Episode 11: Michael Karson on Creating Conversation Spaces that Foster Curiosity and Participation

Welcome to We Interrupt, a podcast that explores the ins and outs of interruptions. In this episode, we talk with professor and clinical psychologist Michael Karson (michaelkarson.com) about personality and societal rules for what is deemed “acceptable” behavior – and how these are normalized, tested, and evolved over time. We discuss the use of performance as a means of exploring – and challenging- roles and rules, as well as the use of interruption in therapy and teaching contexts, as a means to create safe spaces that engender trust and caring.

Episode Transcript

(00:03):
We'd all be hung out to dry
if we had to finish all of our sentences.

We'd have to be like writers instead of talkers.
The fundamental question is,
are we curious about each other?
Are we listening to each other?
Hi,
welcome to We Interrupt.
I'm Laure Haak,
your host.

(00:24):
In this podcast,
we explore the ins and outs of interruptions to understand more fully what interruption is and how it may be useful or even necessary for enhancing creativity,
connection,
sharing,
power and building inclusive communities.
In this episode,
we talk with professor and clinical psychologist Michael Karson about personality and societal rules for what is deemed acceptable behavior and how these rules are normalized,

(00:48):
tested, and evolved
over time.
We discuss the use of performance as a means of exploring and challenging roles and rules as well as the use of interruption in therapy and teaching contexts,
particularly as a means to create safe spaces that engender trust and caring.

(01:15):
Michael.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
I'm really looking forward to learning more about your work and I've had a lot of fun reading through your papers,
and reading your blog post. And I'm looking forward to learning more about your career,
but also talking with you about your perceptions of interruptions,
both in terms of how you communicate with other people,

(01:37):
but also from a psychological perspective:
how we think about ourselves and how we present ourselves and how we each interrogate each other about who we are in that moment.
So that's what I'm
eally looking forward to.
But to start this off,
I would love for you to share a bit about yourself.
I wanted to major in college in English literature because I liked reading stories and I love watching movies and I was trying to figure out a way to make a living doing that.

(02:09):

I got nervous that if you don't become a professor,
then I don't know what you do.
So I started to feel about psychotherapy that it was kind of like reading a novel,
although a particularly interesting kind of novel because you're one of the characters in it.
And then it's kind of like watching a movie.

(02:30):
But again,
a movie that has that kind of interactive component where you can actually affect what's happening.
So I got really drawn to psychotherapy and became a psychologist.
The first chapter of my career was mainly doing psychotherapy.

I have extensive experience in the child welfare system,

(02:51):
evaluating and consulting with other professionals about abusive and neglectful families,
but psychotherapy,
with individuals and couples and to some extent families, was my main focus.
Looking at your university profile,
you list some dramaturgical activities as well.
I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

(03:11):
Sure.

I fell in love with my wife
26 years ago.
I was already an experienced therapist.
She's a theater person. And we started a conversation that is still going on relating theater to psychology and vice versa.

(03:33):
She eventually became a professor at Regis University and started a sketch comedy group to deal with difficult issues that she called "OutRegis".
And right afterwards,
I started a comedy group at my graduate school called GASP.


(03:53):

I wrote most of the sketches,
performed,
directed, and produced sketch comedy about difficult topics like gender,
race,
power differentials.
The idea was that if you could bring up these issues in a comedic format,
it could imbue the conversation around them with laughter which seems positive.

(04:16):
And then also we felt that people are often arguing about issues like race and gender,
but they're not imagining the same example.
You know,
like, one person imagines an example in which women are being mistreated and the other imagines an example,
for example,
where a man is being mistreated,
and they have this argument but they not talking about the same thing.

(04:39):
And so putting up a sketch also enables us to make sure that we're in the post show discussion.
talking about the same thing.
And we found that,

that it helps the dialogue,
and most importantly,
in my graduate school,
we would have diversity events and like eight people would come.
And when we started doing it as a sketch comedy show,

(05:01):
we were getting 100 people at each show.
So for that reason alone,
it was fun to do.
So then how did you do the post sketch conversation?
Because you said you do a kind of dialogue afterwards.
How do you do that with 100 people?
Yeah.
Actually my wife wrote a paper about how to do a post show discussion.
And the main thing is, when it's done well, is to get people to tell relevant stories and also to talk about the sketches themselves.

(05:33):
So she actually proposes the technique for doing that.

I think the backbone of the technique is to ask people,
what do you remember?
What were the moments that you remember?
And then write them on a board and then all those moments are then out there and that helps the conversation discuss moments in the performance rather than letting the subject get too derailed by individuals.

(06:01):
So you're using this sketch almost as
a coalescing point, and you keep coming back to that sketch.
That's really,
really cool.
Yeah.
So you have gone from psychotherapy,
a clinician in psychotherapy settings,

and after 25 years,
you transitioned to academia.
And I'm curious as somebody who started off in academia nominally and left and did a bunch of other things,

(06:25):
why did you decide to enter academia after so many years in private practice?


