On this episode of Power to Be Happy, I’m joined by the extraordinary Blayne Welsh—a First Nations scholar, theatre maker, and a true visionary in the intersection of healing, performance, and indigeneity.

Blayne shares his deeply personal journey of healing through theater, exploring how movement, ritual, and storytelling can transform pain into power. We dive into the concept of liminal spaces, the role of performance in reconnecting with our humanity, and how indigenous practices offer profound lessons for healing and community.

Whether you’re curious about drama therapy, looking for new ways to reconnect with yourself, or simply want to be inspired by Blayne’s wisdom, this episode is for you.

Tune in to discover how theatre can be a tool for recovery, transformation, and belonging—and how we can all create rituals and spaces that heal.

This is a conversation about courage, creativity, and the power of storytelling to harmonize our relationships with the world around us. Don’t miss it!!

Full Podcast Transcript

Joe:

Today, I am beyond excited to be joined by Blayne Welsh—a First Nations scholar, theatre maker, and just an all-around extraordinary human being.

Blayne’s work dives deep into the intersection of theatre, performance, and healing. And I just know this conversation is going to be incredibly special.

Blayne, we first connected after I read your research on the power of ritual in theatre, and I was so inspired by your insights and your approach to storytelling, performance, and healing.

So, Blayne, it’s an honour to have you here today to talk about healing and recovery through the lens of theatre, performance, and indigeneity. I think it’s going to be incredibly special.

Blayne, welcome to the show!

Blayne:

Joe:

Blayne:

When I found theatre, I was in a space where I needed healing, and it just so happened that theatre gave it to me. That’s when I began the journey of realizing, ‘This is useful—not just for me, but potentially for the mob.’

For me, it was about the performance element. Being able to move your body, to move through a space, to create a simulated world where you know the rules and you’re in control—it’s incredibly powerful.

By creating that environment and diving into what it means to be human, I found it helps regulate emotions. But it’s not just that. Theatre expands beyond the boundaries we’ve placed on it in modern society.”

In Australia, we often think of theatre as something confined to black boxes or big productions like Les Misérables. But historically, theatre and performance practices were vital social and healing functions within cultures.

For me, there’s a deep connection to my indigenous ancestors. My dad was taken, so I’ve been on a lifelong journey of returning home.

When I look back at our cultures and ancestors—the way we moved as animals moved, the way we gathered, danced, and performed—it’s clear these practices were essential for healing and regulation.

We’ve removed many of these performative elements from our society, boxed them into museums or theatres, and lost their broader social function. But these practices are still so valuable.

Blayne:

Even though it might seem superficial at first glance, you can see how this ritual helped release potential social tensions. It served a vital function in maintaining harmony within the community.

For me, theatre became a way to reconnect with these kinds of performative practices from my ancestors. It was healing—not just emotionally, but also culturally.

Theatre gave me a framework to express myself. And as someone with borderline personality and complex PTSD, it became a tool for regulation and healing.

It also allowed me to embody the practices of my ancestors in a way that felt relevant to my identity in today’s world.

Joe:

When I think about exploring theatre as part of my personal healing journey, it’s that energy—whether you’re a performer, an audience member, or someone watching a performance—that sparks or contributes to the healing process.

What does that energy bring up for you, in terms of creating it and being part of it?

Blayne:

In that space, a couple of things happen. First, it becomes safe—safe to try things, safe to feel things. If you experience a depth of emotion in a play that you might feel outside the theatre, it’s different because, in the theatre, you can go through it while maintaining the comfort of knowing, ‘This isn’t real.’ That’s the suspension of disbelief.

It’s all about the space we enter into. Even Plato talked about the spirit that exists between the audience and the performer. I’ve been thinking about spirit as the effective, liminal space between beings.

For example, between me and you, Joe, if I think of you, I have a certain image and emotional affect that comes to me. That’s your spirit—not something tangible, but how I reflect it.

Creating that safety and that space is essential. But there’s also work to be done in that space. That’s where directors, shamans, tricksters, clever fellows, and early priests all occupy a similar role.

We’re somewhat outside society in our own way, but we’re in control of these liminal spaces. We have the authority—whether cultural, spiritual, or artistic—to guide a group of human beings through a series of seemingly disconnected exercises. Ultimately, it’s about taking them on an effective journey toward preparation for a ceremony.

For a director, that ceremony might be opening night. For a priest or rabbi, it might be confirmation or a bar mitzvah. And for a drama therapist, it’s about guiding the client through a process so they leave the other side a little healthier and better equipped to manage their relationship with the world around them.

Fundamentally, we’re all doing the same thing—we just have different ‘whys’ behind it.

Joe:

If someone’s never thought of theater or drama therapy as a space or tool for healing, what would you say to them? How can someone begin to explore theater or drama therapy as part of their healing?

Blayne:

What theatre enables us to do is work with the emotional and affective spaces in a direct, embodied way. I’d argue it’s sometimes more effective than trying to cognitively induce those emotional spaces. Both approaches work—it’s just different horses for different courses.

As for drama therapy, there’s a range of different types depending on who you are, what you do, and what your comfort level is.

The first thing I’d say is to break the idea of theatre and drama away from the box we naturally place it in as Australians. Sure, there are elements of traditional theatre in there, but it’s so much more.

Take something like ‘One Two Punch,’ which you’re fond of, Joe. It’s a form of performance therapy. You’re not training to be a boxer or preparing to defend yourself in a fight. The purpose is performative—it’s about creating a physical response.

When I first told my doctor I had depression, he said, ‘Just go and exercise more.’ Thanks, doc. But even that is a kind of performance. What if I don’t like exercising?

Theatre as a drama therapy method gets you off your backside and moving around. It might involve doing some weird things in spaces you’re not comfortable with. We all have this ‘social cling wrap’ that restricts our movements and behaviours.

For example, if you asked someone to walk into a crowded space and act silly, they wouldn’t do it. But in a safe space, once you start moving and let that cling wrap break free, you discover new ranges of movement—new ways of being.

There’s a physical element to it, but there’s also a deeply emotional and affective element. And it’s fun! It might feel weird or strange at first, but once you’re in it, it’s enjoyable.

Drama therapy is often done in groups, which I find personally beneficial. Being around others who’ve been on similar journeys creates a sense of support and connection.

At its core, it’s a physical, embodied, and simulational practice. For example, someone on the spectrum might study people’s performances to replicate them. Through rehearsal, they can engage in the performance that most neurotypical people would call ‘the way things are done.’

Resimulating environments and spaces can be tremendously powerful. The type of drama therapy depends on the method. Some lean into storytelling and character work—like archetypes and the hero’s journey. Others are more improvisational, constantly changing to help people deal with the complexities of life.

If you’re someone who wants to sit down and talk about your problems, that’s fine. But if you’re someone who says, ‘I want to have a go at it—maybe do some training and rehearsal,’ then drama therapy could be an avenue for you to explore.

Joe:

Blayne:

Joe:

Blayne:

Joe:

I really love that, Blayne—it speaks to me deeply. But I also want to go back to something you’ve done recently. You ran a workshop on making totems and deep listening, where participants were creating personal totems. Can you share what a totem represents in the context of healing and why creating one can be such a meaningful experience?

Blayne:

Totems, obviously, are something that pop up in cultures all over the world. Recently, I’ve been told they’re even a big thing in gaming. But for my ancestors, we had what was called ‘Dian,’ which is our meat family—our kinship group—and it was based around animal totems.

For example, my great-uncle was the emu totem. My uncle and grandmother were the black duck. What that did was form your group because you effectively became family with that animal. I’ve claimed the magpie, which took me twenty-five years to finally do.

What that means is simple: it’s an animal you don’t eat. It’s a cultural practice that helped us maintain sustainability because we’re literally brothers and sisters to these animals. It helps heal the land and the human-nonhuman relationship.

Totems also speak to archetypes. For example, the crow is a trickster. And we love archetypes, don’t we? Everyone’s always saying, ‘Oh, I’m an INFP,’ or ‘I’m such a Taurus.’ We look for that association with the physical world—a reflection of ourselves in it.

For us, totems were and still are a deep cultural practice. Many other mobs have similar practices—you’ve probably heard of spirit walking or meeting your spirit guide. When you need to heal or transition in life, which often involves entering a liminal space, that’s where the idea of connecting with a totem or spirit guide comes in.

The way I use totems in workshops is through puppetry. I have to thank the creator for Tamaru’s The Puppeteer and the great people at Polyglot for introducing me to making. That’s when I realized my practice was missing something.

Embodied performance is powerful, but the problem is that the focus is always on you. When you’re making something, the focus shifts outside of you. This is what we call ‘distancing.’

Distancing is crucial in therapy because it creates space between the vulnerable self and the thing you want to work with. That’s why arts therapy, including drama therapy, is so effective. Creating an artifact outside yourself gives you that distance.

The purpose of the totems workshop, though, is to teach deep listening. And part of teaching deep listening is getting people to think critically about how they actually listen.

I’m not talking about performative listening—like nodding, saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m paying attention,’ or pretending you care. That’s not real listening.

For me, deep listening is about getting out of your own way and out of your own head. I learned this early on, sitting with uncles and aunties in my late teens.

To teach this to my artists and ensembles, I create an environment where they’re told something they’re intimately familiar with but might disagree with—or even find wrong. That tension is important.

So, what do I do? I get participants to create a sacred totem—always an animal they care about. But here’s the rule, Joe: what can’t they do? They can’t tell anyone why.

Joe:

Blayne:

When you get to the fun part of the activity I set up—and I won’t go into detail—you’re now listening to someone tell you about this little paper animal they’ve created. And what happens is, you might be directly affected in a significant way, but it’s through this distanced thing. It’s not a direct personal affront or connection.

For example, if I did the same activity and said, ‘I want you to tell the other person what their outfit says about them,’ I wouldn’t do that. Why? Because I need to be wary of the pathways things can go. That’s someone’s personal choice. If you’ve got someone who very specifically and deliberately wears certain artifacts or items to communicate something deep about their identity, and someone comes in and messes that up, that’s on the facilitator.

But with the totem, it creates this safe little animal that becomes the artifact of what we’re talking about. It gives you a safe way of noticing things like, ‘Oh no, I keep wanting to jump in,’ or, ‘Oh my gosh, I wanted to tell them something, but by the time I stopped thinking about it, they’d already gone three sentences ahead, and I missed part of what they said.’

It’s about having that critical thought and reflection. That’s the purpose of creating the totem for this work.

More broadly, totems have been used in different cultures for different reasons, but they’re generally about healing and harmonizing relationships. And I think that’s a nicer way to think about it than just ‘healing trauma.’ It’s about harmonizing your relationships with the world around you.

Joe:

It’s the same thing, at least in my experience. I remember creating a totem—a kookaburra—and it just felt right. It was like some kind of expression of something within me. Allowing yourself to channel something that comes through you becomes a process of trusting yourself again, doesn’t it?

Blayne:

Now, the spiritual element of this might put some people off, but my thoughts are pretty grounded in materialism. I think of the subconscious as our deep thinking—it’s tremendously powerful.

Think about it: your subconscious can generate an entire world for you to fly through while you’re asleep, and you simultaneously experience it. It’s a massively powerful network system. Our sovereign thinking—our conscious mind—is just the surface of it.

But how often do we acknowledge it? Because it’s functionally a different thinking system. And as we know, if we have trauma, PTSD, or some form of neurodiversity, our subconscious is incredibly powerful at making us do what it thinks we need to do to stay safe.

For example, if you’ve ever dealt with addiction, you know how real that is. Your subconscious is sending you signals like, ‘You need it. You need it. You need it.’ And when that goes away, it’s amazing.

This process—creating a totem, free writing, generating a character, or engaging in creative practice—is like having a dialogue with your deep thinking. It’s saying to your subconscious, ‘Alright, I need you. This is what you’re for. Come and help me.’

When you spend enough time talking with your deep thinking about a character, for example, suddenly your subconscious finds the character and says, ‘Here it is.’ And it might come with a whole set of nuances and relationships that you couldn’t consciously plan.

Creative people rely on their subconscious all the time. But this isn’t just about creativity. Indigenous cultures all over the world—and even modern cultures rooted in indigenous practices—have systems for this.

For example, in East Asia, there’s a business practice where, if you’re confronted with a problem or challenge, you don’t respond immediately. You notice it, but you let it percolate.

Think about Archimedes discovering buoyancy. He wasn’t drawing circles in the sand—he was in the bath. His subconscious had been processing all those relationships he’d been obsessing about, and when his body felt the water, it all clicked. That’s deep thinking doing its work.

We don’t give our subconscious enough credit because we’re so focused on our sovereign thinking—‘I’m Blayne. I’m me. I’m I.’ But if you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve had to handle potentially violent or dangerous situations, it becomes clear how powerful our deep thinking is.

It’s linked to performativity for me because personality disorders often manifest as a constant need to perform a role around others. I’ve never really felt within my own identity, so it’s natural for me to see everything as performance.

Joe:

Blayne:

There’s this shared, shame-based, almost unique version of BPD that I’ve read about in articles. It’s something seen in young Indigenous men like me, who are descendants of institutionalised men—or who were institutionalised ourselves, given the circumstances. That carries through.

But also, you know, I understand growing up with biracial parents in the 1980s… Yeah, we all have it. And one thing my therapist—shoutout to Mary, a First Nations therapist—helped me connect to is this idea that the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, was written with a specific intent.

The original intent was for insurance companies. That’s why I suffer from complex PTSD and not something like ‘childhood PTSD.’ Because if they called it childhood PTSD, well, pretty much everyone would have a case that their parents messed them up in some way. Right?

At the end of the day, our parents were twenty-something-year-old beings who weren’t even fully developed adults themselves, trying to manage life in a new world without any ritual or community support. That’s something we don’t have in the West.

In our mob’s old way, for example, when my dad went back home for the first time, he lived with three or four different women before he finally worked out who his mum was. Because that role—the role of raising a child—is a shared role. It’s a communal experience, even while we’re individuals.

But for our parents, they were stuck being individuals, taking care of kids on their own. And so, instead of calling it ‘childhood PTSD,’ it’s labelled as ‘complex PTSD.’ That’s just the reality.

And this ties back to performance too. The thing is, you’re teaching your children the performance of their identity just by doing it.

