curious to being, to changing. ‘Cause I think what happens in early adulthood is we think that we’ve arrived, and this is who we are and at this a straight path, but we’re really “a becoming”. We are not fixed.
VM: Or we think that this is who we should be…
DG: Right, right. We’re locked into the parameters of what we’ve been told by either society or maybe family members or friends. And we can expand that out. So, you can relate to this example with the singing to sports, realizing thinking maybe you’re not athletic or not skilled in a certain area, and then you have a different experience, or you have a different example. You start to learn that you’re maybe skilled in this area. You can foster that strength or anything. When you know your strengths and you learn how to cultivate and build off it, I think your mood will improve and you can develop a sense of agency, a type of self-mastery if you will.
VM: You also mentioned “the self”. I think you also deal in your practice with issues of self-esteem. And this is such an important concept to grasp for teenagers and young adults.
DG: Yeah. I agree. Self-esteem from my point of view is really just starts with our relationship to self. And there is a self and we have a relationship to that, whether we like it or not. We don’t think about that maybe. And there is, I distinguish between self of the small s and one with the big S, the small s is our personality and our likes and dislikes, and preferences and the things people have told us about her life and that personality it’s important, it’s our day to day personhood.
And again, it gets back to how we speak and relate to that self. Oftentimes we’re very harsh with that self, we speak negatively, we’re demeaning. We could be name calling. And of course this isn’t applied to everybody in the same degree, but when we’re talking about issues of self-esteem, it doesn’t take long to usually find kind of a negative or harsh relationship. You speak to that self as if it’s someone we don’t like. So the root of self-esteem, because self-esteem is really self-love and self-care.
VM: And I think also today with the access to social media our self-esteem is somehow degraded by comparing ourselves with others.
DG: A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, if comparison didn’t exist before the onslaught of social media, which it did it now really is on high, cause it only takes the click of an image or, just scrolling across to say, wow, I’m not doing that. I’m not traveling to that great place in the world. Or I don’t look like him or her or, I don’t have those kinds of clothes. And it’s so debilitating. We really have to create a healthy boundary in those areas to really understand that what we’re seeing is in so many ways, really a facade that there’s a wellspring of joy and strength and positivity that exists in each and every one of us. We have to be willing to go there.
VM: And I really like what you said about loving yourself.
DG: Yes…
VM: It’s so powerful.
DG: Self-love is important. It’s not really taught. We’re taught to do unto others as you’d like to be done to you. And all of that’s very important. Again, I never want to throw that out, but you know, it really starts with, if there is no me and no relationship to me, what am I to you? If I’m not filled up, if I’m not caring enough for myself, what is it that I’m giving you? It’s that old idea about, not so old, it’s still present, but on when we get back on airplanes, you know that when they’re doing the safety talk, the oxygen masks come down. And, if we think about it, if there’s a mother and a child who does the oxygen mask go on first? The answer usually is: the child, of course, but not all. The oxygen mask has to go on the mother or father first so that she can have healthy breath to then care for the child. And this is a metaphor for how we should be living with ourselves.
VM: True, true. Speaking of these times… We are living in such uncertain times, and being able to deal with your life, with yourself, with everyday stress is so crucial. And I know you did and you’re doing so much work with stress management. Can you tell us a few things of… how can people adapt to today’s situation, from a stress point of view?
DG: Sure. Stress management, I think is really mind and body and brain management. And so stress is prevalent clearly. I mean, we don’t have to look far at all globally at this time to know that stresses is here, but even pre COVID-19, we’re dealing with stress levels and it’s a daily part of our lives. It’s important to mention that not all stress is bad. It’s actually needed. And it’s adaptive. So this idea of getting rid of stress is just nonsense. We need it. I mean, it’s very adaptive, but unmanaged stress becomes distress. And it’s the source of so many problems, including things, medical problems like heart disease, chronic pain, somewhat immune disorders, headaches.