I'm not really sure, but it feels,
it feels like my little one finished high school and left home and then I was thinking,
what do I want to do with the next phase of my life?
And there was something about doing clinical work and taking care of kids that rhymed and coalesced into one way of being in the world.

(06:53):
And it felt like there was something about teaching and having adult children that rhymed and coalesced with another way of being in the world.
In your academic career you spent most of the time working on or at least some of the time working on personality.
And I love how your experience doing the plays essentially is

(07:15):
reflected in the writings that you've done
in academia.
And so I have a question about this which comes down to essentially how do we define--
"we" very generally -- define what normal is when we're talking about personality,
about gender and discussions about race and ethnicity.
How does the community define what is normal?

(07:36):
And so for example,
there's the 16 PF and the
the Minnesota Multiphasic that are used in clinical practice to assess a person and how they're presenting. Each of the tests presents a set of rules for acceptable behavior,
whatever acceptable means.
But also both of these tests,
have gone through substantial changes since they were first introduced in the thirties and forties.

(08:00):
I'm like,
oh my gosh,
the thirties and forties,
very different way of thinking about psychology,
then and now.
What I'm wondering, is if you could reflect upon how you approach these tests, and your research on re-establishing baselines and what normal or normative behavior looks like.

(08:21):
Normal has two meanings. One is a statistical meaning.
And so both those tests,
the 16PF and the MMPI are renormed
generally speaking every 20 years. And in the renorming process items are updated.
There's a famous MMPI item:
"I used to enjoy playing drop the handkerchief."
I'm like, what?

(08:43):

It was a way of flirting,
I suppose.
You know,
you have to update items.
But the idea is that you just want to make sure that the normative data is contemporary.
So every 20 years of both those companies,
renorm the test
with generally speaking about 3000 semi-randomly chosen Americans,

(09:09):
trying to create a pool that looks like America in terms of race,
ethnicity,
sex,
rural vs city,
geographic, whatever.
So that's one definition of normal.

I think both tests have really good norms.
The other definition normal has more to do with my child welfare work where,
you know,
is it normal to leave a child alone in a house for,

(09:33):
let's say half an hour.
And then of course,
that depends on how old the child is, and that depends on some extent on the local community.
And you don't want to step in and say you're not a good enough parent,
the state needs to be involved in your family, unless you have a sense that what the parent has done would alarm the relevant community.

(09:58):
And the relevant community is hard to specify because, you know,
do you mean the neighborhood, or do you mean the state, or do you mean you know the community of Catholics or do you mean the community of Cambodian immigrants?
It becomes very hard to specify exactly what you mean by normal, and all the child welfare professionals I know are careful not to overly impose their personal reactions on other people's families.

(10:24):
In the past 40 years,
even the past 20 or 10,
,there's been a fairly substantial change in the way normative, normal --
-- maybe those aren't the right words --
that we perceive, understand, welcome expressions of gender.
Certainly the appreciation and welcoming of gender in the classroom,
for example,

(10:44):
among kids, has changed markedly since I was in school,
for sure.
I'm wondering, do these tests use gender?
Is that a part of what these tests do?
Well,
on the MMPI,
you still have to decide you're either a male or a female and you get scored accordingly.
I'm positive,
-- I don't know these people --
but I am positive at the next edition of the MMPI

(11:06):



there is a new one, MMPI-3.


but I would be surprised if it didn't start using only one set of norms.

And then the 16PF in the last edition,

stopped doing that.
And yet there are now debates about what to do when kids announce that they think they're a member of the opposite sex.

(11:29):

I feel like the only appropriate response to that is to say,
well,
I don't know,
it depends.
You know,
it depends on the individual kid and the individual family, and let's not,

let's not rush to legislate things.

I'm old enough so that I remember the seventies quite distinctly. And I thought high heeled shoes were gone forever in 1970.

(11:51):
I mean,
I never dreamed that women would subject themselves to that ever again,
once the second wave feminism came to us.
And it's kind of amazing how the bifurcation of sex roles,
I would like to say it comes and goes,
but it never really goes that far.
And this will be relevant to interrupting because,

(12:13):


the leading theorist, in my opinion, about

gender is Judith Butler. And she sees gender and even sex as a performance.
One way to define gender is to say masculinity is all the things that boys get rewarded for and girls get punished for, and femininity is all the things that girls get rewarded for and boys get punished for.

(12:34):
And you would hope,
I would hope, that there would be as few of those things
you know,
as possible in raising children.
But it doesn't seem like that way to me,
it seems to me that there's still a long list of things that boys get rewarded for and not girls and vice versa.
Yeah.

So that actually brings me to my next question (12:51):
the idea of using theater as a construct for studying liveliness, as well as a means of exploring diversity.
And so I'm wondering if you could talk about what you mean by liveliness?
Cool.
Let me start with an example from family therapy.
The technical term is enactment.

