Dan Tomasulo || Psychodrama & Learned Hopefulness

Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Dan is also the author of several books, including American Snake Pit and Confessions of a Former Child, a therapist memoir. His latest book is called Learned Hopefulness. In this episode, I talked to Dan about psychodrama and Learned Hopefulness. Interventions have always focused on helping people recover from trauma, but Dan believes we

can do more than that through psychodrama. When we reenact difficult experience is we can process and integrate trauma in a way that facilitates growth. It also teaches us to perceive obstacles differently, which is integral to learning hopefulness. I've been friends with Dan for a while and he's one of the most genuine, kindest and thoughtful humans. I know, I really hope you enjoyed this episode and you weren't a lot from him from the many areas that he's pioneered,

including psychodrama. So I'm really excited to present Dan Tomasula, the legendary Dan Tomasula. Let's jump into this interview. Fabulous. You are a fascinating, fascinating guy, and with a someone like you, it's kind of like tricky to know where to start, but I will start here, and that's I would love to hear about your nineteen eighties improv experience and experience as a stand up comedian. Wow, what a

place to start. Yeah, you know, I was always fascinated with comedy, and I guess my character strength of humor was always needed the tough Not that I really knew character strengths back then, but certainly that. And you know, I was so influenced by Robin William, Steve Martin is certainly Andy Kaufman, and they were breaking new ground. You look at George Carlin and I was a Lenny Bruce freak, and I thought, man, what a way to make a living, right,

What a way to do it? Yeah, and so I went to an open audition, I got a call back, and then got a second call back, and then then they put you on the schedule at the improv. But they have you doing the early crowd first, you know, before everybody gets loosened up, so you have to take time and develop your chops. But I had been a comedy writer before that, just writing jokes and trying to sell them, and you know, selling them to I don't know,

Rodney Dagerfield or Philistiller. These are comics back in the day, you know. But when I finally got on stage, it was like, oh my god. You know, performance of any other kind, if you talk about music, if you talk about really any other performance, it could be three, four or five minutes before you get any feedback from the audience, right because but in comedy it's rarely longer than thirty seconds and usually closer to fifteen. So you're going to

know right away how well you're doing. Well? Were you good? Were you good? I was good enough, let me put it that way. And I did get picked for the twentieth anniversary where they picked four of us to be the next generation of comics, and that was that's still floating around on the internet someplace. But it was good. But I don't think I had the chops for the

lifestyle at that time. You know, I was finishing my PhD. And I was working five nights a week and not getting home till five in the morning, starting classes at eight thirty. And you can only do that when you're young and naive. Yes, yes, no, it's true, or you're old and famous already, yes, exactly. But I think I think you know the next part. You know why. I had a piece of my research published from a dissertation and it was Jerome Singer, who you know, obviously we

share that in common. You know, Avit Yale who said you've got to go see the psychodramatists. And that's when deep love of psychology and performance and humor all came together, because it was like, I don't have to sacrifice and make a choice. I can move in this space. Yes, and he Jerome Singer legend in the study of imagery and psychodrama and daydreaming, the value of daydreaming. Were you a big daydreamer as a child? And oh, absolutely absolutely. I mean, you know, the what I went to sleep

is when I got some rest from daydreaming. That is actually quite hilarious. See that was funny, that was thank you, Thank you very much. Who were some of the comics that you intersected with in the eighties that you personally met. There were a bunch. I mean even even that night, which was just you know, it was Joe Piscopal, Rob Williams showed up. They had. The person I had the

most contact with though, was Andy Kaufman. Andy was there almost every night, and what would happen is around two o'clock in the morning is the end of the shows and the improv. Their model was Hell's Kitchen in the Hollywood. So I was right smack in the middle of Hell's Kitchen and all the comics would come back at two o'clock and from two to four or four thirty or five we'd play to each other. And comics are like

the best in the worst audience. They'll laugh at anything, but if it's really not good, they just as soon. You know, Tossia in the street. Can I tell you a quick Andy Kauflin story? Oh please do he's my brother. Oh man. So one night Andy was regaling us with where he came up with fourign man, you know, now he was Elvis's most favorite impersonator, like Elvis saw him

as his favorite impersonator. So he was talking about the fact that he left the improv one night after doing an Elvis bid, and you know how he ends it with, you know, thank you very much, you know that kind

