223 | Character Psychology Masterclass w/ Dr. Dan Siegel

As writers, we're aiming to create the most believably human characters we can, and one of the best ways to do this is to understand their psychology. Today, we're honored to welcome world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel to share how human beings form belief systems based on traumatic experiences in their developmental years, and what it takes for them to transform (a.k.a., the three-act journey of a feature).

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Meg: Hey everyone, welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Meg LeFauve.

Lorien: And I'm Lorien McKenna. Our listeners know that character psychology is a really big part of what we talk about on the show. As a writer,, I think of my characters as real people and not just puppets who I create in order to tell my story.

Lorien: My goal is to be a conduit for them so that I can tell their story. And for that to happen, I need to really understand, appreciate, and love my characters as complex, complicated, and human.

Meg: I was drawn to storytelling because for me it illuminates what we all go through so that even the person who seems the most unlike us suddenly through a story becomes us, and we can recognize our shared humanity.

Meg: I especially love the transformative journey of films when protagonists must confront a deeply held belief system about the world and themselves, and by doing that express the human condition, which is why Lorien and I are just so thrilled to welcome Dr. Dan Siegel onto the show, whose work complements so much of what we teach on The Screenwriting Life.

Meg: By better understanding why we humans do what we do, we gain insights into our own artistic journey as well as tools to make our writing more authentic and emotional.

Lorien: In addition to being an award winning educator, Dan is the author of five new Dan is the author of five New York Times bestsellers and over 15 other books which have been translated into over 40 languages.

Lorien: His work tends to focus on how attachment experiences influence our emotions, behavior, and autobiographical memory. In short, the stories we tell ourselves. Hi, Dan. Welcome to the show.

Dan: Thanks, Laurie. And thanks, Meg. Great to be here with you. Thanks for having me.

Meg: Thank you so much. I've been a fan of yours for years and years.

Meg: So it's a real treat for me to meet you in person and get to dig around your brain for a while.

Dan: Thank you. It's an honor to be here with you. And thanks for all the work you do. And, bringing stories out into the world is a real important contribution as we face so many challenges. on our planet.

Dan: So storytelling is the best way I think we can bring change into the world.

Meg: I love that. We can't wait to dive in and ask you. So we have so many great, wonderful questions. But first, we are going to do how was our week or what we like to call adventures in screenwriting. We'll let Lorien go first.

Meg: Lorien, how was your week?

Lorien: My week was pretty amazing. Nothing happened. Like I didn't get the phone call that changes my life, but I did have. An interesting change in how I see myself not on purpose. It's not like something I've been working on. I'm probably going to cry on this episode. I'm just giving everyone a heads up because I had a lot of really good meetings this week.

Lorien: And two of them were with people that I've worked with before, and in the past when I've met with them and we're friends and have a professional relationship, they've said Oh, do you want to work on that with me? I always reacted as if it was like they felt sorry for me, or it was like, Oh, you need something and for me being needy has always been the grossest thing you could be.

Lorien: And I know why I'm in therapy, blah, blah, blah, but this time I didn't see it that way. It was more like, oh, they believe in me and they value me and the work I do. And just seeing myself as they see me was a really powerful and new way to see myself. And it was really inspiring. And it reminded me that I'm not alone.

Lorien: In this journey. The industry is really complicated right now, and it's hard. And I am, I'm struggling a little, a lot, it's not as if it's easy to do this. I'm not alone, but I get to see people, see myself, how other people see me, and what a gift it is to get to that point and not think I'm a burden or that I'm draining them with their time.

Lorien: I don't know, it was really powerful for me, and something really different. So that was my week, just a little thing.

Meg: Dan, how was your week?

Dan: My week, which I guess we're in the middle of is pretty fabulous. I've got a couple of really powerful things that happened. My, my life partner, who's my work partner and my wife she went off for a week in the wild to become a mindfulness meditation teacher.

Dan: So that was super exciting to have her leave and. She did that at a time when we've just transferred we have a big online school, and we've just transferred it to a global platform. So we're now kind of free to do some different kind of things where that time we spent building the school over these years is now moved to a different platform so that's fantastic.

Dan: And then I was able to spend time with my Thanks. daughter who's a graduate student in environmental science. And that was really fun to be with her. And then my son had a birthday and he's a musician, Alex Siegel. And so we're going to actually fulfill he, he gave me a birthday present.

Dan: We used to raise tropical fish. So later this week, we're going to actually go to the long beach aquarium and spend the day together, just hanging out with the fish. So it's a great week. And Yeah, there's so many other exciting things going on, but that's a good place to just leave it there.

Dan: Yeah. So it's a good week, even in the face of all the challenges we're having on our planet. You got to find the joy and a way to really be grateful for what we do have.

Meg: I my week, I had the joy and was grateful because I got to go to the Hamptons film festival, which first of all, I've never been to the Hamptons.

Meg: So that was fun to go to a brand new place. And because Inside Out 2 was awarded a recognition for screenplay. It was their award for screenplay this year, so that was fun. Congratulations! That's amazing. Award season begins, and it was a nice, it was a nice send off to begin the season. And Dave Holstein and I had a blast.

Meg: And And then, there's the cold bath of coming back into a project where you actually have to write now, you can go and talk about inside out too, and it's all done. And I have all the answers. Now I have to start a new project and I feel a little bit like a toddler. I don't want to, I don't want to go back into the unknown.

Meg: I don't want to go back and do all that hard stuff. Cause it's so much easier to help other people with their projects, which my husband keeps reminding me, which is we actually do have to write. Which we do, we have to write, and uh, I am such a grumpy guss about it until we find the characters, I'm just grumpy as all get out, which is fear.

Meg: I know it's fear, but it comes out as grumpiness, and my poor husband, who's my writing partner, I think it's a hard seat for him to be in because I'm so grumpy, but and, a project that he and I wrote on and worked on for, I don't know, a year more. Got passed on around town, so we only have one place left to possibly say yes, and that's part of our lives as artists is a mourning process, you, those characters will not come to life in terms of other people seeing them, as a novelist, at least you could even self publish if you wanted to write and there's a chance that other people will see it, but when you do our job, You spend years and all of these creative energy and that never goes anywhere.

Meg: And that is just a part of what we do. There's not a writer, a pro writer on the planet who doesn't have that happen. That's just part of a numbers game of the wheel turning and people are ready for that project or they're not. So. I'm doing that too, which means honestly, I'd rather just be going eating a cookie than doing any of the work that I have to do right now, but we can get into that.

Meg: We're getting into what cookies psychologically mean. I'm only kidding. Okay, so let's just get into

Lorien: Means you're addicted to sugar and coping.

Meg: When you're an artist, everything is somewhat chaotic. You never know. Is it going to work? Is it not going to work? It seems to work today, but tomorrow it's not going to work.

Meg: And then people want to buy it. No, they don't want to buy it. There's never any certainty. And it's part of the creative manifestation process, what's certain is that chocolate chip cookie is going to taste good. So I think that's why I like it myself. It is certainty that there is a reward.

Meg: In the mix of all of the struggle. And yes, there's the reward of going to the Hamptons, but of course, there was a tremendous amount of creative struggle to get there, and not because anything was wrong, but because that's how it works.