Imagine this: two men are driving in two separate cars. Behind them, red and blue lights start flashing—it’s the police. They’re being pulled over.

Let’s say one man is white, and the other is black. The white man gets pulled over, looks back, swears, probably thinks, ‘This is stupid. I’m going to be late.’ He pulls over, annoyed, but that’s it.

Now, let’s say the black man gets pulled over. He suddenly tenses up, grips the wheel tightly, makes sure his hands are at ten and two, sits up straight, gets quiet. His entire body language changes. He has a completely different, natural, performative response to being pulled over by the police.

Now imagine each of those men has their son in the backseat, watching the whole thing unfold. Those kids are learning the performance they’re expected to do in that situation.

For the white man’s son, the lesson might be, ‘You can be annoyed, make a joke, it’s no big deal.’ For the black man’s son, the lesson might be, ‘This is how you survive this situation. This is how you perform to stay safe.’

Thankfully, I’ve dodged that particular experience because I present as white. I haven’t had to deal with that. But that’s a whole other layer of performance that’s actively happening for a human in that space.

And the thing is, we’re not even aware of it most of the time because we’ve rehearsed it so often. It just becomes the way things are.

Joe:

Blayne, if someone wanted to create their own totem or even a ritual to support their healing process, where would you suggest they start? Are there any guiding principles they should keep in mind?

Blayne:

How do you discover your own ritual? I won’t touch too much on totems because I think people can easily understand totems. For example, you might have a rock you found when you were five years old that holds meaning for you, and you’ve kept it ever since.

But ritual—that’s something everyone can create, though there are certain traps we fall into in the West when it comes to creating rituals. You see this on display if you go to, say, a new-age ritual. There are a lot of elements that make up a ritual, and I often refer to a guide from Richard Schechner, whose field of performance studies is all about viewing everything as a performance.

One of the key elements he talks about is downplaying virtuosity. If you’re creating a ritual for your healing, it can’t be about you in the performance. Think about a solemn priest giving a eulogy—they’re not up there to show off their public speaking skills or how well they can articulate. It’s not about them. It’s about the task, the effect, the purpose of the utterance and the performance.

This is where we differentiate between performance for entertainment and performance for efficacy or effect. Ritual falls into the latter category. It’s about creating a sequence that belongs to you and supports your journey.

Another important element, which applies to totems as well, is secrecy. Don’t tell people about your ritual. I have a suspicion that when you tell your deep thinking something and keep it stored within yourself, your deep thinking keeps working on it. It doesn’t stop. That’s why, when you’re working on a creative idea, you might stay up all night thinking about it. But the moment you tell someone, it can feel like the energy drains out of it.

…So, when you’re creating a ritual, keep it within yourself. Let it be something personal and sacred.

If you’re already working with a therapist, absolutely talk to them. They can offer valuable recommendations for the emotional effect you’re trying to create. But at its core, a ritual is about getting yourself into the emotional or effective space you need.

This is where role therapy can be helpful too. We all step into certain roles in different spaces. For example, I’m in the process of re-establishing boundaries and routines after transitioning from the bush back to teaching at university. It’s been a rapid shift, and I’m building rituals to help me step into the roles I need to occupy.

Actors do this as well. There’s a concept I love called psychological gesture from Michael Chekhov, son of the famous Anton Chekhov. He used movement to find a gesture that embodied a character, feeling, or experience. Then, he would shrink that gesture and internalize it. When the actor needed to access that emotional space, they could simply think of the gesture, and it would bring them there.

So, your ritual can be anything you want—complex or simple. I prefer simple. The key is to ask yourself: What effect do I want at the end? You’re entering this liminal space through the ritual—how do you want to come out?

People create rituals for all sorts of things. For example, someone who experiences panic attacks might have a ritual they follow when they notice the signs coming on. They go through specific steps, enter the liminal space, and come out feeling grounded again.

There’s an abundance of ways to approach this. The …key is to find what resonates with you and aligns with the emotional or mental state you’re trying to cultivate.

So, start by asking yourself: What do I need this ritual to do for me? What emotional or mental space do I want to create or transition into? From there, let it be personal, intentional, and sacred. And remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect—it just has to work for you.

Joe:

For me, one ritual I have, if I want to feel, like, really grounded and in a good space internally, is performing this ten-minute play I wrote for three characters. I just perform it myself, you know? I literally jump around in the backyard.

Sometimes, when I really let myself go for it—like, I’ll do this before a podcast or when I just want to be fully present—I find myself doing the weirdest things. I’ll be on the ground, lying there, listening, or just doing whatever feels right in the moment. And that’s part of the healing process for me.

Blayne:

There’s a particular drama therapy method I watched while I was in New York. I participated in it, and it’s all about creating a completely improvisational, unsettling space. But the facilitator is guiding it.

So, while you’d be doing what you normally do, Joe, the facilitator might push you to go a little further in a certain direction. But the decision to push—that requires knowledge of psychotherapy and the client to make that call.

That said, breaking free of structured performances can be so liberating. So much of our frustration comes from worrying about performances—our own and other people’s—and what they mean to us.

But here’s the thing: there are no rules to the performance, man. All those weird things you’re doing in the backyard? You could do them anywhere. What are people going to do? Call you crazy? Why? Because they probably want to be rolling around in the grass too!

It’s that conflict between cultural performance and our capacity to say, ‘You know what? I can do something weird and different here.’

How often do you feel it? You’re in a place, and you get this urge to do something ridiculous. That’s a human trying to get out.

Joe:

Blayne:

I’m First Nations, descended from the Wailwan mob. My dad was stolen, and because of that, my journey and identity are deeply tied to dislocation—disconnection and intergenerational trauma.

For me, it’s been about understanding the ‘why.’ Why did we dance? Why did we do the things we did? That’s been my journey home.

Now, you’ve probably heard different terms—Aboriginal, Indigenous, First Nations. There are no hard rules about how they apply. Just ask the person. In the arts scene, we tend to use ‘First Nations.’ In academia, I’ve found ‘Indigenous’ is more common.

Personally, I prefer ‘Indigenous’ because I see indigeneity as more of a dimension or spectrum than a binary. Indigeneity was only made a binary in relation to colonizers.

Part of my work, especially in meditation, is reminding people that we’re all Indigenous. We’re all descended from Indigenous ancestors. I often invite people to imagine every footprint they’ve ever left glowing on the Earth. Then, I ask them to follow those footprints back in time.

Eventually, those footprints get smaller and smaller, becoming the footprints of a family, a single mother, or institutional workers. And if you keep going back, you reach a place where the footprints leave circles on the Earth—circles in harmony with the cycles of the Earth. Daily circles for the sun, seasonal circles for the year.

We all have that Indigenous ancestry somewhere. It’s about a direct, living relationship with the land and a lateral relationship with the community.

There are universal aspects of Indigenous identity, like being more collective than individual. But for me, it’s about disconnection.

My dad’s story is a big part of this. He was taken as a baby, and when he was seven, he and his twin sister were split up. He was put into institutional care and didn’t even know he was Indigenous—or that he had a mother—until he was ten or eleven, around the time of the referendum.

The first person who told him about his mother said, ‘You don’t want to meet her. She just wants to put you to work for grog.’ Imagine saying that to a ten-year-old boy about his mother.

Thankfully, he eventually got to go home, and that worked out well. But there’s so much pain and disconnection in that part of the journey.

For me, my life is about the healing return—so that later generations can access what I can’t. That’s the reality of intergenerational trauma and what is fundamentally genocide.

But there’s also beauty in it. I feel safest in places where I’ve been welcomed, especially when I’m with aunties. There’s something about aunties—they’re just chill.

So, that’s my flavour of indigeneity. It’s tied to disconnection, but it’s also about finding my way back and helping others do the same.

Joe:

It’s about taking your time, being yourself, and trusting the river. That’s the philosophy I’ve taken from all the work we’ve done, and it feels like a good way to segue out.

The idea of the river is something I got from an uncle, Abu Maury, back in the naughties. He told me, ‘You’ve got to follow the edge of the river. If you go into the water, you’ll drown. If you go into the bush, that’s where the monsters are. You’ve got to follow the edge.’

That’s become a philosophy for me. Yes, we’re going to be following our river our whole lives. We can imagine what the ocean is like by stepping into the water, but if we do, we drown and get carried away in whatever direction the current takes us.

Sometimes, we want to get past our pain and trauma faster, so we take a shortcut and go into the bush. But then we’re fighting, struggling, and maybe even getting lost—or worse, ending up on someone else’s river and believing it’s our own.

The key is to walk along the edge of the river, taking every single step along the way. It takes time.

I think the only places where great struggles are overcome in a single, glorious battle are in Hollywood or the history books—and both are works of fiction. There’s no grand moment where everything happens, and you suddenly find yourself. There’s no grand initiatory practice. That’s capitalism. That’s consumerism.

I’m better than I was ten years ago. I’ll be better in ten years’ time. And if we all keep doing the work—those of us who are so passionately community-focused and forward-looking—then we’ll be better in ten generations’ time than we are now.

Just like we’re different now than we were ten generations ago. We’ve had some visitors along the way, but anyway…

Joe:

Blayne:

Joe:

Blayne:

So much of embodied practice—and you see this in academia and theory—is already Indigenous. It’s just that someone wanted to put their own label on it, yeah? Their own brand. Thankfully, that’s starting to shift.

I went to a conference last week, and I was glad to hear people acknowledging that their ideas are implicitly Indigenous.

The thing about Indigenous practice is that you’re sort of already doing it, Joe, because it’s embodied. It’s human. It’s direct. It’s not about artifacts or non-human things. It’s not about being online. It’s about humans in a space together.

If you asked me how to decolonize theaters in Australia, I’d tell you to burn the theaters down and dance by the light of the fire. It’s humans in space, being.

And there’s also the importance of protocol—creating a safe, liminal space. It’s not just about saying, ‘This is a safe space, so everyone just talk.’ There’s more to it than that. It takes time and practice. But when you find that healing tribe, you’ll have it.

I think we’re already moving in that direction. Slowly, we’re getting over the technological trinkets we’ve been sold in exchange for our humanity. We’re coming back to sitting around a fire, grabbing a guitar, and letting people speak their truth.

And when they do, just listen. Don’t offer an answer—you don’t know it. I guarantee you don’t. If they don’t know it, you don’t know it.

So, listen. Sit with it. Slow down. And remember: anything that isn’t a human set of eyes looking back at you is artificial. It’s a representation, not a real thing.

If you’re ever stressed or worried in the moment, I like to bring my attention back to my feet. Feel what I’m in contact with, feel what’s underneath me, and ask myself, ‘Am I in danger right now?’

I’m not, because I’ve got the land underneath me. Why not? Do you, man. Woo!

Joe:

Blayne:

Welcome back to The Hour of Healing! In this episode, we’re flipping the script on therapy. It’s not just about working through pain—it’s about rediscovering joy, creativity, and connection. Therapy isn’t just helpful—it can be fun!

Through personal stories and practical insights, we’ll explore:

This is your invitation to see therapy in a whole new light. Let’s chart a course toward healing, hope, and more fun in your life.

Welcome back to The Hour of Healing! In this episode, we’re exploring one of the most profound truths about healing: it doesn’t happen in isolation. Healing is relational.

Through heartfelt storytelling and practical insights, we’ll uncover:

This is your invitation to reconnect—with yourself, with others, and with the shared human experience that unites us all. Together, we’ll chart a course toward healing, hope, and belonging.

Welcome aboard The Hour of Healing! In this first episode, we set sail on a journey of hope, healing, and self-discovery. Together, we’ll explore how emotional triggers—those moments that bring up old pain or difficult memories—can actually become powerful tools for growth.

Through vivid storytelling and practical insights, we’ll uncover:

This is your invitation to reconnect with your truth, your dreams, and your higher self. Let’s chart a course toward healing, together.

In this deeply personal and vital episode of The Power to Be Happy podcast, Joe sits down with Daniel Rylatt, a clinical psychologist and mental health professional, to tackle one of the most challenging yet necessary topics: understanding suicide and how we can support ourselves and others.

Joe and Daniel reflect on their journey of friendship, which began with a walk in nature and led to profound conversations about mental health, connection, and the ripple effects of suicide. Together, they explore the importance of creating safe spaces for these conversations, the power of authentic connection, and practical ways to approach someone who may be struggling.

Daniel shares insights from his years of experience, including the staggering statistics around suicide, the role of connection in fostering hope, and how to navigate sensitive conversations with compassion and care. They also discuss the importance of self-care, resilience, and finding ways to reconnect with the things that bring us joy and grounding—even in the midst of life’s toughest moments.

This episode is a heartfelt invitation to lean into the hard conversations, to show up for ourselves and others, and to remember that even in the darkest times, there is hope.

Full Podcast Transcript

Joe: Daniel, welcome to The Power to Be Happy podcast. I’m stoked that we’re here having a conversation again—this time about quite a different topic, about a vital topic, about a necessary topic. I honour you for being here, for being in this space, for making the time for this. But I want to welcome you to the show. How you going, Daniel?

Daniel: Hey, Joe. Yes. Good day. Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me along and, yeah, having one of our conversations.

Joe: Yeah, that’s it. That’s it, Daniel. And today, we’re talking about, you know, a difficult topic. I want to probably start with, you know, how this conversation has come about.

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: We’ve been doing some workshops in the community, in the city council, and it all really came about from the time when we were out in the bush, out on a walk, out in nature. We were becoming friends, and I learned a lot about you. I also learned that you’re a mental health professional in the space of suicide prevention. And it was fascinating to me. I remember just asking you, like, “Daniel, why do people do it?”

And in that moment, Daniel, when you started to really break it down for me, I remember we actually stopped. Right? We stopped on the path—it was like a sandy path—and you actually started drawing out this diagram on the ground. You said, “There are three factors that have to come together.”

And I remember feeling this mix of emotions. A part of me was excited to learn about it, but another part of me was flinching. I almost wanted to run away. I felt lightheaded, overwhelmed. I thought, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe we’re talking about this. Stop, stop, stop.”

But that’s when I realized: this is a vital topic. This is a difficult topic, particularly for anyone with a history of mental ill health or who’s been through difficult things in their life. So I think it’s so vital to talk about it in a way that’s safe—or safe enough, I should say—using the right language, but also empowering.