of thing. Well, he goes outside and about half a block up from the improv, he gets mugged by two guys with knives and he starts talking in this gibberish to them when they pull the knife out and even'st ev d. You know, he was doing the beginning of Foreign Man and they they said a couple of curse words and they walked away. And then as they're walking away, he still had Elvis in his head and he went, thank you very much, so the Elvis and thank you

very much for the transition points. And another night he came in about two thirty in the morning with a bike gang and these were not from Central Casting. This was a bike gang and he walked in and a bunch of scroning comics were there, and he just walked right up on stage with them. I forgot who was on stage at the time, but he walked right up on there and he has his bongo drums and he just starts playing his drums and everybody is scared and laughing at the same time, which is really what he

became known for. Right in the wrest lane and everything else. He came up on stage and he starts doing his bang of drums and he starts singing Whenever I feel afraid, right, whenever I feel afraid, I was at happy to And then he gets to the refrain and no one will suspect, and these guys in chorus all go, I'm afraid. Well we just about you know, lost it. It was so hysterical. He was on stage for less than three minutes. That was a Tuesday night, Saturday Night Live. He opens with

that skit, Oh my god, that's funny. Yeah, he was kind of trying it out. Yep, yep, he needed a little reheard and we were in I Love it. So you knew him personally, well, I wouldn't say he would know me if he saw me in the club, you know that kind of thing. It wasn't like, oh, Danny boy, I'm glad you're here, but they were, you know, but he was from he was not from this world. Man on the Moon was the right right movie about him. Of course, you know, Jim Carrey, when did you get

your dissertation? Like why do you why do you decide to go into psychology or into psychodrama? These are good questions, let's say, so give me a timeline here. Yeah, yeah, So if you look at the late seventies, early eighties, and you look at my transcript from undergraduate, you would see that the only thing I was really good at was psychology, and so I had a's in that and not a's and other things. And then I got a job in the university mail room so that they could

pay for my tuition. I was not on the scholarship, I'll say that, And so I took the courses, I did well in them, and then when I decided to go for the doctorate, it was really the fact that I had then gotten a job working with people with intellectual disabilities, who had special needs, and man, I found that nobody was doing any work with them in the early eighties, nobody, and I thought, oh, wow, I'm interested.

I seemed good at this, or at least not bad at it, and perhaps I could study developmental psychology and you move forward, and so sure enough I did that, and right as I was finishing my dissertation is when

all the comedy stuff was happening. So I was in the city a lot, living New Jersey, but it was in the city a lot, and my cousin who was going with to NYU for film, was running a bar called Kettle of Fish, famous dive bar in New York City, and he had been there forever but was also a heroin addict, and at that time he was in a

METHODO maintenance program. But that was back when they were there was a ring of physicians selling drugs and so what ended up happening, they'd give you a double dose, you'd sell it on the street and you'd sell yours and then you know, get heroin. But he was just chipping. So what happened is we had dinner one night, I went did my comedy thing, then in the morning went

to school. He went home and overdosed and so literally on a dime, I changed from wanting to be a researcher and developmental psychologist and wanting to be a clinician. So that was a really big change. And then you know, I think that also kind of squashed the not squashed, but evolved I should say the comedy thing into psychodrama. When when Jerome Singer pointed me in that direction, it was like somebody stuff I had always heard about, like

things like split mothers and stuff like that. It was like, all of a sudden I understood it because it was being enacted and I felt a true affinity for it. And then took the next thirteen years to get Now, where was this right here in New York? Right here in New York. It was at the time the Center for Sociotherapy. And this is so Marino, the founder of it, who was a contemporary of Frauds, was, I guess in his seventies at that point, and my trainers were like

first generation trained by them. They had taken over the institute. Where did you encounter Jerome Singer? Then? In what context? So? I had written a piece of research on imagery as part of my dissertation, and it was criticizing somebody in his department. I think baseball start off, start off at

the top and work your way down. And the criticism was just based on the fact that my findings were one hundred and eighty degrees different than with this guy found and it had to do with memory and the use of bizarreness to facilitate memory, bizarre imagery like in mnemonics and that kind of stuff. And I had research did at developmental ages, so that the older the child got, the more you could use bizarre imagery in order to facilitate memory. So that's why things like Sesame Street at

the time, which you know Jerome was a consultant for that. Right, there was all the big thing, all the big rage of all we could teach kids and get them to laugh, get them to have these bizarre images and then they would learn. And I was trying to investigate like what age that would work and not work? And basically what I found is that there was a peak at the ages where you could use the imagery to facilitate memory.