Meg: So I can't wait to talk about all of this to you, Dan. I have a, I've given a seminar for many years at Austin. We just put it on our workshop site about how I like to use a character's belief systems. As really to chart their transformative act, meaning if you look at Inside Out 1, I had to convince you of Joy's point of view..

Meg: And I'm going to talk a little bit about the emotional point of view on the world that sadness should not drive and should never touch core memories. And if you really watch it, I'm almost brainwashing you. I'm like, there's montages and there's all kinds of stuff so that you deeply go into Joy's emotional point of view and beliefs about herself, about Riley and what Riley needs as a parent for Joy, her world, and about herself and what she's good at which of course is the thing she has to give up, so that at the end of Act Two, you can have a real awakening, a real consciousness, Where that belief system is what dies, that's what kind of is the death moment so that a new consciousness can come and then they can go into the climax and actually act on it actually now live it, not just talk it but actually live that new belief that new view of themselves in the world.

Meg: I love thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and I know that's a big part of your research and what you do as well. From your point of view, how do the stories we tell ourselves shape our behavior as people? What is your kind of view on it?

Dan: Yeah first of all, thank you for that. I want to just make sure to say that part of my week was you getting another award, Meg, for Inside Out 2. I, in preparation for meeting with the two of you, I watched it with my 95 year old mom.

Meg: Oh my goodness. To

Dan: get a shout out, and she said it was one of the best movies she's ever seen.

Meg: Oh, that's fantastic.

Dan: And she loved going through all the experiences, and especially where you have all those beliefs. built into the sense of self, that then gets put in the back of the mind. She loved going through that whole thing and it really stimulated this great conversation between my mom and me, and thank you for that.

Dan: So you get the Sue Segal best movie ever award. I

Meg: love that so much. That I would love to know in the 95 year old woman's belief systems about herself in the world. That's fascinating.

Dan: Yeah. And being raised by my mom, who is a very different person when I was a kid than she is now, but, really influenced what I ended up doing professionally, which, was not only becoming a physician and then ultimately a psychiatrist and practicing psychotherapy, but becoming an educator.

Dan: And when I was at the university I decided to actually study narrative, the science of storytelling. And so I became a narrative scientist because in the field I was working in, which was the study of parent child relationships, one of the findings was the beliefs that a parent has about how life unfolds and what relationships are all about is the most robust predictor of how they're going to interact with their kids. And what was fascinating about it was that you could work in the process of therapy to help people make sense of their inner lives. So it's a really fascinating science story. But the part of your question that I want to apply from the science view is that human beings are profoundly storytelling creatures.

Dan: And what we do is we basically have experiences that get embedded into memory. That memory then intertwines with our temperament, which we can talk about, and especially just getting to know, Lorien, what you were saying, and Meg, what you were saying. There's some fascinating things about temperament and how it's this underlying motivation that drives forward.

Dan: And then we develop these beliefs based on that inner experience of the temperament we have and the motivations that drive us to meet our needs. And then also the experiences we're having, like attachment relationships. And all that intertwines, if you were doing it in an animated film, as you do, it spins together and you develop these beliefs, which are in scientific terms, we use terms like mental models or schema for how the world operates or how you yourself should be or who you actually are.

Dan: And those beliefs then go along with our emotions and our memories and determine our behaviors. And then when we look at all that stuff and try to make sense of it, the narrative process emerges. So there's a whole brain side of this we could talk about, but basically the human cortex, the highest part of the brain has these language centers that you can put words to experience And we are this, as far as we can tell, unique species that has these elaborate stories we tell that are basically ways of articulating our beliefs.

Dan: And so the stories have woven into not only the, actions that you see, but especially the mental life of the characters of the story. This unfolding of how belief is turned into behavior, right? And you can see that during this election cycle, you see that all the time in the polarization in the United States, you see it all around the planet.

Dan: Some of the wars that are there here on Earth, you see it in the way we treat Earth itself. In so many ways, those expressions in behavior come from the beliefs that are embedded in the stories about who we are.

Meg: Where do those beliefs come from? Where do we get them from? I mean, I think I know, but I want to hear you talk about it.

Dan: Yeah you can get them in a number of places. So, from a mental model point of view, they're summations, they're summaries of repeated experiences. So, let me give you a little example. Let's say I'm a child and I interact with my grandmother and she's really sweet and nice. And then I go see her once, twice, three times, four times.

Dan: Pretty soon I'm going to have a mental model of going to see my grandma is a really great experience. And she's a really nice person. And she sees me as a really good person. And she sees, even when I make mistakes, she says, Oh, don't worry about it. Everybody makes mistakes. And I feel good about myself.

Dan: So the belief I have about my grandmother is that she's a good person. A belief I have in interacting with her is that I'm a good person. And I have this belief, I am good, kind of like Riley has an inside out too. So I am good. Now, if I have other interactions, like when I become an adolescent and I start interacting with my peers and they say, like they did say to me, you're a weirdo, you're not on the sports team or, in my case I did girls dance instead of boys gym, which I thought was pretty cool.

Dan: Cause you know, to be an adolescent boy who likes to be with girls. Oh my God. But all of my, what's that? Cracked the code. I cracked the code. No kidding. Up to 50 adolescent girls with two of us boys. I mean, it was. Pretty sweet. Anyway, but in my peers, the boys that were in my class, they thought I was nuts or had, had all sorts of problems or whatever.

Dan: So if I had internalized their statements, which luckily I didn't do, but if I did do that, I might come out with a belief kind of like Riley does. I'm no good. I'm no good. I'm no good. And so you can get that internally from summations of experiences you have. You can get it externally from things that the world tells you there's A scientific term called a master narrative, but it's basically how the culture tells you what you should believe about yourself, and so these master narratives that we have, like my daughter, for example, when she was in high school, she took advanced math.

Dan: And all the girls on her volleyball team said, you can't do advanced math. She said, why not? And they said to her, literally, girls don't do advanced math. This was recently, about a dozen years ago. And my daughter raised by me and my wife, told her she could do whatever she wants to do. And she loved math.

Dan: So she said this girl does advanced math, and so for her, that master narrative, they tried to shove on her, just didn't get soaked in. But if she had been more vulnerable, if we had told her, oh, you can't do math girls, whatever, and there's studies, I'll give you a little teeny bit of that belief system.

Dan: There's a study that that was repeated and it's really sad, but if you give let's say you give a bunch of people a math test. And if you ask the gender of the person taking the test before the test, and then in the other condition, you ask it after the test is done. The test scores are the same for males, but for females, if you ask the gender before they take the test, they do more poorly on the math test.

Dan: Because the master narrative says, oh, girls don't do math. So if you prime their mind and say, oh, you are a girl, look, you're answering, I'm a female, they do worse on the test. Isn't that sad and scary, right? So that would be an example of how you have this belief. And here's the thing I say about mental models.

Dan: They're what's called a part of implicit memory. So you don't know even that you have them. They're kind of like filters. So in this case, the filter gets activated. Oh my God, that's right. I'm a female and this is a math test. Oh no. I either, I can't do well or I shouldn't do well.

Meg: Yeah, it's the shouldn't that I think is so fascinating because I think a lot of these implicit beliefs are based on your survival instinct, if to survive as a female, you cannot be better than your dad, you cannot be better than your brothers, that you get a lot of kickback from that and it feels to your little brain like true life and death or emotional stakes.