(13:13):
There's two ways of doing family therapy.
One is, you can talk about the problem. And the other one is, you could encourage the family to enact the problem.
So instead of saying,

what happens when Johnny has a tantrum?
You say Johnny,
let's see a tantrum.

And I think it's kind of obvious how much more powerful therapy can be if you organize it that way.

(13:37):
If instead of saying to a couple,
describe your arguments to me about money,
you say to a couple,

who wants to spend and who doesn't want to spend?
Let me hear you talk about it.
It's happening in real time there.
So that's essentially the definition of what liveliness is in psychotherapy.
In theater,

(13:57):

liveliness has to do with two things.
One is it makes the audience feel engrossed or engaged by what's happening on the stage.
And then the other definition of liveliness, to me, is that it's not all timed and predicted.


My wife, who is inseparable from my own thinking about all these things,

(14:20):
she wrote a paper before I wrote my book about Deadly Therapy.
She wrote a paper about the Deadly Classroom,
both of which were based on the theater director
Peter Brooks ideas about a deadly theater.
One of the things that describes the deadly classroom is when the student tells the teacher,
I won't be there on Wednesday.
Can you send me the notes?

(14:41):
And if the answer to that is yes,
then that's a deadly classroom.
And if the answer to that is,
you know,
you have to be there to experience what it is
I'm trying to do in a classroom,
then that would be more likely to be a lively classroom.

(15:03):
So another thing you talk about is this difference between theater and performance art.
And I think this gets to the idea you talked about with regard to timing.
Yeah.

Performance art is a technical term for a trend in 20th century art that is highly associated with feminism.
You may have noticed that when you go into a museum and you look at art that was done before 1920

(15:28):

there aren't a lot of female artists.
Partly as a disruptive force and partly as a creative force --

i
it's unclear to which those two can really be separated since most creativity has a disruptive component --
a lot of women tried to not only present the outcome of their artistic endeavors,

(15:54):
but try to show their artistic endeavors partly by working in live in the gallery.
The result was highly engaging,
highly exciting work that was hard to monetize.
And so the history of art is either you either have to make something that people want to buy, or you have to do something that people want to pay to see, or you need a patron.

(16:19):

That's been true since art began, if you wanna make a living doing it.
This disruptive creative rejection of structures and celebration of liveliness eventually became indistinguishable from theater, and then eventually led to either charging admission or getting a patron or making something where the process was recorded,

(16:45):
not just the outcome.




There's a couple of different directions my brain is going in.
One is, I do a lot of work in the research community and a lot of where we go -- and this is

true for academics --
a lot of what you get counted on as an academic is the product,
right?
Your book, your paper
and not the process of what are those discussions and brain waves and all these other things I had in the process of writing that book.

(17:12):
And so I really love this idea of,
look, we're looking at art as not just the painting or the book or the whatever,
but it is that whole,
let's get together in the atelier,

and show people and have them experience
that part of the process.
Another part of that that you've talked about is this idea of theater and performance art as a way of engaging.

(17:35):
I just gonna read a passage:.
"Theater has always served the function of announcing the marginalized in every system,
whether that be a person,
a couple, therapy,
family business, or a country,
there's an executive.

This idea of a hegemony of powerful interest that creates a party line."
I love this line.
This is awesome.
And that party line is the shared understanding of how people behave,

(17:59):
which again comes back to the 16PF and the MMPI and
what are our expectation for acceptable behavior?
And in theater,
what you can do is kind of explore and push what we find to be acceptable behavior.

So it's here (18:15):
[another passage]
"So the history of theater teaches us that those out of line need a method of expression that will escape recrimination from those in line."
I think that's a wonderful thing.
How do we address, explore, understand what we think about, here's a rule and here's how we either follow or don't follow that rule.

(18:38):
And how does it play into how you work with people,
whether it's in academia or in psychotherapeutic settings?
I set the book with a reflection that psychotherapists have for a little over 100 years,
tried to help people narrate important conflicts,
have tried to help people absorb edifying ideas.

(18:59):
I tried to help people get engaged with meaningful material.
Theater professionals have been working the same agenda for,

like 3000 years.
Maybe they know something we don't.


I feel like one way to think about most people's individual psychological problems -- and that has to be distinguished from individual political problems and individual familial problems --

(19:23):

but individual psychological problems is that we have parts of ourselves that we don't accept.
You know,
we just talked about gender and
there are a lot of women in the world who can't accept their own aggression.
And there are a lot of men in the world who can't accept their own tenderness. And that's completely a function of living in a gender- politicized society.

(19:48):
And yet it's true that there are aspects of the self that are hard to accept.
In Freud's day, people had a very hard time accepting their sexuality.
In our day, I think people have a very hard time accepting their aggression.
Those marginalized parts of the self engage in what Jung called guerrilla warfare.

(20:09):
They just want to blow things up because they're not happy.
And the point of psychotherapy is often first to show the patient how having marginalized aspects of the self

is diminishing their enjoyment of life or their effectiveness in living their lives, and then create a place where all those parts of the self can be voiced and welcomed and integrated rather than picking a team and pushing aside.