And I had found that effect after let's say I don't remember it off the top of my heabit, let's say in three weeks. And this person was finding that there was no effect with the use of the imagery. And when I went there and was invited to do the presentation, he was very generous and very kind. He said, well, I measured it in six weeks, you measured it in three, So it's probably a bell curve. You know, it's like you caught it at the peak, which we didn't see

because we measured it over here. So it was it was really not that I had found anything different, just that there was a peak point where it would facilitate memory, but afterwards it would disintegrate. Well, thanks for that little nerdy explanation of your sorry about that. Our audience was rapt attention. Well that's why I left research read that's exactly that's how we did it. Well, that's wonderful. At what point did you get an introduction to Willbrook? Because

you did. You played a huge role in the deinstitutionalization of Willbrook and your memoir American Snake Pit is incredible. I mean, that story is so touching. Can you tell people a little about that and the experimental group home and what you did there? Sure, Scott, really thank you so much for asking about that. You know, the truth of the matter is I was not passionate about the folks or the job or the information. I did not

start out with, oh, I have a mission. So when I got a job, you know, working in human services and working with the population that was really ignored for the most part, I was stunned that psychologist hadn't spent more time trying to understand what these folks need. And

then I got pulled into it more. It was sort of like, oh, you know, I have whatever skills I have or whatever way of thinking about these things I have, but nobody else was really in that field except for a handful of folks at that time, and so little by little by little I was learning. And then also, you know, because I was trained in psychodrama, so it's

it's you know, it's adding to the verbal therapy. You know, if you look at the studies from the seventies, they would say people with intellectual disabilities wouldn't profit from psychotherapy because it's too verbally loaded and they can't process cognitively, blah blah blah. So I was using psychodrama to kind of show all of that in the places I was working. But then has happened a few times in my academic career, I wasn't getting enough money to pay for the tuition.

I had some scholarship, some this and that, but it was just a rough time financially. And this group called YAI was hiring, and they were hiring for somebody to run an experimental group home, and I basically talked myself into the job because there weren't anybody. There wasn't nobody else doing this, you know, no PhD type psychology students looking to do it. And so I talked myself into the job and then really found that I had bitten off more than I could chew because this was not

people who had slight attention dilemmas. These were people who were polydiagnostic, intellectual, psychiatric, and usually a tertiary disability like blindness, auditory problems, difficulty walking, you know, something in addition to the other things. And then then I had to educate myself very quickly and start to see really what was going on at Wellbrook. So, you know, taking the tours, meeting the people, evaluating them, trying to put together a

home where people could have a chance. Technically at the time in New York, they were just trying to throw money at it and make it go away. So I had a staff of about thirty people for ten residents, right, and then eventually we ended up with a staff of about four people for six residents. Because nobody wanted to work there. People would come in. So the idea was the state was going to throw a lot of money at this, have it fail, and then take the people

back into the institution. This wasn't the first tier of people coming out or the second. This is what they called the third tier, which were the people who had all of these problems, and they were never supposed to make it. It was supposed to show we're going to try, it'll fail, and then we'll bring them back and keep the institutions basically still running. And you know, spoiler alert.

In Americans state fit you find out that quite surprisingly, these people had gifts and abilities that were awakened when the right opportunity came along. But I will say that the right opportunity took some trial and error. Yes, well, it's incredible. It's an incredible story, and I think we both share the attempt to show people that they have potential, even if no one else believes in that. You've really made that point in such an eloquent way over and

over again in your own story. Of course, you know, well, thank you. It's obviously why I resonated so much with that story. So how many years of your life that was a big chunk of your life. Yeah, it still is, by the way. The I'm still a consultant for the place that hired me. Oh wow in nineteen seventy nine. Oh my god. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm still I've a consultant as long as you've been alive. Oh

that's hysterical, but yeah. I Actually the proceeds for American Snake Fit have been donated to YAI, so you know, not that they're going to build a wing with the money from it, but at the very least it was. I felt it was a story that needed to be told, but it wouldn't seem proper. If the proceeds you can go back to them. That makes sense, made, that's good. The trauma, loss, and uncertainty of our world have led many of us to ask life's biggest questions, such as

who are we? What is our highest purpose? And how do we not only live through, but thrive in the wake of tragedy, division, and challenges to a fundamental way of living. To help us all address these questions, process what this unique time in human history has meant for us personally and collectively an emerge hole, I've collaborated with my colleague and dear friend, doctor Jordan FEININGELD, MD to bring you our forthcoming book. It's called Choose Growth, a

