In this episode of Trial Lawyer Talk, Scott speaks with Tupelo, MS psychodramatist John Rasberry. Mr. Rasberry shares wisdom he has gleaned from his career as a psychodramatist.
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Transcript for Episode 48, with John Rasberry
Scott Glovsky:
Welcome to Trial Lawyer Talk. I’m Scott Glovsky and I’m your host for this podcast where we speak with some of the best trial lawyers in the United States. We simply have great lawyers tell great stories, from cases that had a profound impact on them. So let’s get started. I’m very happy to be sitting across the table from John Rasberry. A wonderful, talented, funny, and amazing psychodramatist from Tupelo, Mississippi who helps trial lawyers all over the country discover the stories of their cases. John, thanks for being here.
John Rasberry:
Thank you Scott.
Scott Glovsky:
John, can you share with us a story?
John Rasberry:
A story about what Scott?
Scott Glovsky:
A story that’s going to inform us and help us learn about storytelling, and learn about John Rasberry through your telling of the story.
John Rasberry:
Certainly. I have a story fresh on my mind that happened mere hours ago where I was directing a drama with the intent other than or along with our usually of increasing adequate spontaneity and creativity. The protagonist wanted to understand where their intense emotion to protect people came from. So we embark in the classic psychodramatic process.
Scott Glovsky:
And share a little bit for our listeners who don’t know about the psychodramatic process, what that is.
John Rasberry:
Psychodrama is the use of guided dramatic action to help a person achieve what it is they’re after for that moment in psychodramatic theoretical nomenclature. What we’re after is always to increase the degree of adequate spontaneity and creativity in a person. Spontaneity is new and adequate options to old problems, and adequate options to new problems, and the nemesis to that is anxiety. So we are attempting to help a person show us a story, not tell us, but show us a story in action where their anxiety is high, and they’re stuck, they don’t know what to do, they don’t have direction or answers, or the direction they want to follow, they’re scared to death to do that, to follow that direction.
And so we enact this. It’s the second oldest form of psychotherapy next to following psychoanalysis. J.L and Zerka Moreno. J.L. was a Viennese psychiatrist that immigrated to America in 1925, and brought this theory and methodology with him, that his wife helped co-created. And so it is a wonderful storytelling method that Gerry Spence and some other initial attorneys co-created, used, co-create this Trial Lawyers College, and how to go about using the methodology for some of the techniques in the courtroom or in trial preparation.
So today was one of those days that we were … I was helping an individual tell a story, show a story, enact it. And as I said, what the protagonist, that’s a Greek theater term, central figure, what the protagonist was after was this … What makes me have this intense protection of people. So we began the drama, and we always like to go from 2018 or the moment, the present in this case 2018, show us how this intense protection shows up in 2018, and so he took us to a courtroom scene where we could see him, and in the role of an attorney and trial lawyer, passionately, intensely, unerringly attempting to protect his client in an environment that was hostile to his client, and the alleged defenses.
And as so often happens in one of the ways that psychodrama has gained notoriety is its effectiveness in dealing with the past, and undoing the past, and redoing the past to have the kind of ending that should have been rather than was. So here John Rasberry is directing this psychodrama that had significant anxiety present, and I found myself manifesting in action the same intense desire to protect. So the protagonist and I were walking hand in hand. As the psychodrama started, it was my delusion that I was different from him in some way, that I did not have this intense desire to protect, that I was just being a good solid clinician, and psychodramatist, and doing my job.
And so as the tension ensued in the drama, and the struggle to deal with this anxiety, I looked to the newsprint that was on a whiteboard where we were conducting this group, and I was trained to write down the initial statement of the protagonist when I asked the question, “What do you want out of the drama?” And the statement was, “Find out where this intense desired to protect comes from.” And two hours into this drama, significant efforts to try and get the protagonist to a place where I wanted him to be rather than where he wanted to be. It dawned on me.
I am in the moment of intensely trying to protect this protagonist. There go I. This drama is about us, not him. Oh it was just like … I turned to this part of me that was working, working, working to come up with the solution to get him where this part of me thought he oughta be. And I said, “What are you doing? This is your drama, not his. He did not say he wanted to be healed or wanted to get revenge or wanted to undo. He didn’t ask for that. He only ask to help me understand where this intense desire to protect comes from.” And there I was. There you are. This part of me. Just like the protagonist.