And so, yeah, I want to thank you for doing the work that you do in this space for so many years and supporting people. Thank you for what you’re doing. And, yeah, tell us—what do we need to know before we get into the conversation of understanding suicide and how we can support ourselves and the people around us?

Daniel: Yeah. Well, we need to know that suicide is very confronting. It’s a very emotive topic, as you’ve referred to, but we also know it affects pretty much all of us in one way or another.

When we had that talk, I remember the walk and the talk that we had—and getting down and drawing the diagram in the gravel, in the sand. One of the things we talked about then was, you know, I said there is research out there that indicates that for every person who dies by suicide, up to 134 people are affected. That’s the ripple effect.

At first, I thought, “Well, that’s a really large number—how does that make sense?” But if we think about it, people are connected to communities in general one way or another—whether it’s through school, work, family, social groups, sporting groups—and the impact of suicide goes well beyond those first degrees of contact.

And that’s when we’re talking statistics. We start to talk about numbers and percentages and things, but that’s the statistics that are recorded for suicide. That doesn’t capture all of the times that people have attempted suicide or the other people who are having intense emotional crises and might be self-harming or thinking of self-harming. So that’s really, in one sense, to use a bit of a cliché, the tip of the iceberg.

We know that in Australia, over 3,200 people die by suicide every year. That equates to about nine people a day in Australia dying by suicide. And we know that there are other parts of our population that are disproportionately affected.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Those parts of the population, generally, we can talk about them in concrete terms—people who are parts of communities that are stigmatized or marginalized or find it much more difficult to access services. That includes people in the LGBTQI+ community and also our First Nations communities.

We know that people in those communities are subject to more stresses in daily life and worse health outcomes overall—both physically and in mental health. Unfortunately, self-harm and suicide, deliberate self-harm and suicide, are also a part of that picture.

But if we build on that—what’s behind those statistics? One way of summarizing that, Joe, is talking about connection—or, in this case, lack of connection.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: You and I were chatting about this a little bit earlier, and we were actually speaking with some people at the local city council earlier on. It can be easy—I certainly found coming into this space—it can be easy to feel quite overwhelmed and get pushed into a space of hopelessness.

But actually, in defining the problem, we can also start to indicate ways to find a solution—or even if we don’t say “solution,” ways of responding and improving things.

So if we talk about lack of connection, that points to a way out for a lot of people. What can we do if we’re wanting to be supporters or helpers? It’s fostering connection.

We do know that for people who decide they want to end their life, they feel they have no other choice—that they have no way out but to kill themselves. Often, that’s because they have overwhelming or unrelenting emotional suffering.

That suffering can come from a whole range of different causes and sources. It’s usually not simply one thing, but a collection of things—or a building up and layering of stressors and problems that, over time, build up.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: It can happen quite quickly, of course, but it can also build up over time in terms of what we talk about as psychosocial losses. These are everyday stressors, but when they’re cumulative, they can overwhelm someone’s ability to cope or connect.

That’s things like financial stresses, housing, employment, vocational, relational—a whole series of things. And then these intersect with the person’s situation and their context—whether they are part of a community that is more marginalized, if they’re experiencing mental health stressors, and a whole range of factors.

That’s why, in talking about suicide, the field talks far more about understanding and responding now.

When I started working in this area, probably about ten years ago, we used to talk about predicting and preventing. And we kind of know those approaches don’t get the best results. So now, it’s about trying to understand the individual in their context.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. And I love that you bring that context in because I think it’s so important.

It really brought it home for me when you said that this many people die by suicide. You know, that it’s more, I think, than people who die in car crashes, right?

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: So that really puts things in context—how big of a challenge it is for our society, for our culture, to bring suicide into finding more helpful ways to deal with it.

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: But, yeah, I want to transition into talking about, you know, when we’re dealing with our own stress, with our own challenges, but also that of people in our life. Whether it’s someone—it might be a friend, it might be a loved one, it might be your partner, it might be someone you work with, or just someone in the community. How do we approach, you know, how do we kind of try to understand where they might be at? If we see that someone is not acting in the way that they usually do, how do we try to gauge where they’re at? And then, kind of, is it even safe to bring up the topic of suicide?

Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a really good question there, Joe. And perhaps I’ll begin with the last part there. In terms of the understanding in the mental health field, we know that it is safe to bring up the topic of suicide. It’s not that we talk about it gratuitously, of course, but indeed—and I had this fear when I was going through my training—I had a fear that if I asked someone if they were at risk of suicide or if they were feeling suicidal, that I would somehow prompt them or put that idea in their head.

And we know that’s not the case. We know that if someone is struggling or in crisis, quite often they actually feel burdened. They might feel ashamed, they might feel hopeless or helpless, they might feel that no one understands them or that no one else has ever felt how they feel.

So by actually addressing the topic or bringing the topic up directly, usually that has a much more beneficial effect. It lets the person know that we’re interested and sincere, and it can help to immediately start to mitigate that sense of isolation or shame. The fact that someone is interested enough and cares enough and is willing to take the time and stop and ask—of course, thoughtfully, sensitively.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So, yeah, you talked about noticing someone’s change, and that’s actually the key stepping-in point. Some of the signs when someone is struggling are those external changes—whether it be in their behaviors, their routine, how they look, even their body language.

Are they much more down, unhappy, reserved, or withdrawn? Of course, there can be lots of reasons for those things going on, and people can have a whole bunch of problems they’re grappling with and struggling with. It doesn’t mean they’re suicidal. But in terms of the topic that we’re working around today, it is about being alert to and sensitive to signs of distress.

Because as biological organisms, we’re kind of programmed—we’re hardwired—for survival. So for someone to attempt to end their life or for someone to kill themselves, generally speaking, they’ve got to overcome a whole lot of innate instinct to preserve their life.

And so, people can find themselves thinking along those lines when they have what they feel is overwhelming, unbearable, and oftentimes inescapable suffering. It could be physical pain along with emotional pain.

And so, when we notice changes in people’s behavior, their appearance, or the things they’re saying, then we can start to be—the radar’s out there, the radar’s scanning—and we start to want to respond. But response, of course, needs to be sensitive, compassionate, and really, there’s no particular guidebook in terms of required steps. But there are some fundamental principles.

And so, that’s coming from a sense of being authentic, ideally being able to take some time. So, it’s often—you know, there may not be a better time, so it might have to be a rushed conversation. But where possible, being sensitive again to the time, the place, the setting, and also respectful of the other person.

And really doing whatever we can to communicate that openness, that accepting attitude, and very much what we call a non-judgmental attitude. Because that person’s suffering or their distress—that’s unique and individual to them. And we can’t really ever know what that is like or how much they’re struggling.

So being alert to signs of distress, being willing to actually make a move forward and reach out—or, as is commonly talked about nowadays, you know, reaching out—but connecting or opening and inviting someone into a conversation.

Joe: That makes so much sense. Like, what are—I know some of—we’ll talk about, like, how do you start that conversation? Maybe we’ll kind of even, I don’t know, role-play something like that. But I want to actually ask, what are some of the things we don’t want to say? Right? Because we want to be able to have that, as you say, compassionate—

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: —authentic conversation. What are some of the things we don’t want to say in that type of a conversation?

Daniel: Yeah. No, and I’m glad you asked that, Joe. And I do often think about it in terms of—especially, you know, in terms of—I’m someone who enjoys humour, and I know you have a great sense of humour, and we’re always joking with each other.

And from when I’ve got my mental health clinician hat on, I’m thinking, well, where does the humour stop or the blokey humour stop, and, you know, where does some real concern start?

So, some everyday phrases that we use—and of course, we’re not wanting to inhibit people’s speech—but if you are concerned about someone, we want to be talking in a way that helps them to feel safe enough, respected, and that this is an accepting and authentic kind of space.

So, if we especially start with things like, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing,” or, “You’re not thinking of doing something stupid, are you?”—these are all things we might say to ourselves or amongst our family in a day-to-day conversation.

I’m not talking about that. But if we are opening a sensitive conversation, we’ve seen some signs of distress, and we’re really wanting to inquire authentically and build some trust, build some mutual rapport and respect, avoiding saying things like, “You’re not thinking of doing something stupid, are you?” or, “Oh, surely it can’t be as bad as all that.”

Those are phrases that are going to close down the conversation. They’re not going to invite someone to feel secure enough. If they’re already feeling vulnerable, if they’re already judging themselves and criticizing themselves, they may feel that they have a terrible burden and couldn’t possibly open up to anybody.

So we need to start the conversation if we can. We all make slips and trips. I’m sure if I watch back the podcast, I’ll hear myself saying things, and I’ll think, “Oh, why did you say that?” So, it’s not about being the word police on each individual word, but getting a handle on those concepts, very much so.

Joe: Yeah. I love that, Daniel. So true. And, like, we’ve got to know what not to say. But, I mean, how would we gauge that? How would we bring up with the person that something is different? Like, as you were saying, like, something changed. Right? How do we have that conversation, especially if the person might be in distress, might be dealing with things from the past, or might be dealing with challenges now? How do we bring it up in a way that’s respectful, but also, like, you know, bringing up those concerns in a way that we don’t just stop the conversation right away?

Daniel: Yeah. Of course. And, you know, you and I have spoken about this in the past where I could say, you know, it’s about noticing things. Joe is normally really bubbly, he’s normally very talkative, and, you know, of course, if I see you one day and you’re a bit down and flat, okay, that might be fine. But if I’m seeing you consistently over a period, I might be saying, “Oh, Joe, I’m just wondering, you know, I’m wondering how things are going. You seem a bit down.”

And of course, we know you might just sort of shake that off and brush it off or say, “No, I’m fine.” Now, depending on what else I know about the situation and about you, and what other signs or indicators are going on, I might kind of leave it at that because I do need to respect you and trust you. You know, in order to build trust and rapport, I’ve got to be able to accept what you say as well.

However, I can also speak truly to my own experience. So it’s not about me talking at you about yourself, but I can authentically say, “Oh, you know what? Look, I’m glad to hear you’re okay, but I’ve got to say, from the way I see things, you’ve really changed a lot recently, and it makes me worry about you. So, you know, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but I really do want to check—are you really okay? Is there something more going on? Is there something worrying you or troubling you?”

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So, you see, I started that by actually talking about my perspective. Because I’ve asked you, and you said, “No, I’m fine,” you know, you sort of brush it off—“I’m gonna talk about it, drop it, leave me alone, whatever, don’t bother me.” And if I feel that there is a need or it’s important, well, I can revisit that, but I’m doing so now from my perspective—what I’m seeing and hearing and how it’s making me feel in relation to you.

Joe: So cool. Because that’s nonjudgmental. Right? That’s just bringing your own experience into it. And that way, I’m not feeling—you know—or the person you’re talking to is not feeling judged immediately. Right? Like, “You are like this,” or, “You are like that.” It’s kind of talking about your own perspective.

Daniel: Exactly.

Joe: So let’s just say the person brings out the fact that, yeah, there are things going on. They’re stressed. They may have experienced or maybe are experiencing some difficulties now. Like, how do we talk around that?

Daniel: Yeah. Well, one of the first things is to validate that and acknowledge it, first of all. Because I’ve asked you, and now you’ve opened up. You said, “Yeah, it’s not great. This and this part,” or whatever. And now you’ve opened up a bit, I need to honour that and respect that and say, “Okay, you know, I’m really sorry to hear that, but I’m glad you felt you could tell me. Thanks for opening up or thanks for letting me know.”

So, first of all, acknowledging what’s been said.

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: Importantly, you said what not to say. At times, we’re gonna move to a solution, like, “Let’s find a way out of this,” or, “What are we gonna do next?” or, “Let’s put some plans in place.” But if someone’s really suffering and struggling, we don’t want to just come in and shut it down. It can be a closing down again just to offer a solution, you know? That’s pretty similar to dismissing it or minimizing it—just saying, “Oh, we’ll just do this.”

Because if I go to that problem-solving and that fixing—and look, that’s always my first edge. You know, I’ve got a lot of training and a lot of experience in the mental health field, and I still have to have a little kind of voice in the back of my head saying, “Don’t go to problem-solving straight away, Daniel.”

Joe: It’s me. It’s me as well.

Daniel: It’s a normal reaction, so it’s not wrong. But if we are having these sensitive conversations, we’ve actually got to be, as much as we can, prepared to tolerate that distress.

Because, you know, when there’s distress or fear or whatever it is, there are a couple of main reactions people know—fight, flight, freeze—and there’s a few others we can build onto that. But if someone talks about a problem, one instinctive reaction is to kind of avoid it and run away, and that might be why I don’t even ask you. Or another is to make it go away by fixing it.

But if I try and do that, I’m not actually listening to you and understanding what’s going on for you. So asking about how the person’s feeling, kind of attempting to empathize with that—or at least, even if I can’t understand it, again, you can pretty rarely go wrong by being authentic and talking about your own experience.

So I might even say—you might tell me the dilemma or the problem—I say, “Wow, you know, I guess from my experience, that’s something I’ve never really encountered, but I can see or I can hear or I can sense or I can feel that it’s really troubling you.”

So I need to be able to validate that and acknowledge it. You might even say, “Look, thank you so much for trusting me with this, Joe.” Because if you think about it, I might be—now that I’ve asked that question—I might be the first person in your entire life you’ve talked to about this topic or about how you’re feeling right now.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So acknowledge it. Allow it to be there without running away and without trying to close it down and fix it. It doesn’t mean, of course, approving of it, but acknowledging that it’s there and that it’s real for the person, and thanking them essentially for opening up their zone of trust to you.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: That’s so powerful.

Joe: And, you know, it’s that—yeah. It’s that being authentic. It’s just really listening in. It’s just having that back and forth to try to really understand what’s going on for that person.

And let’s just say that, you know, you notice in that conversation that the person is going through a tough time. Maybe they brought it up in some way, and you sense that they’re not in a good space. They’re struggling.

But how do we then—let’s just say we talked about—how do we move from “They’re struggling” to “I’m worried that you might be thinking of suicide?”

Daniel: Yes. Yeah. Exactly. There’s a couple of broad ways. I’ll try not to make it overly complicated, but one we might call the normalizing or external viewpoint, and the other is the person-specific or internal viewpoint.