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Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound, and all major retailers. If you're in the UK and Commonwealth, you can voter now at bookshop dot org, dot UK. We truly hope this book helps you grow and thrive and become your best self. Now back to the show. Okay, so what then drew you to the fill of positive psychology? I guess that's really fast forwarding quite a bit, or you maybe could fill in some of the missing pieces there, the missing part that and you found Martin Seligman nineteen ninety eight

and eight nineteen ninety eight. Actually I was twenty ten when I really got old jas up about about that. But you know, actually it's a it's you know, your your question gives me pose for thought because what happened through the evolution of working with people from Billerbrook and then in that field and then really finding a way to develop develop the form of group therapy back then called interactive behavioral therapy IBT. Tell us a little bit about about it. What does it do? Well? It was

actually very very simple design. You know, as a real fan because of psychodrama of Yalam's work in group psychotherapy, so I taught group therapy at the grand level for a long time undergraduate level as well. And you know, one of the things I realized is that if you're going to try to use all the research that's out there. To reach people who are different populations, you're going to

need modifications. So if you look at the early studies in the late seventies early eighties on psychotherapy for people with intellectual disabilities, they all failed. But the longest study only went out eight sessions, and so you either had people proficient that group but not proficient with the population, or vice versa. You know, they really knew the population, didn't really know group. And I happened to be in that space where I knew both, but my vehicle was psychodrama.

So we added role playing as a central feature into IBT because this way, if you've got six intellectually disabled people in a group, the whole first layer of group has to be about getting their attention and orientation. So I designed the group format where the first stage required the facilitator to get them together to literally physically orient and look at one another, and then build the agenda. You know, what are we going to talk about? And if it was a work group, this that and the

other thing. And as that started to evolve, what became very clear is that if you added a tiny bit of movement, a little bit of role playing, your action everybody's attention went up. We did studies about, you know, attention span awareness. Recall if I put an empty chair in the middle of a group of six individuals who

have intellectual disability. Now I've got their attention. I haven't said or done anything, but now you can use that empty chair in a way that keeps the core of the group focused, such as, what would you tell a new person coming into this group about the good things this group has to offer. Make believe they're sitting in the chair. Well, the activation and creates something called aac

tunker brings people into that space, you know. And anyway, the longness short of it is as this developed, and there's four or five other major techniques that went with it. But at the end of it, we have what's called an affirmation stage. I didn't know I was a budding positive psychologist back then, where the facilitators were trained to go back through the whole group and recall any of his therapeutic factors and feed it back to the membership.

So if somebody was crying in the group and somebody else handed them a box of tissues, that would be a spontaneous act of algruithm and say Oh, you know, Frank, it looks like you are concerned about Susie because she was crying, and it was a very kind thing of you to bring those tissues. And so we were strengthening the therapeutic factors that Yallam had and he was helpful. He was very helpful in helping me understand them and turning me on to some of the ones that were

beyond what was in the book. And what evolved from there was actually kind of cool because we started to realize that everybody in the groups didn't matter. And we had at that point about two thousand groups around the world and all the social countries with socialized medicine. Everybody picked it up because it was easy to use and easy to teach, but everybody was traumatized. So again not that I had a big interest in it, I just sort of sort of an opening for it and learned

about trauma with this population. You'd come to find out as a group, as I'm sure you're ready now, they're the most traumatized population there is because they lacked the cognitive skill that would keep it. And what we started to find out is that really simple things that we would all sort of get through they would be traumatized by like a sibling leaving for college, or the breakup

of a romantic relationship that was short lived. You know, they would be they would have full blown PTSD symptoms for the criteria at the time. And so I actually was the lead author on the rewriting the criteria for PTSD for that group. So I'm only mentioning that because I think to be a good positive psychologist you probably have to have some experience with trauma. You know, you like that, right, it's the springboard, right, you know, I

should have done this earlier. But what is psychodrama? Like I should have asked you earlierly, what is it? Well, it's a it's a theory and a methodology. Right, So when people say psychodrama, because you hear that all the time, Oh, there was such a psychodrama. So there's a theory about it, and then there's methods about it. So as an example, it preceded and actually facilitated the development of Gustolt. Right, So Gestolt came later, but they borrowed many of the

