The Healing Power of Truth with Gloria Myers Beller

Sep 10

Episode 10

The Healing Power of Truth: Making Contact Where Suffering Lies with Gloria Myers Beller

Gloria Myers Beller has been in private practice in Washington, DC since 1991. A particular interest in cultural diversity and multicultural relationships informs her work with individuals, couples and groups. This theme has permeated her membership in the American Academy of Psychotherapists (AAP), as the only person of color in the organization for over twenty years. During, her tenure, Gloria Beller has published "Clashing Realities" (2016) and "Racism: The Other Pandemic" (2020) in the AAP journal, Voices.
As a member of the Mid- Atlantic Group Psychotherapy Society, Ms. Beller has lead numerous process groups as part of the organization's conferences. These groups coalesce around conference themes and their impact upon group members. Ms. Beller believes that interpersonal encounters are cultural phenomena that require deciphering if authentic comprehension is the goal to be achieved.
The field of psychotherapy and analysis is a dynamic space that constantly evolves, and we are all determined to embrace these changes authentically. Over the past 31 years, Gloria Myers Beller and I have been sharing genuine, profoundly authentic conversations. The depth and breadth of our discussions as colleagues and true friends is a big part of what has inspired me to create The Art of Listening.
As a seasoned psychotherapist, Gloria has spent over 50 years amassing wisdom in the field. As she cared for patients in a range of settings – and ultimately in her independent practice – she came to understand how pain constitutes the heart of the human experience.
In this episode of The Art of Listening, Gloria guides us through her own history of therapeutic practice. She illuminates the pivotal role authenticity plays in the therapeutic setting and the healing ability of truth. Drawing from her rich experiences and her own background as an African American woman from the segregated South, Gloria has cultivated a deep understanding of suffering as a universal point of contact among human beings. It is through this understanding that she has found the path to empathy, allowing her to connect with her patients on a profound level across decades and ‘meet them where their suffering lies’.
Chapters
1 - Gloria’s early work in the emerging field of social work and psychotherapy
2 - The evolution of the psychoanalytic work and moving into private practice
3 - Understanding the benefits and limitations of private practice for psychoanalytic treatments
4 - Using suffering as the universal point of contact in psychoanalysis
5 - Gloria’s personal background and its influence on her approach to her work
6 - Developing a practice grounded in authenticity and connection
Links
Gloria Myers Beller
Eileen Dunn
More from ‘The Art of Listening’
Eileen: [00:00:04] I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is the Art of listening, a podcast that delves into the incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth. Talk therapy. The start of a new year is a time we often want to seize. It's a singular moment to end and begin once more, something that on this podcast we have learned to appreciate. It is also a chance to connect with ourselves in a place of truth before taking the next leap. In the spirit of that, I want to share a truth about this podcast today. The Art of listening was first born four years ago on a fateful New Year's Eve. That night, I met with my colleague and friend Gloria meyers Beller for a first leap into the podcast unknown. I have known Gloria for 31 years, and what has always bonded us is our ability to connect with each other just as we are in spite, or rather, together with our differences. In 2020, this podcast was still a dream. I wanted to create a space to share the beauty of genuine therapeutic encounters as we aim to find them in practice. I wanted to open up this space without compromising the critical privacy we offer our patients in treatment. I hoped new ideas, new connections would come alive, and I knew that my dear friend Gloria would meet me in conversation to make that happen. So for the first time, we set up the scene, and I want to I want you to take that microphone and move it just a little closer to your mouth. Fumbling with our equipment along the way. There you go. That's great. Is that comfortable? Yeah. Great. Is that better? It is better. Tell me something. When we settled in, we began to take turns as speakers and listeners, wide eyed, genuine and excited by what our discussion would unearth. You and I are on a virtual journey.

Gloria: [00:02:06] This is our very first. We don't know how it's going to turn out between us, so maybe we can replicate in this podcast what we do in our offices.

Eileen: [00:02:22] There you go. That's exactly the point, right? When someone comes in, they're brand new to you, or you've been working with them for an extended period of time. You don't know what's going to happen that hour.

Gloria: [00:02:33] I don't know what's going to happen that hour, but what I focus on is trying to rid myself of any distractions so that I can be present in a most profound way so that I can really hear.

Eileen: [00:02:57] It was all there. You see, at the very start the intent to listen, daring to show up authentically in the present moment. It existed before we wrapped these conversations in music and sculpted them sleek. It was bare and pure blind, with no sense of where we were going or exactly what would happen. The act of hearing and speaking the truth together. While I cherish these early recordings, I have to admit that with time and vision, building the art of listening has come to life in new ways. So today, four years later, and who knows, maybe a little wiser. Gloria and I gather again around our microphones. Together we discuss the meaning of adaptability and pain in the therapeutic space. We speak of truth as the source of our growth. And Gloria looks back on her practice as a social worker and a psychotherapist to share how her personal history has shaped her approach to care.

