Welcome back to the place we find ourselves podcast. I'm Adam Young and this is part three of a series of four episodes on how to engage another person's story.

In parts one and two, we looked at seven principles to keep in mind when you're engaging someone's story.

And today we begin to look at the tactics of story engagement. In other words, very specific things that you need to do as you are engaging someone's story.

And I want to share 12 tactics. Let me apologize ahead of time. We're going to move fast so that we can get through them all.

And each one of them really deserves more explanation than I have time for. The second thing to keep in mind is that there is no way to do all 12 of these things in, for example, an hour of engaging someone's story.

There's just no way to do all 12 of these at any one given time. These are 12 tactics that I want you to consider employing over time as you're engaging with someone about their story.

So think of it as a tool belt and you can pull out one or two of these tactics one or two of these tools each time you sit with somebody and listen to their story and engage with their story.

Okay, tactic number one. Explore the trauma before the trauma.

The trauma before the trauma now. What is the trauma before the trauma? Okay, well, suppose the storyteller has shared a story of when she was sexually abused by her grandfather.

The trauma proper is the sexual abuse. But the trauma before the trauma is the setup by her parents for the sexual abuse.

So the trauma before the trauma refers to family of origin developmental trauma.

Developmental trauma simply means that your developmental needs were not met by your parents by your primary caregivers in your family of origin. Now what were your developmental needs? What do I mean by that? Well, as a child.

You needed six things from your parents. I call these six things the big six. And here here they are. You needed your parents to be attuned to you responsive to you.

Engaged with you able to regulate your affect strong enough to handle your big emotions and willing to repair harm when they did harm. Those are the six things that every child needed from their parents when they were growing up.

Now the storyteller likewise needed these six things from his or her parents. If the storyteller did not receive a sufficient amount of these six things, then that storyteller has experienced some measure of developmental trauma.

If you want an in-depth explanation of the big six, you can go back and listen to podcast episode two in which I define them in detail. To explore the trauma before the trauma, what it means is it means exploring the degree to which the storyteller received these six things from their parents.

Now here's the critical question. Why is it necessary to explore the trauma before the trauma? For example, if the storyteller has brought you a story about being sexually abused by their grandfather, why is it necessary to know something about the storyteller's parents?

Their parents didn't sexually abuse them. Grandpa did. So why do you need to understand the storyteller's relationship with mom and dad?

And here's the reason. Because if you don't explore the trauma before the trauma, if you don't name the setup for the sexual abuse, then the storyteller will be bound to shame because they know that they were complicit in the sexual abuse.

Now I'll talk more about complicity later. Don't worry about it for now. It's coming. But until you help the storyteller see that their grandfather, who sexually abused them, was actually a kinder, more attuned, more responsive, more caring parent than their parents, the storyteller won't have that aha moment of, of course, I kept going back to my grandfather's house.

By exploring the trauma before the trauma, you help the storyteller see the immense relational hunger and neediness of herself as a girl. And this, in turn, gives her a coherent understanding of why she kept going back to her sexually abusive grandfather.

And all of what I'm saying applies, even if the story is not about sexual abuse, I'm just using sexual abuse as an example. Suppose the story for another example, suppose the story is about a boy who is ruthlessly mocked, terrorized, and beat up by his older brother.

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