Antonio Pascual-Leone

It depends what you...

call romantic.

But yeah, I started as a... I wasn't sure if I wanted to study biology and go to medicine or if I wanted to go into theater.

I ended up going into theater and somehow ended up in a compromise, which I think is psychology.

And many years later, I sort of realized that

There's something that happens on stage.

An actor generates an emotional experience on stage for the entertainment of the audience.

But those are real emotional experiences.

A therapist could help somebody have an emotional experience that's curative in its own right.

This isn't for the entertainment of anybody.

This is their life.

It's for the purposes of health care, that going through certain experiences can be curative, a corrective emotional experience.

Mostly quite bad poetry.

Thanks for asking.

You know, a lot of them, I guess I identified very much with the lovesick kind of unrequited love poetry, right?

I think that was also part of an identity that somehow I had, you know, this is like late adolescence, early 20s sort of thing.

I was very enamored.

Right.

And I think I kind of, you know, the relationship sort of fizzled out.

But my approach, I guess, was to lean in harder.

Right.

So I had a friend who was also became an actor and a scriptwriter.

And that probably didn't help, probably made things worse looking back.

But the last attempt, the rally was to go in the street underneath her balcony of her apartment to call her out.

She comes out on the balcony and I proceed to serenade her with the help of a buddy and

There's singing, a poem might have been read, a big finish, bucket of sand with fireworks in it to end it all.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, kind of a crash and burn, but very dramatic.

You know, looking back...

You know, it was about the performance.

It wasn't about the relationship.

Right.

And it wasn't about what I needed.

There wasn't a lot of relating, actually.

I mean, that became a turning point, right, where I kind of realized I wasn't attending to to what's happening inside me, which is this, you know, sense of insecurity, sense of what did I really need?

And and and how do I feel about this and what's missing for me?

I'm very glad that it's not on camera.

No.

In fact, this is the only telling of that story.

In fact, I talked to my wingman friend.

We're now just old friends.

And he firmly said to me, definitely do not tell that story.

Yes, absolutely.

I mean,

There's sort of a, shall I say, desperate kind of attempt to move on.

I mean, it's a behavioral approach.

It's like, I'm just going to, you know, there's an old saying in Spanish, which is un clavo saca otro clavo, right?

To push out a nail, you just drive in another nail, right?

Replacing the old with the new.

You know, and that is not something that helps you necessarily figure out what you really need.

Right.

So, I mean, you might get over somebody, but but, you know, you haven't learned anything from the relationship.

You haven't changed as a person and you're likely to end up in a similar sort of predicament.

You know, it's also an example of I hate you for not loving me.

Right.

So what's really going on here underneath all the hostility?

No, it's anger.

It's anger.

But the anger is all about it's blaming anger.

It's rejecting anger.

It's about what I don't want.

So what's he fighting for?

That's not so clear.

Right.

What are you fighting for?

What what do you really need?

That part's not clear.

Right.

It's clear he wants distance, but that's not an assertion of of of an existential need, really.

So there's I mean, there are a lot of ways of.

having poor outcomes.

When we look at psychotherapy and you're trying to predict outcome, we generally don't try to predict poor outcomes because there's a million ways of having a poor outcome, lots of reasons why it wouldn't work.

And what's interesting is actually there are a few, a finite number of reasons why people have good outcomes.

And so that tends to be something the focus of psychotherapy research is.

Yeah.

I mean, if we were talking about grief, you know, part of the puzzle is what have you lost?

And people are often thinking about the good things.

What have I lost in terms of, uh,

what I enjoyed about the relationship and will no longer come to pass, right?

This might be the way we used to have the little jokes together or the idiosyncrasies of that person that I cared about.

But then you could also think about, you'd get a different piece of paper if you wanted to do it as an exercise.

You know, saying goodbye to the bad things, the things that I put up with or tolerated.

It might be, you know, the idiosyncratic quirks that that person had, which I didn't really enjoy, but was part of the relationship.

And you just sort of took it.

It was, you know, so that that's a different sort of thing.

And listing those.

Right.

I never really liked when the person did X, but and now I don't have to put up with it anymore.

Yes.

And then this third piece is...

the hopes and dreams, you know, and this is tricky because there's all sorts of things that you hoped would happen or that you imagined would happen.

And those two are part of the relationship.

It's like surplus reality, right?

It didn't happen, but it was kind of baked into my experience of the relationship.

Like one day we would have children or one day we would go on that trip together.

And now those things, those will never happen, right?

So there's all these undeclared losses and kind of putting up, I'll call it little tombstones for those things, helps make them more real and helps make them easier to let go of.

will both shape the emergence of a story and describe the story.