Gloria: [00:03:59] Being an African American growing up in the segregated South, people were always talking, but you couldn't always trust what you heard. I learned to effectively connect with what felt real to me. It came out of a place of trying to find my own safety and my own reality.

Eileen: [00:04:30] Gloria also reveals how she let her practice evolve and unfold naturally, how she learned to trust the process. Just as I trust that our second encounter will bear fruit further. As you listen, I would love for you to reminisce on your own personal experiences of truth and discovery and ask yourself, how have moments of deep truth revealed themselves in shared exchange or personal reflection through or beyond words? How do I know what feels real to me? What is perception and what is reality? And now let us meet Gloria Myers Beller. She is a clinical social worker, a psychotherapist, and a clinician based in Washington, DC. Humility and inquisitiveness have guided her practice for 40 years. She works with individuals, couples and families, and her special interest is in intercultural relationships. Before studying psychology and getting into this clinical social work world that brought us together as friends. You started your academic career in special ed, special education. What drew you to psychology and influenced you to make The pivot?

Gloria: [00:05:54] I went to a few education classes and found them utterly boring, and I knew I was going to flunk out of college if I didn't change my major. So I took a psychology course and was immediately enthralled. And that's when I changed my major. It depended on it, and I knew I couldn't afford to flunk out of college because my mother would have killed me.

Eileen: [00:06:21] So that's a that's a context for persisting and having faith that you would find your path. So one step leads to another. After school, you were offered a unique internship opportunity working in a prison, correct? How did that position and that environment shape your perspective and your studies from there?

Gloria: [00:06:44] Well, back in the early 70s, this when this happened and at that time, people were sentenced to what they call six months of public drunkenness. And as an intern, I would go in and interview the inmates. And one day I observed a man thrashing around, being a combatant. He was going through DTS, and the prison guards had no understanding of what was going on, and they came in and restrained the people as if they were about to hurt others. And just that gross misunderstanding was enough for me to realize that that was not a setting that I could work in, because they didn't understand and they began to treat the inmates inhumanely, which is something I had a hard time tolerating.

Eileen: [00:07:46] That impacted your whole outlook on where you wanted to take your work.

Gloria: [00:07:50] The whole outlook, feeling powerless to try to do any kind of educating. I knew that anything in the criminal justice system was not, for me.

Eileen: [00:08:01] Super impactful first experience. Right? So and then you came to work in a geriatric hospital?

Gloria: [00:08:07] Yeah. Relocated. And there was this pilot program to work with geriatric patients. And I got hired. And those were the days when people were being lined up for ECT. Everybody got electroshock treatment back in those days, and that in itself was quite an educative experience. But what I also came to understand is seeing people who lived there until the end of their lives, they were chronically mentally ill, they were seniors, they got three square meals a day, got their medication, and they would just wander around the grounds smoking cigarettes. And they all had very brown fingertips because they would burn the cigarettes just down till they got burned. And, um, at the time, I didn't realize. Now, in retrospect, I think that it was much more humane treatment than a job I had later that was to go to state hospitals, interview people, and have them de-institutionalized because that was then the new emphasis for mental health that put money in the communities to train regular families to be what they call back then home providers. And there would be social workers and case managers, supposedly to take people to their medical appointments and get their medications. But ultimately the programs were underfunded. And I think the remnants now are the homeless people we see on the streets who and I feel guilty every time I see them, because I think that was my job. And I think what we did in the past is so much more humane than what is happening to them now, that they're still being mixed in with criminals. And there's no there are no really programs that I know of that are specifically geared to separate them out and get them into treatment because these people are ill and they're without medication.

Eileen: [00:10:39] Gloria's experience was built in the field at the junction of psychology and social work. From handling substance withdrawals like delirium tremens to finding humane treatments for long terme mental illness, each new challenge reinforced her intent to care. But as she refined her practice, Gloria began to feel an itch, a need for something more expansive that could grow along with her beyond the structures of her education. When the first health maintenance organizations were formed, Gloria saw an opportunity. Hmos allowed her to move into private practice while providing the integrated care she believed in.

Gloria: [00:11:27] I think I was around at the beginning of a lot of firsts, so I was around the first when HMOs came out. A person I worked with said, you know, I'm doing private practice part time. I really think it's something you should consider doing. And I decided to rent some space for some people in Washington, D.C., and started seeing 1 or 2 people, and I saw that there was a psychiatrist who was president of an HMO in Bethesda, Maryland, and I called him up and made an appointment and introduced myself. And we formed a very intense friendship. And he basically fed me for many, many years until he decided to retire. And then I gradually started getting off of HMOs because they started becoming more and more restrictive. In terms of how often you could see people and what the pay was, but that was the basis of the practice that I have now, the HMOs and the people I worked with in community mental health who wanted to go with me privately.