(20:38):

Exactly.

I love it.
I'm gonna read another quote because I love that chapter.
"The performance artist is a model for the therapist,
creating opportunities for self reflection by occasioning meaningful narratives and interpreting them in a way that challenges the party line."
Which is what you're saying,
right?
The party line.
In this case,
the internal party line of what I think is acceptable for me.

(21:00):
And at the same time,
performance artists are also a model for the people who are often coping with being out of line and refuse to be co opted.
So it's providing this model for you the the psychotherapist to say,
look,
I'm not just going to follow what I think or my immediate society thinks is the party line.
I'm gonna try to open up and try to explore this area with my patient.

(21:24):
I love that.

Michael, you write a blog, and I think that's wonderful.
You've been doing this for many years.
You write this blog called Feeling Our Way,
for Psychology Today.
And in one of these,
you posit this culture of Livelies.

(21:45):
So we've been talking about liveliness.
And one of the reasons I reached out to talk to you about interruptions was this particular blog post that you wrote.
You posit this culture of Livelies from Vitalistan, which cracked me up.
You say in Lively culture,
except in certain certain circumstances,
you interrupt someone to communicate that you understand what they're saying, that you consider them interesting, and to facilitate dialogue.

(22:13):
In Lively culture, if you don't interrupt someone,
it usually means you think they're stupid or boring, or too stupid to merit a response to the point they're making or too boring to have kept your attention.
Now,
of course,
you're kind of poking the bee's nest here a little bit.
But I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how you would define interruption.

(22:33):
You know,
it might be useful to do a little background on Irving Goffman and communicative channels.
Goffman, who sees life as a performance --
I would say maybe that summarizes his approach to social psychology --
specifies that there are different channels that we communicate on. One is the content channel and that's

(22:56):

the content of our communication.
One is the directional channel,
what Bateson called meta communication. Bateson said that every communication has content,
but it also defines a relationship between the people involved.

Goffman called this the directional channel.
There's an overlay channel, which I analogize to watching a sporting event on TV,

(23:21):
with a scrawl at the bottom of the screen which isn't supposed to interrupt the content,
but it is just a different channel of overlay.
There's the disattend channel,
somebody sneezes while they're talking and you just pretend they didn't sneeze.
And then finally,
there's a concealment channel where two people communicate in secret

(23:44):
in a larger group and that channel is supposed to remain concealed.
And so when I think about interrupting,
I think there's two kinds of interrupting.
One is speaking while the other person is speaking,
but you're speaking on the overlay channel or the disattend channel or the directional channel, trying to facilitate or foster or assist the other person's communication on the content channel.

(24:12):
And the other kind of interruption is when you interrupt on the content channel,
and you're really saying,
I wish you'd shut up,
now it's my turn.

And so it seems to me that,

using one word for both,
sure,
fine,
but so many interruptions are fostering the other person's communicative effort

(24:37):

and other kinds of interruptions are trying to stymie.
The other kind of one kind of interruption I think I talked about in that blog post that I think is so important is somebody starts saying something and they're just wrong and they're going to dig themselves into a hole and they're going to regret it later.
And so you just wanna help them not commit to the thing they're talking about by just saying,

(25:04):
wait,
that study was done in 1940 in Finland,
I'm not sure why you're citing it in terms of the discussion we're doing.
Now,
you're not trying to shut them up,
you're trying to help them.

OK.

Yeah.
So basically what you're saying is there's interruption,

(25:25):
but we have to pay attention to what stream is being interrupted and in a sense also the intent of the person doing the interruption.
So it's,
it's multiple things happening at once and it's very complicated.
So you have all of this challenge,
right?
Which one of those streams are we interrupting?
What's the intent of the interrupter?
But there's also a cultural lens that might affect the perception of interruption and whether somebody even knows or is cognizant of those multiple streams of communication.

(25:54):
What is your experience with interruption as a person who is seen as a white man who interrupts. How has that played out in your life?
Yeah.

I think that it is useful to consider your character and your role

in a discussion.

I recently, not too long ago,

(26:14):
said to a graduate student,
how is it possible that you've been in school for 16 years,
and you don't know that the professor decides who talks and when?
I don't think it has anything to do with my being a white man.



This is my classroom. But, in other spaces,
I think that you need to check in on the relationship that you're in and the culture that you're operating in.

(26:42):

There's this basic principle, which is that if somebody asks you a question,
it's rude not to respond.
But if you're doing therapy,
it's not rude not to respond because you've acculturated the patient to the idea that you're not going to respond.
Out on the street, nonresponding is a rebuff.


(27:02):
You wanna train patients or teach patients that not responding always has only one meaning,

which is (27:09):
I'm curious about where your mind goes next.
And as soon as the patient understands that, then when they ask you a question,
you don't respond because you both understand what you're really doing when you're not responding.
Interrupting is similar.


People have all sorts of different expectations of what it means to be interrupted and some people can take offense. I don't think it's worth worrying about that too much.

