Deborah Meints-Pierson, LMFT

Deborah is a master therapist (licensed for over 35 years), spiritual teacher, television host, author and 3rd generation intuitive. She has helped transform the lives of thousands of people around the world. Her pioneering approach bridges Psychology, Spirituality and the Mystic Tools. Deborah is a sought out authority in the field of psychology and has served as a Palm Springs psychological expert for TV, radio & print. She wrote and Co-Hosted the popular television program "It's A Family Affair" on Time Warner Television for over a decade. Deborah has been featured in numerous shows, radio programs and publications including NBC, ABC, K-News Voice of The Valley, Desert Sun Newspaper, Desert Woman magazine and Health & Spirituality magazine.

When Deborah is not transforming lives you can find her hiking in the beautiful desert, music jamming with friends, dancing, practicing yoga, reading, & writing poetry. For more: https://soulpathsessions.com

Brenda Littleton, MA

As an educator & counselor based in social justice, personal literacy, eco & depth psychology, Brenda has worked with thousands of students and clients in their wholeness journey. She holds a graduate degree in education, post-graduate studies in counseling, and depth psychology at the doctoral level and is certified in coaching, trauma and psycho-biotics. Blending modalities of attachment theory, somatic healing, active imagination, dream work, restorative education, & place-based learning, she empahsizes the link between the mind-body-spirit-earth relationship for the healing.

Brenda's has served as a university program director of graduate studies, a clinical counselor for domestic violence & trauma recovery, a behavioral specialist in schools, & is a successful coach of executives, creatives and entrepreneurs. She is a reiki master, writer, speaker & continues in a lineage of Druidic animistic prayer circles. For more: https://www.brendalittleton.com

Acknowledgments:

Original Music composed by Zach Meints

The Soul Path Sessions Podcast is produced by Homeless Betty Productions

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Episode 3 Description

Therapists have traditionally used the genogram to help identify patterns and psychological factors that affect relationships. Those genograms are often highly "wound-aware" focusing on the dysfunctional elements within a family. Brenda & Deborah discuss the use of the genogram in a more soulful way to help clients identify the resources of our family and ancestors that are often neglected: The resilience, determination and creativity that enabled them to survive/thrive that can be recognized and inspire us when dealing with our own life challenges. Informed by family stories and creative imagination, the strength of our ancestors can become our own and help guide us into the future.

Chapters & Links

00:00:55 - The Traditional Wound-Aware Genogram

https://www.therapistaid.com/therapy-guide/genograms

00:02:05 - The Resilience Genogram

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-linear-time-of-our-lives/

00:07:01 - Storytelling as a Therapeutic Tool

https://evalogue.life/the-power-of-remembering/

00:13:18 - Active Imagination as a Guide

http://www.jungiantherapist.net/jungian-therapy-101-active-imagination/

00:17:11 - Feeling Free in the Moment: The Peace of Wild Things

https://onbeing.org/poetry/the-peace-of-wild-things/

00:20:44 - Strongest Man in the World: A Legacy Story

https://your-philanthropy.com/how-life-stories-become-the-legacy-you-leave/

00:25:02 - Addiction as a Hunger For Soul

https://drgabormate.com/about

00:26:26 - No One Can Keep You From Lifting Your Heart

https://soulgatherings.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/a-prayer-by-clarissa-pinkola-estes/

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Original music by Zach Meints

The Soul Path Sessions podcast is produced by Homeless Betty Productions

Announcer: (00:09)

Welcome to the Soul Path Sessions podcast with Deborah Meints-Pierson and Brenda Littleton. Brenda is an educator and counselor rooted in Jungian and Eco Psychology. She helps her clients understand the importance of the mind, body, spirit, and earth relationship for healing. Deborah is a licensed psychotherapist and has been trained in traditional and sacred psychology, exploring from the ground up what makes our human experience meaningful, wholesome, and enlightening. Deborah and Brenda invite you to accompany them on a soul path journey as they explore the possibilities of living a more soulful life as therapists, seekers and lovers of fate.

Deborah: (00:50)

So welcome back, Brenda.

Brenda: (00:53)

Thank you, Deborah.