of the techniques. The idea is that there are scenes that we have in our psyche that house energy, either positive or negative. That need to be explored. Now, psychodrama went the way of most of psychology in that the scenes were used to unlock a block from negative energy. You know, it was about the amelioration of suffering, not really the facilitation of something positive. But in these these enactments, you'd go back and reenact a difficult scene or a

block scene. Right. So the traditional methodology of psychodrama is that if you go back and get to that stuck energy and find ways to release it in real time through the magic of reenactment, that scene reenacted would evoke the original negative emotions. But during that time you have

a chance to do a correction. So I've loved it because if you look at how the history of rational mode therapy and CBT and all these other things, they were corrective, but they were using a correction with language. This was using a somatic correction and something known as embodied cognition, just like how an actor trains for something. We'd go back to the vignette, we'd go back to the trauma, you know, play it out the way it happened,

and then go back and correct it. And the beautiful part about this, going all the way back to Aristotle, was that instead of just a genuine cathsis of the negative energy being purged, psychodrama provided what's called a catharsis of integration. So once the purge emerged, ooh, I like the fact that that part. Once the purge emerged, then the information got put back together in a different way. So the trauma doesn't leave, but it gets reintegrated differently.

And that to me was a fascination. And so a lot of the work I do now positive psychology and psychodrama is like the virtual gratitude visit or the benevolent self, are encounters with aspects of ourselves or the introject of somebody inside of us that activate the positive emotion that's been dormant. And in that activation of the positive is an integration that has a cathartic element to it. People are lifted by it rather than suppressed. It sounds really

promising for lots of things. I mean, where is the field today, Like is it is it very popular? Not in the United States as much as you would want, But I don't work about it that much. Yeah yeah, yeah, not in the United States. I mean, we have the organization, we have all the formal things, but the reason why here psychodramas is secondary credential, so you already have have

to be something else before you can go train for this. Right, So you have psychologists or social workers or LPCs, you know, folks who have a main profession and then psychodrama. But if you go to other countries, like I do some work in Brazil, Oh, my goodness, did is really robust because it's very dynamic. I think right now what's happening is particularly because what's happened with IBT for the people with intellectual disabilities. I've added the character strengths to the

therapeutic factors. So now you have individual character strengths and group therapeutic factors, so thirty eight different things that facilitators are trained to look for. And so what happens you see interactive growth and evolution with the group, but you also see, you know, the resource priming and resource activation,

and this sort of percolates and comes about psychodrama. I think that the lemma, if I can call it a dilemma, it's where psychology was twenty five years ago, in the sense that we're still just trying to deal with the pain and there's only a handful of us who are trying to say, listen, we got these great tools. Why don't we activate the positive emotions so that there's more of a shift in the ratio, a shift in the balance because we have a tool that knows how to

unlock them. And yeah, sure we know how to deal with the pain. But there's a whole class of vignettes and dramas just look at the Probably you would know this better than I, but I think the best possible self is one of the most effective and well researched interventions for optimism, right, and yeah, so what happens if you take the BPS and it acted just talk about it, don't just jot it down. Those are good, but those

are all secondary. Why don't you take a three minute vignette and live it, speak from the future, speak from that role, become that My sense of that would be that that would be an accelerant to the positive feeling, not just you know, another rendition of it. But I think people once they embody it would really evolve. Yeah, did you you should write that paper? I'm working on it. I'm working on it. It's in the new book actually that I'm trying to finish up this month. But that

that's exactly what I'm trying to do. What is your new book about psychodrama? Well, it's very heavily invested in action methods. Cool. It's called the Positivity Effect, and it's basically about using embodied cognition to stimulate and activate positive emotions in a in a more rapid way and in a more sustainable way. Then you might get if it's just a cognition or a written reaction. Cool. Well, I look forward to that one. Yeah, I really love your

most recent book were in Hopefulness. When you got into the field of posit psychology, did you meet a gravitate towards the idea of hope? Was it something that early on gravitate towards or was that a process for you? Yeah? Really powerful questions, Scott, because I hit a low point, you know, and after being a trauma expert, and then all of a sudden you find out, oh wait a minute,