John Rasberry:
So as Doctor Moreno taught us, we’re all much more similar than we are different regardless of the educational level, the experience, the training. When you strip all that away, we’re all the same. So I told this part of me, “You go sit down. You haven’t been asked to come here.” So that then I could turn to the protagonist and say, “You said you wanted to find out what created this intense desire to protect. That certainly feeds your trial lawyer role. Have you found that? What have you found out?” And with tears in his eyes he said, “I got my answer, and the answer is my desire to protect is so intense because I too had been hurt.”
So I could then walk with him instead of try and lead him somewhere. I could be with him instead of above him or beneath him, and beckon him to come and join me. How crazy is that, that I think that I could beckon someone to come be in a place I think is so much healthier or superior to where he is. Zerka Moreno, who I had the pleasure to study with and be trained at times by, in her brilliance on just brilliance as a psychotherapist, and particularly as a psychodramatist, she could … Her spontaneity was so high in creativity, she could see and feel forces in the room that the rest of us couldn’t, and she would come up with stuff, brilliant interventions and directions. And after one of these brilliant psychodramas, a member of the training group said, “Zerka, how do you do it? How in the world did you know to do that at that time? That was perfect.”
Zerka, who at this time was probably 82 years old, one-armed woman, sat silent for what seemed like forever, but I’m sure it wasn’t but a minute, and she looked at the hundred or so trainees in the group, and she said, “I knew to do that because the still small voice told me to do it.” And that same still small voice told me this morning to walk with the protagonist.
Scott Glovsky:
When you were allowing your interest, your desire to protect to become involved, where did that desire to protect come from in John Rasberry’s story?
John Rasberry:
Oh my gracious. Well we would probably need five podcasts to tell that whole story suffice to say my own abandonment, how I have been abandoned, and knowing the pain that comes with that. Feeling that separation from the rest of mankind. And never wanting myself or anyone else to ever experience that ever again. The field of psychology popularized issues of attachment. They popularized those issues back in the late 70’s and 80’s by calling it co-dependency. Being co-dependent, that it’s unhealthy for my livelihood to be overly connected to yours, and so I end up unintentionally … Unconsciously, not maliciously, but I end up trying to make you feel better, so I can feel better, and that there was something wrong with that. Unhealthy.
Psychodrama and sociometry. Sociometry came before psychodrama, and any psychodrama practiced without the use of sociometry is not psychodrama, is just a practitioner that has been to a couple of psychodrama workshops, picked up some techniques. Many of the popular psychotherapists of the 20th century did such. They went and watched Doctor Moreno direct psychodramas, and they took some of those techniques, and made them their own, and wrote books around them, and tweaked them, but they didn’t do sociometry.
You ask many of those practitioners today and back then, “What are you doing?” And they say, “Psychodrama.” They’re not doing psychodrama. They’re using psychodramatic techniques and experiential therapy. So sociometry, the study of interpersonal relationships. So the co-dependency. So the Moreno’s theorized in sociometry that the smallest number is two, not one, and everything is co-dependent. I could not do this podcast if you weren’t here with me sitting across from me. So for this instance, this moment, without you I cease to exist as a person talking on this mic across from you in a podcast for TLC.
I am dependent on you. Problem becomes when it gets too big or too little, but my profession has made us scared of dependency. We need to be independent, don’t need anybody. Make it on our own. That’s what a healthy person can do or does. And since 1925, the Moreno’s have tried to get us to understand that that way of thinking, that concept is a defense mechanism to protect us from the vulnerability of being face to face because you might decide you don’t like the way I’m doing this podcast, what I’m sharing right now. Pull the plug, thank you very much John. Show is over. I got to be vulnerable, and all of us have been at one time or another, particularly children and that’s usually where we got hurt initially, and learned pretty quickly, “If I don’t want to get hurt again, don’t be vulnerable. Don’t get too deep in a relationship. Just kind of keep it … Don’t get too, as my profession says, attached. Oh god. Be careful. Don’t get too attached. You’ll get hurt.” So we’re screwed. Smallest number is two, not one.
Scott Glovsky:
I noticed that you’re wearing a shirt that says, “It’s okay. I’m on 500 milligrams of fuck it all.”
John Rasberry:
Correct. You can go to my website if you would like a prescription. I’d be glad to fill it.
Scott Glovsky:
So share with us a funny story.