(27:36):
I think it's worth instead attuning or tending to how the person is experiencing you.
And if you interrupt somebody and they look rebuffed,
you can say,
oh,

I think we just had a culture clash, rather than I'm trying to dominate you or something.

You've actually just gone through a number of different examples of how interruption can be positive.

(28:01):
You can interrupt yourself interrupting,
as you're paying attention.
And I really love this contextualization -- almost in the sense of look,
everything is a performance and because I'm part of this performance,
I need to be paying attention to this other person I'm communicating with and watching their reactions.

(28:21):
Right?
One of the biggest challenges there is my perception of somebody's reaction might not be accurate because they are from or exist in a different set of cultural circumstances than I do.

I use my hands all the time when I talk,
maybe they don't show expression in their,

(28:42):
in their gesture,
in their face.
Right?
So how do you as a psychotherapist work through some of these things, when you're working with somebody where you can't necessarily tell by looking at them or maybe not even as easily in talking with them how they're feeling.
Yeah.
Well,
in psychotherapy,
I tend to think it's kind of easy because the therapist is authorized to comment on the relationship.

(29:06):
In fact, in my view,
the therapist is being paid to comment on the relationship.
So,
as a therapist,
you're always authorized to say,

I can't tell whether you're talking at such length because you're engrossed in the point you're making or whether you're talking at such length because you want to keep me away from you.

(29:28):
It's a perfectly valid thing to say,
in my opinion,
as the therapist.
I think that'd be a weird thing to say at a dinner party.
And so,
it's outside of therapy that, I feel like



you never really know what to say
because you're not authorized to comment on relationships.
Yeah.
It's like those rules that you have in therapy that you establish one on one

(29:50):
with your patient.

they're very difficult to set up
outside of therapy relationships,
(a) because there's more than one person you're interacting with, and (b) because it takes time.

Right?
What you're doing in therapy is establishing a level of trust one on one with that other person through multiple meetings, and you can't do that at a dinner party.

(30:11):
Yeah.
And then I think, as a professor you ought to be authorized to talk about what's going on in the classroom.
But frequently people will take umbrage and,

and it doesn't go that well.
I've told a lot of interrupting students,
this is not a place for you to challenge what I'm teaching,
this is a place for you to interrupt in order to be sure you understand what I'm teaching.

(30:34):
And then later on,
you can decide to accept it or reject it. That's up to you.
But this is not a debate, this is a lecture.

A chance for me to find some way to communicate ideas.
There's different ways that one can set up a classroom.
If it's a lecture,
a lecture is a certain thing.
And if it's a dialogue or a small group session,

(30:54):
that's a different thing.
We've talked about using interruption in a therapy context, kind of.
In your experience in therapy,
have you actually stopped somebody in the middle?
Like, you said, when they're going on a long soliloquy,
you actually will interrupt somebody in the soliloquy to say,
hey,
just checking in?
Yeah,
in two ways.
One, in couples therapy,


(31:14):
the way I work,
my main mode of working is interrupting.
So when I catch ...

here's my approach to couples therapy. Most problems could be worked out if they're on the same directional channel.
So, if they have the same understanding of how to communicate with each other.
In other words,
if one member of the couple talks to the other one

(31:36):
like they're an idiot.

I don't let that go on.


I jump in (31:40):
time out.
Is that how you talk to each other?
Because if that's how you talk to each other,
you're not going to get to a place where you're able to resolve the conflict that's underlying the,

the content of the discussion.
Can you say the same thing as if she's your life partner,

(32:01):
the woman you love, the person you want to spend your life with, and not like she's some dolt who you needs your instruction?
Most often,
most conflicts can get resolved as long as both of them communicate to each other that way.
So I'm constantly interrupting couples.
It's not as important to interrupt an individual patient because the individual patient,

(32:22):

they may develop a sense that they and I are in a very complicated relationship.
They may think that,

I'm trying to dominate them or they may think that they're just there to get my adoration or whatever,
but I'm not participating.
So we're not gonna get too far down the wrong road.
And so,

it's not as important to interrupt.

(32:53):
You sent me this great clip about Howard Hawks talking about His Girl Friday [clip starts] "I had noticed that people talked and talked over one another and especially people who talk fast and were in a quick argument or quick description.
So we wrote the dialogue in a way that left the end of the sentence so you didn't need it
and then the beginning of the sentence, we just kept them overlapping.
And then a new actor that came in took a couple of days to get oriented and going.

(33:18):

Everybody put up with that and then it worked beautifully.
Don't be on,
please bring us back together again.
Just the way we used to.
But I'm afraid of any time.
Don't mock me.
This is bigger than anything I ever ... [Clip Ends]


So His Girl Friday is

a comedy made in 1939.
It's a remake of a movie that was done only eight years earlier, called The Front Page.

(33:43):
And Howard Hawks had an idea that, why do movies look fake?