I'm struggling with PTSD. I had had an event happened that set me back and I couldn't shake it, and it bothered me because I have access to a lot of resources at that point in my life, and I thought, just if I can't shake this what are we pedal in here? What do we sell it? You know? And a friend of mine was becoming a positive psychologist at the time, and he was all about Marty Seligman and stuff, and I really was not. I was not a fan. That's changed quite a bit, but you know, I'm an

experiential therapist. So the idea of cognitive therapy at cognit Behavior Therapy was like, yeah, that's okay, but you know, drama was where it's at. But he took me to the first Epic conference, and I'm proud to say I've been at everyone since, and you know, Barbara Faedwudson, Bob be Larone, you know Marty. Of course, I think even

Philzombarter was there talking about the psychology of view. But I was like, oh my god, if even a tenth of this is true, psychology is on the on the on the threshold of something amazing, and I wanted to be part of it, and so I jump jumped on it. Yeah, in your own way, you know, you had your own flavor to it, you brought your own unique experience background. Well you do that with everything you do, you kind of as as do you. My friend the DANM. Spin Fleeva.

Tell people about this idea of learned hopefulness, like tell people about people need it right now. I mean, I think a lot of people are gonna this is the most important part of the interview for them personally. I mean, as much as I'm sure they love hearing about your life and your stories for them personally and helping them get through the last two and a half years, they're really this idea of warn hopefulness. They don't know it yet, so I'd love for you to tell them about your

work there. So I think there were like three important parts with the first was that I felt a shift when I started studying positive psychology just by doing the ridiculous things that they were telling us to do. You know, three things that went right and why gratitude review. It seemed like, oh my god, I'm struggling with you know, all this emotional thing and you want me to think what was good today? That's not going to work. But I did it, and when I felt the change, it

was like, oh my god, there's something to this. This isn't just about bouncing back, it's bouncing forward. And when I felt the shift, that was when I got really excited about crafting, let me learn everything I can about the research and the information blah blah blah blah blah. And then I was very lucky, as perhaps we both were were you know, at some point when I finished the program as a student, what he invited me to join the MAC community as his adjunct, you know, as

you know, as his assistant. And so for the last ten years I've been doing that, he and James. And what that did is it put me in the middle of all the research that was coming in, which was a very I felt a very I felt so honored to be able to kind of hear it firsthand and read it firsthand, because I would have been aware of it,

but marginally and not in the depth. And then somewhere along the line, Marty wrote his memoir called The Hope Circuit, and you know, this was the flip from learned helplessness to hopefulness and that loop in the brain with the DOSOFE nucleus and the prefrontal cortex when they realized that it wasn't learning that made you helpless, it was an evolutionary shutdown inside the brain based on a risk assessment. That this blew my mind because the risk assessment from

the prefrontal cortex was what's going on? And do I have a chance to make something happen? And I remember he invited about forty of us to that lecture. I ran out of the room after he and Steve Meyer, who had written the paper that explained all this, I ran out of the room and just sketched out the book. It was like, because it changes, the paradigm, changes everything. Hope is the only positive emotion that requires negativity or

uncertain to be activated. So none of the other positive emotions really need that, but hope does because if it's not activated by uncertainty of negativity, there's no need for hope. So now we have a really unique emotional experience that's transformational by design. That's the first thing. The second thing is that all the research up to that point was about helplessness learned helplessness, and I realized, oh my goodness, if it's really about risk assessment, then it's about perception.

What It's not what happens that matters, it's what we perceive is happening that matters. So the work now becomes how do you help people challenge their perceptions? And in essence, you know, just a declarative sentence. There's another way to look at this. So when the feces hits the oscillator, as they say, what it's like, Well, there's another way

to look at this. It starts your brain thinking about well, turn the perceptions, because I mean, you know this right, George Banana's work has been about there's not a traumatic event. It's a potentially traumatic event. It's a PTE. The traumatic reaction is not in the event, it's in the reaction

to the event. Okay, if you piggyback on that, if we can feel something different about what's coming at us, if we can see obstacles as challenges, if we can see this as something that I have to move toward, this conflict, not avoid or shy away from, all of a sudden, it marshals a whole different energetic approach to it. And then you know some really functional things like micro goals.

You know, micro goals are I've done a lot of these presentations since the Learned Hopefulness came out, and the biggest takeaway people have are breaking their day up into micro goals. What can you get done in the next twenty minutes, Because it's the recalibration of your goal to something achievable that activates the hope. So when people say, listen, I got twenty minutes, they're going to answer these three emails.