Meg: It becomes part of you and it's really, I talk about this like what is your character's survival instinct belief. Those are would be incredibly hard to change, and yet that would be the most powerful change you could give a character in act two.

Dan: Absolutely. Meg this might be a good place and this brings up Lorien with something you said in the very beginning about your week.

Dan: There are seven fundamental needs we have that might be worth articulating. And, they come in kind of a developmental order and when you see them, I'd love to know how you feel in terms of being writers how it comes out in the characters you choose. But when you do an analysis, basically of the brain's function and the fundamental needs we have, we all started out with kind of an experience of wholeness which some people would call coherence, where things are grounded and holding well together. And it's kind of If you will, a foundational need, everyone needs at some level feel whole, to feel this coherence, to feel this groundedness. So that's one of the seven I'm going to mention. When you're born, all these things are a challenge to you to feel that wholeness, because in the womb you used to feel whole, and I just wrote a book for therapists that'll come out.

Dan: Soon, but it's it's something I wrote, I've been working on it for 20 years with four other colleagues, but it basically it takes this notion that you have this fundamental need for wholeness, but when you're born, three foundational experiences happen that challenge number one, your need for what's called agency.

Dan: An agency is basically where you feel competent, you feel empowered this sense of, I'm getting my fundamental needs met. So that's agency. And these are going to spell out the ABC letters. B is bonding, a need for relational connections, right? And this is where we're accepted by other people, we're seen by other people, we feel connected to other people.

Dan: And the third is certainty. Which is basically, you have prediction, so you can have protection. And you can see with agency, if you don't get it, if it's thwarted, the character in your story would be really irritated, frustrated, or angry, or even become rageful. So in the brain, beneath the cortex, the higher part of the brain, these are beneath, you say sub, so these are subcortical networks.

Dan: This agency network is the one associated with anger. The bonding one, when you're driven to connect with other people, when it's thwarted, you feel separation distress or sadness. And when it's really intense, you feel despair. And so this would be, the character's sadness and inside out.

Dan: Both inside outside at her, and this is that experience of, this feeling of I really need a connection, but I don't have it. And for a baby, of course. You feel like you're going to die. Same thing with the agency one. It's literally like a do or die situation. The third one, certainty, is that we need a sense of prediction to have protection.

Dan: And this is really all about basically trying to make sure you're safe. And this is the fear network. So even if you think about inside out, you've got this beautiful way where you've articulated these three core developmental needs, anger, we've got the character of anger, sadness, and you have fear, right?

Dan: And they were, they continue on an inside out, too. So those three, drive us, I think each of those three is actually trying to get us back to wholeness. So that when you feel safe, you feel whole. When you feel connected, you feel whole. When you feel empowered, you feel whole. And then I was, working on some articulation of this recently at a university at Oxford in England.

Dan: And I came across an incredible article by a scientist, Carol Dweck. Up at Stanford, and she had a very similar model and has a very similar model for personality that we had been working on. So I called her up, and what we were chatting about was how agency and bonding and certainty, when you combine them in different ways, you get three more.

Dan: And these are the three I want to add to our list of four that we have now. We have wholeness, Agency, bonding, certainty, and these spell the abbreviation, et cetera. One is esteem. How do you feel inside of yourself? Do you feel worthy? And how do you feel in terms of the social status you have with others?

Dan: Like when a script is accepted or not, does it make you feel worthy? T is trust. And that happens actually, each of these happen when you combine agency and bonding, you have a need for esteem. When you combine bonding and certainty, you have trust and need for trust. And when you combine the need for certainty and agency, you actually get control.

Dan: And so those three are kind of these consolidated needs when they, when you combine The different two, you get those three more. So when I was teaching about trauma and fundamental character development as a therapist, we don't think about fictional characters. We think about actual people who are our patients, clients, but I feel incredibly honored, to be able to talk to you about this because I mean, a couple of things, one, one of my closest friends is happens to be a director. And he's, I don't know if Dan Adias, but he does television director. He wrote this beautiful book called Directing Great Television Inside TV's New Golden Age. So he and I are always going for walks, talking about this stuff. And so he does it from a director's point of view.

Dan: And that's an interesting book, I think, for screenwriters to do it. But for me as a therapist, what's fascinating to have Dan as my friend, is that we can look at his development on a screen of how the fiction writer, the screenwriter wanted to portray what's going on the characters. And then for me as a therapist, I have the privilege of getting to know someone who is exploring their own unfolding narrative.

Dan: So, coming back to this whole question about belief, I believe that beliefs come from these fundamental seven needs. And Carol Dweck has this great term that relates to, I think, in our model, we call them adaptive strategies that lead to your beliefs, Meg, that she, the term is BEATS, B E A T S, and this would be fun to combine this personality view from temperament, which I'll talk about in a moment, into screenwriting, because what you have in a BEAT is you have B is beliefs, E is emotions, And AT is action tendencies, which is basically the kind of behavior you put out.

Dan: So for Carol Dweck, who's just a beautiful researcher, came up with the whole idea of growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Carol Dweck's Beats view of personality is that these beliefs are fundamental to what distinguishes different personality patterns. And that is completely consistent with this 20 year project that we've just completed on that, on these adaptive strategies, which are based on your narrative, the story of who you are is actually shaped by your own temperament.

Dan: So when you look at different characters, you could simply as a writer, you could be saying, which of these first three are the most fundamental for my character? Agency, bonding and certainty and Carol Dweck also agrees these are the core three motivations and the importance of looking at a motivation is that when it's frustrated, when it's thwarted, you get the emotion and also it leads to what's called goal directed behaviors and it shapes the beliefs that you have.

Dan: So my beliefs, for example, about this body called Dan, given that I'm in the certainty vector, that's my sensitive zone, maybe different from a friend of mine who is in the bonding vector and another person who's in the agency vector as a sensitive place. So when I write a book, which I write, I'm really interested in speaking the truth.

Dan: Trying to have the book get to that truth as best it can. And when the book is published, I hope people will like it. I hope they'll buy it. It'll help me build my retirement fund. But if they don't, oh I did the best I could for the book, but a friend of mine who writes books, if his books are not popular books, he gets very upset because his motivation was for bonding.

Dan: And when he got people's approval when they buy the book, it gives him the feeling of wholeness. I just was driven to try to feel like I got as close to truth as I could in the articulation of the book. So our motivations are very different, even though you would have his book and my book in your hands, they would be motivated in very different ways.

Dan: And so the experience would be very different. So in a character then, my teacher of narrative was a guy named Jerome Bruner and what Jerry would always say about narratives is they always had the landscape of action and the landscape of what Jerry called it, consciousness, which is really, I call it mindsight, the way you see the mind, the inner nature of the mind.

Dan: And so every story then has two things going on, what you're actually seeing with your eyes. And when you dive deeper into the mind to actually see the inner emotions, beliefs, The stories, the thoughts, the perceptions that are driving the outwardly visible behavior.

Lorien: This is, of course, as you're talking about this stuff, I'm thinking about myself, right? And then a character I'm working with and where that center of, the agency bonding or certainty. And then when you talked about esteem, trust, and control, it was You combine like trust is that if bonding and certainty where you're insecure places or you're what'd you say? You're like the point pain point.

Dan: Yeah, you know this sensitive. You know in terms we use sensitive or more Intensely reactive. Yeah, those are temperament terms. Yeah

Lorien: temperament term. So can you talk about temperament and how that equates into all this?