That was the fundamental idea that the director had.
And he noticed that most actors spoke their lines and expected no one else to say anything else while they were speaking their lines.

(34:04):
And then it was the next actor's turn to say their line.
And Howard Hawks said, that is not how people talk to each other.
That's not how dinner parties work.
That's not how conversations work.
People don't let each other finish their sentences.
Otherwise we would
we'd all be hung out to dry.
If we had to finish all of our sentences,


(34:25):
we'd have to be like writers instead of talkers.
And so he suggested that the actors in the film not let each other finish their sentences.
And then he with help rewrote the script to make sure that the core of what each line was trying to communicate in terms of content didn't happen right at the beginning or right at the end of the line to help the actors interrupt each other and still get across,

(34:49):

what they're trying to say.
And then it turned out to be interesting that,

Rosalind Russell was a classically trained actor and it took her quite a few days to catch on.
Whereas Cary Grant grew up in vaudeville and improvisation and he was like,
yeah,

this is the way I've been on the stage all along.
That was the part that really interested me.

(35:10):

This whole exploration
and the reason I'm doing this podcast is really to understand how do we, in a way, normalize interruption, even though it's already normalized? And how do we think about interruption in a way so that it isn't necessarily a bad thing.
If you look at children's books, for example,
almost every,

(35:31):
actually,
every single children's book that mentions interruptions mentions it as a bad thing:
don't interrupt!

And, at the same time as you just said,
how we finish each other's sentences and come in and come out is a way of speaking.
So how can we better attune ourselves to understanding that this person is talking over the end of my sentence,

(35:53):
because they've heard me and we're gonna move on to this other thing.
We can come back and always cycle and have this messy interchange of ideas.
And, at the same time,
I think the challenges as we are working on diversity in the workplace,
accepting better multiple cultural backgrounds,

(36:13):
et cetera.
It almost seems like this is the time that we need to take a breath after the end of a sentence to make sure somebody has had the chance to say what they wanna say and get their whole thought out before we move to the next sentence.
And,
and I think that's the challenge for me in thinking about interruption because yes,

(36:35):
it can be a good thing.
But at the same time as you said,
you hear of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell that,

one is classically trained,
one is trained on the vaudeville stage, and you have to take a little bit of time to get used to this other culture.
How do we have these conversations about how to talk to each other just in general, and how to listen to each other?

And I think that's the part that is perhaps the most fraught (36:57):
we're talking and talking and talking,
and then sometimes I think we haven't quite learned how to listen and maybe how to signal all those three pieces together, that I hear you.
I understand you.
I have something to add.

(37:18):
I'm not interrupting to be mean or powerful.
I'm interrupting because I'm adding on to your sentence.
So, I just think about like how you've been doing some of these workshops with people on those post performance conversations.
I'm just really interested in how you think about this.
Well,
one thing that comes to mind is, when I teach psychotherapy,

(37:38):
I teach students, don't ever nod your head.
Don't ever say,
hm.
Don't ever coo,
don't ever make cooing sounds.
If you want to show the patient that you're listening,
there's only one way to do it and that is say something you couldn't possibly say unless you've been listening.
The fundamental question is not,
how shall we structure the conversation according to rules?

(38:02):
The fundamental question is,
are we curious about each other?
Are we listening to each other?
Are we just trying to trump other people's identities and ways of being in the world by outlawing them?
Or are we actually curious?
And if you're actually curious,
I wish that we ... hope we can live in a culture where you don't have to then prove it.

(38:25):
You know,
you can,
you can relax.
And if you're not actually curious,
then that's the first topic of business that needs to be addressed.
I love that,
that idea that,
yeah,
you're not fighting for dominance of a person.
You're really trying to listen in the best possible way because you are curious and you have a question and they've said something that triggers something and you say,

(38:47):
oh,
not triggers in a bad way,
but triggers in a good way of like,
oh there's this idea.
I wanna follow up on this one thing that you've just said.
Right.
Once our faculty a long time ago was having a discussion about what our core values were and, predictably critical thinking, diversity and social justice were listed.

(39:07):
And I said,

those are really important to us,
but our most important value is humor.
I pointed out that somebody frequently interrupts somebody who's making a point about scientific method,
making a point about diversity, and making a point about social justice by saying something funny, and nobody ever objects.
But if somebody interrupted somebody saying something funny in order to make a point about diversity,

(39:30):
social justice, or critical thinking,
there would be blowback.
So humor must be our primary value.
Now,

I was making a joke while I was saying it,
but I was also serious.
So whenever someone says,
may I please finish?

I wish the next thing that happened would be, I don't think we're on the same page about what we're doing together.

(39:54):
Not,
yes,
go ahead and finish.
So how would that play out?
Because I'm just thinking,
you know,

if I said to somebody,
please don't interrupt me,
and then they responded with,
I don't think we're on this same page, to me that would feel really uncomfortable and I wouldn't go with that.
I know. People don't like to approach conflict.