So one thing we were doing is getting people to write about traumatic experiences or the most difficult experiences they've had and then looking at the way they tell those stories, right?

And it turned out that there were certain markers and you've mentioned them here, the sort of the same old story and also the superficial story

The superficial story is this, you know, might be big on plot and characters, but never really getting into the deeper experience.

And the same old story would be, yes, they get into the emotional experience, but they're stuck in some sort of maladaptive state.

Right.

This is it's always like this for me.

It might be the poor me story or it might be feeling like a victim or it might be I'm just giving some examples.

Right.

When people told stories like that, irrespective of the content, right?

It's the manner in which they told their stories, right?

So this is the phrasing, this is highlighting certain things, irrespective of the content.

We could actually predict symptoms, their symptom level.

So depressive symptoms, anxious symptoms, even trauma symptoms.

So I can't stress enough.

It isn't that they're telling stories about trauma and therefore they've suffered trauma.

It's rather the way they tell this story.

And so it's like I can tell I know what you're feeling, meaning I know what your symptoms are to some degree and the symptom severity based on how people are telling their stories.

Yeah, because you can think of emotion in terms of immediate experience, but it also gets embellished and elaborated as a narrative, right?

And sometimes people cling to a certain emotional loop or an emotional state becomes the centerpiece of the story they tell about who I am.

Well, yeah, I mean, I remember being in a relationship and leaning into it and

Yeah, I guess now that I'm thinking about it, there's sort of a theme here, right?

I mean, not wanting to be the reason why the relationship ends, right?

And in some sense, she was the brave one and she ended the relationship, which had come to a kind of a natural conclusion.

Relationships really need to be reinvented every seven years or so.

But this one...

had run its course.

And yet I was having trouble letting go of it and just wanted to make it work.

But then when it became really clear the relationship was ending and was over, I guess I realized that the way

you handle the end of a relationship defines you in some way or that it would define me, right?

I mean, I'm the kind of person who, and then you fill in the blank for yourself, right?

If you're the kind of person who's hateful and angry and destructive, well, then that's who you are, right?

And I think there's kind of a moment where I realized that

this was an opportunity to honor the relationship to, you know, I was unhappy that it was ending, but at the same time, it was somebody I learned a lot from.

This was somebody who I cared for, who cared for me.

The relationship's now over.

And in some sense, give it the funeral it deserved, right?

I think that changed me because it's a choice point, an existential choice point.

I think I also came out with a,

with a sense of clarity or a sense of direction.

realizing that i needed somebody that that was ready to to put me first uh that was ready to champion me in a way you know there's an old definition of love is something along the lines of um when you are able to make other people's needs your own right um

or kind of support somebody in what they need.

And so I was willing to do that for somebody, but I also needed somebody who's willing to do that for me.

When I met my future wife, I knew it was right.

And I think that was part of the ending of the relationship in a clarifying way, where you realize you're both the author and the reader of your own story.

Right.

So she was saying things like, I feel like an idiot.

I feel I must have been... I'm such a fool is something that really stuck with me.

Her saying, I'm such a fool.

How could I have been so blind that this was happening and so on and so forth?

And of course, it rattles her, right?

It's not just the loss.

It's of a relationship because the relationship was ending.

But it's also...

you know, rocked her, her, her confidence.

Yeah.

And these sort of doubts about, um, feeling adequate, feeling lovable, feeling attractive enough, feeling, you know, like somebody wants to spend their life with me.

Um, you know, so that's an injury to, to identity in some ways.

So, yeah, I mean, that's that's in some ways a similar example.

Right.

I mean, I was I was quite young and, you know, a teenager.

What?

And it was somebody saying to me, you know, we're sort of breaking up and I wanted to know why.

You know, the why question is never a real question when people want to know why.

It's not a real question.

It's a rhetorical question.

Right.

It's I don't want to break up.

But in any case, I was really hooked on why.

And she said to me, well, you're just not good at getting stuff done, which was yikes.

It was right, right in my soft spot.

Right.

Because I had my own doubts.

I had my own things.

I was struggling.

I was young.

I wasn't, you know, wasn't always very assertive and was having trouble getting

you know, um, blossoming into the kind of person I wanted to be.

So, I mean, that was particularly difficult.

Uh, it's kind of like a mercy killing really, cause it also helped and the relationship.

Um, but, uh, ending the relationship, I think this is to your point, ending the relationship left me with a wound that, uh, that no longer was related to the loss of the person, but was an injury to my, my sense of self.

Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple of things going on, right?

This is an issue of...

You know, and he's angry and you can hear that, but he's also really hurt.