John Rasberry:
A funny story? A funny story. Let’s see if I can recall the correct phrase I was using at this time. Oh gosh, I’m struggling to come up with it. All right, let me move to another funny story. I was in the middle of a psychodrama many years ago, and I was playing someone’s … What we call child ego state and attachment theory, but in psychodrama we call the inner child or the child part of the person, and so I was playing that role, and we were dealing with abandonment issues, and I was doing my usual stellar academy award work as the small child who had been abandoned. Grieving and begging my mother to come back, to not leave me.
20, 25 people in the group, there was not a dry eye in the group. My mother in the drama was just suffering, and in tremendous, tremendous emotional upheaval to have to leave the child. Me. And the tension was mounting, and the director who shall remain nameless, came in this poignant moment. This touching moment of restoration and healing. And as he bent down to take my mother’s face in his hand, and my face in his hand, he farted. The place fell apart. The place fell apart. It was the most hilarious, wonderful, vulnerable moment that I’ll carry to my grave.
But the essence of life, the very essence of life that in the depth of that pain, in the depth of that reality, that a mother was leaving her son both with their hearts ripped out, a fart emerges. You can’t write this. I know no author, no producer that could write a script that powerful.
Scott Glovsky:
What a great story. So what are the elements in telling a great story? Or what advice do you have for lawyers who are trying to tell a great story?
John Rasberry:
Leave yourself and become the other. The only way I believe a great story can be told. As long as I tell a story, the story, your story, my story from only the perspective of myself, then we only get half the story, and it’s no good. So the trick becomes not empathy. Our culture has been stellar both religiously and educationally to impress upon us and train us about the importance of empathy, but empathy is only a half measure. The only reason I can become empathic with you is because I’ve had the very same experience. I know how you feel because the same thing happened to me.
Well if that’s the only way we can connect, then that means I can’t hang out with people or connect with people that I don’t share a common experience with because I won’t understand them. Christ taught this before his death. We have struggled with it since. J.L. Moreno picked it up because one of his … I won’t say mentor, but I will say one of the most significant figures in his life was Christ. He was a Sephardic Jew believing in Christ, and Christ always told us, “The greatest gift,” I paraphrase. “The greatest gift a man can give to another is lay down his life for that man.” Christ was not talking about dying literally. He was talking about dying to the ego of yourself.
For that moment, not forever, but develop the ability to leave yourself and become the other, and we’ve heard it particularly in the 60’s through song. Walk them out in my shoes. Well that’s not empathy unless you want to stay you, and I’ll take your shoes Scott and put them on my feet and try to walk in them, but I’m still John Rasberry trying to walk in Scott’s shoes. I have to be able to become Scott, and that takes some training. But you asked me to tell a good story. I have to become the object of which I am telling and speak from that role, so that I can then say to the jury, “Ladies and gentlemen, here is my truth regarding the incidents we’re here to litigate.” So many ways to tell a story, but only one way to fully feel a story.
Scott Glovsky:
So you shared with us your story of the psychodrama dealing with abandonment, and then the director let out a fart. So for the benefit of our listener’s education in psychodramatic tools, I want you to reverse roles with a fart. What do you look like?
John Rasberry:
I am a vaporous, ethereal combination of swirling gasses and fumes.
Scott Glovsky:
What do you sound like? What do you smell like?
John Rasberry:
A combination of the carcass of a rotting buzzard, combined with that of, at my age Scott, a good shindig in the pants.
Scott Glovsky:
And once you come into being in all of your glory in this dramatic moment of life, what is it that you want the world to understand about you? Give me your soliloquy.
John Rasberry:
Even in the depths of pain and love and loss, there’s some shit somewhere.
Scott Glovsky:
John, thank you so much for sharing with us your great stories and wisdom and humor, and I know that you have helped so many lawyers discover phenomenal stories to help their clients, and helped clients help people discover their stories to become empowered and healed and connected. I just want to say thank you for all the wonderful work you’ve done, thank you for helping me personally through psychodramas of mine that you directed, and thank you for taking the time to be with us today.
John Rasberry:
Thank you for the opportunity.
Scott Glovsky:
Thank you for joining us today for Trial Lawyer Talk. If you like this show, I’d really appreciate it if you could give us a good review on iTunes, and I’d love to get your feedback. You can reach me at www.ScottGlovsky.com. That’s S-C-O–T-T G-L-O-V-S-K-Y dot com, and I’d love to hear your feedback. You can also check out the book that I published called Fighting Health Insurance Denials, A Primer For Lawyers that’s on Amazon. I put the book together based on 20 years of suing health insurance companies for denying medical care to people, and it provides a general outline of how to fight health insurance denials. Have a great week and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
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