Overloaded: Understanding Neglect Season 4

Show Notes: Episode 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Today’s episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):

Host: Luke Waldo

Experts:

• Annessa Hartman – Oregon State Representative
• Dr. Nadine Burke Harris – ACE Resource Network and Former California Surgeon General 
• Desmond Meade – Florida Rights Restoration Coalition
• Tshaka Barrows – Haywood Burns Institute
• Samantha Mellerson – Haywood Burns Institute
• Dr. Bruce Perry – Child Trauma Academy
• Jessica Moyer – FrameWorks Institute

00:00-02:20 – Luke Waldo - So far this season, we’ve tracked the big picture, the public narratives that shape our culture. We’ve examined the harmful patterns where radical individualism intersects with caregiving that turns collective crises into personal failures and therefore shrink our sense of shared responsibility. But today, we’re going inward.

Today, we turn inward to examine those internal filters, our mental models—the deeply held beliefs that too often divide us and limit our own capacity for change.

Today, we are asking: What happens when those filters limit us? What happens when the stories we tell ourselves keep us from seeing our own power, or the humanity of the person standing right next to us?

This is Episode 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves.

2:20-2:33 – Media Clips

2:33-2:57 - Luke Waldo – But it’s also a deeply personal one. Before we can change the systems that serve families, we often have to rewrite the internal scripts that tell us we can’t. 

2:57-3:46 – Annessa Hartman – “I had no dreams of becoming a politician by any means, and I ran really with the like conviction that every single person deserved to be at all levels of government, that if certain people can run for higher office, Why can't someone who went to culinary school, who was raised by a single mom who we, you know, had to choose between whether or not she was going to pay a bill versus putting food on the table? Like, why can't people with lived experience be in these positions?” 

• The Shift: Voices of Prevention – Annessa Hartman

3:46-5:07 – Luke Waldo - That is the internal narrative work. It is a story we now tell ourselves because it's the dominant narrative that's been told to us over the years. 

[Media Clips]

How high we reach is often determined by the limits of our imagination. Our imagination is built on the stories that we’ve been told and those that have been withheld or dismissed as unattainable and inaccessible. 

It’s why Annessa had to dismantle a story that said "people like me don't belong in power".

5:07-5:55 – Dr. Nadine Burke Harris – “One of the things that you learn when you're a child and you're exposed to huge amounts of trauma and it persists is is that if you raise your voice, it doesn't do anything. And in my adult life, it has been very important for me to rewrite that narrative, to say, you know what? If I speak up, it does make a difference. We can change outcomes for people.”

• The Shift: Voices of Prevention – Dr. Nadine Burke Harris

5:55-7:07 – Luke Waldo – If we believe the story that our voice doesn't matter, we create and maintain systems that are unresponsive and unaccountable to us, but if we rewrite that script, we create openings for change.

In our first episode, Jess Moyer from FrameWorks warned us about the "individualism" mindset, the idea that people end up where they are solely because of their own choices. When we tell ourselves that story about a parent involved in the child welfare system, or a person returning from incarceration, we distance ourselves. We create an "Other."

7:08-7:48 – Desmond Meade – “The United States, before they bombed Hiroshima Nagasaki, they engaged in this narrative campaign that desensitized people as to the humanities of Japanese and actually dehumanized them, right? And and and and in doing so, when they did drop the bomb and killed all these kids and women, they were celebrating in the streets. Think about it, celebrating in the streets. That's the power of the narrative. A narrative actually controls how we react to atrocities.”

[Media Clip]

• The Shift: Voices of Prevention – Desmond Meade

7:48-8:10– Luke Waldo – Narrative controls how we react to atrocities. It controls whether we celebrate suffering or mourn it.

Desmond’s antidote to this dehumanization isn’t a policy paper. It’s a memory. A story from his childhood that challenges harmful narratives that keep us apart. He calls it the "poison pill" to polarization.

8:10-9:45 – Desmond Meade – “And that poison pill, I believe, is this connectivity that we have.”

The story about Amy.

• Let My People Vote – Desmond Meade

9:45-10:15 – Luke Waldo – If only there were a way to challenge the narrative of division, a cure-all, a simple way to reframe the “Other” into someone familiar. How might you do that? And if you and your organization have been nominated for a Nobel Peace prize for changing hearts and minds of millions of people, you likely had to wrestle with that very question.

10:15-10:53 – Desmond Meade – “Whenever I approach somebody, right? First question I ask Do you know anyone who you love who's ever made a mistake? You know what I say? I say anybody who you love or care about who's ever had a felony conviction. See the difference? You see what I just did, right? Do you know anyone who you love who's ever made a mistake? Right? See what I did there, right? Well, number one, love, right? Number two, it's somebody who you love that you're connected to. And it's not those people, right?” 

10:53-11:19 – Luke Waldo – This is narrative change in action. It shifts the mindset from punishment to shared experiences to empathy.

11:19-11:52 – Annessa Hartman – “If someone could just learn to like help their neighbor instead of just immediately judgment and like learn it, like lean in with curiosity rather than immediate judgment, like what could that do for people? And I think that the same thing could be said in an agency lens, right? Like um, if someone is dealing with substance use, not your bad parent, but why? Like, and what can we do to help you instead of judging you in that way?”

