5 Reasons to see CrAzYToWn: my first psychopath

About CrAzYToWn: my first psychopath

How do you know that nice, helpful guy in the next cubicle is a psychopath? You don’t. In Crazytown, real-life therapist/performer Jude Treder-Wolff takes you down the rabbit hole of belief that led to her being blind-sided by reality. It’s a comic take on an over-eager therapist getting over herself (when nothing else seemed to be working). And these days, when our phones are smarter than we are, and we can meet, fall in love, shop for a ring and get some counseling with someone and never meet them in person – it’s a cautionary tale about how authentic a completely fake person can be.

5 Reasons to see CrAzYToWn: my first psychoath

1. No psychopaths were hurt or exploited in the creation of this show.2. It's funny because it's true! 3. If you've ever wondered "how did things go so wrong when I thought I was so right?" well, you may get an answer... 4. 55% funnier than any other show with "psychopath" in the title, according to research studies we just made up.5.The voices in your head might actually agree on something. Performance schedule: April 20, 2012 The Examined Life Conference: Writing, The Humanities and The Art of Medicine, Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA learn more Sept. 5 - 16 San Francisco Fringe Festival, EXIT on Taylor Theater, San Francisco learn more Check out video clips at www.judetreder-wolff.com

Roles, Relationships and The Art of Talk

   by Nicholas Wolff, LCSW, BCD, TEP
      In the early nineties, the Air Force achieved a 60% drop in accidents after implementing a program called Crew Resource Management (CRM)training – which emphasizes the “human factor” skills of communication,situational awareness, decision-making and team performance. The pre-CRM cockpit featured a “a traditionally rigid hierarchy with an autocratic captain and subservient flight crew. The cabin crew was not even considered part of the flying team. This tradition closely mirrored the maritime industry’s concept of the captain being “master of the ship.” Since adopting CRM, U.S. air disasters (not related to terrorism) have fallen from approximately 20 per year to one to two per year”  ("Sustaining and Advancing Performance Improvements Achieved by CRM" Dynamics Research Corporation). Since that time, aviation professionals reached out to the medical/surgical field where CRM is gaining ground
      Medical, surgical and aviation teams operate in high-stakes situations with lives on the line that demand technical precision with little margin for error. Specialists in group dynamics will not be surprised to learn that when mistakes are made within teams – sometimes with catastrophic results - the majority are due to problems in communication within the team and interpersonal issues. A few examples:

• “Communication Failures: An Insidious Contributor to Medical Mishaps” published in the journal Academic Medicine states that “Communication failures are complex and relate to hierarchical differences, concerns with upward influence, conflicting roles and role ambiguity, and interpersonal power and conflict.”
• A study published in The Journal of the American College of Surgery found that “communication in the OR was perceived to be poor by the anesthesiologists, adequate by the OR nurses, and good by the surgeons” revealing a true disconnect among members of the same team.
• Communication skills trainings significantly improved the communication between oncologists and patients that is critical to effective care, and more resources should be allocated to this work, according to a study reported in Lancet.  

   What works in a cockpit, surgical theater or EMS response unit is a powerful model for what works in any team that has a job to do. These studies point out the importance of talking openly and honestly and of creating a system of communication that allows hidden dynamics among people in groups to be examined and understood. Trainers and therapists can apply the Crew Resource Management model and improve the effectiveness of any group, whether that group is a company, marriage/ partnership, family or project team. Anyone who has served on a committee that talks a good game but accomplishes little, or sat through tortured meetings with policy-focused administrators unwilling to hear about the real problems their staff encounters day to day knows that communication breakdowns due to dysfunction within the group leads straight to burn-out. And the work suffers.

        Co-facilitating is a worthy test of relationship skills, as well as a check in the self-awareness department. Professionals who run groups are as vulnerable to role conflicts and hidden tensions in relationships as our trainees and clients. Symptoms that a training team needs some rehabilitation show up in post-processing after an event, the first of which is avoiding the debrief altogether. Just as troubling is a team whose members take the time to debrief but withhold questions or confusion about choices made by others during the event.  While our work does not usually have the life-or-death component that is always there for teams of firefighters or EMS personnel, the fact that people in our groups surrender a degree of control, lower their defenses and open their minds to us means we have a high degree of responsibility to both honest and respectful in working out our differences with one another. 
Read a Crew Resource Management Manual

 

Nicholas Wolff, LCSW, BCD, TEP runs a weekly training group
 in Experiential/Action Methods at Lifestage, Inc.