Deborah: (00:55)

We're going to try this again and have some fun with a lot of different ideas that we're personally really involved with. Something you said really intrigued me, because it's different than the model I was taught as a therapist, which was how to do an intake with a new client and the traditional model of the genogram or family history model is trauma based. We certainly don't want to ignore that. That's a really important piece of getting to know each other as humans and as a therapist it's really important that we don't skip over. Like we talked about last time, the dark stuff and try to transcend, but sometimes it gets so wound-aware in that process that the client becomes more aware of the wound and not the potentialities of what's gone on before in their family of origin. So I'm going to just let you explain your process.

Brenda: (02:05)

Thank you. I started doing genograms on intakes in a domestic violence clinic and that was the very beginning of my intake process. I would sit with someone and over a period of an hour we would chart out and see this pattern, multi-generational from grandparents, even great-grandparents. Some of the women were quite young and knew their great-grandparents and we could actually see the distortion and the behavior choices as a pattern. It was so flooring for them. It was the first time that they had ever looked at the culture of their family and yet part of why they were in the clinic, why they were in the program, was that they were busting out and they wanted new choices and new behaviors. So the awareness was so overwhelming that much of their process for a couple of months after that was, as you said, dealing with the awareness of the wound. That has stayed with me for a couple of decades where I realized, way before being a therapist,

Brenda: (03:22)

I was a professor and I had worked in quantum as far as using quantum to teach personal literacy. That is involved with narrative and personal story, in a lot of Brian Swimme's work. The idea that time continuum is non local and it's multidimensional and that if you can go backward, you can go forward and going backward meant looking at all aspects. When I started my coaching practice, the idea was to really look at what a client brings in as far as resources and I started to do the genogram, but instead of looking at the wounding pattern, I wanted them to identify the resources, the resilience. We never had those conversations looking at what our great grandparents went through what our grandparents went through. Most of us are immigrants

Brenda: (04:24)

even if we're native born into the United States. There is a history that's really easily located as to what immigrants had to go through and what year. I know for myself, I have a long lineage on both sides of my parents of immigration from England, Scotland and Ireland, multi-generations way before 1849. So just working with clients to identify where did they come from? What transportation did they use to get to the west coast, or to the east coast. To really allow a person to identify, wow, there was a lot of resilience. There was a lot of imagination. There was a lot of belief and hope, as well as working through new situations, situations that were unconfirmed, unpredictable, having to pivot at the last moment and survive. As well as basic care. Like how did they secure food? How did they secure a home? How did they start a community? How did they fit in? Once we can identify those skill sets, we may not believe that we ourselves are using them on a day to day basis, but when we come across some conflict or when we come across a wall, that's difficult for us to figure it out, for us to call upon the resources of their ancestors. And it works.

Deborah: (06:05)

You were fortunate to be working with, in the case of some of these clients you're mentioning, that they knew about their ancestors. I think there are times where people really have an unclear picture or it's so dysfunctional.

Deborah: (06:23)

I know that sometimes we have to use active imagination, helping people to imagine what it might have been like for the people that came before them. It's great when people actually can know these folks and what they went through. I'm finding that a lot of my younger clients don't have a real good idea. I sometimes ask them to ask for the story, say to grandma, "tell me the story of how that happened", which they're very reluctant to do. I hope it's not a dying art to sit at their knee or next to them and say, "what was it like when you were growing up?"

Brenda: (06:58)

Why do you think they' are reluctant?

Deborah: (07:01)

I think a lot of it has to do with electronics. When people sit together, many times they're referring to things that are going on that are distracting, maybe a TikTok video or a meme. I'm not against those things, but the older person can just be sitting in the corner or if they want to join in, they have to share the modern. I think that can be one way to block it. In my family, storytelling was a thing. The Irish side and the Swedish side, the Finnish side and the Northern European side. There was a time where you actually recited poetry, when you told the story of how you got here.

Deborah: (07:42)

As a little girl, you really did gather around people that were born in 1893 and heard about people that were born in the 1870s and what they went through and the funny stories, the things they endured. My grandpa George talked about his dad having to go to mining camps and set up bars. He was just this only child and the way he brought food in, when his dad would be gone setting up a new camp, would be to go down to where they'd dump the waste into the lake or the river and he'd catch fish. He was like eight years old. I think he had a third grade education, but his resourcefulness always stayed with me and how much fun he had with this dog, King, jumping on the back of a wagon as it was leaving down. Just that sense of adventure and delight,

Brenda: (08:34)

Tom Sawyer, or Huck Finn.

Deborah: (08:36)

He was a provider when he was 7, 8, 9 years old.

Brenda: (08:40)

My relatives brought a house from Ireland around the horn and then figured out how to get to the inside of Vancouver island.

