Category: Psychology

7 universal insights into storytelling between therapy and communications

by adriana, posted in Communications, Psychology, Volunteering

[FLASH OF CREATIVE INSIGHT✍️🧠] Storytellers, anyone? “In therapy we say: Let’s edit your story.” I’m inspired by people who do courageous things, who tell honest stories, or even help to change them. And by great content editors, but that’s a different…story.

The book “Maybe you should talk to someone” by therapist & writer Lori Gottlieb made me think hard about the universal truths of stories, between #comms and #psychology. Why care? We, and our world, are made of stories.

6 INSIGHTS. IN MY WORDS.

🟠 ALL STORIES BOIL DOWN TO UNIVERSAL QUESTIONS. On a human level they’re something like this: “Everyone lives their own story, but underneath the details we’re forced to face the same essential questions: How do I feel safe in a world of uncertainty? How do I connect?” And in comms we all need to answer “What’s your reason for being?” (PS: don’t forget those WHY questions), as a communicator you know.

🟠 STORYTELLING IS ABOUT BUILDING UP, AND LETTING GO. “We grow in connection with others. Everyone needs to hear that other person’s voice saying, I believe in you. I can see possibilities that you might not see quite yet. I imagine that something different can happen, in some form or another.” “…But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself – to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are.” Stories only have the power that you give them.

🟠 THE FIRST STORY WE TELL IS NEVER COMPLETE. Give important stories time to unfold, and to change. “The story a patient comes into therapy with may not be the story she leaves with. What was included in the telling at first might now be written out, and what was left out might become a central plot point. Some major characters might become minor ones, and some minor characters might go on to receive star billing. The patient’s own role might change too – from bit player to protagonist, from victim to hero.” And in comms, how often have you been scratching surface level or getting it all wrong?

🟠 STORIES DON’T ALL OBEY THE SAME RULES OF EXPRESSION. So go find the right one. “Wendell [her therapist] and I had a conversation, even if no words were exchanged. He watched me grieve, and didn’t try to make things more comfortable by interrupting or analyzing the issue. He let me tell my story in whatever way I needed to today.”

🟠 STORIES CAN CONNECT US, OR CAN (PURPSEFULLY) KEEP US AT BAY. The seemingly pointless, repetitive, aggressively boring and aggravatingly-angry ones are attempting the latter. “Anger…pushes people away and keeps them from getting close enough to see you. I wonder if John needs people to be angry at him so that they won’t see his sadness.” Deep. Be boring with your therapist to do get stuck, but please don’t do it in comms.

🟠 STORIES HAVE LIMITS TO SHOWING REALITY. Remember to work in the here-and-now, to illustrate, to let different people speak up. ”One on one, therapists get depth but not breadth, words without illustrations. Despite being the ultimate #insider in terms of Julie’s thoughts and feelings, I’m an #outsider here among all these people I don’t know but who knew Julie.…Instead of focusing on a patient’s stories from the outside world, and here-and-now is about what’s occurring in the room.” Whatever you do, don’t get lost in the BIG, generic narratives. Understand what you’re not seeing, the puzzle pieces you’re missing.

The foundations of it all: understanding. Understanding of the self in therapy, understanding of a subject in comms. And that can be pretty humbling. 

Here’s to telling and editing stories that help real people.

Hi! I’m a comms professional and creative for social impact. On my CV, I have life experience in leadership. Off it, I know about some hard edges of life. Through it all, I write to connect the dots and help bring out the best in people.

Reach out via LinkedIn or mail if you’re now feeling a tingle of connection, excitement, thirst for more.

We’re not all superheroes of our story, and silence kills humanity

by adriana, posted in Psychology

“I didn’t want to enroll in this class and the teacher sucks.” (forgotten source)

6.6.22, edited in Sept ’22. This is a place for fragments, written as a human, borrowing the words of others – and not a professional trying to prove something to someone. This is a piece about walking through raw things, while saying goodbye to someone you love – despite everything. Before I write I ask myself: do I have anything to lose? I don’t, though I’m not afraid to lose. And soon, I’ll shed the skin of the person that I’m now. Instead, the world has everything to win if we all make the invisible visible. PS: please be cautious if grief is not what you can read about right now (then I don’t know how you got here. Still, welcome!)).