Following The Fear, Or Getting Over Myself….Because Nothing Else Seemed To Be Working

by Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, RMT, CGP

   Improv guru Del Close famously advised his students to “follow the fear,” a phrase printed on a T-shirt I recently bought at The Pit-NYC and framed to post in my office. “He didn't just say this to neophyte improvisers afraid of performing without a script,” writes Mike Bonifer, founder of the business learningcompany Gamechangers on Huffington Post. “Del taught the best there was. Bill Murray, John Belushi, Tina Fey, Gilda Radner, Mike Myers - his former students are the improv hall of fame. What he said is that you can use your fear as a kind of divining rod. Do what makes you uneasy, he taught. Do the thing that scares you most. You will discover new worlds.” When we step into an improv situation, we agree to rattle our own cage by engaging in an activity that involves psychological risk. Defenses structured to keep our flaws hidden from view - what we habitually, reflexively, do to look good - are threatened when we surrender control in order to respond to unexpected choices from other players. This is a healthy way to cultivate resilience to stress, to train both brain and emotions for the unexpected. Because one never knows when we might have a day like this:

     The 6:55 a.m. Long Island Railroad Train gets me into Penn Station-if all goes according to plan-at 8:19. More than enough time to travel to the New York Public Library in midtown where I’m scheduled to run a staff training that begins at 9:30. Except this time, nothing goes according to plan. The Long Island Expressway, always busy at this hour, is a parking lot. Service and side roads are also paralyzed. At 7:30 I am trapped on a side road miles from the train station wild with anxiety, trying to calculate how late I am going to be if I get on any train at this point. I call my husband – who is, remarkably, always able to wake from a dead sleep fully alert when a call for help comes in – and he immediately offers to drive me to a station closer to the city using the High Occupancy Lane (HOV). Nick is already outside when I pull up a few minutes later - his crazy morning hair in an homage to Einstein - but hope plunges once again when we are crawling at 5 mph in the HOV lane. I leave frantic messages to my contacts at the Library, knowing it is likely they will only be heard when angry participants storm Human Resources. They are entitled to anger – they took time from work to attend this thing and it cannot be easily re-scheduled. I want to tell myself “I’m only human,” or “this happens to everyone, at least everyone who lives in New York,” but this does not mitigate the completely irrational but ever-so-familiar shame triggered by failure. As a free-lancer, these are important gigs and I can't afford to lose this business. The shame grows as time races by, along with dread over having to face an understandably frustrated and possibly hostile group. I know I have to do something. So I cry.

     Nick continues the mercy run – well, crawl - all the way into the city while I rethink my presentation based on how late I’ll be. I breathe from the diaphragm. I repeat affirmations. Anxiety wins. As we exit the Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan it is clear that here too, cars are moving much slower than people. I jump out of the car and run - in my suit, my high heels and carrying my briefcase. I run without thinking and definitely without stopping, and enter that training site dripping like I just came from the gym. My hair is stuck to the back of my head. It’s like a sauna inside my suit. I've sweated off whatever make-up had not been washed away by tears. Vanity and ego threaten to derail my focus on the presentation. After all that stop-and-go, moment-to-moment decision-making, I am only 30 minutes late but there is no time to waste on how I look.  Walking into that scene feels exactly like entering an improv scene, with no time to feel the fear but a clear injunction to follow it. I explain the situation while catching my breath. We have a wealth of real-time material to work with that relates to the training theme: “Creative Thinking In Difficult Situations." The participants receive my story and my imperfect self as if they are experienced improvisers themselves - they listen. They express understanding. We go from there.
     Improv trains us to accept uncertainty and exposure, in order to – hopefully, possibly, sometimes gloriously – create a truly alive and spontaneous moment. To tell a story. To find the funny in a dynamic and authentic way. The improv scene is like the blank page to a writer, the empty canvas to the painter, the design problem to the engineer. It is the training ground for getting over ourselves.