Deborah: (08:50)

That's a show stopper. Like everybody's going, "They brought a house from Ireland?!"

Brenda: (08:56)

Piece by piece. Then they put it together and they had this furniture, this one piece. I don't know what happened to it, but I wish I did. It was a long, long table. And there was a running board at the bottom of the table where you put your feet on. In Ireland you'd have your feet on this running board so your feet aren't standing in sh*t at the bar or something, you know, the refuge. This table was in the very large dining room and I remember being three and I was asleep on this running board. I remember there were all of the relatives. It was a huge dinner which was common on Sunday evening. I fell off the table and I realized I had been jolted and what they were doing was sitting around table tapping. So the table was levitating and table tapping.

Deborah: (09:50)

You're going to have to go deeper into that because people are like "table tapping?"

Brenda: (09:53)

They're asking a question and calling energies to answer the question based on table tapping. But this thing was like 20 feet long, very heavy, and it held, I think there were like 32 people around the table. Those types of stories, those sense of...

Deborah: (10:13)

That's a great story. I want to just sit and ask, "How did they actually get that house here?"

Brenda: (10:18)

They took it apart piece by piece.

Deborah: (10:20)

And they put it on a what?

Brenda: (10:22)

A boat that they built.

Deborah: (10:24)

That's so great. Yeah. I mean, they built a boat to put their house in to take it to the new world.

Brenda: (10:30)

I don't know how they ended up knowing to go up the coast of California, up the coast of Oregon, up the coast of Washington and on the outside of Vancouver island and going in the fiord and going into this little area called Port Alberni. I have no idea how they knew that.

Deborah: (10:47)

Plus the open seas they faced. I mean, it's a long way to Tipperary.

Brenda: (10:53)

This is what generated my...I downloaded this idea. It was because I was facing some ardent and strenuous moments in my life, as I normally do. and I heard this voice saying, "Brenda, think of your great, great, great grandmother. This is nothing." The rain was pouring in my house. The roof was leaking for the third time after having three roofs and it was still gushing and thinking, "this is nothing, I can get through this. I can face this. I can laugh about this. I do not have to puddle in a corner thinking, ohh."

Deborah: (11:34)

Yeah, the resourcefulness. You just had to be resourceful. My great-grandmother, when her shoes wore off, she wore them on the opposite feet.

Brenda: (11:42)

Why?

Deborah: (11:44)

To get more use out of them.

Brenda: (11:46)

Like changing the tires in the car, rotating the tires?

Deborah: (11:50)

Right. She had goats and she was just really practical in that way. but she was the only person to make it out of Finland. As I recall, her brother took another boat. So she and her brother, it was a family of like eight children. When I went back to Finland, which was a marvelous journey of the soul, to trace her roots. All of her siblings and her parents died of influenza. That was after a war, a great war. So she, as a young woman, got on this boat without knowing a word of English, and Finnish has nothing in common with any language that I know of, and she made it over here and she lived really, really simply. She was just really kind, she lived close to the earth. I know my mother was greatly influenced by her kindness and her connection to God was her faith. And that carried through the lineage on my side, her great faith. I mean, it's like, I couldn't tell you a story of her faith as much as I could tell you how it feels and how much my grandmother drew from it and how much my mother drew from it. The power of prayer, that quiet candle of prayer got passed down to me.

Brenda: (13:06)

So you're the current downloadable version of that. That's how I introduce it to clients. It's like, what current downloadable program are you carrying? What can you share?

Deborah: (13:18)

I love that. So if someone doesn't have a relative, let's say they came from two generations of dysfunctional addictive violence, which is sadly true, and they have a shining quality. I suggest to them that there's someone in your lineage who has passed this to you. Can you imagine them? And believe it or not, they come through with somebody if they sit there long enough, they come through. It doesn't necessarily have to be through their family. They might bring in an entity from another life. They might say something like, 'I've always felt like a native person, the soil. I hear that, I feel that when I'm out in nature. They don't necessarily draw from this family. They have a larger collective.

Brenda: (14:10)

So you're including the possibility of animism. That's a great foundation for me as well. Everything has spirit. Everything is soul. Being in an animistic state, that liminal space that can lead us into active imagination, is a great guide. Being able to see images, to step into that frequency of activity that transcends generations. Whatever that activity is, you kind of step into that flow and allow the information to come through.

Deborah: (14:59)

To relate, which is relationship. It'll be in relationship to it.

