Mental Health, Story Work with Therapist Cyndi Mesmer

Cyndi Mesmer – colleague, mentor and friend to Danielle. She’s first and foremost a wife and a mom of five. She’s a therapist and owns her own group practice called Art of Living Counseling based out of Illinois. She also works at the Allender Center, based out of Seattle, WA, and wears many hats as a teacher and trainer as well as story facilitator. Cyndi is an avid reader and loves to hang out with her kids. 

Cyndi is doing well, just came off of a 4-day intensive at the Allender Center called Story Workshop where they engaging trauma stories and teaching. It’s both a blast and so much fun as well we exhausting. She likens it to deep sea diving; you go down deep and then have to come up for air every once and while before going back down. She’s well but really busy. 

Danielle says it feels like the mental health field is slammed during this ongoing trauma of COVID. 

Cyndi enthusiastically agrees it is slammed! Initially when COVID hit she felt like they bought into the idea that it was just going to be three weeks, and then we’ll be back at the office and everything will be well. But three weeks turned into six weeks, then three months, then here we are [18 months later] and it just keeps going. “In many ways, it turned the world upside down.” 

She is experiencing in her practice within the mental health field a huge influx of people needing care. Her view is that the trauma that has been embedded in people bodies that normally stays hidden—under coping mechanisms and other techniques to suppress, ignore or avoid—has come to the surface during COVID. She sees this playing out for her clients in their family dynamics, their marriages, with people struggling with depression and anxiety and are now seeking help. 

Cyndi doesn’t know many therapists that don’t have completely full practices—everyone is full. She herself has a 45 person wait-list and finds herself emailing around every week to see if there are any therapists in her network that have room for new clients. She’s even trying to hire new therapists for her counseling group to in order to try to meet the demands for mental health care. And it’s not just adults who are looking for care—Cyndi says adolescences are having a really hard time.

Maggie asks if Cyndi if the actual work she does with clients has changed at all since the pandemic start. 

Cyndi thinks people now are more “raw”; they are showing up more authentically and eager to do the work that they need to do because of the unprecedented levels of distress they are feeling.  Before people before the pandemic would come to therapy for “crisis resolution”– to fix an immediate issue—but they didn’t really want to get to the underside of what’s actually causing their symptoms or to engage the embedded trauma in their bodies. They would come for a few sessions and feel better and be gone. But with the pandemic, everyone’s schedules, routines and nervous systems are getting triggered and changed. What seems like it would be restful—being more at home and slowing down—has actually unsettled people and created a significant amount of distress for their nervous systems. Everyone is exhausted! The people who are coming to therapy now are doing really good work because they are more ready, raw and eager to do the deep work of engaging the underlying trauma. 

Danielle has felt like a mental health emergency responder. She says is it like the past trauma shows up in ways that creates internal activation; People want to get regulated and to learn to self-regulate knowing that the isolation could continue. 

What comes with that, Cyndi says, is confusion. People are asking, “why am I experiencing what I am experiencing? They can name that we’re in a pandemic or that their kids are now at home when they would have been at school, but there is so much more going on and people don’t really know what is happening. Now they are willing to unpack the hard stuff. 

Maggie says the disruption that occurred globally with the pandemic triggered internal disruption for people on the individual level. Pre-pandemic people normally on a regular everyday basis have good coping skills, tools, resources and mechanisms for getting through the day. But when the world turned upside with the pandemic, the disruption caused their coping skills to not be as effective. This left people wondering, “what is happening to me?”

Some of those defense mechanisms, Cyndi said, were actually built into structures—they were tied to our routines and schedules. “We are routine structured people: we operate really well, our bodies operate well, when we have routine, structure, a typical schedule we follow. I think our bodies like that. I think our bodies operate best like that.” And when the pandemic hit, it disrupted and upset our normal routines and schedules and our bodies didn’t know what to do with that. 

Her schedule changed: Now, she goes to her office once a week when she used to go 4 times a week. And when she’s home. she has to contend with her kids being home when she didn’t have to do that when she was at work. Her body is confused because it used to be when she was home, she spent time with her kids but now she’s working from home most days. It’s a big shift and change. 