Now you got something bi directional. I feel a little bit of energy, But then I get that goal done. That gold finishing up now feeds me with a little more energy to get the next twenty minutes done and the next. So my day is filled with dozens of twenty minute blocks of get something done. You know, yeah, yeah, do you really practice what you preach? Then oh? Absolutely, absolutely. Wow. You know there are a lot of really neat exercises in your book, And can you give a couple more

for people? Sure? Sure, I think there's a couple that I really enjoy. I have people imagine a lemon, and imagine cutting that lemon in half and smelling lemon, and then picking half of that lemon up and then biting into it. And if I took a while to set that whole thing up, everybody produces saliva and there's all done with imagination. And then if I were right behind that, ask you to imagine somebody you love and who loves you, and do you feel something in your body. And if

you do where and what do you feel? People will point to their heart and they'll say they feel warmth. Now, neither the lemon nor the lover, as my students have pointed out, are there, right. But through your direction of your thought, the imagination of one or the other, you change your biochemistry. And so it's just that would be the first thing I would say is to be to recognize that your thoughts will go in the direction that

you send them. So if you send them on the lemon thing, the rumination thing, the intrusive rumination thing, that's what you're going to get. But if you have deliberate rumination, which is the correction to think about people you love, to think about something positive, what'll start to happen is it'll change your positive You know, your positivity. So if you're in a dark space and you feel the intrusive rumination, imagining somebody you love is one of the quickest ways

to break the downward cycle. At the very least, it'll neutralize it, and on the other side it'll start an upward spiral. The other one that I would say, in addition to the micro goals and using the love, is to practice kindness now that sounds a little California. But to practice kindness like to look for ways to be kind. And I will tell you I thought this was nothing but bull when I first read about it and heard

about it. But picking one day a week to do five acts of kindness, so like you know, like my day is Thursday, right, every Thursday I go out, I look for five acts of kindness, either that I witness or that I take part in or acknowledge it. Right, So like today, Scott, if you drop a book, I can't help you. I mean come back on my Thursday. You gotta be at that, I said, Jeez, Scott, Pinja dropped this out. It doesn't mean you can't be kind

the other days. But those five acts of kindness, recognizing that there is by activating a love you can truncate a downward spiral and reverse it, and using the micro goals are really three very They're simple, very simple. Right, None of these things are rocket science, but they make changes because it changes your perception about the world we're in. If you think I can't wait to do something kind today, today's my dad, I'm going to do something kind. Boom.

I'm thinking about a person who loves me rather than the next damn thing that's going to come along. Right, Yes, and I've got twenty minutes to make something happen. Let me pick a goal, get it done, and feel good about myself. Oh wow, these are great, great tips for

people in your more recent incarnation stage of life. You're at Columbia Teachers College and you are part of a spirituality program there, spiritual psychology, and I'd like you to talk a little about that program and how you you know, can you explain to people how hope and spirituality work together? What a great, great point. I was teaching as an adjunct there for five or six years. I designed and was teaching the positive Psychology course, and they were looking

for an academic director. And I certainly was not a person that would have applied for that. That's not that wouldn't have been something I would have aspired to or thought I could could manage. But doctor Lisa Miller, who runs that program, apparently they were having trouble finding somebody that the whole team and group could agree on, and she just called me up one day and said, listen, I put your name into the into the running here.

And people said, if you'll take it that they would agree to it, and I was like, really, I guess I hadn't aggravated enough folks yet everyone loved. Yeah, well, well we'll see what happens downstream. But at least they didn't, you know, they were ready to throw me out, and so I very you know, I really had to think about it because it's a massive change. You know, I

have had big practice I was teaching. You know, it's like just but man, I said, She's this is an opportunity to put all this stuff into play with the next generation. You know, we get and this program is the first of its kind. You know, it's spirituality, Mind body, and we have a whole institute, a spirit Mind Body Institute, where we have everything from ecology and working on the planet to very deep research. You know doctor Miller's work and her most recent book on the Awakened Brain is

showing all the neural psych correlates of spirituality. And we have just a phenomenal faculty who are we have three main domains, so we have Schools with spirit where we bring a spiritual curriculum back into the public schools, private schools, and we have a faculty that are superb at helping teachers sort of fold in this idea of purpose, meaning and spirituality into the career, kill them, you know, reading stories and developing curriculum that awaken children. And then we

have spiritual entrepreneurship. So you know, we've even invaded the business world. And quite honestly, our stats for graduates starting and maintaining businesses is higher than right now. It's higher than the Columbia Business School, Wharton or Harvard's because there's literally spirit behind it. Now we have a small group, we're not an MBA, but when they start their business, it's got sold to it. There's something about it doing the right thing for the right reason in the right way.