And it can also create tensions in the mind when it’s unchecked: anxiety, panic, and impaired sense of self, depression. So learning to balance out our stress response, that has a healthy correlate in the brain. It prevents that little almond shaped structure in the mid brain called the amygdala from hijacking our experience of joy and wellbeing. And you’d be surprised, sometimes when we’re overwhelmed with stress, we feel there’s no path back, but it might just take one small breath or one small change in our thought pattern, or just shutting the computer and lying on our backs for a few moments. And we can reaccess that sense of wellbeing. This to me is extremely exciting. That means it’s right at our fingertips. It’s right, literally under our nose, the breath.
VM: And I like it how you transitioned from stress to well-being.
DG: Hmm…
VM: It’s very important also to have a mindset that you’re not stuck with this stressful situation; that you can transition to a better life.
DG: Absolutely. We have more control than we think. And another thing worth mentioning about stress is that stress comes from the outside. There’s no doubt, tons of paperwork from your boss, cold weather, that’s stressful, traffic, demands that are placed on us from the outside, illness. But stress also comes from me inside. So what we want to focus on is managing the things that are in our control. I cannot control traffic. I might be able to control when I leave in the morning, to offset traffic but while I’m in traffic, that’s there, but I can control my response to what’s happening. Do I go into the usual mode, tensing my shoulders, starting to curse the traffic gods, all of these things, or do I just take an opportunity to take deep breaths, to change my thinking about it, to look at the sky? I mean, it sounds a little corny, but to the brain and body, it’s exactly what we need.
VM: True, true. So important. And I think I consider you as an expert on this topic because you even wrote a book: “From Stress to Centered. A Practical Guide to a Healthier and Happier You” (2015) which you co-authored with Dana Gionta. So, can you give us some tips on how we can tackle stress?
DG: Sure can and just on, thank you for your kind words about expertise. I wanted to share my view on that is that while I have had a lot of experience in this area, my knowledge and understanding really is co-learning and co-created through my work with people. So I feel very humbled and honored to be learning from the people that I’m working with. And also reflecting on just my own experience. I mean psychologist and healers are going through the same things that our clients and patients often are doing and that’s worth mentioning just so we keep that in mind.
VM: Totally, and maybe that’s even more powerful, right?
DG: Yes. Because what’s a greater teacher than our own experience, right, our self-experience. But I thank you for bringing the book in.
VM: Sure, so can you like give us three tips, actionable tips that we can… you know, tomorrow morning when I look at the sky and I see that there’s pollution… and okay, I’m going to remember my interview with Dr. Guerra. Please…
DG: So one major tip is to start with simply knowing that you have inside the ability to affect and control part of your internal experience, which may feel like it’s on autopilot to you. So just bringing your sensibility and your awareness to knowing, “Hey, I’ve still control over this.” That itself is a stress management tip.
The three areas that we look to in order to manage stress is body, breath and mind. So one example of something that you can do to impact bodily tension and stress, it’s a great technique, it’s called progressive muscle relaxation – PMR. It’s based on the concept that an anxious mind cannot live in a relaxed body. If you want to practice progressive muscle relaxation, you can go on YouTube. There’s tons of practices. On my YouTube channel, it’s there an audio file and also an Insight Timer, a wonderful free app. There’s plenty of progressive muscle relaxation practices and I’m published on there as well. So if you like or dislike the sound of my voice, you can go in either direction.
The second, for the breath is ratio breathing, ratio breathing is just breathing to a certain count where we, for instance, inhale to a count of four, hold for a count of two, exhale to a count of seven and eight, this expands the exhale breath, which moves us out of fight or flight into rest and digest mode. It’s well researched. And it’s a very easy practice you can do anywhere. Again you can find that on Insight Timer on YouTube, anywhere.
Though stopping for the mind. So something actionable is to just notice what your favorite top three to five negative thoughts are, “Oh, I’m never going to finish this. Oh, life is terrible. Oh, I feel so overwhelmed, It’s never going to change” and just say to yourself, “Stop! Not now!” and if you want extra credit, you replace that thought with something more realistic, neutral to slightly positive.
VM: I love that.
DG: “Is it really true that everything in my life is out of control? No, not really. Only some things are out of control.” Many things are in my control. That’s an example.
VM: So, I also think that all these three tips that you have just shared with us have to be applied, but there’s also a mindset. And I think having a growth mindset, to be open to the idea that “Yes, I can change. Yes, I am in control.” is very important. What do you think, can growth mindset help people who find themselves in a rut?