Cyndi believes all the change is activating people’s nervous systems, their embedded trauma and their attachment issues. The profound sense of isolation is what she thinks triggering people’s attachment issues—their anxious-ambivalent attachment, their avoidant attachment. The language she uses is that the younger parts of people that are embedded in the very neurons of their bodies are being activated and are coming up to the surface. She says this feels like a sense of powerlessness, looming fear and indecision (not knowing what to do).

Danielle said even when she’s in her office she feels the attachment with her kids—she says when she comes out of a therapy session with a client and sometimes she’ll have 40 text messages from her kids with emojis of hearts, smiley faces, more hearts. In that moment, she can’t make sense of it, but she says she needs to know from them; “what is going on? Is there an emergency?” Danielle says even folks with children and adolescence in their lives feel their attachment is disrupted with those kids. The patterns and normal healthy patterns of relating are disrupted. This is what came to mind when Cyndi mentioned the increase in adolescence in therapy. 

Cyndi names that kids being taken out of school for so long was very hard for them. For her own children (one out of school, one senior in college, two in high school and one in junior high) she wonders how much they really learned last year online. Not because the teachers weren’t doing an awesome job trying to teach virtually, but more around the fact that their brain was offline. How much information did they take in? 

She’s seeing high levels of anxiety, not just in her own kids but in the adolescence she sees in her practice. They felt anxious during the [lockdown part of the] pandemic wonder what is going on with our world, feeling anxious they can’t be with the friends. Now that they are back at school there is a high level of anxiety about how re-enter: will I have the same friends? What will school look like now, with everyone wearing masks? Cyndi says they are holding so much anxiety in their bodies. Even her college student struggled significantly when COVID and decided to return home to take a year off because it was too much. 

Kids are really struggling. Cyndi says kids are also picking up on and are aware of all the anxiety that parents and other adults are feeling. Sometimes parents are working from home now and she says some marriages do really well with both parents home and some don’t; Some marriages function really well because someone (or both) go to work. She is seeing a rise in domestic violence, more fighting going on at home. Kids are confused when they have a parent working from home and try to engage them; “hey come watch a movie with me” or “let’s go for a bike ride,” but the parent is actually working. It’s a lot of turmoil and disruption happening in homes.

Cyndi says she is grateful that people are reaching out and are asking for help. Some of the new clients she took on during the pandemic she had only been meeting with virtually. So now that she’s seeing clients in person again she’s realizing she’d never met them in-person before. That was true for her and Danielle—they would talk all the time on the phone and built a friendship but didn’t actually meet in person until they recently attended an in-person intensive training. It’s weird. 

Maggie agrees, the only words that seem to fit this strange season are weird and disruptive. Every relationship within family systems have been disrupted: marriages, parents and their kids, kids going to school, kids staying at home. It is no wonder that there is so much confusion when we’re in such chaos! Maggie asks Cyndi, when she works with adolescence, how does she help kid re-engage their bodies?

Part of it is giving them language, Cyndi answers, to help them process, make meaning around their experiences and to connect to their bodies. To be able to teach kids and adolescences how to identify where in their body they are feeling, what does it feel like and then validate what they are feeling. And it’s not just kids that need language, adults do too! There is comfort and validation in being able to name what your body is telling you. Then next step after identification is to honor what you have come to know about your embodied experience and to say, “Thank you, body for communicating that to me.” It is helping them to find the answer to “How do I create a sense of peace and calm for my body and to soothe in healthy ways?” We talk a lot about body work: Knowing what is happening in our bodies and how to care well for our bodies. 

Danielle adds, we are built to co-regulate, to be with other people. And not just one person, but a village. When there is so much anxiety pent up in a family, co-regulation becomes more difficult. It then becomes disruptive for kids to navigate and readjust when they go to school. Danielle asks if Cyndi works with families and what do you do when a family comes to you?

Cyndi says, yes she work with families. Her experience has been that a child will start showing symptoms, the parents don’t know what to do with the child so they send them to therapy so that the child can be “fixed.” But usually, it’s a parental or family issue. She said what she finds difficult is getting families to join the process of change. Often times what comes up for the child is caught up in their family dynamics, their role in the family. When she invites parents to look at the family system, they don’t want to. They just want their kids “fixed.”

Maggie says that feels true and it’s a perfect segue into Story Work. What Maggie hears Cyndi saying is that with families there’s an invitation for the parents to do their own work. Maggie asks Cyndi what is the different between story work and therapy?