Brenda: (15:02)

It's quantum.

Deborah: (15:03)

There you go. Yeah. So the sky's the limit. Many people tell me it might not have been a person, but it was my dog. My dog carried a kindness that permeated me with a loyalty that was there for me. I didn't have a mother or a father, but I had a soul come through and an animal that kept me company and that's a beautiful story to go with the dog's faithfulness, like my grandfather did with King. King was always there when his father would leave and leave them stranded, King was there.

Brenda: (15:38)

One way when I'm sitting with someone, who really can't go beyond their parents, for whatever reason, I'll ask them to imagine a place of sovereignty, their own sovereignty, and to go back and describe the setting. Inevitably there is this connection with nature, sitting outside, the stars, maybe going camping, being a young child. There there's some connection, either picking a flower or having a moment under a tree or along the ocean. I'll ask them to revisit and to remember the sense of sovereignty, the sense of personal empowerment, the sense of peace, and then bring that forward. Even just tracking back and then bringing it forward and then having it live, be here in the room, is a way to open those doors of remembering some prior ancestral work.

Deborah: (16:51)

Like you said, time isn't really the thing, it's in the now moment that we connect,

Deborah: (16:58)

I feel a poem coming on. The poem that came to me was by Wendell Berry,

Deborah: (17:11)

A lot of people love this poem, it is one of my favorites. I think it is really a good pump for now, when so much is going on in the world, that is difficult. As we speak, the Ukrainian people are going through tremendous pain and we're all feeling for them and with them. Our own family histories, many of us are here because of war, with our ancestors coming because of war, driving them out of their world. So the poem is "The Peace of Wild Things." When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound and fear of what my life and my children's lives may be. I go and lie down with the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the piece of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water, and I feel above me the day blind stars, waiting with their light and for a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

Deborah: (18:25)

There's a reason I think we call this Mother Earth.

Brenda: (18:29)

Could you repeat the last couple lines please?

Deborah: (18:31)

Yes, of course. I think the part that brings tears to my eyes: I come into the piece of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water and I feel above me the day blind stars waiting with their light, and for a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

Brenda: (18:58)

Yeah. Those moments of feeling free are so important in our own personal space.

Deborah: (19:10)

I think it's this. We were both graced with the peace that came from the story that came from our ancestors, which we were very fortunate that they told the stories, that they could tell them, that I would sit wrapped at my grandmother's feet while she talked about growing up in Mexico. Her father was a silver miner who's body is buried somewhere in the desert, and just Pancho Villa coming into town and her having to hide from the guns a blazing. She was this young psychic, young woman that tapped into so many things. So we have that sense of it.

Deborah: (19:56)

I would go into a lull. My grandmother's stories, I have to stop myself and just edit because I could probably go on speaking. I listened so much that the stories captivate me. That's the lull of the story, where you aren't doing anything other than being fed in the very cells of your body and experience from the past. That teaches so much just in the telling, but you're not actively trying to learn it. For those people that don't have that connection, the idea that they grew up with the forest, or they grew up in the desert, especially who were in desert here, they grew up at the sea. There's a sense of the stories that the sea would tell, the stories of the quietness or the sound.

Deborah: (20:44)

We have both. We can draw from both of them, this, the power in knowing. I've got a little brag alert, my great-grandfather was the strongest man in the world. Really? Carl Mackey was the champion rock driller in the world. That meant they used to take a railroad spike and a man would hold on a spike that was on the top of a rock. My great-grandfather took this big mallet thing and just slammed it down. He was like six foot four and his huge guy and he went into the rock further than anyone else in the world. And in those days, because mining was such a big deal, he was the strongest man in the world.

Brenda: (21:33)

As an example of playing with our skill set in genogram and all of our good things, all of our strengths, how are you embodying that molecular activity of your grandfather?

Deborah: (21:53)

As my kids would say "She's a little nutty." So one of the things that I know I can do,

Brenda: (22:00)

What are you opening up?

Deborah: (22:01)

I open up that idea of endurance, incredible endurance and difficulty. First of all, you know, he was an immigrant. He did brave things. He pulled a railroad car down the track. So, when I think of my luggage being heavy or something, I think of Carl Mackey, we actually call him Carl " F*cking Mackey.

Brenda: (22:25)

Like a dancer.

Deborah: (22:28)

Well, Mackey is Finnish. I think it's Irish too, but I can jump in ice, cold water and swim, and I think of Carl Mackey.