And then we have a wellness track, so if people want to learn how to design webinars or do workshops like your beautiful course that I've recommended to so many people. You know, you've put that together, you put it on the book and the work and the research, and how do you enact that. Well a lot of people have those ideas, but they don't know how to bring them forward.

So we have a whole program than that. And you know, and then of course we have equine therapy, we have animal human bond, and then we have all the classic stuff like on Youngian psychology as well the history. And then of course I teach the positive psychology and the first course offered at a university on the healing power of hope, so we use all the new research there. Tell us more about that. Well, that was very exciting

after the book came out. Actually, doctor Miller again, she's a I just have to take a moment to say, between her and Marty, I feel just very blessed and lucky to have that kind of support in my life. She was like, you know me and you, yeah, out your support system. I thought it was implied, you know, I'm sorry, I said, that's right. I have three major sources of support here and the biggest fans. Isn't that true?

You know? You know, And just to take a minute, Scott, you know a lot of people didn't live who are probably listening to this broadcast, didn't live through the sixties and the revolution of humanism and humanistic psychology, and man, I have to tell you, when you and I started to know one another a bit more and I could see what you were doing, it was like, oh my god, this is this is what we needed back then this

is what you know. There was a lot of good the sixties that we had a shelf for a while to bring back. But I think that as an inspiration, it's like, oh, man, Scott's Scott's doing what. I hope to be able to bring it into the world, something that is valid and updated, and take some of the ideas that really never got a chance to fully flourish and bring them back and make them sing, Oh, you're

doing it, You're doing it. I mean, the intersection between hope and spirituality and putting that on a firm psychological and scientific foundation is a really special niche. Yeah, is there anything you want to say about that connection that you're saying about right now? Yeah? You know, the first

thing is hope, optimism and faith. Right, People interchange those terms all the time, but the truth is from a more scientific perspective is when we talk about hope, it's what it is that you believe you can do to change the future. It's very personal. It's a it's a it's a call to action. It's something that you believe you can do. Whereas optimism, as I'm sure you know, is generic. You know, I feel something good is going

to happen, you know. And as Angela Duckworth says, you know, I think tomorrow is going to be good, is better than I'm going to do something to make tomorrow good. First one is optimism and second one is hope, you know. But faith is when something greater than you is going to take care of the future. So it's it's not that you believe something good is going to happen, or you are going to make something happen. It's that something else is going to take care of that right now.

The best description I ever heard of that came from Catfish Hunter, who was a pitcher, and when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, they had interviews with him where he talked about how much he trained and trained in all the different weathers to keep his arm in good shape, and this and that and the other thing. And what he said is I worked really hard, really hard, so that I had as much control over that ball as I could, but at some point I had to

let it go. And I thought, hmmm, that's it. And isn't that the intersection with hope? We do everything we can to align ourselves with God's grace, with the universe, with whatever the source is, so we do war part and then the universe does its part. Oh well, maybe we should end there, but let me let me just do a quick wrap up here, because your your life is You've done so many seemingly disparate things, but they

all seem very connected to me. When I read your twenty fourteen paper positive Group Psychotherapy Modified for Adults with Intellectual disabilities, up to reading your work on positive Interactive Behavioral Therapy, reading your work on word hopefulness, reading your work about you did deinstitutionalizing certain places. It's it's it's there's there's common What would you describe the common theme? Because it seems obvious to me, But what do you see it as? I think? Hope, there it is. Thank

you very much for good night. Can I add something yeah? Yeah, please, Yes, I also see the common theme as human potential. Mmm. Isn't that the truth? Yeah, that's where we really bond. That's really yeah, real bond. Dan. Thank you so much for being such a bright light in this world and for coming to my podcast. Finally we got we got the great Dan Thomas. You are awesome, Scott, and for your work and podcast man bringing this out into the world.

Just awesome to watch. Awesome. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out.

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