Welcome back to the place we find ourselves podcast. I'm Adam Young and I am here today with my friend Kathy Lorzel. Kathy, it's good to see you.

Thank you. Thanks for having me back.

You've been here before and you've even been here before to talk about what we're going to talk about today, which is the whole subject of how do we engage not our own story, but another person's story.

It's one thing to address, explore, be curious about your own story and I talk a lot about that on this podcast, but it's quite another to engage a friend's story or your partner's story or a coworker's story.

So let's just begin with the big picture. Why is it important to help someone else that you care about, get clear about their family of origin story? What's the point of helping them with that?

In this day and age, I've noticed more and more people like their lives are kind of falling off the rails. So many of my friends, family, people are really struggling and I don't think that's new necessarily, but for me, you know, my group of friends were in our 40s.

It's hard. And so I think why I care about this work and how to engage some else's story isn't just for therapists or pastors or people who are working with people, but all of us need to learn how to be better friends and more relational humans so that we can help each other when we're in need.

And that's everybody. That's not just your therapist, like, you know, right now the therapist, I know, have full practices and it's almost impossible to get into see someone.

And it's insanely expensive to try to get care with people who are fairly good at it, which tells me that we need more people who know how to care about one another regardless of their profession.

And that part of our calling is learning how to tend to people and the way we tend to one another is through engaging and knowing how to talk about our lives together and not just a sense of, hey, how are you, I'm okay.

I'm sorry about your mom, sort of conversation, but how do we actually tend to one another's hearts in a way that that allows us to have comfort and freedom and connection.

And that's hard to do. And I think for a lot of us, we're so isolated, we didn't necessarily learn from our parents how to have good connections. And so we're learning, we need to learn that as adults.

When it comes to engaging someone's story, when it comes to doing that well, it's important to understand some of like the basic theory behind story work.

We could call this story theory 101. Will you share some of what do we mean by like the basic theory behind story work or story theory 101? What are some of the bullet points that are under that heading that people need to have a good grasp of?

I think the basis of story work is that we don't always know how to understand our own story. And so we need another witness to come in and see it for us.

So I travel a lot for work. And when I'm gone, I'm at someone else's house or a hotel or whatever. And I come into my house after being gone for four or five days. And I smell all the smells of my house.

For like 10 minutes, I all of a sudden I walk in and I'm like, what's that smell? Who is that? Like what's happening over in the bathroom or what's happening in the garbage? Like for about 10 minutes, I can smell the truth of my home that I live in every day.

Because when I'm living there, I become nose blind. My point in that is that we become nose blind to our own stories in the same way that we become nose blind to our homes.

And so where I have a window where I'm removed enough and I can smell all of the smells when someone else comes into my home, they can smell those smells right away because they're not nose blind to them.

And so what we're doing with story work is really going back into people's homes, their childhood homes, seeing scenes, understanding the complexities, the relationship, what happened to them.

And because it's not our story, we're not nose blind in the way that the person is.

When I look at someone else's story, I'm wanting to put myself into their narrative and then be able to go, huh, this doesn't smell, this smells kind of rotten.

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