Jude Treder-Wolff is a trainer/consultant, writer and performer. She is performing her new show CrAzYToWn: my first psychopath at Broadway Comedy Club in New York, NY on Feb. 18 and 25. Click here for more information.

About CrAzYToWn: How do you know that nice, helpful guy in the next cubicle is a psychopath? You don’t. Some people can lie better than the rest of us can tell the truth. In Crazytown, real-life therapist/performer Jude Treder-Wolff takes you down the rabbit hole of belief that led to her being blind-sided by reality. It’s a comic take on an over-eager therapist getting over herself (when nothing else seemed to be working). And these days, when our phones are smarter than we are, and we can meet, fall in love, shop for a ring and get some counseling with someone and never meet them in person – it’s a cautionary tale about how authentic a completely fake person can be.

Changing For Good: Relationship Lessons From The Words of Dr. Martin Luther King

Dr. Martin Luther King

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that."

Dr. Martin Luther King,

by Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, BCD, TEP
     February is Black History Month, and an opportunity to reflect upon Dr. Martin Luther King's unconventional and seemingly counter-intuitive approach to oppression and injustice and apply it to our daily interactions at home and work. He spoke stirringly about peoples' real and immediate suffering while inspiring them to work toward change they might never see in their own lifetime. He communicated with clarity and force about long-standing wrongs while encouraging civil, collective movement toward a new way of thinking for all of society. "Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism," he said, "or in the darkness of destructive selfishness."
      Intimate partnerships and family life are a mini-society in that both are created by intricate weaving of our actions and choices with those of others. Both contain the energy to support or block the pursuit of our dreams and realization of our better selves. Struggles for social change and in personal relationships are more often between “old and new’ than between “me and you,” and have the potential to take us from dark to light, like Ebeenezer Scrooge, or dark to darker, like Darth Vader. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” said Dr. King, “but it bends toward justice,” encouraging oppressed people to think beyond their hurt and anger and envision themselves as playing a larger role in reshaping the world. 
              The nature of interdependency is a balance of benefits - psychological safety, support, and life satisfaction, according to numerous studies – and sources of conflict. Our need to be right can interfere with respect for others. Our need for power – or simply the fear that someone else will take advantage of our vulnerability - locks us into battle-ready positions from which we will tend to perceive any disagreement or disapproval as a threat. An underlying fear of loss can turn normal differences of opinion into pitched battles for control.
     But as the Civil Rights movement demonstrated, the seeds of transformation are sown through conflict. Dr. King's visionary approach sought to transform and uplift the whole rather than satisfy resentments, which is probably why we may feel tremendous resistance to applying it in real time. We may have grown comfortable staying small, feel safe in woundedness that justifies indulging the “inner wimp” always ready to run or the “inner warrior” always ready to rumble. But small shifts in our attitudes can make large differences. Simply opening our awareness to what others experience as a consequence of our actions can generate good will in a relationship. Respectful communication, especially in disagreements about hot-button issues, pays off in the ability to come up with long-term strategies when ‘live-and-let-live” is the only solution. And we don’t have to be some sort of “relationship genius” to do this, although it helps to want a transformed relationship more than we want to “win.”“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve,” according to Dr. King. “You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve... You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

Jude Treder-Wolff will perform her solo show CrAzYToWn: my first psychopath at Broadway Comedy Club, 318 W. 53rd St. New York, NY on Feb. 18 and 25, 2012. Click here for more information.ABOUT CrAzYToWn:
How do you know that nice, helpful guy in the next cubicle is a psychopath? You don’t. Some people can lie better than the rest of us can tell the truth.In Crazytown, real-life therapist/performer Jude Treder-Wolff takes you down the rabbit hole of belief that led to her being blind-sided by reality. It’s a comic take on an over-eager therapist getting over herself (when nothing else seemed to be working). And these days, when our phones are smarter than we are, and we can meet, fall in love, shop for a ring and get some counseling with someone and never meet them in person – it’s a cautionary tale about how authentic a completely fake person can be