Dan: Yeah. This is so interesting because, I'm trained as an attachment researcher where I studied parent child relationships.

Dan: We found that the narratives people tell are the most robust predictors of how they do with their kids. So, I was just fascinated with stories that way, but someone called me up and said, Hey, you left out temperament. I said, yeah, because attachment is different from temperament. And so this guy named David Daniels, he goes do you want to learn more about temperament?

Dan: So I ended up studying. With David this whole popular personality system called the Enneagram, and it's a nine pointed figure, is what that means, Ennea is nine, gram is figure, and I thought it was woo, I didn't believe in it, I thought it was just out there, wasn't scientific. So this is 20 years ago, but he says come, study this.

Dan: So I went up right near Stanford. There's a retreat center called Valenbrosen and I spent a week with the, with these folks all there to study their Enneagram type, one thing we learned is there's no such thing as a personality type. There's personality patterns with a range of values to the various qualities of that personality pattern.

Dan: But what we did was we tried to figure out what's the neuroscience of the Enneagram. And in doing that, we had to do a deep dive into temperament. And so basically what temperament is and we know this, any of us who have kids, is that you are born with an innate tendency of your nervous system.

Dan: So that two kids in the same family, even identical twins with the same genes, can have very different temperaments. Because the nervous system, if you're leaning left or you're leaning right, whatever, the brain just can grow differently. And when a network's a little more sensitive, let's say on day one, our heart, our proposal is that you have these three fundamental networks in the brain agency, bonding, certainty, let's just say yours happens to be agency.

Dan: You need a sense of embodied empowerment, and that's your sensitive one. Let's say it's just a little bit more sensitive than let's say the bonding network. Your twin. She has, let's say, her bonding network is a little more sensitive. Now you're a week old and the way the brain works is a teeny bit of sensitivity on day one leads to more neural firing because of its sensitivity and maybe it's even more intensely reacting.

Dan: So now it's got a more robust firing and it's firing more often. So now you're a week old and You've now, basically based on that firing, created more wiring. And now with the more intense wiring, at one month of age, more attention is going to this wiring because it's getting more activated. And where attention goes, neural firing flows and neural firing, neural connection grows.

Dan: So attention drives firing, which drives the wiring. And so now you're two months old and now that's really robust. And now you're six months old and someone says, Oh my gosh, the temperament of this kid was a little bit that way. Now it's really big. That's how it happens. So what we're finding, and we've now, we had 50, 000 narratives.

Dan: Actually, we analyzed. from what David had collected. It was quite a robust set of data we had, but the issue about it was all biased in terms of people interested in this Enneagram world. So when Carol Dweck came up by analyzing personality research and knew nothing about the Enneagram, she came up with the same model, pretty much.

Dan: That we came up with. It's like, it's an example of consilience, meaning independent pursuits came up with the same finding. It was an incredibly exciting moment. Just a few weeks ago when I read her paper, I went, Oh my God, this is amazing. So I called her up. We had a big meeting and it was just a beautiful get together.

Dan: So what I can say is that it, I, it looks like it's not just biased through people that happen to be interested in the Enneagram, but here's the deal. You have a temperament you're born with that starts shaping your inner experience. So for someone of the agency group, they're going to have a little more anger.

Dan: Someone of the bonding group is going to have a little more sadness and separation distress. Feeling a panic when you're separated. Someone like me, my baseline is in the certainty pattern. I'm anxiety and fear, right? So now that emotional experience becomes part of your life. So you have what we call adaptive strategies.

Dan: Carol calls them beats. Beliefs, emotions, and action tendencies. That's exactly what we describe as these adaptive strategies. It was just amazing. So you're basically adapting to your own temperament. And then if you, this is our hypothesis, if you have non secure attachment, like the wholeness you might experience with really loving parents who could give you secure attachment, that's exactly what we You'll still have a personality, but it might be more flexible and fluid, be more like a playground.

Dan: But for those of us like myself, who had non secure attachment, what that means is that, I think, that your temperament is actually to be rigidified. And it'll make a more prison like personality that you have. So, you never really, I don't think, get rid of your temperament, which is probably subcortical, but those adaptive strategies are arising as the cortex learns how to deal with both what's going on inside of you, that's your temperament, and then what's going on outside of you, that's your attachment.

Dan: And if those outside experiences weren't so secure, it's just going to intensify how you deal with your own temperament.

Lorien: It's so interesting and I love this conversation because there's been a lot of conversation with writers around what is the character's flaw? And I've been thinking about it differently in terms of what is the character's superpower it's the same, I guess, same set of attachment, or, what did you say, God, you're saying so many amazing things and I'm taking notes, you said the Adaptive

Dan: strategy?

Lorien: Adaptive strategies. Yeah. That can become our superpower, but can also become our super flaw in a way if we're the actions that we're taking in those motivations instead of just here's the bad thing that happened to you in terms of, we talk about flaw or core wound and more about.

Lorien: Here's how you are managing your temperament and if you've got the right attach, or the healthier attachments to like the agency bonding and certainty. It's just a really cool way to change the language in terms of recognizing these things in ourselves and then recognizing them in a character rather than trying to prescribe a certain thing to a character to make it fit the story we're trying to tell.

Dan: Oh my god, Lorien, you're not going to believe this when, if you are up for reading a therapist's book, I wrote it for a therapist, with my four colleagues as co authors you, I think you're going to be blown away because the whole model is exactly what you just said.

Lorien: So I feel like a genius now because I came up with that on my own.

Dan: Good, but there you go It's beautiful. Yay. Yay so so the idea is that each of us has a Vulnerable side and each of us has a strong side the strong side being like the superpower of that particular Temperament and how you're moving forward in life and how you work with a belief in a flexible way And the other is the vulnerable side where your temperament may never change, but it's like the downside of it.

Dan: So, we could even go through, I mean, we either do it now or we could have a book club if you want. But when you go through the nine adaptive strategies

Lorien: Yes, I would like to have a book club, please.

Dan: We could do that. No, seriously, you could do that because you can look at least for me, you can look at different fictions that you watch and each of the characters I see tend to fit into one of these nine we call them PDPs or patterns of developmental pathways.

Dan: So you can call it a pattern in a present moment, but over time you see this pathway a person has, which always has a vulnerable side and a strong side. Okay. For the same pathway. So that makes it, as a writer, I think it would make me super interesting. And the way I constructed the book even though it's for therapists, I think it would actually be really useful for screenwriters.

Dan: I didn't think about this until we're talking about it now, because you'll see the characters fundamental beliefs. summarized in the beginning of each of those individual chapters regarding each of the nine patterns. And then it goes through a deep dive into what the vulnerable side is, and then what the strong side is.

Dan: And then it's not like you ever achieve, Oh, I'm enlightened. I'm always on the strong side. You can have a bad day, you can not eat or be hungry. You could not sleep well and be tired. And then it pulls out you to your vulnerable side. But even in terms of people relating to each other, I mean, when Caroline, my wonderful wife learned this system, it really helped our relationship because you could really see, oh, I see the motivation she now can do beneath my fears, beneath my anxieties. So instead of her getting really frustrated with me, she just gets really compassionate with me, and it's

Meg: Can you give an example without betraying a marriage thing? Give a specific example of something that could have happened so that we can understand what you're saying.