The fact that she can't answer, you know, people are often feeling like they need to have a conversation or finish somehow to get closure.

But there are ways to do that that don't really involve the other person.

Well, I mean, of course, it's about the other person in the sense that I've had an interaction with the other person.

But it means something to me.

And the unfinished business I have is my own.

You can't change the historical facts.

But you can change quite a lot.

What you feel about it, when you think about it, you can change what it means.

And even some of the details of what you remember.

Memory is actually very dynamic and more dynamic than what people tend to believe.

In the end, exactly what happened or what was said matters less than what it means and what I'm going to do with it, right?

In working with victims of trauma or complex trauma, sometimes the other person isn't, like in this clip, you know, a partner or an ex-partner, right?

who's unconscious in a hospital bed, but was actually a perpetrator of abuse.

That kind of person is not a person usually that one can have a conversation with.

They're not going to acknowledge the abuse.

So clients will say things like, I've told them and they deny it.

And it's sort of like, yeah, yeah, they...

I agree.

That's not a conversation you can actually have with them because they always deny it or dismiss it or shut you down.

So actually not having the person here can be more useful.

Me getting over the relationship is no longer a shared project.

Me deciding what it means to me, it doesn't have to mean the same thing to me as it does to the other person.

We often have, you know, there's this question of, well, isn't it just better to talk to the other person?

And there was a study that kind of looked at, that's a great question, right?

An imagined dialogue versus a real dialogue.

So this was basically a study where what they were treating was suicidal adolescents who had essentially unfinished business with parents, right?

There were rifts that were very painful related to the situation.

Adolescence, suicidality.

And, you know, they could randomize and treat in two ways.

One, you could put them in family therapy where they actually have dialogues with the parent about what's going on.

Or you could put them in individual therapy and have imagined dialogues where they imagine that the parent is alive, is living somewhere else, but they're imagining a dialogue here.

So this is really interesting.

It answers that question because you actually get different outcomes, different kinds of outcomes.

So if what you're looking for is relationship resolution, if what you're looking for is to improve the relationship, have a better relationship, then having a real dialogue with a real person is going to be more effective.

That's where you'll see the change in the quality of the relationship.

not necessarily in the degree to which they've worked through their own unfinished business, right?

So you can repair the relationship and still not feel entirely resolved.

On the other hand, if you had people imagine a dialogue,

Emotional processing, I'll call it, is better if the dialogue is imaginary.

So the working through is their own project.

Even if the person is alive, right?

You still need to do your work.

They can't process it for you.

Yeah, you know, so the idea is there might be things to say and you need to clarify things.

the boundary violation, if that's what it is, or you need to clarify what you're defending or what the loss is, for you to move on, to unhitch and to move on with that.

Teaching the other person a lesson or educating them or correcting them, you know, that's often what people are wanting to do, right?

Or punish them.

I mean, that's not really going to get you the change you're looking for.

And you'd have to actually ask yourself, do I really want to re-educate the person?

Is that really what this is about?

So the idea is to have a venue where you can express yourself with clarity.

You could sit and think about it.

Turns out that thinking about your difficulties is not particularly effective.

There's something about writing it down in some form, whether it be an email.

That's tricky because you really want to hit the send button.

But writing a letter, these are ways that compel you, that put you in a scenario.

Therapy is similar, right?

Puts you in a scenario where you have to...

creates sort of a coherent story of what you're feeling and why.

So the scenario puts demands on you to be more clear and more coherent than if you were just going for a walk and daydreaming about it.

People's daydreams about their emotional difficulties tend to be full of incomplete sentences or the analog of that, right?

And lack clarity.

So it's good to have a formal exercise of some sort.

Might just be talking to another person.

It's very evocative.

I think this is the first thing, right?

So if you need to activate emotion and you do, people need to feel their feelings, right?

And one way of activating emotion is to imagine the other person.

People do this all the time.

I mean, you talk to yourself in the mirror, you kind of imagine, at least I do it all the time.

My wife is always like, who are you talking to now?

And I'm like, I'm not, I'm brushing my teeth.

But, you know, like, you know, there's a clarity you have in imagining a conversation, but it's also much more evocative.

Imagine the difference between telling somebody, now we're not talking about unfinished business, we're talking expressing love here, but if you say, oh, I really love so-and-so, or you imagine they say, I love you, and use their name.

I mean, the second is much more evocative, right?

or I forgive you, or I'll never forgive you.

I mean, saying it to somebody in an imagined scenario is much more evocative.

So it evokes emotion.

That's the first thing.

It helps with clarity.

So you clarify what you're feeling.