DG: Yeah, I think growth mindset and also, I like to, if I can add to that mindset, just a mindset that gives ourselves back to the self, a little grace, a little space, again, not to remove ourselves from hard driving self-achievement, but one of the ways that we foster good outcomes is to give ourselves a little room for error, a little room for not getting everything perfect.
I have to be very careful in teaching this. By the way, I’m type A ++. If I was unchecked, I’d be driving myself to the end of life. So I practice what I preach in this area. So for instance, I would much rather folks practice a little bit regularly over the course of their day, than to do two hours of intense stress management work when they’re feeling like things are falling apart. And so yes, a growth mindset and a mindset that includes that there can be usefulness and joy in giving ourselves a little bit of room and actually reaching the same outcome.
VM: Right, I think it’s very important to understand that we’re not always on this “amazing race”, right? And that we can actually slow down and, you know, look left and right, and as you said, I like that, “give yourself some grace”. That’s just amazing. We’re always, like achieve-achieve-achieve, do-do-do-do-do, more-more-more.
DG: When operate on a constant mode of doing like you’re suggesting, it’s the classic way to miss life. It’s the classic way, wake up ten years from now and go, “Where did the time go?” I don’t believe the time goes fast. Time goes exactly as it goes, but our experience of time can slow down. When we, as you said, look left and right. Stop and smell the roses. Not all the time, but in moments. And this ,we’re talking about today, are these moments
VM: True, true. So true. In your practice you also deal with grief and you also address emotional suffering. Like, these are such heavy, heavy subjects. How do you approach these issues?
DG: Yeah, there’s so much of this right now, Voicu. I can’t even begin to tell you what’s happening. I’m sure around the world, but particularly in New York where I’m living, everything from first responders to my clients who are not first responders, when you’re dealing with grief and emotional suffering, really the hallmark of this is cultivating an atmosphere of being with the other person. You cannot rush grief, move it along. You can only observe, again, create an atmosphere of care and empathy and sort of walk alongside them to be with them.
Not everybody grieves in the same way, unlike what we sometimes think in popular psychology there’s these stages that we move through. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was awesome in her stages, but she even was very clear to say that they’re not linear, one cycles back and forth depending on who we are personally. With that said, you know, there’s a time to help people move out of the stage of grief when they’re ready or emotional suffering to actionable steps. But when they’re in it, when it’s just present, the best mode is empathy and being with, not sympathy.
VM: Yes, empathy. Such an important word and, I think, we kind of forget that. Empathy is such an important… I almost want to say… like skill.
DG: It’s absolutely a skill. Yeah, a hallmark of emotional intelligence.
VM: Right. Right. You have a very unique way of promoting wellness by combining both Western and Eastern approaches. Can you give us more details?
DG: Sure. I mean, this is a real favorite topic of mine. So even before I entered higher education for psychology, I had a real interest in passion for Eastern philosophy and the mind-body practices. I think this came out of my joy and passion for world travel. When I was around 20, I began to travel the world. I had an experience of studying across the pond in England there and just got to travel. And I saw that different cultures had different approaches to wellness and mental health.
And, I got out of that mindset as like, you know, Western science is the answer to everything. It’s great. And it’s amazing. But again, there are some native cultures and some old wisdom that’s entrenched in these different approaches. And I just was fascinated by this.
So at that same time, yoga and meditation, were reentering the psyches of America and of Americans after lying dormant with the sixties and seventies and that movement. And I had the incredible opportunity to study the deeper dimensions of yoga, not just talking about body classes, make the body look good, but the deeper dimension with a highly trained teacher and yogini named Gurani Anjali from Calcutta.
And I started to see the impact that those practices had on my own mind, body, brain. And I wanted to integrate this with my training in psychology and share it with others. After grad school, I did another trip around the world, just from my backpack and went even further into Asia and some of those places and just really strengthened those practices and learning. I had the opportunity to teach yoga in many countries around the world. It was great.
VM: Since you mentioned yoga, what are some of the benefits… maybe it’s kind of obvious, everyone says yoga is so important, it’s so good for you, but I’m not sure people actually know what the benefits of yoga are beyond that, like okay, you look good and you’re flexible.