(Pierre Bamin on Unspash)

“One of the things most people count on every single day is that there will be plenty of time. Until there’s not. Until life steps in and we are reminded that there are no guarantees and life is is far too short.” Writes grief specialist @micheledeville on one of the supposedly most superficial places on earth: Instagram. It taught me a lot about grief in the little in-between-moments, these are some things that made me go “yes, yes, yes”:

  • “Part of grief is feeling like I no longer fit in a world I once belonged to.”
  • “Time doesn’t heal your grief, it teaches you how to wear it.”
  • “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love.”
  • “Grief is a long road.”
  • “No matter how little or how much people support you, grief is still lonely…And: grief needs room.”
  • “The only thing I need I for you to show up for me, listen and acknowledge my pain and grief without trying to fix it all.”
  • “Grief isn’t easy and especially when the person you used to be is gone and you have no idea who you will become.”
  • “Sometimes you need to stop trying to meet the expectations of everyone else and just meet yourself right where you are. That’s what your grief needs right now.”
  • “Grief knows no boundaries or limitations..Your grief matters, always.”. (@micheledeville) & the list goes on….
(Toan Chu on Unsplash)

Grief and loss might be invisible. But once they’re there, they’re everywhere and they are here to stay. “Grief sucks. Family sucks. Playing with burnout, but not there yet” I write in a midnight note last month on my phone (that would break down a month later with all the documentation of a life turned upside down). It’s suprising how before all of this happened, in far-away 2020, it is as if I knew. I was reading “Option B: Build resilience in the face of adversity” by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant in between a stressful job, giving a climate workshop somewhere in Austria and my lockdown-times-bed. And there were more books that year.

How do we change with grief? I can just say, my old self has ceased to exist. And I don’t put up with shit anymore. I still work too much, but I put other things first. I guess that I’m an adult. I’ve built myself foundations cause I needed them at all costs, a purpose, and I went back to my roots, that grow where I don’t feel like a guest, a stranger. To not lose myself, I swore on being as honest as possible, authentic and vulnerable. To remember who you are. “Grief has given me the gift of not being scared of being a truer and more authentic version of myself.”– writes Stacey Heale on Instagram after losing her (btw famous) husband and father of their children to cancer. The power of fear is limited when your focus is elsewhere, and to power on you need to stay true to yourself.

“Now i see my mum first as one very brave person”, I’ve read this somewhere and I agree. “You can’t be afraid to love. Not ever.”

“We only get a few specks of time where any of this makes any sense. The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind.” (Leyley Imgart, illustrator). I just want you to wonder what your co-workers may be going through behind the brave (and hopefully not overworked) faces. I want you to check on your loved ones and have them do the cancer screenings, the health checks they thought they wouldn’t need, out of love towards life. I want you to take your health seriously. I want you to be kinder than you feel and might have ever been. Remember the ones who seem weak, but are the strongest they’ve ever been. No, work is not your priority. I want you to remember that if you haven’t lost a close loved one yet then you’re lucky, but sometime the moment will come. I want you to understand that a culture of positivity is toxic, exclusive and well…simply fake. And silence kills humanity. Things don’t happen for a reason in life and we’re not all superheroes of our story, not machines, not performers. We’re just people. Running a marathon of emotional miles. Showing up is your breakfast, discomfort a foreign concept, void skirmishes a no-go. Allergic to judgement, longing for companionship. Old patterns their shadow. Goodbyes your breath. Trying your new forcing.

There’s room for you here.
Still, in this world.
Remember that.
While you work and walk through your pain.
You’re loved.*

*in all the different love languages out there

(Elyas Pasban on Unsplash)

“I learned that if you don’t deal with grief at the time, it will never leave you.” (Kumi Naidoo, human rights and environmental activist)

From nothing comes nothing, thank you for all people on the web talking about grief. You do such an important work. Here some random, helpful sources on the topic, to grow in the future:

Coaching and counselling: spaces to speak about the unspeakable while summer is standing outside

by adriana, posted in Psychology

“There are no easy questions here”, she is right. I’m deeply in love with the fathomless connections that emerge in a first instant of collaboration between special humans. Just like between Vienna and the South, months before the first coaching session. And then I get another call. The mind fog is thick, I write what I can recall and decrypt of my hand-written notes. Apparently grief and exhaustion are detrimental to your short-term memory. What a surprise.

After the coaching I close the computer, just sit and vibe to music. Coaching diverts life from its well-trodden highways, just going back to work and walking in that same path isn’t an option anymore. You just lived through a moment in which you told a person that you fully trust them, you had someone to work through things with. The gift of time, one on one. The gift of being seen for the fuller human that one is, in the moment, in times when fragmentation is a lifestyle and a survival strategy in between roles to balance. Creativity in the room, room for creativity. “You’re living with this every second of your life”. No one can take away the loneliness of loss, bit by bit, but they can make it less threatening and they can kick the toxic guest ouf the room occasionally. You’re not alone.