(40:14):
And one of the main things that I think theater teaches us and that psychotherapy teaches us is the advantages of approaching conflict.
But rather than make assumptions,


I would be curious about what it takes,

what would it take in this group to create an environment where you felt like other people were genuinely curious about your experience and your point of view.

(40:40):
And let's work on that,
not work on,

leapfrogging over that, pretending that it's true when it's not.
So that you are actually setting up a space -- and maybe this is what safe spaces are all about, is this idea that I'm in a space where I am curious about other people in this space with me ...

(41:05):


It's creating that sense of trust again,
and I, in this space,
I trust that other people are curious about me and I'm curious about them, and that we are entering this conversation with that sense, that grounding that allows us to interrupt or have quiet time space where we're thinking about what's happening.

(41:29):
Yeah.

One of the joys of my life is taking long walks with my wife, during which we talk.
And so this morning we were on a walk, and she was talking about some idea and I was careful not to interrupt,
not because we were gonna have this conversation now,
but it was because interruption was on my mind that I noticed that sometimes she's telling me an idea and I interrupt her because I have something to say in response.

(41:56):
But sometimes she's working out an idea and when she's working out an idea,
my role is to keep quiet until she's

got it where she wants it.
To me,
the big question is,
is the dialogue collaborative or is it competitive?
And if it's competitive,
it doesn't matter whether you interrupt or not,
it's gonna be like a presidential debate and you're not really talking to each other.

(42:20):
So let's don't pretend that you are in a collaborative dialogue.
It doesn't matter whether you interrupt or not because you have a sense that
if the other person interrupted you,
it's probably because they have something they want to say that's meaningful and relevant to the conversation at hand or even if it isn't immediately.
So it'll come back to it.
And I think when you,
when you're in that collaboration, again,

(42:43):
you're in this space together where you've agreed that you're working together,


and not at cross purposes and not just shouting into a crowd.

One of the things you've mentioned is this idea that
dialogue is a bicycle built for two.
I wanna dig sideways on this one.

(43:05):
When you're in a therapeutic setting,
you are usually, not always...

You've done couples therapy, and one-on-one conversations.


When you move from one on ones into these group settings.


with couples therapy or with the
the post drama piece



(43:26):
where you're working with 100 different people.

How would you explain shifting,

how you interact in these one on one situations versus
a one on two, or a
a threesome and then larger groups,
how do you adjust?
It's complicated?
But I,

I think the fundamental questions are,

(43:48):

What are we doing together?
What is my role here?
And, can I be facilitative in my role?
Yeah,
facilitative.
I think that that's so hard though, when you're in a conversation,
like even this one,

where I'm the host.


I'm trying to facilitate a conversation,
but I'm also part of this conversation and I'm listening and participating,

(44:10):
but also thinking about the next step.
How do you shift? For me, how do I shift from being a facilitator to being in conversation?
And I also do a lot of work with groups where I am the facilitator for a larger group.
And how do you engage people at the beginning
in that trust building exercise?

(44:30):
And what I love about what you've done, is using drama,
using comedy,
using sketch, to bring people into a place together,
kind of setting,
well,
setting the stage,
right?
Getting people engaged, and then what you were explaining earlier saying,
OK,
let's reflect on what we've seen.
What did that bring up with you?

(44:51):
So you keep bringing people back to that center point.
At the same time,
there is still a level of, or some aspect of, power and control in that,
right?
Like who has power and control over the conversation. In a way, who is saying what's in the space and what's outside of the space.
So I'm wondering, maybe it's the last thing we talk about today, is thinking about power structures in all of this.

(45:16):
When you're in the classroom,
you have a certain expectation,
you're the professor
and you develop a lesson plan, and people need to be listening to you.
When you're in psychotherapy, you're the therapist.
Even in those larger groups,
you are putting on the drama,

the piece,
and also saying, this is what we're paying attention to today, in the conversation that we're having.

(45:36):
So maybe that's where we can reflect here and talk about, when we think about interruption,
all of these examples we've used today...
I think one of the biggest challenges with interruption is that perception of power balance. Who is using interruption and how it lands is based on a perception of power in the interaction.

(46:09):
My thinking about that starts with the idea that the solution for a history of exploitative power is not taking all the power out of relationships. It's using power,
but not exploitatively.
So, a parent who has mistreated a child,
the child grows up and goes into therapy.

We don't want a therapist who has no power.
We want a therapist who uses their power for good,

and not for self aggrandizement,
for example.
And then another simple example is, you go to a lecture or a TED talk and they're talking and you're in the audience,

(46:36):
you are not authorized to speak.
So don't speak.

Peter Brook, the theater director,
talks about this lovely French idiom for going to a play, which means "I assist."
So you don't attend a play,
you assist a play, and you assist by going and paying attention and keeping your mouth shut and bringing cough drops,

(46:57):
so you don't interfere.

The smaller the group and the different structures teach us,
signal to us what our role is in them.
Generally speaking, we wanna stay in a role.
Now there's exceptions to that.
Sometimes somebody will say something so offensive that you feel like you're assenting.