Dan: Oh my god, there's so many examples. Let me think of one that's Oh, this is a good example. I think this is good. Can get into a place we, I was away for a while, came back, we went for a walk. I was telling her everything going on. We just redid the front of our house with these stones and everything that was inspired by one of our neighbors.

Dan: So as we're walking and I'm getting into the details of what I'm saying to her, then she's The neighbor comes by. She says oh, those stones turned out really well. Do you want to see them? And I'm feeling like, Oh my God. How can I have any kind of certainty? I'm in the certainty vector, right?

Dan: That she's going to really care about what I'm saying. And then I start going, I get fear that she doesn't really care about me. And I go start spinning all off this thing and she can see I'm worried. And so she just looks at me and I realized I'm just. going out of control. So I do my own internal work in that example.

Dan: And I just said, don't take yourself so seriously, I say to myself. You have a fear network, this motivation for certainty, and this is just the random appearance of a neighbor, and of course she should invite the neighbor over now, because you hardly, we hardly ever see the neighbor, so I could let my fear go.

Dan: That would be the internal work. Or, she can see if I'm, going shopping or whatever, we're making a dinner and she doesn't buy an organic banana or something or making banana bread. I go nuts, as a physician, I'm all into organic food, blah, blah, blah. And she, instead of her being frustrated with me, she could say, we need to make this banana bread.

Dan: I know you cared about the organic. I did look for it. It wasn't there and we've got to make the banana bread. So I take a deep breath and realize, we could have been in a restaurant buying non organic banana bread. So I gotta let it go. But she, in the past, if she didn't know that was my vector, the certainty vector, which has the vulnerability of becoming fearful she would, it would just, she would have felt really insulted by my, not just accepting the non organic banana, so that kind of.

Meg: I need to buy book just for being in relationships.

Dan: Yeah. That's the next book. I gotta write.

Meg: My husband and I have had the same fight for 30 years and I think if we read the book we might see what's actually going on What's the name of the book because you said the book but you've written so many...

Dan: I know where this One's coming out.

Dan: It's called Personality and Wholeness in Therapy. So it's written for therapists, but it's totally, since therapists don't know anything about this, believe it or not, 99 percent of therapists on this planet, as far as I can tell, don't get any training in how to work with personality in therapy.

Dan: And so they work with personality disorder, but not just everyone has a personality. And so it like blew my mind. I was just doing this initially with my colleagues to figure out the Enneagram. And then as a therapist, I go wait a second. What has anybody taught about personality and temperament, basically, in therapy? And the answer is zero.

Lorien: Do you think that's because they're trying to fix a thing rather than look at what's working before you're trying to make it?

Dan: I think that's exactly it.

Lorien: So I have a question about these different sensitivities. I tend to react one way to my husband. Anger, and then I'll react to a different person in a different way, like with, with Meg, it's bonding, right? So if I feel like I've let her down, I get sad, so like why are we doing that?

Meg: Yeah. How do you find the base one that may be?

Dan: I've been doing surveys lately and it looks like most of us have more than one baseline. Yeah. And they also may be what's called state dependent.

Dan: State dependent just means the condition, the situation you're in, like you're with Meg in one situation, you're with your partner, your spouse, the other situation. So they could be state dependent, but it looks like most of us have, certainly one, maybe two, maybe three baseline. And when you look at the grid that I'll show you when we do our book club it's really fun because, and actually as a screenwriter, it'd be super cool to just, put this grid in front of you as you're doing your, what's it called when you put the little things up on the board

Lorien: Cards, the outline.

Dan: Yeah, the storyboard. storyboard? Yeah and full disclosure, I just got to say, we have a startup that we started, 24 years ago that was trying to develop a new way to tell stories. And so I have two partners. One's a producer, one's a director Casey Silver and Steven Soderbergh.

Dan: And so we've been doing this for years. We're on a long hiatus now, we tried to see if there was a way you could dive into the minds of the characters. So we'd have these storyboards that were just. In a wild way, incredibly intricate, because every character you would dive into their mind and get further down the rabbit hole of that person's mind, their motivations, their emotions, their histories.

Dan: And then we tried to figure out ways in this interactive storytelling way to get into it. So that's a whole nother story. So that's the storyboard that I have in my mind here, but you could absolutely set it up with this grid where you would say, Hey, how is this character bringing out this particular thing with this person?

Dan: So for example, if I'm with someone who's in the agency vector and I'm in the certainty vector, that's pretty much all of my baselines are pretty much in the certainty vector, but. If you do this circle, I'll show you when I draw it out for you. I wonder if I have it here. But what you see is the et cetera, ETC and the A, B, C, they fit together beautifully.

Dan: So A, between A and B, you get esteem between agency and bonding. You get esteem between bonding certainty, you get trust. And the big issue when I'm with someone from the agency vector is control right? Who's in control of getting the bananas, for example? And did you get the right stuff like that?

Dan: Whereas with someone else. So, Lorien, if we figured out where you were and Meg, if we figured out where your baselines generally were, it'd be really interesting to see if in your relationship with Meg, there's something about that. I don't know if any of it feels like it's, whether it's esteem, or whether it's, trust, or whether it's control.

Dan: It should be fascinating to look at that and then look at your partners, your spouses, and see if it comes out different that way. That's just, that's the excitement about this is no one's done this before. So it's a brand new framework, but it looks like I did this in All sorts of places recently.

Dan: And it looks like about 85 to 95 percent of people find one or two baselines that they say, this is my home base. This is really where I live and I have the vulnerabilities and I have the strengths and I really want to work at what we call a growth edge so that my growth edge is to try to move towards these strengths in me, but ultimately to reach out to the strengths of all of the other eight patterns.

Dan: So there's a kind of freedom to get to know all of these ABCs, because what I haven't described to you is that, and I don't know if you've experienced this in your character writing, but we noticed in the tens of thousands of narratives that we're analyzing, some human beings seem to have their energy outward in the world.

Dan: Like they come into a room and their energy is out, their attention is outward. Some characters in a story maybe, but certainly in these narratives are more inward. They walk into a room, you can just tell. And it's not the same as introverted. They can be very social, but their attention is inward.

Dan: And then others of us, and this is my baseline, are shimmering between inward and outward. And it's not that they get combined. But it's more like a, in science we use the word dyad for a tension between two things. So it was called dyadic. So this is a dyadic inward and outward.

Dan: Have you noticed that in your own lives or in the characters you write about that some characters you write as very inward, some outward and some kind of both?

Lorien: Right now I just write stabby characters. They're just real, real mad and they're all out. So we're not curious. We don't, we know where that comes from.

Meg: I haven't thought of that for the characters, though I will, and I think, yes, I think, Joy's definitely out. She's got a lot of energy, and here she comes. Sadness is going to be a bit back and she's going to observe things. But it's always fun when those characters shift, not organically, authentically shift, because nobody's one thing.

Meg: But I think definitely for casting, too, I feel if you get two actors who intuitively play back, You don't get a lot of spark. You need either two playing forward or one playing forward so that you can get some kind of, and they're just people. They just intuitively are either that kind of back personality or they're pushing forward.