Coaching teaches you a lot about who you are. There’s my strong desire to connect – deeper than what most people can offer. The loneliness is…really a lot about the space, about picking up on stories and bids for connection, about the ability to share. The lack of all of this. Parallel realities, and something dies inside. “I’m too lost”, there is a question I cannot answer.

Confidence and courage. I realize how much energy it takes to walk with your head high. “How do you want to show up?” The hardest of all questions, but there are no easy ones. Great stuff to unpack. But in this new life, “want” has become a thing of insignificance and impossibility, besides the little moments of escape and reflection. Sometimes coaching gives me the feeling that the forces bigger than you are smaller than you think. You’re not powerless but you’re also not in control. Every little step that you make is a wonder. Playing big, having a choice, mastering the energy for the extra things is a privilege. Old values, worldviews and habits: worthless. So I’m playing small for me, most certainly not for others. I realized that I gave up, but that it’s now time for a next step.

/photo by Külli Kittus on Unsplash

Owning a field, knowing your thing, having it all covered, while persistently growing and playing detective in a messy world is frankly the most exciting thing as a 20-something-year old young professional. I wish people would see me more for the person who I am, in between the personal, the professional and the things bigger than us. The energy constantly looking for an outlet. In the end we talk about me-time, I’ll create distance, I’ll walk to change spaces. I’m giving myself space – for the flower to bloom, even in pitch-black night. What’s up with the metaphors today.

The phone rings. Later, this day will feel surreal. Going to that Impulstanz performance, regenerating through lake vacation, falling asleep through an imagination of a soothing childhood memory, connecting through the one big story of caregiving and having a room in the house where you leave everthing behind before you enter it. The little things I pick up in between talking and listening to advice. Mapping reality at last. You live in your own world, having a permanent backpack to carry. You have people disappear from your life besides the very closest friends. Society is exclusive. Distant out of fear and discomfort, looking away, silent. And in everything happening you have the responsibility to look after yourself, set boundaries, stop being unfair to yourself, and spend time that you enjoy. You owe it to yourself. When you belittle your actions, then counselling helps you to understand where you really stand, how much you’re really giving. A practice in humility, cause the big solutions have never been in your power. “Whatever may come, all of these have already happened.” The connection, the singing, the stories. Two lives. And a quest to stay true to one’s “I”, cause yourself is who you are, undiluted. Your identity. Your own life – despite the bonds that will stay, despite the months and years that feel like the same day that never ends. “I feel like I’ve lost my (stable) sense of self.” – I write in my diary yesterday. But maybe I’m right now on the quest to finding it. Cause there are other bonds and the practice of confidence. For me it’s my bond to Eastern Europe, to Russian, it’ my power, and a story living on. In me.

Writing this has been beautiful but exhausting. Don’t be afraid to be raw, take time to process things, and take care.
#spaces #gratefullness

Recommendation: Check out the work of phychiatrist Luise Reddemann & the establishment of safe places (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11620-002-0018-9 – Link in German)

/photo by Karl Hedin on Unsplash


Into worlds beyond the capital, talks between youth at night and the signs of giving too much

by adriana, posted in Human stories, Psychology, Volunteering

We talk about social entrepreneurship in the hot morning sun at the arrival centre. Us – no more volunteers, but humans with ideas, jobs and lives. I remember that we’re empathetic, we relate, when we act from our whole being. Caring, then setting boundaries. But this day also brings me down to the bottom of reality. In German we say “aus den Augen aus dem Sinn”. Out of sight, out of mind. We’re not responsible, we don’t know, this is not our job, we follow the rules, there’s no more that we can do, this can’t be, there must be a solution in place. But I’ve already pluged into worlds beyond the capital.

O. arrived to the centre from the northern tip of the country, before she approaches me while I’m jogging between the tables in the waiting area. There are another woman and a child with her. After landing in a distribution centre they were sent to live in a hotel – they call it a курятник, a hen house. The other woman is ready to go back, how can you live in such conditions, back to Kharkiv. I just listen to their request, ready to jump to the next task, but this hurts. From their story – the hotel houses 50 people, it’s old and dirty, and I wonder if it was closed cause of the pandemic or other reasons. 2 floors, people sleeping on the first floor which isn’t made for that, one toilet (besides some in the rooms, that don’t fit all?), two cooktops, two fridges and a kitchen sink for all. Imagine the queues, she says. A billard table. Food stored on random cupboards. Contorted, slippery, endless corridors in the dark. Elderly people left to their fate in this environment. No pharmacy in the village, kids shouting into the night, and the stories of having to hop on a bus to the neighboring village to get bread (if you cannot pay 3,5€ for a loaf, who can). I watch videos with rats and filth, and here I stop the story that at the start I find too hard to comprehend myself. A few discussions and a phonecall later there is a next step, but how can writing to some mail address with videos and photos attached feel like enough? The lack of knowledge, procedures, horizontal coordination, of transparency and faces to approach. Maybe the worst thing isn’t that this is happening, and that this wasn’t the only case, but that I-We don’t know about it, and the most vulnerable people we don’t see. As if this world didn’t exist, as if we had all the grounds to trust in the system beyond this microcosm that has been working since March 4th. But why would we. There are things that one can understand but not accept, this is one of them.

