Walk the Line

In this episode of Walk the Line Podcast, Ives Wittman talks about how he helps people, develop deep connections with themselves, with others, or with a higher power.Episode TranscriptSo I've could you tell me a little bit more about that? The identity issue that would be thinking about recently. What's your take on it?So in my experience working as a counselor, especially and, you know, even in other areas of my life, I've worked with a lot of individuals from a lot of different backgrounds. So I've worked with individuals from very different places, Africa, Eastern Europe, India Pakistan, Central America, even in Far, East Asia, Vietnam. Cambodia, and some of the things that I'm realizing is in the culture today. It's really important to be aware and acknowledge someone's cultural background and to try to understand where they're coming from their culture and this is a part of their identity. And what I've come to learn, is those pieces of their identity, those pieces of their life, how they've kind of frame themselves and to find themselves,Are in and of themselves, sort of part of it, and part of their veneer. And some of that goes, very deep Beyond being a veneer. And what I like to see and what I've noticed over time is there is an element of a universal Humanity that start to show up with people. This means that we all sort of end up at the same place in some ways at the core and root of what we are looking at.My work is about helping people, develop deep connection with themselves with others, may be a higher power.And also a depth of being so that they fully can Plumb the depths of their core of who they are. So the universal Humanity, ideas it at the core there. I believe that in many ways were contending with similar issues of which culture and gender and race andEthnicity religion. All these things play a role that shape and conform it along with our biology.So what I was discussing recently was, I've had this happen a couple times and it has happened recently with a couple of African-American clients where they are sharing a story about their life. May be from Africa, they may be from the inner city of New York yet. What starts to happen is in this case, both of these men were sharing about there.Relationships with their fathers.And the idea here in my work is one of the ways we come at this as we all sort of pick up a script about how we're supposed to live our life and something that I ran into a phrase or an idea. Randall couple years ago at one of my counselors offices. Was when you're writing the story of your life make sure you're the one holding the pen.Now, that's difficult because, you know, as we're growing up, you know, we are influenced by pretty powerful people. So nonetheless, this situation showed up with these men's fathers and one in particular was attempting to live out a particular way of life in his profession, how we saw himself through what his father wanted for him now. Present seems pretty simplistic.You know, pretty easy to pick up, make sense, yet it becomes a very deep operative inside of us. That's beyond. Just we get it in our head. It becomes part of our instinctual being or emotional being if it can even tap into our heart. So these things are very wetted us and we have a particular type of loyalty to these scripts and to the people who have sort of expose dust to their way of being and thenTheir definition of us. So this man's story became my story to in this way, because I also had a relationship with my father. And he was extremely demanding in a particular way. He wanted me to show up for myself and how I wanted to be make my way into the world for me for him, that I became a doctor. And that exerted, all kinds of other pressures school. And that was a big one.Getting certain types of crates. So this impacted a lot of part of my story andPart of trauma, emotional, trauma is being pushed into being something. You aren't.And most people, I would say doing this work of me have had to fit themselves into a square box and there may be around bag and over time, this can wear someone down and there's a lot of shame that can start showing up because of the fact that they aren't abiding by the family script, or the cultural script.One thing that seems to me to be and I would love to know from your perspective. This is just an impression or not, but it seems to me that this, this sort of issue that you described especially what in real in relation to Identity. It's very, it's a very recent issue or at least theThe abundance of cases seem to be very recent, is that true? Well, they awareness of it is, definitely now.Surely become a deluge and it's important. And I don't intend to disparage, it trust me because I don't think the emphasis was placed on this for many years in this way, for sure.And I think what's been good about this is we are now becoming more open to each other's identities and understanding those identities. The challenge becomesHoly seeing that as Who W

So, how do we get to a place of forgiveness? How do we get to a place where we've been in situations that may have, maybe, be in resentments. Situations where we've been angry at somebody who's hurt us. And these are very old wounds. These are very old things that have happened to us from the past. It could be our parents, teachers, friends, family members. And I quite frequently encounter, uh, people wh’t know how to work with the pain they've experienced.Perhaps their parents or certain family members, they still want to have a relationship with them. They still want to auto these folks. How do they work through what they have to work through towards a place where they can then sort of seek or offer forgiveness to the people that have hurt them? And I think that this takes a lot of work, to understand what we've done to ourselves.It's a lot of what people don't see and are blind to: that we are the ones that put ourselves into harm's way. Based on childhood strategies and the way that we experience our upbringing and things that have happened to us can cause us a lot of hurt. Because of how the people that were supposed to take care of us have treated us.So it's not so much about blaming our parents as much as it is that we had an experience that hurt deeply and when it happened, we really didn't have any outlet for that hurt to go. So what we do is we stuff it. And it's really at a much more tactical level. It's our systems or our nervous systems are reacting to something that's threatening, reacting to something that's holding us back.And that tension that's created locks us up. And that experience of being, that's sort of aroused in a way where we're freaking out, but we really have no place to go because the surroundings won't permit it. People are yelling, screaming, we get lost in it. Someone's yelling at us. So we bury what it is it's happening to us and it gets stored in the body.So this is stuff that is readily known more and more now. There are many experts that talk about this: Bessel van der Kolk, Ariel shorts, Peter Levine, a gab Mormon, Tay. These are all people that I have used to learn about these things. I also have studied with Brenda Schaffer. But the idea that this really important idea of the body and how people store pain that becomes an emotional memory and it's in the body and we don't really know what's going to trigger it. And when it will come back up, but once we're an adult, we do have to understand that what we experienced back then hasn't gone away. I was on a trip recently, and the captain of this ship that we were on said that where we were visiting, the footprints will disappear. However, the memories will endure and persevere. It's kind of the right words. And that's the way I think it is. We aren't back there anymore. We aren't back when things happened originally, when we were hurt, beat, yelled at, screamed at, accused, whatever it was.But yet here we are essentially attracting the same emotional dynamic in our life as an adult. And now it's for all intensive purposes, it's just as painful as it was back then. But now we're an adult body. So now we can do something with it. Now we can act out on it, if we're not careful and we can either stuff it until we're ready to explode or we can start taking out on others.So that's difficult to work through so that we can understand that. We then turn that on ourselves and we beat ourselves up because of the way we feel. We beat ourselves up. We sort of attack ourselves for being inadequate, being weak. And these are again, part of it. It's the meanings that we probably will place on what we're feeling.So we have an, a particular sensation. We have a particular feeling. We don't even realize it's non-verbal. And then as we grow, develop, we get to adults, we've created a particular meaning around what it is we're feeling. And then that compounds the problem. Because now we have a particular script, a particular way of talking to ourselves, thoughts, beliefs that then trigger what's in our bodies, our bodies trigger themselves to replicate or create these meanings that we have created to make sense of what's happening. And usually they're negative. And usually they're against ourselves. So to move through that requires realizing that a lot of times we start working on this and we start to realize it.The stuff hurt back then. And the people that did it, we either will say, well, they were doing the best they could, they didn't know any better. And there's a lot of truth to that yet at the same time, sometimes I wonder: people know what they're doing. People pick up on that. They knew that they're hurting someone and they keep doing it.And people that are vulnerable will be at the mercy of those people.To get beyond that -what I would call loyalty to the dysfunction of their environment that they're carrying - you have to break that and you have to get angry and sometimes you have to get angry at the people who were there to suppos