Meg: But how does it's funny. Cause I absolutely agree. I'm going to get this book because I'm utterly fascinated now. And I do agree with Lori in that often there's so much wound talk right now in our Business of writing that people mix it up with. lack of agency. They mix it, they mix having a wound or a trauma or something that maybe shifted the base tendency because it was so traumatic or whatever that they, there's this assumption, and I think it's because we all assume life is happening to us versus creating it.

Meg: There's this assumption that therefore that character has no agency. It's very hard to make that character want something. Lorraine and I do a lot of work with female writers, especially Female writers have often, not always, but often have a very hard time, including myself, having a character want something in the plot.

Meg: Not emotionally, they got all the emotional stuff figured out, but getting a female character to want something in the plot, i. e. to start creating their own agency. Again, maybe that's coming from the master belief system that women can't do this because guess what? You'll get burnt at the stake.

Meg: It's just an interesting phenomenon with females specifically.

Dan: Yeah, I think that's a there's so many layers to what you just presented, Meg. Let me try to address each of them to go backwards. Yeah, I think people can take a master narrative and think I'm not supposed to really be as the strong protagonist of my own story.

Dan: And I think when you look at some of the way the academics write about narrative and even the way some of the clinical views of narrative are, they talk about the difference between being a passive, participant in a story that is not one you've written. So you're just, even when you tell a story, you tell it as just a very passive witness.

Dan: Whereas other people are put into what's called the authorial position, where they're the authors now, and they are writing their story. So those are very different things. And then there are people, of course, who don't even have the skills, at least yet, you see this with clients in therapy, to tell their story in a way that helps ultimately with stories, allow us to do is make sense of experience.

Dan: So those are folks who don't even, they're not even able to describe what the story is. They just say, I don't know, I'm just here, but I don't know what you're talking about. So, even though we all have the birthright of being able to become, storytellers and people that make sense of life. Not everyone does that.

Dan: So that's the first thing. So people where the master narrative is, let's say females should not be strong and really, putting themselves out there. And I think we're seeing that in people's beliefs about the election now. That doesn't have to hold sway, but it certainly influences people, especially during adolescence As Riley, sees she's trying to fit in, and fit in with the fire hawks and get into that whole thing and she leaves behind her old friends.

Dan: There's a real drive to belong in adolescence, in, in a book called Brainstorm. I read about the Inside Out view of adolescents. Trying to get the essence of their life there, an emotional spark is E. S., this spells the word essence, social engagement, which you see Riley really trying to do, and you see her emotional spark that morning when the parents come in and puberty has started and she's like, all these intense emotions are happening.

Dan: And is novelty seeking, where you are trying to rev up your dopamine a little bit, because it gets a little center stage in adolescence. So novelty is a big thing kids do during adolescence. And then CE is creative explorations, try to find a creative way of doing stuff.

Dan: So there's a whole drive that, biologically can drive you. And so your story begins unfolding and there's even some amazing research on how If you look at the book by Mary Pfeiffer called Reviving Ophelia, for females, they're really cut off from, feeling empowered to have their essence.

Dan: And she writes about that in that book. Another writer also, she writes about, and I'm, I can't remember this one's name, but her stories basically are how early adolescence, you have these different states that you're in. You want this way with one group of friends, this way with another group of friends, but you're not aware of it.

Dan: The middle of adolescence, you become aware of it. And then later in adolescence, you resolve the conflicts across these different states, which we always have these different, states inside of us. But the deeper issue of like how do these narratives start not only expressing themselves, but revealing the different characters we are, in life.

Dan: I do think does relate to this thing you're asking about wounding and how writers are writing about wounding. So let me say a couple of things about that. I was just teaching at a trauma conference in Oxford, in England, and hanging out with two of my buddies. One is someone who writes a lot about trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, and he was saying that this model in this book that you're going to see, Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, for him presents a really powerful way of seeing how trauma isn't just a one thing.

Dan: That there are likely nine ways, at least. Through these temperament issues that get manifest as adaptive strategies that we call personality, how trauma actually will influence a person and in our view, the way it influences them is it intensifies that temperament and that, that personality pattern that's emerging, that it didn't necessarily create it, but it actually intensifies it.

Dan: So that's that wounded thing. The other person is Dick Schwartz, who writes about internal family systems and the idea that a wounded part of you gets exiled. And then you have these protective parts that he calls managers and firefighters. And Dick also, who was at Oxford, we were all together, was saying that this model really helps see how these different aspects of a person he calls parts would then be filtered through these different vectors, right?

Dan: These are temperaments. So when you go through it in detail, you can see that the beliefs we come out with Then, and this comes back to your earlier question, when you're creating a character where a belief is going to be an organizing structure, and then you say how did the wound affect them?

Dan: So, one of the things I think as a writer to ask yourself is, this wound that you're thinking about putting into the story, when did it occur? And that makes a huge difference in a person's life. So, if it occurred in the hands of an attachment figure early in life, That's called a developmental trauma, and that's, that's one thing that you could look into and, one of my former patients had severe developmental trauma, had therapy with me, recovered from her, in those days we called it multiple personality disorder now we call it dissociative identity disorder, she became a therapist, And then, in the online courses I run, she was in one of the courses when the students in the course were saying, teach us about dissociation, how early trauma fragments the mind, which is really, as a writer, that's what you'd want to be writing about, is dissociation as an outcome of this early developmental trauma.

Dan: When it gets thwarted, when his need for having it, this fundamental sense of empowerment, that's what agency is, a center of initiative, right? When that's thwarted, he's going to have one reaction. And you're going to have, in response to his reaction, you're going to have a very different reaction. And then you go, oh my God, we'll never understand each other, we're so different.

Dan: That's good you're different, what you want to do is not worry about the difference, but try to understand the differences. And that's where I'm so excited about this model, because by saying, listen, it's temperament and Attachment is super important too. So then what I've seen is that some people, like one person I met at a workshop recently, he came up to me and he said, what the, your model just helped me see is that I've been trying to make myself so tight with an agency just to try to bend myself because my, in this case, an abusive parent was so intrusive that I had to push back, but I'm really someone who needs relationships. I think that's who I really am, but I've been hiding it.

Meg: There's so much power, there's so much power in acknowledging, recognizing your own temperament, meaning yes, you might have had this trauma, you might have grown up with a father who was a sadist, you might have this wound which created a flaw, blah, blah, like it's all real, but there's so much power In that, and you were you, it's, I find that so fun,

Dan: What people do. Oh, I'm sorry, Lorien, go ahead.

Lorien: Go ahead. I was going to say, I'm pretty sure. I'm in the agency vector.

Dan: And do you think you're inward, outward or diag?

Lorien: Oh, I'm outward. I'm outward.

Dan: Okay. There you go.

Lorien: I mean, nobody has any doubt about that. And I, but what was interesting is that when you said you're born with you're born with this. That made me feel so much in control and feel so satisfied. Like I have always been this way, right? It just made me feel like I'm in control of my life. So it was super satisfying.

Meg: There's nothing wrong with you. It's not like that's right. This horrible thing happened to you. You had not you, but a person you had these, this parent, that parent, whatever. Therefore now you're this fucked up thing. No, I was always the fucked up thing.

Dan: Oh, I love this. This is so cool because Your feeling of relief about this is my deepest hope, in spending 20 years doing this, is that If you can get down to the bottom line of this stuff, it should be liberating like that.