Brenda: (22:37)

Okay.

Deborah: (22:37)

Because I think if Carl can do it,

Brenda: (22:39)

You can do it too.

Deborah: (22:40)

I can do it too. When our kids say something's difficult, they just say, well, you know, if Carl "f*cking Mackay, could do it. I could do it

Brenda: (22:51)

That becomes the lineage. That becomes part of our legacy. If that's what we can bring for our future generations, even just owning it in this moment, in the present, I think that is living our true selves, our true molecules.

Deborah: (23:11)

I think it's an inspiring story. I have sn extended family of children that I adore and I'm their mother, spirit-mother, whatever, and they've actually said, I want to feel Carl "f*cking" Mackey for myself. That energy is so strong. and they've actually lived in the story enough. Yeah. To relate that it's even possible, like in the Olympics where people do like quadruple lutz or whatever. They just know that once something's been done, you know, you can do it. And that's what a story is about. I could endure it. I could exceed or succeed.

Brenda: (23:51)

Profit from it.

Deborah: (23:51)

Profit from it. I could dig in deep.

Brenda: (23:55)

And not be wiped out by it.

Deborah: (23:57)

And not be wiped out.

Brenda: (23:57)

I think that's one of the goals in this modality of resourcing and knowing that it sucks and we can get through it.

Deborah: (24:08)

That brings up some sadness too, because my grandparents were very clear that there was poverty in some ways. They had to endure that, but they didn't stay in a victim in place with it. There was loneliness, there was some isolation. They generally put a humorous turn on it. Like my grandfather talked about his cousin Bessie, falling out a window in Chicago and landing on the awning and being all right. There wasn't safety for the children there wasn't sometimes enough food to eat, but they'd find resourceful ways to get it. They'd wait for the Iceman to come and they'd beg for ice, these kinds of things.

Brenda: (24:54)

As you're speaking, I'm remembering family stories of similar but different ideas.

Deborah: (25:02)

Sometimes when I'm working with people who come from long line of addiction, I look at addiction as really a hunger for spirit, a hunger for a connection, a feeling of safety or to numb out. So when I'm working with someone who's wanting to face the world without that shield, to reframe it as you are the one who will do it for your family.

Brenda: (25:30)

I can see that. I I'm pretty influenced by the work of Gabor Mate in addictions. It doesn't matter what. It doesn't have to be chemical. Biochemical can be behavior, but the idea of a real longing for love. In resolving that biochemical imbalance, working toward balancing ego and soul with the idea of personal resources, resilience and love is, is it.

Deborah: (26:03)

And he was in world war II and was an infant in Hungry?

Brenda: (26:10)

His mother gave him away to save him. They reconnected, of course, but still that was a real wounding moment of being given away, not having mom, but that's a whole other world.

Deborah: (26:26)

We're kind of revisiting it now as we see images of war, this revisitation of that. I think it's the stories that do keep us strong. When you're, when you're bringing up Gabor Mate, I'm thinking of another person with Hungarian roots, which is our favorite, Clarisa Pinkola Estee who wrote Women Who Run with Wolves, and her father's side came from Hungary. Her mother's side from Mexico. Poem alert! I feel a poem coming on. This is going to happen. It's like, Ooh, special music. But it kind of ties into a poem. These things happens as soul works and it has to do with what we're talking about. She talked about the tremendous struggle of genocide in her family and the people that survived came in on the trains. They had just seen the death of children and young men and families, and the ones who survived, went on to plant trees and, to cook and rebuild and tell stories. So there's this prayer that she shares at the end of one of my very favorite books, which is called The Faithful Gardener. So if with your permission. I'm having a moment here. A Prayer: Refuse to fall down. And if you cannot refuse to fall down, refuse to stay down. If you cannot refuse to stay down, lift your heart toward heaven and like a hungry beggar ask that it be filled. You may be pushed down. You may be kept from rising, but no one can keep you from lifting your heart toward heaven. Only you, it is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says nothing good came of this, is not yet listening.

Announcer: (28:46)

That concludes this week's episode of the Soul Path Sessions podcast with Deborah Meints-Pierson and Brenda Littleton. If you'd like to hear more about living a more soulful life, please subscribe to our channel on your favorite podcast app and be sure to check out the show notes and links below. For more information from Deborah visit soulpathsessions.com and for Brenda, brendalittleton.com. Thank you for listening, and remember to follow your soul, it knows the way.