11:52-12:28 – Luke Waldo – But what happens when these old stories, stories of judgment, of separation, of hierarchy, get told over and over again that they feel stuck as if poured in concrete? They become the foundations of our systems.

12:28-13:01 - Tshaka Barrows – “…I often ask people to think about, you know, our railroad tracks and the system that moves all of the cargo across this country. People every day are on these railroad tracks. The width of them. Was it based on study? Is it the most advanced width, you know, that we could come up with? Or is it based on the horse and buggy that they used to build that first set of tracks? And are we still limited by that? Absolutely. That's infrastructure. You know, that's what we're trying to think about in terms of human services and this opportunity to reimagine.”

13:01-13:39 – Samantha Mellerson – “I think it's really important to acknowledge when these systems and institutions were created, they were created for certain folks in mind. We had a lot of people in the population that were not considered human at that time, right? … When you look at the even the history, the root of these foundations, these institutions are rooted in systemic inequities, right? Very deliberate in a time of racial hierarchy.”

• The Shift: Voices of Prevention – Tshaka Barrows and Samantha Mellerson

13:39-14:16 – Luke Waldo – If the tracks were built on a narrative of exclusion, we cannot simply "reform" our way to justice. We have to tell a new story about what the tracks are for, what they are capable of and what they are not.

14:16-15:15 – Dr. Bruce Perry – “There are systems, there are mechanisms that want to put you back in equilibrium. So the status quo of a group is very hard to change, and there are lots of mechanisms that keep, maintain the status quo. And usually your view of the world is something that centers you, that involves the system accumulating resources and power and taking it up to you. And so it's the very rare person who is open-minded enough to actually see that I, we need to change something that will take power away from me.”

• The Shift: Voices of Prevention – Dr. Bruce Perry

15:15-15:26 – Luke Waldo – The story of the system, then, is often the story of self-preservation. To change it requires what Tshaka Barrows calls "reimagining." It requires us to believe that a different way is possible.

15:26-15:53 – Tshaka Barrows – “We need examples of humans figuring it out. What does that look like? Why is our creative juices not pouring in that direction?”

15:53-16:23 – Luke Waldo – We need to shine the light on examples of humans figuring it out. We need new stories. Success stories. Stories of connection, shared aspirations, communal resilience, and thriving communities.

16:23-16:53 – Jess Moyer – “We need to kind of take that lens to every decision that we make together. How will this impact children? And kind of think through that question. Because all the decisions we make about society have some impact on children in some way, and in the same way they impact all of us. They're social issues and that they touch all of our lives. So expanding that concept of care to something that's collective, inclusive, and expansive, I think is something that everybody can do.”

16:53-17:14 – Luke Waldo – When we expand the story of care, we change the logic of systems. We move from a story of fixing broken people to a story of building healing environments.

17:14-17:51 – Dr. Nadine Burke Harris – But one of the things that a panelist mentioned is that the opposite of vision is fear, right? And so I can understand if there's fear there, right? But then I think that there's this incredible opportunity for us to come together, even if there is fear and concerns around solutions, so we don't let that fear get in the way of families getting the access to the services that they need.

17:51-18:06 – Luke Waldo – The opposite of vision is fear.

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, who has spent her career showing us the link between trauma and health, is now writing a new story about what that trauma actually means. It’s not just harm. It’s power.

18:06-18:47 - Dr. Nadine Burke Harris – “I'm close to the beginning of writing my second book now, and it's called Pain to Power. And it's like our source of our pain is also the source of our superpowers. The fact that ACEs impact all these different sectors is huge. It's a huge toll on our society. ... But it's also the source of our superpower because it means that everyone's got a stake in this. So when we come together and we do it strategically and we're organized and we each play our different part, we can make transformative change.”

18:47-21:47– Luke Waldo – “The stories we tell ourselves can either keep us trapped in fear, fear of the other, fear of losing power, fear that we don't matter, or they can give us the vision to build something new, to play our part in making transformative change. 

I would like to again thank Prevent Child Abuse America for their partnership and the opportunity to co-host their podcast, The Shift: Voices of Prevention, at their 2025 national conference. If you’d like to hear the full episodes where the many voices and clips that you heard today came from, find The Shift wherever you listen to this podcast or you can find the links above.

Today, we turned inward to examine the stories we tell ourselves and how these personal stories scale up to become the very foundations of our systems - systems built like old railroad tracks that were designed for a different time, for some, not all.

But here's the powerful part: we learned that we are the authors of these narratives. Every time we choose curiosity over judgment, every time we see a parent's struggle in context rather than as their character, and every time we speak up when the system tries to silence us, we are editing the script.

But there's another crucial part of this story: how dominant narratives don't just stay in our heads—they become concrete. They transform into policies. They solidify into practices. They get reinforced until they become the systems that govern our lives.

In our next episode, we're going to meet Prudence Beidler Carr, Director of the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law, who will walk us through a pivotal moment in history when a dominant narrative about "unfit parents" became the foundation for the child welfare system as we know it today. We'll explore how the stories we tell about poverty and parenting got confused, then codified into law, and what that means for families still caught in that system. Because if we want to reimagine harmful systems, we first have to understand how narratives built them in the first place.

Closing Credits

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