Dan: Like you say, and especially, and this is what I say, because people say, How do you know it's like this? This is what I say. This is a really super brief story, I came out of my family and Went to college, whatever, and then I went to medical school, and I couldn't stand what was happening to me in medical school, so I dropped out.

Dan: I wrote a whole book about this called Mine, but the bottom line is I dropped out. And in the course of dropping out, I just went on a journey, just to figure out who I am. I thought I'd be a salmon fisherman, or a dancer, or a choreographer, or something. Something with joy, and, So there I was, deciding, okay, I'm not gonna be a salmon fisherman.

Dan: I wasn't that interested in how things appeared, it's a long story, but I've never said this publicly, but my girlfriend at the time ended up becoming a a film producer. And she's the one who made with Jonathan Dayton, this is Valerie Ferris. Valerie, I'm outing you as my girlfriend.

Dan: She made what is the war of the sexes and what else a little bit of sunshine and stuff like that. Yeah. So we used to drive around that yellow VW van, Val and I, so anyway, that's a long story. So I've dropped out of school, right? And right when I'm, this is 1981. So I'm thinking about going back to school, and my Professor of brain science wins the Nobel Prize for discovering that the energy you put into a brain changes its structure.

Dan: This is David Hubel and his colleague Torsten Wiesel. But for the same prize, it's called the Prize in Physiology and Medicine, the same year, 1981, another person was giving the Nobel Prize, Roger Sperry at Caltech in L. A., in Pasadena, for showing that the brain has innate differences. left and right are innately different.

Dan: So what I like to say to people is when I was, and I decided to go back to medical school and everything like that, but when I was basically in training, these two Nobel prizes were given about the brain for exactly what we're talking about. Temperament is innate. Just like the difference of the left and right are innate, but experience is how energy streams through the nervous system shapes the structure of the brain.

Dan: So in attachment terms, we think about the higher part, the cortex learning from experience, and that's important. And we have the subcortical areas that are basically formed at birth that are probably the origin of temperament. And that's like the fuel that's setting the direction for how the cortex needs to respond.

Dan: And the way to remember it is just like temperament. Is the inborn stuff that would be related to what Roger Sperry found, basically, and experience is what David found, David Hubel, and so when you put all this stuff together, it's really useful as a therapist is incredibly useful as a person, I hope as a writer, it's useful to say, okay, what's the temperament of my character?

Dan: What are the attachment experiences that shape them? So that they're learning how to negotiate life based on what they've learned. But part of that learning is how their own temperament is creating the internal emotional world and motivational world of their inner life that other people don't necessarily see.

Dan: But you, as a writer, I think need to really get in touch with that. What's the motivation? And related to motivation is emotion.

Meg: Yes, because whatever is internal has created the external. It's why we believe the world is the way it is. It's why we're starting an island that's very scary instead of one that's beautiful, because to him, it's scary.

Lorien: I love this because it really reinforces the idea that as writers, as artists, we have to be self aware. We have to understand What our coping mechanisms are, where our pain points are, where are all the attachment stuff, all the beautiful ways you had of saying the stuff that I'm garbling all your great language.

Lorien: Because it can help us diagnose where our blind spots are in our writing. So as I'm listening to you talk, thinking, Oh, I don't have any of my needs met as a kid. I'm all of them, but then really Oh no, I do think it's agency. I do have the other stuff as well, but. I think it's agency and I've written a feature about a 16 year old girl and I love it.

Lorien: It was very, I read Space on a Book and I was like, yes. And in the feature, she's very angry. The two pieces of feedback I've gotten are. Your plot gets convoluted, meaning she wants two different things, but it's not quite clear where it ends, and that it's not emotionally earned. And as I'm listening, I'm realizing, oh, she doesn't go into the vulnerable side.

Lorien: And the agency, she's so desperate for agency that I'm not Actually showing her take agency, because she's afraid to pick, because I'm afraid to pick. So, it's this, oh, how can I, my 16 year old self, it's oh, I have to write this like my 16 year old self, instead of a character in a movie, so I have to sort of get out of my own way.

Lorien: And what a gift it is because now I'm seeing her more fully and that I can write those scenes where she does get into that vulnerable space because right now she's just carrying around this anger and it's funny for a while until it's not until she turns into kind of an abusive bully right which to me is very satisfying to write but it's too many scenes of it which I've somebody mentioned that to me as well so I have to be willing to go to that emotional place For her sake, so that I can more appropriately and more fully tell her story.

Lorien: And so, that's with therapy and listening to this conversation and, but it's just so important for us as writers to be as self aware as possible, and to understand where those blind spots are in our own personal life, and how it's manifesting in our scripts. Sometimes I joke about I'm writing stabby characters because agency is my issue and it manifests as anger, and like my, some of my early drafts are just angry women stomping around doing angry things, then I have to pull back and like, where's the vulnerability, which allows me to access plot, which allows me to access what they want, that they're going after something specific rather than just stomping around being mad. It's very satisfying to write. Anyway.

Dan: Yeah.

Lorien: Meg, you were going to say something.

Meg: I was going to say, and I think there are some writers and creatives who they're such dreamers that, that they're all they're, they really don't use their intellect.

Meg: They're just raw dreaming beings. And I think that's good too, because if you're really truly in the river, it will come up, that vulnerability will be there. It's when our intellect, in a weird way, only keeps us kind of in one part of the river. So, however you are as a writer, it's about allowing that depth or what we call lava or the vulnerability to actually be part of it too.

Meg: This has been such an amazing talk. We could talk for like probably four more hours. Maybe we have to have you back for our book club. We'll have everybody on the podcast, all of our listeners read the book, and then we're coming back to ask a lot of questions.

Dan: Great. That would be so much fun. And it's a real pleasure to be here with the two of you. And thank you so much for having me. It's really been fun.

Lorien: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Meg: Yeah, it's for me, it's just been so exciting because I've been such a fan for so long. So thanks for joining us today.

Dan: So Sally then says, to me on text because we're colleagues now. She writes, I'll come on and do an interview with you. And so she did, and we did the course on disorganized attachment and dissociation, and she did the six hour interview with me. And from that interview, she decided to write a whole book, which is now going to be published next year.

Dan: Called a brilliant idea of how to, how do you, a brilliant strategy? How do you actually take the, Overwhelming experiences, the wounds and turn them into a way of surviving and sometimes it's fragmenting the mind and then she shows how recovery can happen. But if the trauma is later on something happening during kids adolescence.

Dan: and their attachment security is there earlier, then that's a whole different way of writing that character because the deep structure of the mind won't have been as impacted along these nine patterns for sure. It wouldn't be impacted that way. And that can still shape a person, especially, if it's, I mean, I remember thinking about adolescence, I'm thinking about one time I was in my early twenties and a friend of mine who was really close with in our early teens.

Dan: We lost touch with each other. We got back together. I said, what happened to you? And he said, I dated my first girlfriend. I said, oh, great. He goes, not so great. I said what happened? And he goes, Oh, we tried to make love and I guess I didn't know what I was doing. And she said, you're so bad.

Dan: She starts yelling at me. And he goes, I had to leave the United States after high school because of that and try to become a monk. I said, what?

Jeff: It

Dan: was, it was so traumatizing for me. I didn't want to face dating or being in America. And so I thought I would just become a meditator and just be quiet, and he, and I saw him when he came back from Japan and and I said, wow.