So, you might tell me certain things have happened in your life, or this is what’s going on for you at the moment, or things have happened in the past and now it’s come back and affected you. So I’ve acknowledged the reality of that, I’ve expressed some empathy and sympathy or some support, and I’ve thanked you for trusting me.

And then, if nothing explicit has come out but I’m worried about it, I can say, “You know, Joe, often when people are experiencing those kinds of things, sometimes they can get into a crisis situation and they can even start thinking about suicide. I’m just wondering, have you been thinking about suicide?”

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So that’s that external or normalizing perspective. There’s a mental health professional—he’s actually a psychiatrist in the US—called Sean Shea. He has a clinical institute that he’s founded there, and he’s published several books and techniques on how to ask questions about sensitive subjects. It can be about mental health, it can be about physical health, and of course, mental health and suicide are very sensitive and sometimes even taboo subjects.

So, he coined this and labeled it the normalizing approach, saying, “Lots of other people who have been in similar situations have felt this. Just wondering if that’s how it’s affecting you.”

The other way is what Sean Shea calls shame attenuation, but it’s like what I call the internal or personalizing approach. And I might use that particularly if I know you a little better. When we’ve got a closer relationship, I might say, “You know what, Joe, just hearing about all of that makes me think. I’m wondering about you, and I’m wondering if, given everything that’s happened to you and how you told me you’re feeling, you’ve been having those thoughts. I’ve seen how withdrawn you are. I’m worried, and I’m wondering—have you been thinking about suicide?”

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: I shouldn’t, by the way—if we go back and watch it—I probably wouldn’t have said “worried” because I don’t want you to then worry about me worrying about you, if I can put it that way.

Joe: Exactly.

Daniel: But then again, I think that’s also true because, you know, you’re not ever gonna be in a place where you can perfect it.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: You haven’t got the script there perfectly.

Joe: Yeah. You’re not gonna say, My dear friend… Oh, hang on. So yeah, let me rewind

No, that’s totally right. But I wanna also focus on the fact that we are being very specific, right? We’re not—again, you know, we talked about things we want to avoid using phrases like, “You’re not thinking of doing something stupid or silly, are you?” We’ve been very direct, right? So we’re saying things like “suicide” or “killing yourself.”

Daniel: Yep. And just before I respond to that, I’ve talked about the two approaches—internal, external, general, personal. Neither one of those is right or more right than the other. It depends on the situation, the feel. If you don’t know what to do, just mentally flip a coin and choose one. It doesn’t really particularly matter in most circumstances.

Joe: And you could probably even switch between them in the context of one conversation.

Daniel: Yeah. Exactly.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: But then, to come to the question you asked now—yes, if we’re actually concerned about a suicide risk, and we’re gonna have this conversation meaningfully, we need to actually know what we’re talking about.

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: Because there are many times—as you said, I work as a mental health professional—and sometimes I’m interviewing someone and I’m thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is where the conversation’s going.” It might be the source of it, it might be anywhere else, and it’s not until I ask those clarifiers that I realize, “Oh, okay, I was on the wrong track. We’re not heading down this pathway, it’s about something else.”

Or, you know, you might be telling me about your problems, and the example we’ve used today is, say, someone’s lost their job. That’s why I have to understand—what is the meaning and the impact on that person?

Because to me, for instance, losing my job—that would be, “Oh my goodness, this is terrible, this is a disaster. How am I gonna pay my rent?” and all of this kind of thing.

So if I think about it from my point of view, I’m gonna impose that view on you. That’s why I need to put my own perspective aside and be genuinely there to find out your perspective.

Because for every time that someone loses their job and I say, “Oh my goodness, that’s terrible, you poor thing, how are you gonna cope?” they might go, “Yeah, it’s great. I really wanted to get out of there, and I’ve got this fantastic opportunity.”

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So, we’re wanting to have a laugh a bit, but I’m not joking about that. It’s about the person—what the person’s perception and interpretation of those events are.

Because you might be really down on it because, yeah, to play with the job theme, you might have decided you’re taking your career in another direction, and you’re feeling really bad because you don’t want to tell your boss. You’ve got a really good boss, a really good company, a really good manager, whatever it is, and you feel like you might let them down.

So in that little scenario I’ve just painted, you’re actually feeling really down because you’ve got an exciting project, but you’re worried about how it’s gonna impact on you.

So until I find out the extent of that feeling, I might be trying to problem-solve something that’s not there.

Joe: Yeah. Totally. I love that because that goes back to being authentic and listening. And so let’s just touch on that for a moment because I think this is so vital. Especially for people like me who love to jump in and problem-solve or are sometimes tempted to assume things, right? Like, “Oh, this is how I am. This must be how everyone else is.”

How do we become more empathetic and really try to listen by taking the other person’s perspective in a way that’s rooted in compassion?

Daniel: Well, it’s those—and you pretty much answered the question in the way you asked it—it’s about being very present, what we call active listening.

In fact, I’ve worked in mental health for 20 years now, and it’s only about two or three years ago that I actually discovered a deeper meaning of empathy. I thought I knew what sympathy and empathy were, and it wasn’t until I was running courses and workshops in these areas that I realized I had it wrong.

I used to think that empathy was me putting myself in your position—mentally imagining what it’s like for me, Daniel, sitting there in Joe’s chair running the podcast.

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: That’s wrong. What empathy actually—like radical empathy—is, is me doing what I can to imagine what it’s like for you in your chair. Not what it would be like for me in your chair, but what is it actually like for you?

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And we can never truly know, but we can try.

Daniel: But in one of our other conversations about this topic—I know on the weekend—I mentioned it’s something you can Google on YouTube. Look up on YouTube, there’s an interview, and the guys in Northwest Mental Health actually put me onto this little clip. It’s about two minutes long, and it’s a news report about an interview with this fellow, Darnell, the bus driver.

I won’t talk you through it now in detail, but if people are interested, they can look it up. Darnell’s actually a bus driver in the US, driving across a bridge with a busload of commuters during the morning peak. And there’s someone on the bridge, and they’re actually on the other side of the railing on the pedestrian bridge. There’s a car bridge, a pedestrian walkway, and a railing.

So Darnell, he stops the bus in the middle of traffic. Yeah. He calls back to base to ask them to call the ambulance. And he gets out, and he actually goes up to the person. He doesn’t rush at them. He’s a really big guy, and the person on the other side of the railing is quite small—a small woman.

And Darnell’s a bus driver on a busy bus route in the morning. He’s put himself in that position, that person’s position. You know, it seems kind of really obvious, but he noticed it, and he stopped. Cars are going past, people are cycling past—you can see it in the footage from the dash cam in the bus.

And Darnell decides—he realizes there’s someone in distress. You know, who’s gonna respond? So he gets out, he stops the bus, gets out, and he says—he just says to the lady, “Ma’am, would you like to come back onto this side of the railing?”

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So he’s responding to what’s there. He doesn’t need to ask her what problems she’s got. He doesn’t need to ask her how she’s feeling about them, you know, in that sense.

We don’t want to overcomplicate it. That’s why I love this example. Sometimes, when we’re running a workshop for professionals, I show that at the end of the day. I say, “Okay, we’ve just spent eight hours learning all of the theory and the techniques and practicing them, and here’s a bus driver that can do the whole thing in two minutes.”

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: Because he just says, “Ma’am, would you like to come back on this side of the railing?”

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: And as I mentioned to you, Joe, he’s a big guy. The lady in particular is quite small. He actually sits down on the ground so that they’re on the same level.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So this guy’s brilliant. He plays American football, he drives a bus, and he does a perfect suicide awareness and response.

Joe: Yeah. In two minutes.

Daniel: In two minutes.

Joe: Love it, Daniel. I think that’s such a perfect example of how you kind of cut straight to the chase. Right? You don’t—you know, and obviously, every situation is different. Every situation is different.

But still, sometimes you can just be there. And I think that’s what we’re talking about—what you’re really talking about—that right level of empathy. You’ve been there with a person in the moment.

You don’t bring your own opinion, perspective, or judgment. You’re there. You’re helpful. You’re ready to listen. You’re ready to support.

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: Now, let’s just say the person you’re talking to is—yeah. Maybe you ask them in a way that is direct and will not be misunderstood, right? “Are you considering suicide?” or, “Have you had thoughts about killing yourself?” Now, let’s just say the person said, “Yeah.” You know what? That’s something that’s come up—or whatever way they say it. Like, what do we say or do then?

Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m thinking back to the start of this conversation this afternoon. There are going to be clues in that already as to how we can respond.

Because there’s some understanding of what’s going on for them, but also, as we’ve just spoken about—bringing in, you know, referencing the general response that Darnell epitomized—is that people often have their own resources, their own ways of coping. In times of crisis or stress, they can actually lose touch with those or forget about them.

So it’s not all about an expert mental health clinician intervention—that there’s someone else who can magically sail in and keep someone safe. There’s a whole range of things. I often talk about it in terms of a pyramid or that sort of triangle, with the base being the person’s own resources.

Now, for that example with Darnell and the woman on the bridge—her own internal coping resources—they’re overwhelmed at that point. But for the rest of us, in our own conversations, in our own lives, for ourselves or our loved ones or people we work with or people we know, it’s important not to forget those things.

So that’s things like our walk—that’s how we got started on this conversation, Joe.

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: Because you ring me up or message me, “Daniel, when are we going for a walk?”

Joe: Yep. Yep. Because that time just doesn’t arrive by itself, does it?

Daniel: No. We have to make a conscious decision to make that happen. I have to put it in my diary. I have to make sure I protect that time. And sometimes I ring up and go, “Joe, sorry, I can’t make it. We’ll do it next week or the week after.”

But there are internal coping mechanisms. It’s things like going out in the garden, reading a book, calling a friend, going for a walk to the beach, patting a dog—all of those things.

So I mention that because it’s important not to lose sight of those.

Joe: Yes.

Daniel: And to know that there’s a whole way of responding and supporting.

So, some of those things—those internal, self-directed things that we already have or know—I was speaking to someone once, and they were actually quite an accomplished musician. They played a number of instruments, and they were in a really quite terrible situation.

And I said to them, “You know, the weekend’s coming. Are you going to play one of your instruments?”

And they kind of looked at me, and they’re like, “What are you talking about?”

And I said, “Well, you’ve just been telling me you play this and this and this and this.”

And they said, “Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten about that.”

Of course, they hadn’t forgotten, but they had lost touch with that. They had become disconnected from it.

And I asked them about it, so we sort of, you know, settled on one of the instruments. I said, “Where is it?”

They said, “Oh, it’s in my wardrobe, at the back of the wardrobe, up on the top shelf.”

I said, “Do you reckon when you get home, you could take that out? And maybe on the weekend, you could play that instrument?”

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So I’m not being flippant about this. We all have—everyone has—some sort of way of coping that they’ve forgotten about or lost touch with, and usually, that can be reactivated.

Then there’s the next thing up the pyramid—social contact. And that’s kind of just connecting with people, catching up with friends, inviting a friend for coffee.

And there are two ways of doing that. One way can be, if you like, keeping that privately to yourself. Like, “I want to catch up with my friend. Let’s go see a movie, or let’s go for a coffee, or let’s go for a walk at the beach.”

And I’m just taking—I’m just making use of that social connection to help sustain myself. I don’t, for whatever reason, want to open up to them. I might not need to, but I’m reinvigorating that social connection.

The next level is what we might do if—because we talk about these issues—I would feel quite comfortable. There are lots of people I wouldn’t ring up and say, “Oh my gosh, I’m having an emotional crisis. I don’t think I can cope. Could you come and help me?”

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: Like, I know they would, but I would feel really awkward about that.

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: But I wouldn’t feel awkward calling you up and having that conversation.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Because I know, through our conversations we’ve already had about this topic, I know that you would want to be involved.

Joe: Yes.

Daniel: And I know that I wouldn’t have to start back at zero or one in the conversation. I could start right where we are in the conversation.

So there’s social contact that’s kind of more general, and then there’s the more specific—that trusted friend, the mentor, the person you’ve shared all sorts of troubles with in the past—that sort of connection.

And then there’s the professionals.

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: So it can be a counselor, GP, or a drop-in center. You know, we were around in Frankston last week, and they’ve got a drop-in center through the library, through the council there, where there are some social workers on hand. So people might know about those local resources.

And then there’s more specific—there’s going to the GP and saying, “Actually, I think I need to speak to a mental health professional, mental health social worker, or a psychologist.”

Then the top of that pyramid is actually the acute health services.

And so they’re things like the triple zero emergency line or the local crisis team or the emergency department. And you can go and seek help there. If that’s not the right spot, they’ll tell you. They’ll let you know and redirect you to where the right spot is.

So you don’t have to solve that puzzle yourself. If you’re struggling yourself with trying to help someone, you don’t have to get all the answers right.

But that’s a little bit of it—a bit of a hierarchy. And it shouldn’t be stepwise. You can weave all of those things together.

The other thing you’ve often asked me about is also about those helplines. And I think Headspace and Beyond Blue—they also have some online chat groups.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And some of those are 24/7—24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not all of them are, but some of them are.

And the people there are trained and experienced. If it’s appropriate for them to help you in that moment, they will. And if it needs something more, they’ll actually let you know and help connect you in.

So, you know, we’ve been doing this sort of little bit—almost a role play, not quite a role play—but, you know, Daniel and Joe, and I’m asking you, and you’ve opened up.

So there might be a time where I say, “Joe, I’m really worried about you, and I think we need to call someone straight away.”

Joe: Can we do that?

Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. And if it seems that serious, I need to stay with you until we can make that call, until we can get the professionals involved. Other times, no, it’s fine. It’s like, “Okay, you know, Joe’s telling me he’s on top of it. I know he’s going back home, I know his situation there, there’s going to be someone at home.”

And so we’re getting into the realm now of what we call safety planning.

Joe: Yes.

Daniel: By the way, in case I forget, there’s a really good safety planning app available. It originally comes out of the work of some researchers in the US—Barbara Stanley and Gregory Brown—around US veterans. These are men and women from the armed services returning from conflict zones.