Cyndi loves Story Work. She is currently doing 5 story groups a week and says it is super fun for her. She even does one group with young adults. Cyndy says that Story Work is an invitation to bring a particular story to look at and engage. She usually asks people to bring a “young story” (from formative years, 5- 18 years old) because how someone shows up today in the present is based on what happened in the past. 

“The past is always showing up in the present.”

Participants write a story and then they stay in the context of that story. Which is very different than therapy – it can go all over, the present, the past, etc. Story work stays in the context of the story where there may have been harm. What we’re looking for in the story is where is the person bond? Where do they carry the most shame or complicity? 

What we’ve found in story work in the context of trauma or harm is that we didn’t get good attunement, containment or the offer for repair. This trauma is then embedded in the very organs and cells of our bodies and we end up shifting our style of relating to try to cope with that. Staying in the context of the story can bring better awareness and better understanding of the characters in the story. Cyndi says having a group bear witness and speak into their story with kindness and care, offering attunement, containment and repair can actually shift their narrative and bring a sense of healing. This doesn’t change the past, but it helps them to see a clearer picture of what happened in the context of the story which leads to more agency and freedom to change the here and now.

There is a sense of understanding why we are the way respond the way we do in the present as a result of our experiences. The ways in which we were harmed impacts how we show up today. 

Story work is kind mystical, she says. And she’s aware that you have to experience it to really get. Many times, she’ll invite a client to engage in a story group and people are often put off with the thought of sharing their personal story with a bunch of strangers. But she continues to ask them to try it because she knows what goodness can come through story groups. So much change happens in a short amount of time. 

Once they experience it, they’re hooked. It creates significant change; more change in 12 weeks than in a whole year because you’re getting access points from all over the place as others engage your story and as you watch other people’s story receive care. It’s just beautiful she says. 

Danielle does story intensives with a colleague for couples and groups of people with the agreement that they are in regular therapy outside of it so they have somewhere to do back to. She says, the movement is incredible! She sees more openness and ability to move someone forward with story work. 

Maggie adds to what Cyndi said about story work in that you have to experience it to really grasp it: when we’re harmed in relationship, healing will also happen in relationship. There is something so powerful about the seeing and caring eyes of others while doing story work. Of course in therapy you have your therapist kind and caring eyes, but to have the others speaking and looking into your story—because they think and see things differently than you do—it brings new awareness. “There is so much power in the group dynamic that happens in story work.”

Cyndi agrees and adds that another thing that happens when you do groups is over time people start playing their family roles. This creates fun group dynamics to play with. When you start showing up in story group with your family dynamics it gives people a safe and trusted place to try new styles of relating and to get help with not self-sabotaging. “There are so many different layers to doing group work that is not only in regards to story work but also the group dynamics that play out in the here and now.” When someone comes away missed or hurt by something that was said and they bring it back to group, there’s an opportunity to experience repair. 

Danielle asks about Cyndi’s trainings. Cyndi loves story work and story groups – her deepest desire is for there to be more story groups going on. “My feeling is that story groups are how church should be.” She has been a part of church since she was born and when she does story groups it feels like church to her – holy and scared. When she does trainings, her goal is to train people to do story groups all over the place. I train pastors, lay people and therapists to engage stories well. This is different than just saying things to make people feel better. To really engage a story well, it creates disruption because it invites people to grief and to name people in their story. It is hard work. 

She does consultations – one-on-one teaching someone about story work and how to do it. She also does trainings twice a year with folks who have already had some training in story work, maybe from the Allender Center and desire to grow and hone their skills. It is a place to practice facilitating stories and build on what they’ve already learned. 

This Spring she’s invited three of her friends, Danielle, Jenny McGrath and Adam Young, doing intense training, engaging their own story as well as how to form your own story group. Training, supervision, coaching as well as guidance on how to start their own story groups in their spaces. 

Connect with Cyndi, join one of her story groups or sign-up for a spot for her Spring Training at www.artoflivingcounseling.com

She has hybrid options: both online and in-person 

Cyndi is reading: Brain Talk by David Schnarch

Cyndi is listening to: ON being with Krista Tippet, Adam Young’s Podcast called The Place We Find Ourselves, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill

Cyndi is inspired by: her kids. They are constantly teaching her new things.

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.