Scene cut.

After this, the other stories blend into the background, mums and kids, the deaf family, the deaf woman. Kharkiv, Mariupol. Shampoo, excel sheet, info sights forwarded, familar face, talks to understand why we don’t know, and lunch in the volunteer container. A constant exercise in staying firm, confident about your responsibility, and at the same time human and fair. I believe in justice – not equality, it’s hard to live it. And there’s summer outside.

Scene cut.

Conversations. I think that we’ve all had our own savior to helper story as volunteers. The frantic beginnings, going the extra step of the way with the people we were helping, feelings of sympathy and guilt and not doing enough, bonding beyond the professional, handing over personal mobile numbers to many more people than now, thoughts revolving around some situations or people we can’t forget for days. Then a certain alienation, and a return – slower, maybe stricter, with an own solidified understanding of one’s role as a helper. And a life to still uphold. “Ah my child? There’s also this yes”. It’s a marathon. What I’ve learned: to be fully present. And that we’re a team, an organisation, a little wonder (thanks to the people who set this up).

Scene cut.

The night at the train station a few days earlier. It’s a calm one, few people are arriving, I’m the only translator, things happen. The colleagues from the other organisation are sitting on two stools, one of them says what’s up with Ukraine, it has calmed down, one doesn’t hear “anything” anymore after all. Well..We talk. I’m always amazed by the rift in realities. Before, there’s the family that needs to go back to Ukraine cause of a medical emergency. The moments when you think why, how much pain can you bear? The tickets are very expensive, the free ones sold out. Then the drunk guy is annoying but it’s all part of the game, the volunteer pouring him a coffee laughs out hard when I translate. Mediation.

Late night talk with R. from Kiev, in his 20s, once the basic questions are clarified, the camp bed for the night is occupied and the station is unwelcomingly empty. Crafting French ceilings and drumming in a Christian community. From Kiev to Ternopil, Georgia, Vienna, now Germany – “to friends”. What would we do without them, the people who co-create our geography and give us something to hold on to in the unknown. The humans who gift us a bit of “home” away from home. There’s so much more, and I don’t have words left. We’re just doing what we can, we walk through the sleeping city to the night bus towards home, go back to work, jump between different realities, big respect for everyone.

Signs, rules, boundaries & motivation – What the supervision taught us

Friday afternoon on Zoom. Here some super quick takeaways.

  • If something irritates you, then that’s to be taken seriously. You have to feel good about your work. A negative emotion is a sign that we have been giving too much.
  • There’s always an organisational and a personal side to things 😉 and to purpose. Remember the organisational question of what can we offer the people arriving, we have a specific function, we have a main task – everything else comes second and can be delegated (if there’s someone to delegate to), we’re not equally responsible for everything. Know exactly who you are and why you’re here – personally. Know your motivation.
  • Automatization of processes is important to reduce conflicts, an obviously increase clarity, in an organisation.
  • In all the helping, and doing things, and good emotions it’s always helpful to reflect why a person / situation made us feel in a certain way. And sometimes just be aware of when a bond is created or there’s manipulation happening. In the end, the endeavour is still about helping as many people as possible. Oh, the psychology!

As a writer you have huge responsibility, and I feel it with every word that I’m putting here. I hope that I respected it with the way I wrote this text. Volunteering can often produce an emotional cocktail of love, cooperation, irritation, indignation, duty, standing your ground. And there are no obvious answers.

8 things that no one taught you about helping people with aha-moments, and without burnout

by adriana, posted in Psychology, Volunteering

Oh the psychology! In March, after going through a deep state of shock and “adopting” a family from Kharkiv, I started volunteering to help Ukrainians seeking refuge in Austria as well as those passing through. At the main train station in Vienna, later at the registration center (Austria Center Vienna) and the arrival center, and sharing infos and ways to take action all along. So, here a first part with some learnings that no-one taught you about before – about your emotions, working with traumatised people (without some degree in social work) and the superpowers of sandwiches. Yes, sandwiches and other 3D stuff.

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