When they were having a crisis, they might be in their town, they might not even know where the local hospital is or what the phone number for the crisis service is. So they realized—even if we just get a piece of paper and write down the phone number for the hospital—when we’re not in a crisis, we can think, we can plan, we can generate.

And we start to lay down some of those ideas, some of those pathways in our neuronal systems. When we’re in crisis, we’re talking about the blinkers coming on. We’re more pessimistic. We can’t be creative. We can’t generate solutions. And if we see outcomes, we usually assume they’ll be negative.

So we put some of that work in when things aren’t so bad into some safety planning. And if people look it up—it’s beyond now. It was auspiced originally from the work of Stanley and Brown, and it was auspiced under Beyond Blue, but they’ve now handed that over to Lifeline, the people behind Lifeline.

So a quick internet search—if you put in “Lifeline Beyond Now safety planning,” it’ll take you there. It’s free, of course. There’s an app you can download for your phone, and that’s probably what I’d recommend. But you can also do a web-based version on the computer.

And it’s got reasonable categories about warning signs, ways of connecting, contact numbers, professional help. But importantly, with safety planning too, again, it’s not about jumping in totally with solutions, but looking at what’s underlying that and looking at meaning or reasons for living.

So when we think about safety planning—well, what are the reasons for living? Now, sometimes people will say there aren’t any, and that’s their experience. But that’s also—remember I said, for every problem, the solution is kind of contained in that. It’s like, “Okay, now we know what we need to work on.”

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: This is what we can think about. This is what we can experiment with.

So safety planning might take time. It might cover an hour. Someone’s disclosed to me that they’re really very much on the verge of making a serious suicide attempt. I need to stay with them, make a call, involve them in that discussion as much as possible. But I also might have to override their wishes.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: If they tell me they’re at imminent risk to themselves or someone else, I’ve actually got a duty and obligation—an ethical and moral obligation—to respond and call for help.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Safety planning that I talked about through the Beyond Now app—that’s a work in progress. And in fact, some other people I work with in the UK—an organization called For Mental Health—they actually advocate that everybody has a safety plan, even if you have no history of suicidal thinking, even if you don’t have a mental health history.

Because, of course, crises don’t arrive at convenient times.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Whenever I talk about this, I see a lot of people in the group or in the workshop nodding. Crises don’t arrive at, like, 10 AM on a sunny Tuesday morning. Of course, sometimes they do. I’m not minimizing people’s—you know, adverse events can happen to people all the time.

But generally, crisis situations—they’re at one o’clock in the morning, on a Saturday or a Sunday or a public holiday.

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: So we need to have had things put in place already, if we can, that we can then activate.

And so, having put some time into the safety planning, we’ve already got some things in mind. So that short-term planning, but also that longer-term piece of work.

And that might involve, “Well, I do want to see a counselor, but it’s hard. It’s hard to find someone.” You know, you put a lot of information out through the works that you do, and through this podcast, about people finding a journey to finding what is helpful therapy or what is useful counseling or support for them.

And so that takes time. So if it takes time, it means we kind of need to get to work now.

And what the people at For Mental Health shared with me—and I love talking about it with other people—those crises, they never—they come from left field. The ones that undo us, you know, usually we can’t see them coming. Or if we see them coming, we don’t get to pick the time.

And so they talk about it being like driving a car and having a safety belt and an airbag.

You know, in Australia, we’ve got compulsory seat belt laws. We do have a lower road toll as a result of that, no matter what anyone thinks of seat belts. But we don’t—I don’t, you know, when I drove over here today, I didn’t think, “Oh, I’ll probably have an accident today, so I’m going to put my seat belt on.”

And yesterday, I didn’t think, “No way I’m having an accident today, so I don’t need it. I won’t wear it.”

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: We just put that safety belt on. If we can, we have a car with an airbag in it because we actually accept that when that crisis is going to arrive, it can arrive really unexpectedly and at the worst possible time.

So I need to have that safety belt already fitted to my car, and I need to put it on.

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: And that’s the same with the safety planning.

So even if it’s this discussion that we’re having, you know, we’re activating ideas in each other’s brains. People listening and watching—they’re kind of getting ideas. So all of that’s feeding into this, “Okay, if I was struggling, or someone I love, or someone I know, or someone I just pass in the street is struggling, what could I actually do?”

So that’s the essence of safety planning. Sometimes it’s just in the next hour or the next day. You know, “Is my friend Joe going to be okay till I meet him tomorrow morning?” And then we make a further plan, or we go down to the hospital, or I’m going to sit with him while he calls his GP and gets an emergency appointment in the next day or two.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: As well as the longer-term safety planning that we might do through things like the Beyond Now app.

Joe: Yeah.

Joe: I love it, Daniel. And I love the metaphor that you used of the seat belt, right? Like, we want to try and do things beforehand so that when the crisis hits, there’s something that helps us—something that helps our friends and loved ones—so we can deal with it better when, you know, those blinkers might be on. When we might be in a space where we don’t see other options, where we might not have immediate access to our own resources.

I was really moved by you bringing up that example of the professional musician. Right? Like how the person was in a state of distress where even something that brought them so much joy, so much passion, was sidelined because they were going through a difficult time.

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: So maybe let’s touch on that. And let’s touch on—because I think self-care, to me, is really all about your connection with those resources that you might already have. You might take them for granted, or you’ve forgotten about them.

Daniel: Exactly.

Joe: Like, let’s just talk about that. What are some of the things about self-care? Especially—and I guess self-care is, in a way, part of that safety plan, right? Because we don’t just become resilient when the crisis happens.

Daniel: Yeah. It’s something we hopefully build up over time. Just like, for example, if we want to be fit, we want to be doing something consistently that helps us. I can’t just decide today I want to be fit, go to the gym tomorrow, do an eight-hour session, and then magically I’ve made the decision, I’ve done the hard work, and now I’m fit.

It takes time to build up. And there are ups and downs, of course, and the road—it’s not a straight pathway.

Joe: Of course.

Daniel: So a lot of those things are things that we’ve been told, things we know, things we tell other people. Like looking after things—trying as much as possible to look after healthy eating, getting enough sleep, getting a reasonable amount of exercise.

And it’s also reaching that point of accepting, “Oh, well, maybe I’ve got to invest something deliberate in looking after myself a little bit so that I can keep going.”

Joe: Yes.

Daniel: So it’s not about perfecting everybody or kind of getting a rule book out. You know, when we’re younger, in our teenage years or twenties, we can get away with not sleeping, maybe using plenty of alcohol or other things, and not having a really clear diet. But over time, those things—they don’t bolster our ability to cope.

Actually, if they’re covered, we can cope with everything a little bit better. It’s not going to solve everything—healthy eating isn’t going to solve everything—but it can help to underpin that.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And it doesn’t mean we have to be like that all the time or every day. But if we’re kind of working towards that, as you say.

Something that really helps people is pets.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Often, you know—and there are dog people and cat people, and then there are other pet people as well—but certainly, pets, and there’s plenty of research and science to back that up. Having a pet, stroking a pet, or looking after a pet—looking after someone else, anyone else—can actually have benefits for us.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And one thing that people—I know lots of people who have dogs. I don’t have a dog. I love dogs, but I don’t have a dog at the moment. But they say, “Oh, I’ve got to get out for a walk because the dog makes me.”

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Because the dog doesn’t care if it’s a public holiday or—well, sometimes some dogs won’t go out if it’s raining—but dogs don’t pay attention to whether you’re sick, or it’s a public holiday, or it’s a bit cold. They want to go out for that walk.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Especially in most urban environments, if you’re walking a dog—you end up going to a park. And what do you run into at the park?

Joe: People with dogs.

Daniel: People with dogs, yeah. And you actually get—I used to know all the dogs’ names, and I didn’t know the owners’ names. They were just, you know, Fido’s dad and Spot’s mum.

But allowing some of those things to be in place—and then there are other more deliberate things, as we’ve referenced. That might be, you know, physical activity. We know there are mind-body benefits for physical activity. Physical activity improves our physical health, and it also improves our mental health.

Not everyone has the same range of opportunities or abilities. So it’s working out what works for you. For some people, it’s training for a marathon or running a marathon. And of course, if I look in the media, there are people who can run seven marathons in a week.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: But it’s not about that. If that’s what works for them, great. But it’s not about that. It’s about, “Will I get out and go for a walk to the park? Will I think about getting a pet? I can’t have a dog, and I like cats, so I have a cat.”

This might sound like really matter-of-fact, everyday stuff. And just because it is doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: They’re not going to jump in and solve the problem on their own. We know that. But just to emphasize, for people who are listening and thinking about applying that for themselves—all of these things actually add up.

Joe: Exactly.

Daniel: They all bring some benefits with them. And even if we’re really struggling, they buy us time to get through to the next day.

Joe: Exactly. And it makes me think about those protective layers in that context.

And I know you also mentioned—I just want to bring up something that I think is really important, that really stood out to me when you were talking about it in the workshop the other day—that when someone often has thoughts about suicide, they can be quite intense, but they’re often short-lasting. I just wanted to quickly touch on that.

Daniel: Yep.

Joe: That’s the case, isn’t it?

Daniel: Yeah. As much as we understand that—and there are people who have studied this, professionals who have worked with people during suicidal crises, and people who have survived a suicide attempt—we know that the thoughts come and go.

Absolutely. And I don’t want anyone hearing this to misconstrue what I’m saying. They can go, but they come and go, and they’re short-lived.

Generally speaking, the most intense suicidal thoughts—those associated with that intensity—it can’t be maintained. It can’t maintain itself.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So they’re generally short-lived. That intense suicidal urge or impulse can be quite short-lived. So it’s about being able to get through that for ourselves or if we’re supporting people.

And this is where I think we were talking about it. It can be about diverting or distracting.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And again, I’m not trivializing it, but if we think—if anyone’s ever been a smoker and tried to stop smoking, or any other kind of addictive behavior—those urges can be very, very strong.

But we actually learn that if we can ride out that urge—

Joe: Yes.

Daniel: The intensity might still be there.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And we know it could come back. But that intense urge—“I have to act now”—that’s actually quite short-lived.

Joe: So, yeah. Exactly. And I think that’s so important to bring up because those protective layers—those self-care routines, if you will—or just an authentic, compassionate conversation with a friend, that can sometimes make all the difference, can’t it?

And sometimes that’s when you can, hopefully, access the things that you love doing—maybe your passions, maybe your hobbies, maybe rediscovering something that was pulled aside. Maybe life just got in the way, and you didn’t get around to playing that sport, or playing that instrument, or doing that thing with a friend.

So those things become really vital, don’t they? Including things like therapy.

Daniel: Well, let’s say—and that’s why, if I can just jump in there, Joe—that’s because, yes, those intense feelings are very short-lived. And it can be about distracting or diverting or just getting through the hour, you know? Getting through tonight, or this day, or this 24 hours.

But also, yeah, as I said, I don’t want to minimize that. Sometimes people experience that recurrently. So, okay, it’s short-lived, but it’s going to be back. And it’s back again, and again, and again—to the point where it feels unrelenting.

And people can become really quite sensitized to that. Even when there is relative peace, they’re actually on edge because they know it’s going to come back, or they fear it’s going to come back.

So that’s indeed where we want to talk about—if that’s the situation—it is important to think about, yeah, where is the scope? And that’s where I think you were going now—where is the scope for deliberately undertaking some sort of therapeutic endeavor as well?

Joe: Exactly. And, you know, exactly right. And I feel like, for me, therapy has been something that—I had a lot of self-labeling around therapy. I was like, “Well, up until several years ago, I thought, if I go into therapy, what is it going to solve? Or, if I go into therapy, does this mean that I’m broken? Or that something is truly wrong with me?”

But also, another thing that was coming up for me was, “What if I do therapy and it doesn’t help? Then I’m really screwed.”

Daniel: Yeah.

Daniel: Like, then that means, so there’s a sense of, like, there’s a lot of barriers that get in the way. Especially for many of us who may have, for example, tried having a conversation with a mental health professional, or a GP, or whoever else in that space.

And maybe that conversation wasn’t helpful, or wasn’t what you kind of expected. And you’re kind of going, “Well, I’m not going to do that now.” Right?

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: Yeah. Now I’m in the worst position, as I said. “Look, I gave it a go, and it didn’t work.”

So I just want to get your thoughts on that as well. Because obviously, you know a lot about that space, being a clinician as well.

What are your thoughts about therapy and how it can help someone who’s perhaps dealing with a history of personal trauma, or traumatic stress, or maybe ongoing stress or stresses that can lead someone towards suicidal thoughts, or just experiencing a huge amount of everyday distress?

Daniel: So I’ll touch on this idea of problem-solving. It might not solve the problems.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: It might not make them go away. You know, I might be in an area where the roads authority or the council wants to knock down my house and build a highway.

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: Guess what? Spoiler—therapy is not going to fix that.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Therapy is not going to save my house, is it?

Joe: Yep.

Daniel: So what can it do? What is the point?

Well, what it can do is help us kind of process some of that in a different way. And I was almost going to say “deeper way.” I was thinking about that—in a deeper, maybe in a deeper way—but I’ll actually stick with “different way.”

So, any situation in life involves perspectives.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: You and I are having this conversation right here, right now, but we’ve got completely different perspectives.

Joe: Mhmm.

Daniel: I’m being really literal about that, Joe.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: You’re sitting over there looking at me.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And I’m sitting over here looking at you.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: It’s the same event going on, but we’ve got very different points of view—very different perspectives.

Joe: Because I know I’m right and you’re wrong.

Daniel: Well, apart from that—and I like to indulge that delusion of yours, you know, that helps me to feel superior.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So we’ve got different perspectives, different points of view. And there are usually numerous points of view.

When we’re struggling with something, we might go to those blinkers again. We can get really stuck. And this is particularly true where fear and trauma are involved.

We process things in a very particular way, and our brains process and store memories in particular ways. And that can seem like the only way to experience or understand something.

Now, that’s a survival response, so it’s not wrong—it’s not unhealthy. But what it can mean is that, over time, any survival response is really important.

You know, if I’m walking across the road and a car’s coming down the road and I’m in the wrong spot, I’ve got to jump.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: I might jump and land and break my leg.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Was it the wrong thing to jump? No. That’s the survival response—that instinct that I need to do.