All hegemonies interpret silence as assent.

(47:19):
And so you may need to find a way that if you can't stand it,
that you can voice objection.
But that's pretty rare.
Mainly our job is to pay attention and assist and try to get engaged in what a lecturer is saying.
And then, a few people approach other situations with confusions about their role.
You know,

(47:40):
you're at a dinner party and somebody starts telling a really long story.
Is it Robert De Niro telling about,

making Mean Streets, or I don't even know what movie,

some Martin Scorsese movie and everybody's fascinated sitting on the edge of their seat.
Well,
that has a different meaning then than if it's,
you know,
somebody talking about their trip to Brussels and just dominating the entire conversation.

(48:05):
You know,
we have to be alert to what our role is in every situation and then operate accordingly.
What I love about being a therapist, and that is much more complicated everywhere else,
is that in therapy, you're always authorized to say,
what are our roles here?
What are we doing together?
Yeah.
And maybe that's part of what we can start to build more into regular conversations is, what are our roles here?

(48:31):
What is your expectation of me?
I know that's something I've tried to build into a lot of ways that I interact with people,
is just starting off with that.

This is my expectation.
This is why I'm here.
And I've noticed a lot of organizations where they're starting to build instead of just a standard employee handbook that says,
thou shalt not, that building team manuals that include "how to work with me" statements that not only say,

(48:57):
hey,
this is how I work,
but also have feedback from other people in the organization that comment on,
hey,
actually,
this is how you really need to deal with this person.

It feels so open and freeing to be able to,
when you join an organization, read up on how the CEO interacts with people or how your immediate boss interacts with people, and their expectations of other people. Just to be so open about that.

(49:23):
And I don't know if,
if that's anything that you've been engaged in at all.
But I,
I really see that as a good sign.
Well,

what I want to communicate is not what my rules are.


I had a professor who said to the class if you want to eat in class,
I'm totally cool with that.
But something about the sound of cans being opened,

(49:46):
soda cans being opened just drives me crazy.
So,
would you please open the can before the class starts?
Yeah.
Ok. Now we know!
What I want to communicate is this:
this is something we're doing together.
So, if you have any questions, ask them.
A signal moment in my history was when my wife and I went to France and we were trying to figure out what the French do after...

(50:13):


You're in a sidewalk cafe and you're drinking wine and eating olives.
What do you do with the olive pit?

And we thought,
well,
there's ash tray on the table, because it's Paris,


so we put the olive pits in the ashtray. And our Parisian friend showed up, and she sat down and the first thing she did was she threw the olive pits from the ashtray over her shoulder into the street.

(50:36):
And we were like,
oh,
I guess when you're in Paris,
you throw olive pits in the street. And it turned out that's true because they wash the streets every day.


I don't feel like I needed a guide to tell me that.
I feel like it would have been fine to say to someone who knows,
hey,
what are we supposed to do with the olive pits?
Right? To ask.
Michael.

(50:57):
Thank you.
This has been a really fun conversation! Thank you for sending the clip.

It's a hoot.
And the book that you've written on Deadly Therapy was just wonderful to read.
I think it reminded me of things that I had known,
but I hadn't remembered, if that makes any sense, of how we enter into conversation and being with other people, and these different ways that we present ourselves in different types of conversations and different types of situations.

(51:30):
Entering this as a "It's a performance." We may never quite know what quote unquote real is,
but part of real is that it does change based on the circumstances you're in.

And that in a way that almost gives us this space as individuals and as,
as a people to continue to evolve our relationships over time.

(51:50):


A
As you talked about before this idea of,
look,
there are certain values and principles that I operate by.
Maybe if,

if that could be where we start and then we allow ourselves to continue to stand by that,
but then adjust how we interact based on
the kinds of circumstances we find ourselves in.
Yeah.
And then,

(52:11):
and that's the,
to me,
the essence of liveliness is responsivity as opposed to deadliness is non responsivity.
Meaning you already know how you're gonna be.
Right.

And just get the notes.
Right.


Exactly.
Again,
thank you so much.
I really appreciated this conversation and it was great talking with you.
Likewise.

(52:37):
Thank you for joining us! For more about We Interrupt,
please see our website
at www.weinterruptthis.com for show notes,
links, and other episodes.
Contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for the series.
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee,
Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.

(52:57):
I pay my respects to Elders past and present,
and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful forests and waterways.
Thank you to Emma Levinson for her artwork featured on our website.
We include a short clip in this episode from a documentary about director Howard Hawks and how dialogue was constructed on His Girl Friday,

(53:20):
a 1940 movie starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
Segue music in this podcast is Peaks by BraveNewStorm, licensed from Tribe of Noise BV.

Intro and extro music is Bartok's "Melody with Interruptions", played by Alan Huckleberry for The University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy Video Recording Project. The podcast image is a public domain image from rawpixel, Yellow-Red-Blue abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky. Original public domain image from Wikipedia. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.