DG: Yes, exactly. I’m going to just announce, I have a real bias in this area. Because especially in the West, we’ve taken a very, very old ancient, sacred, deep practice and no offense to anybody out there, but we’ve made it just one more thing that we do for fitness. And again, it’s not untrue. It’s fitness, it helps the body, but it’s a side effect. It’s a positive side effect.
The real yoga, in my opinion, where it all began is Hatha yoga and there’ll be people who disagree with me, so you can expect that. But Hatha yoga in my opinion is really less about focusing on sculpting the body or seeing if you could twist yourself a little bit more into a pretzel or really get that hard yoga position. In my opinion, this is not where we learned yoga.
It’s really more about learning to harness the mind, all of the body positions in yoga, Asana as we call them were developed, quiet the mind. And you quiet the mind through relaxing and strengthening the body. And so that’s the positive side effect.
So Hatha yoga is technically comprised of six limbs, but the deeper dimension of yoga have really eight limbs. And if I may, I’ll describe them briefly.
You have Yamas, which are abstentions. These are practices that we engaged in that we withhold from them because they’re helpful like non stealing or nonaggression. And Niyamas which are observances, cleaning the body and practicing self-care, as examples. Those are two limbs. These lineup a little bit with other faith-based ideas like commandments, let’s say, or the ways we practice in humanity.
The next limb is Pratyahara, which is withdrawal of the senses. And withdrawing the senses is important because the senses are out there 24/7 touching, feeling, tasting, seeing, hearing. And that’s wonderful, but there’s a time to reel those in and be more reflective. Fourth limb, Asana, that’s a body pose. Fifth, is Dharana or concentration. Most people when they’re going or many people I should say when they’re going to meditate, what they’re really starting to practice in the beginning is concentration, trying to have one point in awareness and focus on one thing at one time. Then there’s Dhyana, which is meditation. And finally Samadhi, loosely translated into enlightenment.
VM: It’s an amazing practice and, as you mentioned, do you just sit down and, okay, I’m going to do two hours of yoga or do you live through moments. So should I put aside a 2-hour practice every day, or should I spread it around the day?
DG: Yeah, it’s a great question. I can say quite honestly in all transparency when I was in a younger mind and body in my twenties, and I had that sort of drive that was untamed. Yeah, I was doing two or three hours of yoga a day and I was traveling, and I was in the learning mode. It fit my personality and the way that I take on things, if anybody that knows me, I bring my full self to something and then I can kind of ease off once I learn it. Everybody’s different. You might have somebody in a younger mind and body who’s a little bit kinder and has more grace with oneself and we’ll take it in bits and chunks. And also everybody has different life circumstances.
So my recommendation is this; is that there’s formal yoga or formal meditation and there’s informal yoga and informal meditation. I believe that in the beginning, when we’re learning something new, we need a little bit of formal training. So you got to sit your butt on a cushion to practice meditation, and time yourself and learn from teachers. Same thing with yoga, have a teacher, it’s much better when we can to be in person with an experienced teacher to learn the deeper aspects of yoga and even Asana, the body postures. Then after a while, you start to integrate and learn the informal approaches of meditation and yoga.
I do practice both formal and informal. Informal meditation example of that would be to keep attentive to your breath and to your own emotions while you’re in a conflictual situation with a person; practicing yoga on the subway, or while commuting to work, it takes place by noticing your tension in your body and releasing it with your breath. Or when I was riding the subway, I mean, people are hesitant to do that these days, but when I’m on the train, I might notice how are my feet? Am I standing with a straight body posture or am I slumped, or am I holding onto tension? So I think there’s lots of room to practice and feel good about that.
VM: That is just great great advice. So, you are an advocate of mindfulness-based approaches to wellness. It seems that people are becoming more and more aware of the benefits of mindfulness. In your opinion, what is the importance of mindfulness these days?