But it might mean that I end up carrying with me—carrying in my body or carrying in my mind—things that are still impacting me.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: So the purpose of therapy and the aims of therapy are to be able to actually come into contact with that in a way that’s just a little bit safer.

We can talk about reprocessing that, or getting different perspectives on that, or understanding that, but also coming to terms with that.

Now, we know—I talked about my fictional house that’s going to get bulldozed for the highway.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: While that’s approaching, while that’s on the table, that’s really distressing.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And I’m going to be really upset and try and stop it.

When it happens, I’m probably going to be mortified. But I probably will move somewhere else.

And again, I’m not minimizing this. I’m not dismissing the intensity of people’s feelings, but I’m just trying to illustrate the point here.

Eventually, I’ll get another house, and I’ll settle in there. And eventually, hopefully, I’ll look back and think, “Gee, I really liked that house, and I miss it. But you know what? This house is pretty good too.”

Or it might be, “That was the best house ever, and I don’t like this one. But at least I’ve got a roof over my head.”

Or it might be, “Actually, I thought that house was great, but this one’s even better.”

So the process of therapy is about trying to come into contact with things that are unhelpful, or blocked, or stuck, or traumatized, or paralyzed in fear, or in hatred, or in anger—and trying to approach those in a safe enough way to encounter them in a different way than what happened the first time around, or what keeps happening in my mind or in my experience.

And to approach those from a different perspective, get a slightly different understanding about them, and start to come to terms with them.

It’s always talked about—the loss of that house was real and really hurtful. That doesn’t no longer exist. But with time, I can come to get a little bit of separation from that. I’m not denying it happened, but I’m starting to adjust to that. And let’s just have a level of adjustment.

It’s like, you know, I’m much less in a hurry now. I mean, much less of a hurry now than I used to be. But I used to want to drive everywhere, you know, at a hundred kilometers an hour or a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour.

And guess what? I just had to adjust to the fact that, well, it’s not safe.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Firstly, I stopped doing it because I didn’t want to get a fine. I could only think about myself—“I better not do it because I’ll get a fine.”

And over time, I kind of adjusted to the fact that, well, it’s actually also not safe.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And later, it doesn’t really matter, you know? I can just leave ten minutes earlier.

But so again, I’m not making light of people’s past problems or their current difficulties, but just using these as little analogies to illustrate the processes.

So engaging in a therapeutic process helps us to get different perspectives on our problems. It helps us think about them, come into contact with them, and talk about them—often with another person—to help that process.

It doesn’t work for everyone all of the time. It’s not the best thing for everybody. And also, as I think you’ve mentioned, Joe, it’s not just a matter of finding a counselor or finding a psychologist. That might not be the right person, might not be the right fit, at the right time.

Joe: Exactly. Exactly, Daniel.

But I love that it kind of helps you to change perspective and find, I guess, a more helpful perspective on your own experience. It’s not, you know, denying or minimizing your own experience, but finding a more helpful perspective.

Daniel: Well, I guess I’ll jump in on that though too, Joe. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be more helpful—it could just be less unhelpful.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a win as well. And that’s where we don’t—I don’t want to lose track of those as well.

Daniel: Yeah. Because if I set myself up thinking, “I’m going to go to therapy, and I’m going to feel better, and it’s going to help me,” I can come away discouraged.

If I can accept that, well, if I undertake this, I might be just a little less worse off—I’m going to count that. I’m going to count that as a win.

Joe: Yeah. Okay. Gotcha.

Daniel: But also, you and I have been talking about something really important too, Joe. We’ve spoken about, you know, when we talk about therapy, I always think of what we call “talking therapy.” Seeing a counselor or a psychologist—sitting down, talking.

They might be like an old-school psychoanalytic therapist—they might sit behind you when you’re on a bit of a couch. They might sit face-to-face. They might have a desk.

Joe: You like to do that sometimes?

Daniel: Well, there are all sorts of approaches.

But we’ve also talked about—you know, we’ve talked about walking and walking the dog and things like that—but we’ve also talked about that mind-body interplay.

And that when we’re working on trauma, our memories, our trauma events—we carry them in our mind, but we also carry them in our bodies.

And, you know, I wanted to be able to talk with you about something we’ve spoken about before.

Joe: Exactly. And I’m really glad that you brought this up. I mean, first of all, I just want to mention that we’ve got our guide on PowerToBeHappy.com called Healing Space Melbourne that talks about different therapeutic modalities—not that you have to do one or the other.

You know, different therapists can use a toolkit of these approaches. But it helps us to understand what some of the things are that might work for you.

Is it something that might be more suited to someone who’s more creative, for example? Or someone who wants a more embodied approach?

And one of those things that, of course, we’re going to dive into now is Left Right Hook. That’s also in the Healing Space.

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: But it’s something that is near and dear to my heart for many reasons. That’s where my journey into healing from trauma began.

It’s also how we became friends and how we bonded over that experience.

We met through it, right? So let’s talk about it. These days, you’re so involved in Left Right Hook, and we’ve got so many great things coming up.

So first of all, Daniel, tell us about Left Right Hook, why it’s important, but also what are some of the things we’ve got coming up that someone can learn about—and maybe even explore if they want to join in and give it a try?

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: Well, first of all, Left Right Hook—what is it?

Literally, for me, I picture the words. It’s “left” and then it’s “right” as in writing, and “hook.” It’s a deliberate play on words—it’s a deliberate pun referencing boxing.

So, yeah, Left Right Hook was developed by someone by the name of Donna Lyons. She’s actually an associate professor in film and television, but also Donna’s been very open and public in her advocacy and talking about her own experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

Donna actually developed Left Right Hook out of her own experience and her own quest for recovery.

And so Left Right Hook combines a process of expressive writing and trauma-informed boxing.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: There’s a bit more to it than that, and I’ll get to it in a sec, but that’s it in essence—if we say, “What is Left Right Hook?”

And so, that’s been developed into a recovery program for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. And now, for groups that involve women and gender-diverse participants, they’ve kind of opened it up more broadly to people who have experienced other forms of gendered violence.

Now, we’ll get to the guys—to the men—in a moment because that’s a really exciting development I want to talk about.

But yeah, we’re asking that question: What is Left Right Hook?

It’s an eight-week, peer-designed, peer-developed, and peer-led program by survivors of childhood sexual abuse and other forms of gendered violence.

The sessions are about two hours, and they actually spend the first half engaging in some expressive or creative writing. That’s done to a timer. It’s writing to prompts.

It’s designed to trigger—or, if you like, unlock—a bit of unconscious expression. It helps participants get in touch with things that aren’t necessarily part of their conscious, thinking brain.

It’s about getting in touch with thoughts, feelings, and perhaps experiences that are more subconscious or unconscious. And being able to get those out on the page—it’s a way of processing.

It’s a way of bringing trauma or fearful things that are locked in our brains and bodies out into the daylight—onto the page.

And then people are invited to share that within the group because it’s very much a group process.

People don’t have to share their experiences, of course, but they’re invited to.

And then, after a couple of rounds of the writing, there’s a bit of a break.

They actually literally run the program in a gymnasium—often a boxing gym. There’s no one else there. The other gym people aren’t there. It’s a protected time.

Then they actually put on the boxing gloves and start punching the punching bag—maybe doing a bit of work, non-contact work, or work with the pads. And that unlocks a way of expressing trauma, perhaps, or expressing anger, but also connecting and reconnecting with the body.

You know, we’re talking about someone reconnecting with their ability, their art, and their creativity as a musician. Well, particularly if people have experienced trauma or early trauma that’s stored in their body, people can become disconnected from their body or their physical experience.

So the boxing embodies so many things. It’s an opportunity to actually connect and reconnect with the body, but also to ground.

You know, I’ve got a background in martial arts myself, so when I encountered the boxing, there were a lot of similarities there. And all of those modalities—all of those undertakings—involve connecting and grounding.

And this is important for being, literally, safe—safe enough and stable in the world.

So the boxing enables or invites people to connect with their body, experience being whole to a degree, and grounded. But also, yeah, expressing things physically, including anger.

So locating healthy anger and being able to express that and let it out in a safe, consensual, contained kind of environment. And so people can channel their feelings out through their punching, through the physical movement.

It doesn’t have to be boxing. Boxing is what made sense to Donna Lyons in her own recovery journey. I mean, it could be done with walking, or running, or yoga, or ballet. It could be any of those things.

But there is something quite powerful and transformative about connecting with the body and connecting with feelings through the movements, the grounding, and the movements of boxing. That can be quite transformative.

And I know I said to you just recently, but, Joe, when I first heard about Left Right Hook, I thought it was arts—that boxing and writing thing.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: And then I learned to reorder that. I realized, well, it’s actually writing and boxing. And again, that’s not me necessarily just being the word police. But the writing is about getting in contact with those internal, intangible thoughts and feelings.

Joe: Exactly.

Daniel: And what I just want to touch on—something we talked about earlier—is, you know, in Left Right Hook, as the name implies, there’s the writing, and that goes first.

There’s the boxing—that’s activating the body, bringing your mind into it.

But there’s also, of course, the community.

Joe: There’s the third element.

Daniel: The third element.

Joe: I thought it was boxing and writing. And then I learned—I discovered—that it’s writing and boxing. But again, I didn’t quite get it because—

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: —until you explained it to me.

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: That third element.

Daniel: Yeah.

Joe: Exactly. And that’s a sense of community, right?

Especially when you’ve been through traumatic events, or perhaps ongoing trauma in the past, or it might be occurring in the present—or being brought to you in the mind.

It’s so important to find that sense of community.

And that sense of community doesn’t necessarily have to be—you know, it doesn’t have to mean you’re constantly talking about trauma or constantly talking about these events.

Just—I know for me, being around, for example, yourself and other people I’ve met through my own journey—it’s just the fact that you are in the presence of someone who has experienced it and has that lived experience.

That’s something so incredibly powerful because you don’t even have to talk about it.

Daniel: Sometimes people say, “Someone else who gets it.”

Joe: Yeah. Someone who gets it. It’s just—it’s just implied. It’s just felt. It’s just this felt sense that exists.

Daniel: There’s this shared understanding.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: That doesn’t even necessarily require words.

Joe: Which is so incredibly transformative, even on its own.

Daniel: Right?

Joe: Even without the fact that you’re finding a different perspective and bringing your body into it.

But all of those things together become really, really powerful.

And I know there’s, you know, obviously with Left Right Hook, there are different streams, right? You talked about women and gender-diverse survivors.

But now—

Daniel: Well, that’s what—again, full disclosure—you and I, we’re almost frauds right now because we’re talking all about Left Right Hook, and we haven’t done the program yet.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: But yes, so the incredible thing that I’m excited about—that we’re both thrilled about—is that, for the very first time, we’re running a men’s program later, starting in mid-October.

It’ll actually be in Wyndham City. The venue’s in Hoppers Crossing. And it’s the first time the program is being made available to men—to male survivors.

And so you and I are going to be there in our journey of training as facilitators, but we’re also going to be very much taking part in the group.

And so that’s something that people might be interested in finding out about. The recruiting for that is closing very soon, but there are still some spaces available in that program.

We’ll also be doing some research related to that. We hope to show, similarly to the initial research with women and gender-diverse participants, some of the many benefits of that program.

Joe: Yeah. Cool.

Well, let’s solve something. I mean, I’m just like—it’s funny because I almost have to talk about it as if I don’t know about it. But, obviously, I do, and I’m there.

And so—and I’m also excited to be doing this with you.

So, Daniel, tell me—if someone wanted to find out about the men’s pilot in Wyndham, what would they do?

Daniel: Yep. So, get on the search engine. Just type in Left Right Hook. Even if you don’t spell it the right way, a quick little look around, you’ll find it.

They’ve got a really well-designed and really helpful web presence. You can find out about the various programs.

I’ll also take a little detour to the side as well. I mean, in developing the program—Donna Lyons’ background informed it—they actually made a documentary about the first groups of women and gender-diverse participants who went through the program.

And, you know, as you know—it’s not news for you, Joe—but, yeah, they made a feature-length documentary film that premiered at MIFF, the Melbourne International Film Festival, last year. It actually won the Audience Award.

Joe: Yeah.

Daniel: It’s also since won an International Documentary Film Award and is now available, of course, on Netflix.

So if people want to know about the program and get a really first-hand look and feel for it, I really recommend looking at that documentary.

There are screenings around the country from time to time—less so now—but there’s one coming up on the Sunshine Coast in the near future.

The website’s got all of those details. People can put their name down on the mailing list.

But also, if they click on the link for the programs, there’s an expression of interest—or EOI—form. People just put in very basic details: name, postcode, and whether they’re interested in a program for men, for women, or for gender-diverse participants.

And then the amazing staff at Left Right Hook—it’s now built on those first beginnings and, through the documentary, into a charity.

So it’s an organization that’s growing, and they’ve got some really wonderful people behind it—running things like the website.

So, yeah, if people have a little bit of a look on the search engine, find the Left Right Hook website, and then have a look for the programs, they can register an expression of interest.

Joe: Fantastic, Daniel.

Well, thank you so much for being here today, for sharing your insight and perspective on understanding suicide, finding ways to support yourself, finding ways to support others, but also bringing that into a bigger conversation.

How do you care for yourself? How do we care for our health? How do we seek meaningful support?

And that’s how we kind of ended up talking about Left Right Hook, which is, you know, another way to reconnect with yourself, with your own body, reconnect with other survivors, and find that kind of sense of community and belonging.

But overall, I just want to thank you for your presence and just the things that you do in the world.

Daniel: Thank you, Joe. And thanks for the great work and the advocacy you do—and your Trust+1 enterprises—and, yeah, for making this happen.

We wouldn’t be having this conversation if you hadn’t brought all this together and got the two of us in the one spot. So thank you very much. Thanks so much for everything you do and for this opportunity.

Welcome to The Hour of Healing! This week, we’re tackling one of life’s most challenging weights: judgment. Whether it’s the voices of others or the doubts within ourselves, judgment can feel heavy, discouraging, and even paralyzing. But here’s the truth: you’ve already survived so much, and you have the strength to rise above judgment too. In this episode, we’ll explore how to stop taking things personally, set stronger boundaries, and reconnect with your higher self. Through reflection, visualization, and practical tools, we’ll work together to liberate you from the grip of judgment and move toward a life of greater freedom, belonging, and fulfillment. Let’s chart this course together—your healing journey continues here.