    

When A Door Closes, Open Your Mind

by Nicholas Wolff,
LCSW, BCD, TEP

    “When a paradigm shifts, everything goes back to zero,” writes Joel Barker, author of Paradigms: The Business of Discovering the Future, in which he mentions the telephone and movies with sound as inventions that were disparaged and passed over by corporate giants. Digital Equipment (never heard of them? That’s my point) went out of business because they could not let go of an old idea about who could use or understand computers. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates changed history by re-imagining the computer as something anyone could own and use.  What’s true in business, science and technology is also true in the way we think and live. When events beyond our control force us onto an entirely different course, letting go of the old is about the most important – and for many of us most difficult – aspect of thriving in the “new normal.”

     A famous example of this – and the subject of the recent New York Times essay “Leadership Lessons From The ShackletonExpedition” by Harvard research historian Nancy Koehn – is  the story of the Antarctic-bound ship appropriately-named The Endurance which became trapped in thick Arctic ice for 2 years. Ernest Shackleton took his ship and crew on what began as a bold, history-making vision to be the first men to walk across the continent but within a year life-threatening conditions upended those plans completely. “A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground,” he wrote in his diary, and the record shows that his ability to quickly and completely let go of the original plan and create a new one in real time led to his entire crew’s survival against overwhelming odds. “I was struck by Shackleton’s ability to respond to constantly changing circumstances. When his expedition encountered serious trouble, he had to reinvent the team’s goals. He had begun the voyage with a mission of exploration, but it quickly became a mission of survival,” writes Koehn. “This capacity is vital in our own time, when leaders must often change course midstream — jettisoning earlier standards of success and redefining their purposes and plans.”
     Therapists and trainers are constantly engaged with people having to reshape their goals and redefine their identity because of unpredictable circumstances. When life redirects our course and there is no going back, letting go of the person we used to be is the pivot upon which a successful future turns. Another New York Times article ("When Injuries to the Brain Tear at Hearts") speaks to this through a story about interventions with couples when one partner has a traumatic brain injury, which often results in personality changes that dramatically alters the emotional landscape of a marriage.  Quoting Virginia Commonwealth Univeristy psychologist Emilie Godwin, the article states that although some familiar  tools in the therapeutic toolbox for couples are useful in these situations – like communication skills, focusing on the positive in one another, taking time for fun and romance – the core of the work is “asking people to just look forward, to not look back at all. To try to recreate a relationship.”
     When a paradigm shifts, and “everything goes back to zero,” we bring all that we are and have developed within ourselves to the challenge of reinventing our dreams and our attitudes. Shackleton brought his emotional intelligence, personal courage and strength to the task of improvising a structure of activity that kept his men engaged with life and with each other rather than sinking into despair for 2 long years in catastrophic conditions. Living with a life-changing injury or catastrophic loss that redefines our roles is a similar process of improvisation.
    We can develop and maintain the psychological “muscle” needed for thinking on the fly and effective responses to uncertainty through the practice of letting go. Let go of old, unrealized dream. Take a hard look at habits of thinking or action that are familiar but futile. Release what is no longer working. The creative tension produced by unloading the past prepares us to deal with the unexpected. We become more flexible and adaptable. We can shape our future rather than wait to be shaped by it.

Nicholas Wolff facilitates a weekly professional training group in Experiential/Action Methods for therapists, counselors, educators and trainers. Contact him about participation in this visionary group by calling 631-366-4265 or email: lifestage_2000@yahoo.com