DG: Mindfulness based approaches are very powerful. And I think the reason for that is because it involves many of the concepts and things that we’ve been talking about up until now. It’s an age-old practice dating back for… through the millennia. And I had the good fortune of, when I was kind of coming up in graduate school that there was a lot of good published research in this area, driven a lot by Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts, with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s, who was an American microbiologist, but he was also a practicing Buddhist. So he had that Eastern wisdom and training in meditation, but wanted to find a way to make it very accessible to regular folks like you and I. So mindfulness and mindfulness-based approaches are really about learning how to cultivate and harness one’s attention. And we are in a world and in a time period, more than ever where attention and focus is very scattered.
VM: It’s everywhere.
DG: Everywhere, all over the place. And you don’t have to have a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity, and these kinds of things to relate to the that we’ve become somehow a culture that’s trying to do many things at once, and we’re doing all of those things at 40% effectiveness and the art of focusing on one thing at one time and this case, particularly our own inner experience, it’s been lost. And when we return to that, we recognize that there are a ton of benefits, including being able to manage stress responses, increase our concentration and focus, have better outcomes in relationships, improve our physical and mental health, have better outcomes in business, benefit from greater leadership.
It really involves emotional intelligence, those aspects of emotional intelligence that involve self-awareness, what is it that’s going on inside of me in my thinking of doing, and then self-regulation being able to modulate, and for me to be in the driver’s seat, not in the passenger seat of those thinking, those thoughts and feelings, and then also being aware enough to know socially what’s happening around me so that I can sense what’s happening in you and respond appropriately. So that I can be aware of, is this person trying to harm me or help me, or somewhere in between, how much of it is you, how much of it is me or us, and those kinds of skills all helped and cultivated with mindfulness.
VM: And I think these days it’s… mindfulness is more available to everyone, there are so many apps one can use, there’s a plethora of information… So, if I were to start today mindfulness practice, where can I start?
DG: Well, it happens in the same way as some of these other practices, just find a good teacher. And there’s plenty of them out there. But there may be some that are not so good. So using your mind to discern what is and what isn’t and there is no better teacher than self-experience. So you will start the practice of mindfulness by beginning to trust your own inner experience about the relationship you have with the teacher, whether that teacher is on Zoom or YouTube or in person wherever possible. I always believe in person is better but we’re living in strange times. And, yeah, just start by doing a little bit of reading, a little bit of searching out, understanding. I love Jon Kabat-Zinn’s books, they’re accessible to the everyday person. One great place to is “Wherever You Go, There You Are”, fantastic book with three-page chapters that you can kind of skip around in, and you can start to begin to understand where mindful approaches are. And then after that, you have to sit and do the practice. And again, there’s so many different types of teaching out there. I have my own form that’s more related to mindful based stress awareness, but there’s so many types of mindfulness trainings out there.
VM: Earlier on today you mentioned the mind-body connection and I think you see a connection between mind-body and physical illness. How so?
DG: There was a time I believe when humans were very much interested in their higher order thinking and rationality. The age of rationalism and enlightenment. And I think we got stuck there a bit. So that age was very important, but we got so obsessed with it to the point of ignoring the wisdom of our body and our emotions. So it’s that old Cartesian adage of, I think therefore I am. So I would revise that today to say, I think, I feel, I sense, I listen, therefore I am. We’ve understood that all of these things are equally important. So it’s got us off track a bit with respect to our own body awareness.
And so the mind and body are so intricately related that I think it’s more useful to characterize our experience as mind-body-brain, almost like one word to capture it. Maybe we’ll come up with a new word to capture that. So one impacts the other so greatly.
Here’s some examples, heart attack patients do so much better in the ER when the emergency medical team puts a hand on their shoulder and reassures them. The use of guided imagery can offset the negative experiences of chemotherapy for instance in cancer patients, and also make use of the brain’s power to boost one’s own immune system, just through noticing and awareness. Another example is an unconscious tensing of muscles in the chronic pain patient and the anxiety of living with a condition like chronic pain. Will it ever go away? Is my life always going to be debilitated? All of that contributes to the pain itself. It might not have caused the pain.
VM: But it amplifies it…
DG: Yes, and increases inflammation in the body, that tension. Why does inflammation get increased? Many, many reasons, diet, the pain itself, but also through our autonomic nervous system. When you’re chronically stressed and you’re activating the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, fight or flight, on and on and on, you have certain neurotransmitters and hormones being secreted like cortisol and adrenaline. And in short term, these are so adaptive and important. But over the long term, they work against us. They inflame the body.