You can say the things that you would never be able to say in real life.

So sometimes there's a vulnerability or what, or a conversation.

You can have conversations with people who are no longer available, who are passed away.

But then you can also, taking it a step further, you could actually change chairs.

It's that come over here and be the other person.

What happens?

You know, what would they say if they could hear you?

And this is an entirely fabricated part of reality.

It's definitely not a rehearsal.

But there's an unpacking, a meaning.

There's always expectations and things that one has of other people.

I could give examples of where people in therapy sort of reveal an understanding of the other person, or rather they create an understanding of the other person that they didn't have by enacting them.

So yeah, that's the sort of changing that I'm talking about.

This was a client who had suffered a lot of trauma.

But what was salient to this person was the constant criticism.

The teaching of a lesson with a very hard hand.

And at some point in working through, he was saying...

you know, what my father doesn't understand is, and I had him speak to, speak him, tell him what he doesn't understand.

And here there's an unpacking of a conversation that, that isn't permissible.

That could never happen.

That wouldn't be tolerated, for example, by the father.

And then as you're saying a next step, come over here.

What would it be like for your father?

Like in his heart of hearts, if he could hear this,

If it could somehow make sense to him, how might he respond?

And this is fabricated, right?

This is an invention, but it's full of the client's...

deeper understandings, projections, and expectations of his own father.

And he imagines, you know, he can imagine his father expressing regret and says, you know, I'm like, I'm sorry.

I'm anxious.

I'm just fearful.

Really, I regret being so mean.

I'm a nasty, miserable person.

But it's like, I'm anxious for you.

Right.

I mean, that doesn't make the abuse any any less abusive.

It doesn't excuse it.

But for the client, it starts to mean something different.

You know, and later the client says to me, I don't think he says I don't think my dad could ever explain that about himself.

He doesn't really he doesn't know why he's mean, but I know.

And the client ends up in some ways forgiving his father for their terrible relationship, which isn't always the way these things work out.

And there's not a mandate for that.

But it was a very interesting turn.

He decides to forgive his father, but to always keep a healthy distance.

He says, I'm going to shield my daughter from her grandfather.

He's a mean guy.

Yeah.

I don't have a lot of extended family.

Uh, I never met my grandparents on, on either side, um, because my, my parents immigrated, um, and, and they were older, but I, I had, um, an aunt who was the oldest person in the family, um,

And I was very close to her.

I mean, when I was born, she actually named me, right?

She named me after her husband, my first name.

And they were like grandparents to me in many ways.

They were an aunt and uncle.

They never had children of their own.

They couldn't.

And so I guess there was a closeness.

I mean, they had other nephews and nieces, but...

for me, it was a very special relationship.

It was for them too.

And she was, she was brilliant.

She was like a prize winning researcher in endocrinology and very vivacious and sharp witted.

Right.

And so in some ways a role model.

And I remember her, you know, I've been writing this, this giant book, which is now finished, but I, you know, I, I mentioned her in the dedication and I was looking forward to showing it to her.

But it,

But she died.

The thing is, you know, she dies at 91, just this past year.

So there's the loss of the person.

But...

She also started to lose herself a little bit.

She suffered dementia in her last, it became more obvious in the last year or two.

And so she became quite different, right?

So, you know, I remember visiting her in Spain and sitting across from her and talking and she wasn't there anymore, right?

So it's quite hard to say goodbye to someone or to a relationship when they're sitting right there.

So that's kind of, you know, the analog is the person's there.

They're not really available.

I don't really want to say goodbye, but the relationship has ended, right?

Part of the process, you know, and I...

You know, I cleaned out her apartment, big apartment.

I think that was part of, you know, part of it to sort of, you know, and you go through people's stuff and she doesn't know, but I know.

I guess I'm not finished yet, right?

But I still need to find a way to kind of honor that relationship.

I'll go to Spain actually on sabbatical.

My kids are there.

Eight and 10.

So they're actually about the age where I remember feeling really close to her.

So I guess I will show my kids around and maybe bring a bit of that back in a different form.

Oh, yeah.

You got any Kleenex?

You know, I would think she would say... She would say...

Antonio, I'm really proud of you.

It's good.

I'm proud of you.

I'm proud of how you honored the people in our family.

And when I say that, if I imagine her saying that, it gives me a sense of

I feel good.

I was going to say proud, but it's more like I just feel good.

I'm really happy that I'll be bringing my kids to Spain, visiting some of the places she showed me, and that creates kind of a continuity.

I'm excited.

I'm looking forward to the future.

Thank you, Shankar.

It was a delight to talk about this work and a really refreshing interview.

Thank you.