Creative Courage: Improv and Freedom To Flail, Fail, Flop and Flounder



by Jude Treder-Wolff

    Friday nights at 6 p.m. The Pit-NYC offers a free, drop-in improv jam they call Happy Hour. It has all the "you've-had-a-hard-week-just-have-some-fun" ethos of any conventional Happy Hour, minus the alcohol and the self-pity. Everyone puts their name in a jar. The host pulls 2 names. Those two people get up on stage. A suggestion is offered from the audience. Lights go out. A Beat. Lights go up. The scene begins, then unfolds through a series of offers and responses. Two minutes - lights out. Scene over. New names. New scene. And so on. This "anything goes" and anyone-is-welcome improv event is unpredictable enough to induce tension but warm and supportive at the same time; it provides exhilerating relief from the stresses of the week, the intensity of the city just a few feet away, and the thinking thinking thinking self that can never work it all out but never lets up.
   What makes this a kind of spiritual process is the faith required to do it. Faith that the people who show up will keep the agreements that make improv work, e.g. accept all offers, respect your partner and make them look good; choose moving the scene forward over ego; contribute and let go of control over outcomes. In this context, faith is freedom.
    Freedom to flail. The structured world of work, business and community trains us to be so structured in our thinking that many people feel extremely uncomfortable and self-conscious in any situation that might remotely involve "flailing." And there are everyday situations that feed our discomfort with not-knowing - the ridiculous ego needs of people we must deal with every day, systems we must navigate set up by institutions that take forever to change, colleagues who willfully crush others' chances out of rank self-interest, the eyes of others on our children's behavior ready to pounce on our parenting skills, to name a few. And yet the creative mind -with all it's rich potential to come up with an idea that blows away the competition or sparks the best behavior in the kids, - revels in flailing, as long as we can stay with it long enough to have some fun. To flail we have to put aside self-conscious pondering and competition. The two-minute limit of the short-form improv leaves enough time to enjoy some time in the spotlight but not get carried away with ourselves.
    Freedom to fail. With the nonstop competitive business world and the demands of family life in the Age of Complexity we are under constant pressure to perform. We don't often feel there is room for failure and are often unfairly harsh with ourselves when things do not work out as we hoped or planned. Improv blows past the fear of failure by making it part of the whole experience. In feeling the freedom to fail, we learn to flow with it as part of the creative process. Innovators, inventive thinkers, and entrepeneurs with this attitude make the most out of every "failure" - usually by looking honestly at what does not work and searching to understand why.
   Freedom to Flop. Being in a scene that goes nowhere. Standing silent and blank onstage while others make offers we cannot work with simply because we have shut down. Being self-conscious and really feeling it. In a 2-minute scene for which we have a split-second warm-up, these can happen easily and often - something to be genuinely happy about. To find a place in life where it is okay to look hapless, have a brain freeze and then just move on is an amazing thing. This is the closest we can get to full-on acceptance of our flawed self because it happens in front of a group of people who will applaud the effort. And who want your support when it happens to them.
   Freedom To Flounder. Creative thoughts and truly innovative breakthroughs can come in a stream of consciousness that is one of the most exciting and spiritual experiences a person can have in this life. But floundering is often what puts the "break" in "breakthrough."What breaks apart during a "floundering" phase of anything new - a new role or phase in life, a new project, idea or plan - is usually structured thinking that is obsolete but laid into our minds much like the grain in wood. It feels natural to follow the familiar, and to go in new directions feels wrong, fearful, even shame-inducing. So we flounder in order to break things up. We learn to tolerate the discomfort through the group's acceptance. We discover the scene by being in it, just as we are. Just as we discover the gifts hidden within mistakes and missteps by accepting and mining them for meaning.
   The Happy Hour-style improv jam can be a release of the tensions of the week and it does indeed bring about feelings of joy. The peeople who show up - always true at the Happy Hour events I attend - will remind you that showing up in life is a creative choice. They will be grateful for your openness and humanity.  They will thank you for playing.

About CrAzYToWn: How do you know that nice, helpful guy in the next cubicle is a psychopath? You don’t. In Crazytown, real-life therapist/performer Jude Treder-Wolff takes you down the rabbit hole of belief that led to her being blind-sided by reality. It’s a comic take on an over-eager therapist getting over herself (when nothing else seemed to be working). And these days, when our phones are smarter than we are, and we can meet, fall in love, shop for a ring and get some counseling with someone and never meet them in person – it’s a cautionary tale about how authentic a completely fake person can be. Click here for information about upcoming performances.