Dan: And I knew him when he was younger and he had loving parents and, he was just your regular old kid, but whatever. So he had a trauma with his first girlfriend and it was traumatizing. Now you could say Why didn't he just tell her to go bug off? And, why would that have driven him to go become a monk in Japan?

Dan: So I don't know. I don't know him well enough to know that, but I was fascinated just as a college kid to see, wow, you can have events that aren't from your parents that are super impactful negatives and trauma can be defined as an experience we have that overwhelms our ability to cope.

Dan: And he couldn't cope with it. And his way of coping was to try to leave. being a part of our society. So, so that's the wounding story, Meg. I mean, and it shapes us. Yeah.

Meg: I do think that idea of being able to cope. And I think that's where a lot of people get stuck because they think because their character has been traumatized in the past, or even, two days ago, because it's a teenage story that therefore means they can't cope.

Meg: But I think that people cope in different ways. I have a friend who's the funniest guy you've ever met. He is so charming and that's his coping strategy. Because you cannot get close. You just can't. He is constantly using it as a way to control the situation. So it looks outwardly very ag There's a lot of agency.

Meg: He has a lot of friends. But boy, try to get him to actually talk about something internal and emotional. No way. So I just think that we forget as writers that a wound and not being able to cope isn't like a black and white. You're still out in the world. You're still doing things. It's the details of the coping strategy.

Meg: That's so interesting. Oh, absolutely. Creating a character, right? They have meaningless sex all the time, or they don't have any sex at all, like your friend, or, but they're still out in life and they still want something. There's no, I think we forget that they're not conscious of their own coping strategy.

Meg: Like they don't know that's just safety and life to them.

Dan: Absolutely. Let me give you an example from the PDP framework, the patterns of developmental pathways, framework. So in the. agency vector with the focus of your attention and that tendency of attention. I made up a word a tendency, the tendency of attention to be outward for those where that's the baseline.

Dan: And maybe this is your friend. I don't know. It's only up to him to figure it out. Not us. That's why it's cool. It's always an inside out job. You can't say it about somebody else. But let's just talk about in general. The classic findings you see with the agency outward is with anyone who's outward, they're just not aware of their internal world.

Dan: So it's kind of what you're describing. And because it's about agency, that means this embodied empowerment, competency, getting my basic bodily needs met, right? But my focus of attention is all outward. So I'm busy. I call it a directing pattern, just directing other people, telling jokes, do whatever I am.

Dan: I'm like, doing all this stuff. The main things when this is on the vulnerable side of this pathway is that they cannot stand being vulnerable. So, They cannot stand needing other people, and so they have all this energy. They're really caring people, right? So it's not about not caring, but in their own words, because I've interviewed a bunch of people in each of the patterns, they're in their own words is what they say.

Dan: When I'm not doing so well, my big challenges are being empathic. and being insightful. So what I'll say to them, I said that's very insightful that you're not insightful, but it's just this is someone who's been like working on this and thinking about it. But when they're not insightful about that and they're on your writing team or you happen to be married to them or, or they're running for an office or whatever, it's kind of scary because there's this outward energy, this huge amount of energy.

Dan: And they're busy in this directing pattern, telling other people what to do and the way it's supposed to be. And yet, when there's any invitation for inner reflection, like you're saying with your friend, it just bounces off them. They'll tell jokes, they'll do whatever, they'll make up stuff, whatever it is.

Dan: Because being vulnerable is The absolute opposite of what agency wants you to be, if you're not kind of more enlightened, not aware, not developed more, not integrated is what we call it.

Meg: I want to make sure I understand the sensitivity. Let's say you realize, okay, your partner has a sensitive to sensitivity to agency and I have a sensitivity to bonding. Okay, let's just say, maybe.

Dan: Yeah. Theoretically.

Meg: Theoretically. Is the sensitivity coming from something that's happened to you, i. e. in your childhood attachment, or is it just how you're born? Like it's just, that's the brain that came out, or is it both?

Dan: Yeah. So, obviously the safest thing to say, oh, it's both.

Dan: Here's what I think is going on. I think we have a temperament that the research is really clear is independent of your attachment experiences. Okay. It's an inborn sensitivity and intensity of reaction of your nervous system that, my guess is, that is what agency bonding and certainty are all about.

Dan: That, I'm in the certainty group, right? I'm not in the bonding group, I'm not in the agency group. I just know that's kind of in me, and no matter how much therapy I'll ever get. That's going to always be me and that's okay. It's like the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer, right? Let me have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Dan: So what this PDP framework allows for any of us, in the next book I'm writing is actually this for the public, but this first book is that I wrote with my co authors is for the therapy group. What it does is it allows you to say temperament is probably beneath the cortex, subcortical, and it's probably not very changeable, but the cortex responds to attachment experiences.

Dan: So you can have someone, for example, in my case, I had every kind of non secure attachment you can imagine. Avoidant, disconnection from my mom because of the way she was adapting to my dad, ambivalence with my father because he was so inconsistent, and disorganized with my father because he was so terrifying.

Dan: He was a rageaholic and a sadist to boot. So, it was a horrible way to grow up. But, It gives me at least the inner experience of each of those. I don't think any of those non secure attachments made me a certainty vector person. I think it's my temperament. Now, I think I became really a worrywart and filled with fear because my father was a sadist and no one was acknowledging that.

Dan: And it was pretty terrifying actually to be basically living with the enemy who wanted to hurt you. So, that was a scary way to grow up. But if I were in the bonding temperament vector, then I would probably say, Oh, I have relational issues because my father was a sadist. Or if I were in the agency vector, I could rationalize it that way.

Dan: So we can have stories, and I think this is what happens even in the Enneagram community, is the way they used to talk about it was, oh, you had these early attachment experiences and it formed your Enneagram type. That's the Enneagram talking. I don't believe that's right. I think it's your temperament that then pushes you towards the vulnerable side of those adaptive strategies if your attachment was non secure, including traumatizing, and pushes you towards the positive side of it.

Dan: Positive means your personality is like a playground. You don't take yourself so seriously. It's a playground of possibility and connection. The prison side, the vulnerable side, is where it makes you prone to chaos and rigidity. And you can have your characters experiencing that within their particular pathway that they're on.

Dan: So I think it's temperament. Now, to get to your point about if you have a partner who's one thing and you're the other thing, the reason it's helpful to know it is because, when you come from a place of caring and love, that's great and a really important starting place. But it can get confusing when you're having the same experience, and one person is coming with the anger about something, and it's about agency, and you don't understand their motivation, right?

Dan: So for you, let's say in a relational pattern, theoretically, then what you do is you go, Oh, wow, I see this anger is disconnecting me. So I'm feeling separation, distress, panic of separation, and sadness. And this partner of mine is getting angry and irritated, maybe even rageful. That's what happens with his subcortical network.

Dan: A pleasure.

Jeff: Dan, before I let you go we talked so much about this book you're writing, both for therapists, but we've learned it's going to be so insightful and helpful for screenwriters.

Jeff: What was the name of that book again? And I'll make sure to link it in the description below.

Dan: Great. It's by me and the PDP group that's the authors. It's called Personality and Wholeness. in therapy and the publishers Norton publishers. Great. I'll link it below. Thank you.

Meg: Thanks so much to Dr. Siegel for joining us on today's show.

Lorien: And remember you are not alone and keep writing.