What example that you might find interesting too, is one of my first patients when I was a very young graduate student, had chronic headaches for years and years, couldn’t get rid of them. Even went to the point of thinking about surgery, there was medicines. She was on all kinds of medicines. Finally, the doctors got so fed up, they said, “Go see a psychologist. This must be something that’s psychologically related.” Well, in a sense, they were right. It was unfortunate that the way they delivered it, because it felt like she was to blame, which she wasn’t.
But when we looked into her life, we realized that when she had headaches, that was the one time in her life where the family started to show her attention and love and caring, just happened to be that way in her family. She was responsible for everything. She worked full time, cooking, cleaning, the husband expected dinner on the table, just happened to be that way. But when she had a headache, somehow everybody chilled out and started to turn their attention to her. So she was in an incredible dilemma. I gave up my headaches. Now this is unconscious, right. But I give up my headaches and I lose this very, very important emotional need in my life. Or I keep these headaches, which I can’t stand. I mean, it’s really debilitating, but at least I get some. So we had to work with her assertiveness and asking for emotional needs and changing the structure of the family. So I give that example only to say it’s a very complex system that we have, and that secondary gain from physical problems relates to why the mind and body are so intricately related.
VM: So true, so true. Let’s switch a bit gears here but actually I don’t think we’re switching gears. You also have an interest in theatre and how theatre can be used as a cathartic experience. First of all, where is the passion coming from, for theatre? And again, how do you actually implement this in your practice?
DG: I thank you for asking about this. It’s such a joy. I don’t always get to talk about it. This might be a little bit unique to my personal path, although it is out there to be discovered if other people want to figure out the correlates between psychology and theatre.
So, the way it’s happened for me is that ever since I was a young boy, I’ve always had a passion and interest in the dramatic arts. I think I suppressed it in service of doing something serious with my life and being more scientific and headed toward that path. For whatever reason, I had that in my head that I want to stay away from that, even though between you and me, I had a real love and passion for that. So that was a dormant for a while, until I got into late university in grad school, where I started to audition for a theater, and I was getting parts and I really loved it.
And I started to see some overlap between psychology and theater. Number one, I mean, character development and personalities are ripe and rich inside theatre and plots and those sorts of things. We just need to look to Shakespeare as one example, to see how many psychology moments we have there.
But what happened over time is I started to become aware of things like drama therapy from J.J. Moreno. I didn’t really do a deep study in that, but it was in my awareness. And then somewhere about 10 or 11 years ago, I had been doing little bits of theatre here and there, did some voiceover work, but I opened up “Backstage” magazine, which is a magazine for actors to see what auditions are going on in the city. And there was this advertisement for playback theatre performance. I had never heard of playback theatre. Well, I went for the audition and I’ve now been a member for 10 years. And we perform in different parts of the world actually, but mostly in New York City area.
And playback theatre is a form of theatre that plays back the audience members story or experience. So it’s interactive theatre. Usually you go to a theatre, you sit passively, you watch the performers, you clap at the end. But in playback theater, we have a conductor or an MC that interacts with the audience. And it’s usually weaved around a social justice theme, that social justice theme could be around mental health awareness, could be racism, could be violence against women or LGBT communities, any of those things.
And we get, we cultivate stories in the audience and the actors will play those stories back through improvisation. No rehearsals, no script, just listening and performing. So we’re trained in improv. We’re trained in listening, empathy, validation, and we have a musician too – world-class musician from Russia – who is also an improv performer, and he improvs the music and sometimes we’ll sing the story or will act it out. And that’s how the passion got into practice and it is related to psychology.
VM: Yes, yes, totally, totally. It’s amazing how the arts, music, painting, can play such a big role in therapy.
DG: Yes, absolutely. There’s that as well. Playback theatre is only one form of this. Clearly, there is so many other forms whereas you mentioned, that relates so much because it relates to our emotions or our passions or our inner self, Self with a big S if you will.