Welcome to The Hour of Healing! This week, we’re diving into the heart of relationships—those connections that can lift us up or leave us feeling stuck. Together, we’ll explore how to navigate challenging dynamics with clarity, compassion, and courage. Through visualization, reflection, and practical tools, we’ll uncover the three essential conversations that can transform your relationships: one with yourself, one with a more understanding version of them, and one where you speak your truth. It’s time to let go of frustration, embrace hope, and chart a course toward deeper connection and healing. Let’s move forward, together.

Welcome to The Hour of Healing! This week, we’re setting sail to tackle one of life’s sneakiest challenges: distraction. Often seen as the enemy, distraction is actually a coping mechanism—a way we navigate life’s storms. But what if we could redirect that energy toward something greater? In this episode, we’ll explore how to break through the invisible barriers distraction creates, reconnect with your truth, and channel your focus into living a more fulfilling, present, and limitless life. Through reflection, journaling, and actionable steps, we’ll work together to turn distraction into a tool for healing and growth. The sun is rising—it’s time to move forward, together.

Welcome aboard The Hour of Healing! This is your safe harbor for navigating life’s storms and setting sail toward a limitless life. Each week, we’ll dive deep into healing, reconnecting with your dreams, and stepping into your higher self. In this episode, we’re tackling triggers—those moments that pull us away from the present. But what if triggers could be tools for growth? Together, we’ll explore how to harness them for deeper healing and greater joy. Grab a pen, reflect, and let’s chart a course toward calm, connection, and courage. The sun is rising—it’s time to move forward, together.

If I had five minutes with my younger self when my life was falling apart, the first thing I’d say is – you can heal, you will heal, and you can do it your own way!! And one of the things that I wish I’d done then is drama therapy – it’s a fantastic modality to engage your body, and your creative power in the service of healing and moving.

Drew Bird is an expert in Drama Therapy. Drew is also the Head of the Creative Arts Therapies Program at the University of Melbourne, with an incredible dedication, passion as well as contribution to the field of drama therapy. I think that you’re going to love this conversation!! Drew is speaking from his own professional opinion on drama therapy.

​Full transcript:

Joe Bakhmoutski:             All right. This is Joe Bakhmoutski. Welcome to Power to Be Happy Podcast. I’m incredibly excited today because we had an incredible conversation with Drew Bird. Drew is an expert in Drama Therapy, and Drew is also the head of Creative Arts Therapies program at the University of Melbourne. And Drew is just an exemplary human being. Drew, I’m stoked to have you, welcome to the show, Drew.

Drew Bird:                           Thanks, Joe. That’s quite an opening there to live up to. Quite a welcome. But yeah, I’m very grateful to talk about Drama Therapy and its benefits.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah. Beautiful Drew, listen, from the moment we first spoke, Drew, I just saw that fire in you when we talk about Drama Therapy and just, you light up and you just, you’re so passionate about it. Drew, can you tell us, like, what is it about Drama Therapy that really makes it different from everything else? Like what is it about Drama Therapy that really makes it unique?

Drew Bird:                           Okay, well, that’s a good place to start. So, well, Drama Therapy is a unique form of psychotherapy. And most traditional forms of psychotherapy use the spoken word. So, you know, a lot of reliance on talking, talking therapies. And now Drama Therapy is like a lot of the creative arts therapies like dance therapy, music therapy, and art therapy. But they don’t rely so heavily on speaking alone. But we look at what we might call nonverbal communication. So, you know, nonverbal could be through movement, it could be through image making. It could be through story making.

So in a sense, the emphasis is not solely on talking. It’s about exploring and expressing yourself verbally. So in a sense, being able to move and express oneself, you know, through gestures, it can also be a really helpful way. Not just for someone who might not be, if you like, confident with words, but actually it’s a really good way of being able to access perhaps, experiences that we might have had, like traumatic experiences where we might not even have words for.

So, the nonverbal approach in creative arts therapies lends itself to people of all ages, all types. And it’s a very creative way of exploring and expressing oneself, you know, in a very nonconventional way. So, as I said, it could be through image making, it could be through music. Obviously I’m a drama therapist. We might employ all those ideas. We might employ music, we might employ image making. But mostly we’re employing story and we’re using the body to help us express ourselves in ways that maybe words have limited.

So in a sense that we might not have much repertoire. After all, 96% of our communication is non-verbal. So finding a way to express ourselves through our body helps us potentially to access a bigger part of ourselves that may not always be available when we use words alone.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah. I love that Drew. And I love how, going through expressions through your body, through something that comes up from somewhere deep within us. I feel it’s also something that helps us to, especially when you may have been impacted by trauma. It helps us to find that sense of trust within ourselves. Something that, yeah, right. Like something that you can now go off into the world and be more confident about, you know, sharing just your true thoughts, your true feelings, being more confident in the way that you lived your life, no matter what sort of things have happened to you in the past. And I love that journey. You know, I also remember our first conversation with Drew and I remember holding up this book about Drama Therapy, and I said, how much I love this book. And he said, well, I got a chapter in that. Do you remember Drew?

Drew Bird:                           Yeah, I do. Yeah.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah, you can’t make that up. And I just remember, because I remember this chapter. I had a bookmark in it, and I just remember it just stood out for me. Because that work was so personal. And this is one of those things that I love. I guess the whole mental health therapy space, if you will, is like, it’s very personal. It’s very meaningful. And it’s something that, like you want to carry through and you want to share with the world because it means something to you. Like what is your connection and how did you say you found yourself in this world of Drama Therapy, of creative expression with the focus on healing?

Drew Bird:                           That’s a good question. I mean, how did I find myself in this world? Well, I mean, I’ve always been interested in psychological health. I started my career as a social worker. So I was interested in how we enable people and how do we empower people, you know, to express themselves? And how do people find themselves, you know, when they might be traumatized or limited in some ways through illness or disability. So I’ve always had an interest in, you know, enabling and supporting and helping people find meaning in their life and overcoming oppression.

So that’s a really big feature in my mindset is that there’s a lot of oppressive forces out there that can really limit people. And how do we work with these sorts of political forces that potentially have an impact on how we are and how we live in the world. So that was where I started my journey. But I’d always had an interest in theater and, you know, from a personal experience, I’d found it very engaging, very liberating, being able to be someone else other than me. If you like, give access to parts of myself, my normal presentation of myself might not permit.

So, you know, if I was to play King Lear, you know, from Shakespeare, you know that that’s not a normal everyday role for me. That’s not part of my everyday reality. But within the dramatic reality of playing that role, of playing King Lear, I might be able to access parts of myself that are not normally available within my everyday reality. So we all have these latent parts of ourselves. These parts of ourselves that haven’t been evolved, these parts of ourselves, if you like, looking for the right conditions to become active, to become prominent in our role repertoire.

So I’ll come back to that in a minute. So there’s something about playing someone other than me that gives me access to, if you like, resources that aren’t normally available to me in my everyday role, in my everyday presentation. And it’s also very playful, you know, something about playing a king or imagining myself as a king, imagining myself with that kind of power. And earlier I talked about oppressive forces, you know, and the thing about oppression is that it can stop us having a voice. It can stop us expressing ourselves, you know?

So when I imagine myself as someone who’s more powerful, I feel like I’m trying on a persona. I’m trying to find a way of being where I can express myself, I can play with having power, I can play with being able to change things that maybe in my normal everyday presentation, I might not feel able to change. And that is also a form of oppression. So again, we might have a limited range of roles. So earlier I talked about repertoire, and a healthy person might have a role repertoire of about six or seven different roles, but particularly if we’ve experienced trauma in our lives, we might have a much more limited role capacity.

And the thing is about having a limited role capacity is it might be we are not very flexible. Yeah. The thing about having a range of roles is that we can adapt ourselves to different circumstances and different contexts, but when we’ve got a limited role repertoire, that ability to adapt and be flexible in different contexts, in different environments might be limited. Yeah. So, for example, you might find that someone acts and behaves the same in whatever context or environment that they’re in.

So in a sense, what Drama Therapy does when we play out different roles is, I feel like a very playful way of trying on roles that normally aren’t available to us. Trying out ways of expressing ourselves and widening our range of expression can also, as I said earlier, help to activate those latent parts of ourselves that haven’t been activated, we haven’t found the right conditions that, you know, so within the context of a story or a play, you know, we can try out these new roles that help us to get in touch with these parts of ourselves that we haven’t been able to access previously.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah. I love Drew and I feel like, you know, it really resonates strongly with me personally, because I remember always being drawn to theater. You know, first as a kind of a clueless young man, and then kind of later on, much more recently when, you know, writing for theaters became, you know, a big part of my, I guess, you know, journey towards healing. And I kept coming back to this world, and now that I’m hearing you speak, I think it really is that ability to, you know, find a different role or expand that kind of role repertoire to give rise to parts of yourself that, yeah.

As you say, you may have been, you know, repressed or may have never even been given a chance to kind of show up, and speak and express yourself and kind of show up as part of your true self. So I guess, when we think about the types of revelations and breakthroughs that can come through, you know, Drama Therapy, what sort of changes have you seen people make, like positive changes in their life when they do go through the process of Drama Therapy?

Drew Bird:                           Well, I mean, it is a wide range. I mean, people might feel just more confident, you know, being able to express themselves, you know, not just verbally, but, but within their body. You know, they might notice that they’re more able to articulate themselves with gestures. You know, or they might even be more sensory aware of their experience. You know, they might be able to find more pleasure within the sensory world. Because what happens when the body is traumatized or frozen, is that the body’s capacity to, if you like, tune into the sensory world, might be impaired.

So, in a sense what can happen when somebody starts to develop a more sensory relationship with their experience is that it opens up all sorts of other possibilities for expressing themselves in more nuanced ways. Yeah. So, again, you know, it’s very varied and everyone’s going to respond quite differently, but certainly you might expect to see someone being able to build better relationships, you know, more secure relationships. They might be able to regulate their emotions better.

And the thing about trauma, which is predominantly what I’m focusing on today, is that when the body’s traumatized, it is often frozen. But the thing is, when someone’s experienced trauma, stress or a difficult situation might re-trigger the nervous system that can be very hard to regulate. So sometimes people have been traumatized, you know, they might struggle to regulate their emotions and that can have an impact on their relationships. So being able to regulate your emotions obviously has an impact on the skills that you can learn, the relationships that you can build.

And particularly with children who’ve been traumatized, you know, it’s really important that they can forge secure relationships, secure attachments and obviously that also helps to regulate their emotions as well. But also when they do, the capacity to regulate emotions also has a great impact on one’s capacity to learn, to respond, to be flexible, to be able to develop satisfying relationships that have meaning. Because obviously a healthy relationship is one where someone’s able to respond and reciprocate, but what can happen if someone’s got a limited repertoire that might come from being traumatized, their capacity to respond might be impaired to some extent.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             So vital Drew, and I love how you brought all those different connections together about relationships and the role repertoire, and, you know, making personal meaning from our own experience and through our sensory kind of experience. And I guess it kind of takes that idea of what we touched on earlier about, you know, trust in yourself and your body and your own experience, but also now essentially building trust in other people, and having those relationships that whether they be, you know, friends or at work or romantic, like, those relationships really start to come out and go to a different level.

Drew Bird:                           Yeah. I’m really liking what you’re saying. I think building trusting relationships is so crucial to wellbeing, but to be able to build trusting relationships requires flexibility and capacity to be able to respond capacity to be able to have nuanced responses. And trust can be significantly impaired if one hasn’t got the capacity or, or a limited ability to regulate oneself. You know, it’s that regulating the self that helps to build, as I said earlier, satisfying relationships and satisfying relationships or relationships where we can trust. Yeah. Because it’s in that trust that that helps to build a fulfilling life.

And life is about fulfilling relationships, you know, that’s how we grow, that’s how we regulate ourselves, if you like, by having meaningful relationships and trust. It is so crucial. And of course, mistrust can be the reverse side of that. It can have a terribly detrimental effect on, you know, healthy life, given the importance relationships do have in our capacity to live a fulfilling, enjoyable and engaging life. You know, and this is, you know, it’s my own research area, if I’m being really honest, is that, you know, what impairs on forging a healthy relationship.

And a lot of my more recent research has been around clowning, believe it or not. And the clown’s capacity to be able to forge a relationship with the audience is one of trust. But it’s also the ability to be vulnerable, the ability to surrender. You know, so whilst I’m talking about clowning, these are all qualities that are needed within a healthy relationship. You know, that ability to surrender, to be able to respond. That ability to trust, that ability to be able to co-create meaning, that we, together, this is what we create.

So again, I’m obviously bringing a current interest to my thinking here, but I think my interest in clowning, and the relationship with the clown in the audience has, I think there’s a lot we can learn about the importance of being vulnerable. And the thing is, when you’ve been traumatized, it can be very hard to be vulnerable because the vulnerability potentially can reignite some of those conditioned responses that have come from a traumatic experience. And actually to live a healthy and enjoyable life, vulnerability is really important. It’s part of being human. And, but again, when you have experienced trauma, you know, people’s capacity to be vulnerable, can potentially be impaired.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah. Yeah. I love Drew, and it’s such a beautiful way to describe what is essentially an indicator of success on someone’s personal journey towards healing. How do you know that you’re making progress? How do you know that you’re moving in the right direction? And that is the quality of relationships that you have. Do you have more fulfilling, more meaningful, more relationships where you have that trust built in? Because after all, that’s, yeah, as you said, that’s what makes us happy. That’s what makes us more fulfilling humans. Isn’t it?

Drew Bird:                           Yeah. Exactly. I mean, you just sort of summed up, you know, beautifully, you know, this importance of relationship, and how crucial it is to a satisfying life, a life with meaning and wellbeing, you know, is so crucial. If we have a life of meaning and wellbeing that, you know, relationships are core to that. And building healthy relationships, we need trust. We need to be able to have the capacity to be responsive, the capacity to be vulnerable and the capacity to co-create, you know, these are really important, you know conditions in order for us to build that healthy relationship that that can be missing.