Five Arguments For Therapists, Trainers & Educators To Learn Experiential/Action Methods

by Nicholas Wolff, LCSW, BCD, TEP

 Full Disclosure: I am a trainer in experiential/action methods, a psychodrama Trainer, Educator, and Practitioner with a long career history of using these methods in clinical practice and a you-name-it-I've-been-there list of professional training situations. That is to say, I believe in this stuff. If action methods were the hair club for men, I'd not only be a spokesperson, I'd be a member. So here are five - out of many - arguments for academics, clinicians and trainers of every stripe to receive training in these methods, supported by some studies from a range of disciplines:
1. In the Information Age, learning must be integrative.
When Harvard physicist professor Eric Mazur looked into the effectiveness of the lecture method of teaching physics, he discovered that after an entire semester students understood only 14% of the concepts they had memorized. "Students have to be active in developing their knowledge," he says. "They can't passively assimilate it." His innovations include group interaction, group process and active discussions about the class content. The results show that in this age of easily accessible information, the instructor's role needs to shift from "the sage on the stage" to "the guide on the side." (Physicists Seek To Lose Lecture As Teaching Tool, NPR transcript)

2.To Train Others To "Possibility Thinking" We Have To Be "Possibility" Thinkers
Children think in terms of possibilities - the "what if" approach to the world - until we shut that down with repeated explanations of "what is." We can all agree there is nothing wrong with explaining the way the world works to children, but possibility thinkers keep an open mind about how it could, might or should work. Drama and imaginative experiences connect us to the "what if" mind set, regardless of our age, education level, or problems. This a serious idea that is leading innovation in the field of primary education and upon which psychodramatists and trainers who work experientially base their approach. Check out these journal articles: "Documenting 'Possibility Thinking': A Journal of Collaborative Inquiry" and "Pedagogy and possibility thinking in the early years" from the journal Thinking Skills and Creativity.

3.The Pace of Change is Accelerating - Creative Methods Enhance Adaptability To Change
Life is not about being balanced, it is about the act of balancing. Stanford University professor Patricia Ryan Madson writes about a key life skill learned through training in improvisation, something she calls "embracing the wobble." Like riding a bicycle or skiing, there are physical activities that are nonstop feats of balance - "Things are not stable, linear or predictable," she writes in Improv Wisdom. "The situation is always in flux. Our footing keeps changing. Even if we succeed in finding solid ground for a while, we can depend on the fact that it will eventually change." And just as reading a map is not the same thing as taking the trip, the experience of uncertainty in a safe, supportive learning or therapeutic environment is uniquely helpful in gaining the skills for balancing in life.
4.Life Is Unpredictable. Train For It.
Cockpit, surgical and police teams work in the most tense, dynamic situations, and the latest advances in their training includes simulations - or fully realized role-plays of events that happen in the field - communication and assertiveness skills, and creative thinking skills. When it comes down to those dynamic, dramatic moments that people in these professions encounter, the life-or-death decisions have as much as to do with relationships and trust among the team, the capacity to take in the nuances of the situation and to be inventive on the fly. If experiential methods are effective in training for what those guys have to deal with, think about their value in learning to cope with the uncertainty of the classroom or consulting room. ("Strategies to Improve Cockpit Resource Management," Aviation Knowledge;  Crew Resource Management and Team Training," Anesthiology Clinic
5.Everything is connected.
Albert Einstein's famously said that "Imagination is more important than knowledge" and he argued all his life for the benefits of creativity to academic learning and personal development. Guided, creative, interactive experiences enrich new learning by integrating it with the development of a creative process and relationships with other people. In the networked world that Einstein's scientific breakthroughs made possible, it is more important than ever that we provide clients, students and trainees with the tools to create and sustain relationships, for both personal and professional satisfaction.

Nicholas Wolff, LCSW, BCD, TEP facilitates a weekly professional training group in experiential action methods at Lifestage, Inc. The group meets Wednesday evenings 7-9 p.m. To contact him to discuss participation in this group call 631-366-4265 or email him at bookings@lifestage.org