VM: Yes, yes. I think I kind of see a trend in this discussion and as we approach the end of our interview I think we mentioned some very important words here: self, empathy, mind-body, meditation, breathing… which I think are very important concepts that we don’t have to master today but we can start thinking about them and putting them intro practice little by little. Right?
DG: Absolutely. Yeah. I totally agree with you.
VM: As you know, I’m also a psychology teacher at an international school here in Beijing so I want to show this video to my students. What advice do you have for young people thinking into going in psychology? And how can psychology help them in their future careers? Not necessarily as a psychology teacher or as a psychologist…
DG: Yes. We could do a whole talk on this, but I’ll suffice it to say that I want to start by just saying that psychology is so broad. It’s so broad. This will create anxiety for some people because we want to know a specific path, but for others it will create possibility. I recommend it create possibility for those that are interested. So much you can do: research, you can help people, hopefully like I am in with mental illness, there’s writing, there’s teaching. You can move psychology into business. This is another hat that I sometimes wear with executive coaching and helping people develop their leadership capabilities, advertising.
VM: Marketing.
DG: Marketing, human resources. If you think about it, psychology exists in almost everything because people exist in almost everything and to have those kinds of people skills is so important.
Then there’s all of the branches and side branches of psychology. Like neuropsychology, biopsychology, social psych, evolutionary psychology, animal psychology, personality development, child psych. So lots of, lots of opportunities. Another way that getting into the field can help if you are interested and aware enough is that you can start to use these concepts to know yourself and to practice your own mental health.
It’s not a surprise or it’s not a secret that many therapists who have gone into the field have had some trauma themselves, some difficulties in their early childhood. As you’ve alluded to before, there’s nothing wrong with that. If we’re willing to be aware of it and to learn and leverage it to help others, where it becomes a problem is if you think you’re going to override your past difficulties by sort of learning something, becoming super expert at it, and then impart that wisdom down to others.
That’s why I’ve mentioned before that while I appreciate you recognizing my expertise, it’s really a co-creation and a humbleness in learning that on this spectrum of difficulties that we all have. We are on that spectrum, whether you’re a healer or a very accomplished person; this is good news. This is good news because we can learn and grow.
So my advice to your students is to really delve into your passion and let that lead you. You want to be going down a path that you believe is connected to your joy and something that you feel really good about. Not only necessarily what’s popular, expected of you, everyone else is doing. I mean, there might be some elements to that. We have to think about practical things, Can I get work? Can I make a living, but really, I believe wholeheartedly, and I’ve practiced this myself and it’s come to pass that when you follow your passion and your drive and what you love and are excited about everything else follows and you have good mental health.
VM: This is a beautiful message and I’m sure it will connect with my students. Lastly, I see a bookshelf behind you over there… Can you give me one title of a book in positive psychology, if possible, because I am on a mission of making positive psychology as part of my life, and I’m trying to understand how positive psychology can be implemented in everything that I do, from daily life, to business, to sports. So what is one book that you recommend for me to read, for our listeners, for our readers?
DG: Okay. I’m happy to recommend it. And the authors is one where I’ve struggled as many do with the name for so long. You may not struggle with the name based on where you’re from. Well, let’s see, the book is “Flow” and the author is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “Flow” is an excellent book. One of my favorites really teaching us how to drop in and cultivate that practice of learning how to be present and learning how to be in flow as… and in the zone as we reach our successes and our goals and learning how to operate in unity with an integration with mind, body, and brain. I love that book.
VM: Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you so much for your recommendation, thank you so much for your amazing, you know, tidbits of advice, and thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you so much once again.
DG: It’s wonderful. And Voicu thank you so much for having me. I wish you the best with the podcast and it was a real pleasure to be here with you. I’d like to visit your class one day.
VM: It can be done in the future. I think right now we’re all, you know, bunking in for this situation that we’re all in.
DG: I’m thinking positively.
VM: Yes, I would really love to keep in touch with you and one day we will, we will meet. Thank you so much once again and have a great day there in New York City, I’m going to get ready here for bedtime. There’s 12 hours between us but it was an amazing conversation, I’m very happy to have reached out to you and I’m very grateful that you actually accepted the invitation. Thank you so much.
DG: You’re quite welcome. Thank you so much.
VM: Good-bye.
DG: Bye-bye.