And I think we’re all, you know, we’re talking about everybody. We all benefit by being more vulnerable. And the thing about drama therapy is that you can play or play with being vulnerable. You can play with these differently, try on these different ways of being. And there’s something about rehearsing those ways of being that then makes parts of those ways of being available to you. Because whilst it’s a fictionalized context, we might be playing King Lear, you know, and at the end of King Lear, he’s very vulnerable, isn’t he?

His daughters are abandoning him, you know, and there’s the weather’s coming down, the storms, you know, it’s sort of a metaphor for his life, really. And he’s very, he’s an old man and vulnerable. He’s lost all his status. He’s lost all his power. But in a sense, it’s our capacity to be vulnerable that makes us human. It’s our capacity to recognize that we’re all potentially powerless really to some extent. We’re all going to be dying. We’re all vulnerable to disease as well. And it’s not easy, is it, to try and be present with that, you know? And I think King Lear is a really good illustration of that kind of shift from all that power to, you know, that kind of really feeling completely abandoned in a way.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah. Exactly. And I also kind of sense that, you know, what is really important with, you know, personal progress towards healing and living a kind of a greater and more and happier and fulfilled life, is that we also kind of, we have a greater understanding and appreciation for those shared experiences that we have as humans, right. Shared as an, you know, sharing of our own struggles, of difficulties, of strife that we face sometimes in everyday lives. What you refer to as, you know, oppression as well.

But also I think the things that we have in common in terms of standing our ground and trying to find love and trying to seek connection and those things that we have in common as well as humans. And I think it’s understanding those experiences and layering them on. And sometimes, as you say, doing it in such a creative, expressive way that can help us to reconnect with those parts of ourselves that we share as part of our humanity. Drew, when you kind of think of Drama Therapy and you know, what does that actually look like and feel like when you might be in, say, your first Drama Therapy session? Like, how does it actually work?

Drew Bird:                           Yeah. Well, I guess it depends on if it’s individual or group work. But I think I’ll talk about group work. Because you know, that for me is where drama therapy really creates the really great conditions for building relationships. So a session, we might start with an opening ritual, which is sort of just a way of marking a different kind of reality, if you like, moving into a dramatic reality, which is different to an everyday reality. But we might do some theater games, which again, help us into our bodies.

It helps us to develop that playful spirit, helps us to come into relationship with one another in a very playful way. You know, it could be just a game that involves just passing a ball, even, you know, it could be a game where we pass a zip, zip, zip and then someone might go, bong, and that changes the direction of the zip. So playing theater games is really important. Sometimes they’re called warm up games. But I really try to resist using that kind of language. I think that relegates actually how important games can be in helping us to come into relationship in a very, kind of contained way.

The thing about a game is it’s repeated. Yeah. You know, we learn the pattern of the game, and that can actually help to really build confidence. Oh, you know, I know how this is going. It’s quite predictable. Some predictability can be quite important, particularly when you might be working with people who’ve had traumatic experiences, you know, where you feel like they’ve had experiences of the unpredictable. So building predictability can also help to build confidence. And from that place, people can start to develop their capacity to play.

So, then we might develop a story. In Drama Therapy, we might play with folktales, we might play with fairytales, we might play with myth. Yeah. And the thing about a story is it’s rich with symbolism. So sometimes, you know, you don’t say, I was playing a snail, you know, and I like playing with animals because animals, we don’t play animals, do we? You know, there’s something about an animal that is so far away from being my everyday self, and this is the crux of drama therapy, is it’s creating this distance that couldn’t be further away from my everyday role.

So, something about being a snail that is so different to the way I operate within my everyday reality. But playing a snail, it sort of gives me permission, if you like, to express myself in ways that I wouldn’t normally have, potentially have opportunity. You know, for example, moving slowly, I tend to rush around in my everyday life. I don’t normally have to carry my home on my back. And that’s an interesting metaphor, isn’t it? You know I’ve got this shell and you know, when I’m threatened, I can squeeze back into my shell.

Now, playing with that metaphor and that symbolism, it might be I’m exploring some potentially deep rooted and unconscious parts of myself that I’ve not explored before. So the thing is, when we are playing with symbolism, we don’t always know what we’re playing with, but it can give access to a lot of ourselves that maybe consciousness might limit. Yeah. So playing a snail, playing, you know, I’ve got this big shell on my back at any moment I can retreat into it. You know, that’s very different from my everyday persona.

Or is it, you know? It might not be so different, but there’s something about the safety of playing with a snail. I can sort of play with, oh, you know, this snail, it’s not me. It’s nothing like me, couldn’t be more different to the Drew that I know. And that in itself, it sort of opens up possibilities. There’s things I might be able to do as a snail. There’s things I might be able to express as a snail that in my everyday presentation, I might edit, you know, if you like repress or I might restrict. But playing with the snail and its playful nature, you know, I might be able to go places that my everyday personality or habits might not permit.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah. I love that. I already feel like I want to play with a snail. Yes. No, you’re so right. Because It allows us to kind of unlock that part of ourselves that might be so different that it kind of shifts that whatever, like, I think what you refer to as kind of role repertoire. It might shift so way out then, you know, making a different step or behaving in a different way in life, even just a little bit, it doesn’t feel so weird. Right. Like, it kind of, that’s where we lead to, isn’t it? In a way.

Drew Bird:                           Yeah. I mean, I was just thinking, you know, these tendencies that we all have to limit ourselves, I often catch myself in everyday reality saying, oh, that’s not me. You know, no, I wouldn’t do that. No, that’s not me. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to watch that. That’s not me. You know, you know, we have all these rules about what we permit ourselves to do, these entrenched conditioned habits you know, that we might not even be aware of that limit us. But when I’m playing the snail, I’m not governed by those same rules, yet I’m operating in a dramatic reality where anything is possible.

I haven’t got the limitations that I’ve normally built into my life and my existence. And there’s something about the snail and the world of the snail that, if you like, gives permission to myself to do things I wouldn’t normally do. For example, you know, if I’m frightened, crawling up inside the shell. Just having a sense of the security of that shell. I suspect in my everyday reality, I probably wouldn’t want to be that vulnerable. I might resist acknowledging that I really would like to crawl up and hide from the world. But as a snail, that feels quite permissible because that’s the world of the snail, you know?

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah. Absolutely. And it just makes me reflect on the personal experience. You know, several years ago when I was going through treatment for cancer I remember I had a lot of side effects from chemotherapy treatment, and I couldn’t play or spend as much time with my then 3-year-old son. And I just remember like when he came over one day and just wanted to play with me, and I just felt so like, exhausted from like, just this chemo fatigue, and I couldn’t play with him. And the look of disappointment on his face, it just really brought tears to my eyes.

And I remember like, there was a moment when I said to myself that I want to bring that, you know, the sense of fun into a relationship with my son for however long I have that, you know, if I am alive. And thankfully I am, as you can see, I’m here. But it’s really changed up. I took on that element of fun and just really like made that the dominant way of interacting with him. I’m always playful, I’m always ridiculous. As you can see, right. I’ve always been silly. I’m always kind of and it’s changed my relationship with him, but it also changed my relationship with life.

And I feel like that sense of playfulness and especially given some of the more difficult experiences that I might have had in my own life, it gave me an extra dimension of that sense of aliveness. The sense of just feeling exploratory, and that sense of possibility that is possible about life. And it kind of also takes away that layer of, oh, like, I have to be a professional actor, or this is something that is only reserved for people who are like professionals. Right. So I just want to take a moment to also bring up the fact that Drama Therapy, like anyone can do this, right? It doesn’t mean that you have to have some kind of artistic personality or this type of bent. Right?

Drew Bird:                           Yeah. So that’s a very good point. I mean, I’m very struck by you talking about fun, and I was thinking about fun as being a very all encompassing response to life. You know, when we’re in a fun mode or the play mode, you know, we’re very open and receptive. You know, we’re not closed. And just thinking about Drama Therapy. Yeah. You know, when I first started telling people I was a drama therapist, people assumed it was for actors. Of course. It couldn’t be more different. Really. It is for anyone.

You don’t need to have had any acting or theatrical experience. I guess what you probably need is just maybe just a bit of curiosity, you know, and a receptivity to try it. And the thing about Drama Therapy is yes, the fun can help us into our playfulness. And the thing about play, play is a wonderful resource. You know, one of the characteristics of play is flexibility and malleability, which just kind of comes back to what I was talking about earlier before, that ability to respond in a creative way. Yeah.

And the thing about play is that it helps us to master ourselves. Play is full of discovery. So, again, developing a playful self, you know, some of us, sadly, when we became adults, our playful selves might have got left behind. You know, and the thing about play is it’s a wonderful resource. So as a drama therapist, you know, we talk about drama and story, but actually it’s the play. It’s the playing really and that capacity to step into a playfulness that we might have lost, that we just need to recreate the right conditions for us to engage with.

It’s not that far away. I don’t believe that play is ever buried so deep we can’t reclaim it. But I like this idea that Drama Therapy is about reclaiming the play, reclaiming the playful self, reclaiming that kind of flexible malleable self, that sense of newness that comes from play. That’s what play is. It’s a constant discovery of something new. It’s something really amazing. I love it when I discover a new walk. And that’s very different to reading about a walk in a book, about walks. There’s something about discovering it through my own means, it’s so satisfying, rather than being told what to do.

Yeah. So, you know, obviously I’ve talked about games, you know, in Drama Therapy in different roles, but at the heart of all this, it’s just that play, you know, that willingness to try something on, to experiment, you know, oh, I’m going to experiment being a queen. I’m going to experiment being a snail. I’m going to experiment being a king. You know, what might I discover from playing all those different roles? You know? So yeah, it’s sort of that playful endeavor. And as I said earlier, play is about learning to master the self.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Reclaiming the playful self. Drew, I love that. If somebody wanted to try Drama Therapy, what would they do?

Drew Bird:                           Well, there are drama therapists out there. You know, in Melbourne there’s plenty of drama therapists and creative arts therapists. So sometimes we talk about the arts therapies and arts therapies involving drama therapists and dance therapists. So yeah, there are plenty out there in Melbourne. Obviously they all have different levels of interest in working with different people. But that would be the first port of call. There’s also ANZACATA, which is the Australian and New Zealand and Asia Creative Arts Therapies Association.

So we’ve got several hundred members there. So that’s always an access point for finding art therapists. There’s also PACFA, which is another acronym, psychotherapy counseling, something and something, something But yeah, there’s lots of acronyms. And of course we’ve got the Australian Dance Therapy Association as well. So, you know, these are all opportunities to discover the playful self, discover all those parts of you that you’ve not found words for that are still here, still waiting to be explored, still waiting to be expressed, still waiting to find an outlet to, if you like, breathe. To breathe into that kind of part of you that you’ve not breathed into.

I’m just going to say something about breathing. Because it’s really important, in Drama Therapy, breathing is really important. Not that it’s not important in the other arts therapies, but there’s something about when you play a game and you breathe, you have a much richer and much deeper experience of yourself, and the breath really helps you to connect with your emotions. So there’s something about just having your mouth just slightly open when you’re playing a game that can really help you into that experience, to deepen that experience, to potentially get in touch with those emotions, those parts of ourselves that are just waiting to be touched.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Wow. And I love how you talked about breath and kind of, you know, using breath as almost like a tool. And this is what I want to close on, Drew. I think we all are trying to have a better understanding of the way, you know, sleep and exercise and nutrition can, can help and better our mental health, but what part of self-care and perhaps self nourishment, if I might call it that, which part is not getting enough attention, do you think?

Drew Bird:                           Well, I think I have touched on it, I think this part that perhaps doesn’t get enough attention is probably our bodies, you know and our capacity to be playful in our bodies. I think most people recognize that exercise is good for us, but actually, you know, if I’m thinking about dancing and shaking and rolling. And strutting and you know, just bringing those parts of my body into play that I may have struggled to find a place for. You know, there’s all this part of me that’s longing to be expressed, these parts of me that I just need to bring into a playful relationship.

So I think the body is really key here. You know, it sort of comes back full circle. We started talking about, you know, the traditional talking therapies and how drama therapy wasn’t traditionally a talking therapy, but it’s very much moving and non-verbally working with the body. And the thing is the body doesn’t give up. Some of its, you know, the trauma’s still stored in the body and, you know, through the body we can access it, and bring it into, change our relationship with it, if you like.

So I think for me, that would be the key message to a healthy life. You know, in a sense, I’m potentially advocating, you know, a more creative relationship, a more playful relationship with our body, you know, getting it to move in ways maybe that you didn’t know it could move. You’re finding ways to express things that you might not even know what you’re expressing. But there’s real joy, I think in finding a body that can express itself. So that’s key. I think the other thing I feel is key is creativity, which is really what I’m talking about and is finding a creative and playful act that you can do consistently.

You know, I love writing. I love writing stories. I love to dance, I love to dance. You know, these are the two key things in my life. And there’s something about giving myself over to creativity every day that gives the consent to newness, consent to newness. And the thing is I went to an event recently and I was very struck by the keynote speech. And what they were saying is that if we looked at the world, if we looked outside of ourselves, if we looked at the news, the headlines. Yeah, there’s no, it’s not good news, is it? You know, it’s very sad news.

And it can be really hard sometimes to know where hope is. It can be really hard to see where there is hope in the world. And what I’ve discovered is that when I play through my creativity, I find hope. And it’s important that we don’t lose hope. It’s important that we can find a creative act that helps us to get into touch with hope. Because in a sense, it’s the hope that we need to take responsibility for in our own lives, in order to find hope in the world, because there is no hope in the news. So we, you know, to some extent, I feel we all have a responsibility to find a creative act or creative practice where we can nurture hope and bring light to the world.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Thank you Drew, for bringing us to that hopeful place and for giving this beautiful overview of Drama Therapy, what it means, and expanding our repertoire and reclaiming our playful self. And also sharing what it looks like, what that experience might feel like, and also where to find through perhaps those associations. I’ll put those links in the show notes, but I just want to personally say thank you, Drew, from the bottom of my heart for the work that you do, but also just like the passion and the drive that you bring into this world to help more people reconnect with those parts of themselves that may have been lost or perhaps not even had access to. So thank you for what you do in the world, Drew.

Drew Bird:                           Well, thank you. And, you know, and thanks for this opportunity to share something that’s changed lives, and it’s changed my life too.