You're listening to the place we find ourselves podcasts. I'm Adam Young and today I am here with my friend Kathy

Lorsell who's been on the podcast a number of times and is one of the founders of the Allender Center

and the new author of the book redeeming pocket heartache. Kathy welcome to the podcast.

Thanks Adam, so glad to be here again. We are going to talk today about how to engage

another person's story. It's one thing to engage your own story and we talk about that a lot

on this podcast but it's a whole nother ballgame to talk about how do you go about engaging a friend's

story or your partner's story or a coworker's story. So the question for today is how do you

engage another person's story well and another way of saying that is how can you be with them

in a way that brings healing and freedom to them and I want to start out by disposing of a myth that I

think is common and here's the myth you have to be a super duper counselor therapist type with magical

powers to really know how to engage someone's story well. This is a myth engaging someone's story

is part art it's part science but it can be learned. It's not a magical ability that some people

have and some people don't. There are certain principles that apply and we're going to talk

about that today and these principles can be learned that's the science part and then I think

there are skills that need to be caught by watching other people engage stories and I consider

that the art part. So Kathy when you were first introduced to story work and you first began

engaging other people's stories were you any good at it. I love that this is where you're starting

no I'll I'll go at it from two angles one the way I started to engage this this work is because I

found myself in lots of situations where people were telling me their stories because I was willing

to listen and because I had a sense of the agony of the human heart and the reality that we we

always we live at a different playing field than what's true underneath the surface and so because

I was open to that people would come all the time and all of a sudden you know as a teenager as a

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