Eileen: [00:12:49] When we say private practice, basically we're saying going into business for yourself. So it's really on you. You left the structures that had educated you this way and that way, but it really challenged you to take all the experiences you had had previously. I wonder how did all those different special populations and encounters influence your outlook?

Gloria: [00:13:15] Well, you know, a lot of it was trial and error, and I learned very early on the people who could be seen in private practice that required more discernment and screening, because I learned that there were people who just weren't appropriate for private practices because they needed more services than a solo practitioner like me. But it was also valuable in terms of having seen such a broad spectrum. Clients, I think gave me a great foundation, you know, to figure out who could benefit, who was appropriate and to compassionately let people know who I thought needed more than a private setting could, could provide.

Eileen: [00:14:07] I mean, you had been exposed to a lot of real pain and, you know, ways of experiencing life as a human being, from the elderly to the incarcerated to born with special needs or developed them. Um, it's it's really striking that the common denominator is something about appreciating the circumstances and the capacities and incapacities of these special populations and the settings that they were in.

Gloria: [00:14:40] Well, you know what I still carry with me from the old days that really informs my work is I'm always connecting around the suffering. I always go to where I experience the suffering, and that's my connection. And I think that's what my early, early hands on training taught me, where the pain lives inside of people. And if I'm not able to find that, it makes it very difficult for me to work because that to me is the place where whatever the circumstances are, where we're all suffering is the place where I'm able to connect regardless of external circumstances. And I think it transcends the person's external circumstances, no matter what they may be. And so I'm always going for the suffering. Because that's the place where I know that the client and I can join him.

Eileen: [00:15:51] It's the point of contact you're saying?

Gloria: [00:15:53] Absolutely. It's the point of contact.

Eileen: [00:15:56] And can you say more about, you know, the nature of empathy there? I mean, no two sets of experiences are the same. And yet, you know what it is to feel your pain and your suffering. And if that's the way to connect with someone.

Gloria: [00:16:13] Well, what I do is and it's taken me many years to kind of fine tune this, I really do try to take in the lived experience of another. I don't try to challenge it, explain it. I just try to take it in because they are saying to me, this is my internal reality and I owe it to respect that and not get in the way of it. And that together we began to examine what all of that is about.

Eileen: [00:17:00] Here. Gloria reminds us that pain leaves a trail in our minds. Our hearts. A ghost kind of feeling. Not quite sensorial, but etched in us nonetheless, long after it's gone. We feel it deep down. It carries us into the next stage. A reminder of how we made it through the pain. It is the most universal experience too. That we hurt and grieve and continued to live. With pain. We can take in what is real and welcome acceptance of the good and the bad of the truth within and beyond our perception. This, Gloria learnt from her personal experience of racial and social injustice. It's no simple thing to bear the effects of someone's story or someone's experience at times, especially when it's, you know, profoundly traumatic or hurtful. And I just wonder what really taught you to let it be what it is.

Gloria: [00:18:12] I understand it in myself, dates back to my own personal history of being an African American, growing up in the segregated South, where people were always talking, but you couldn't always trust what you heard. And so I learned to affectively connect with what felt real to me. I think it came out of a place of trying to find my own safety and my own reality, which was not necessarily what was being communicated.

Eileen: [00:18:59] But when you say effectively connected, you mean you were listening with the third ear, as they say, or a sixth sense of what's really going on here.

Gloria: [00:19:10] What's really going on here, and how it actually felt inside of me. Did it connect with some reality? Did it make sense? Did it not make sense? And so it was both my body and my mind and seeking truth and reality. What is really real?

Eileen: [00:19:34] And just to hear you say, as an African American woman from the South.

Gloria: [00:19:39] From the segregated South.

Eileen: [00:19:40] From the segregated South.

Gloria: [00:19:42] That's that's significant. I think it helped make me a better therapist, because I really did have to listen to be able to discern what was real or not.

Eileen: [00:19:58] It just circles the whole question of learning to trust yourself and whether or not to trust someone else. What you're talking about, as I understand it, is you're listening beyond the words all the time from the get go. And whether it jives with what if I'm with you, what you feel you trust or not.

Gloria: [00:20:20] Trust or not, or and where I feel grounded and, um, it's been slow, but being able to open up and work with colleagues and doing that same type of evaluation through what I call affective attunement, does it feel real? And over time, being able to let more scholarly people in where I then could know more about my blind spots with people that I trusted that I could see struggling doing their own work. Of, I guess I call it kind of character development therapists who were committed to developing their own characters and being able to really help each other, kind of beyond academics.

Eileen: [00:21:24] And by character, you mean who someone really is.

Gloria: [00:21:28] Who someone really is. Not just what they've done and what they know and what they've studied. Yeah, it transcends all of that. So for me, it's about being surrounded by like minded people who are willing and open to do that, you know, who are we as people? And then how does that make us better as therapists or mental health professionals?

Eileen: [00:22:01] Have you ever felt you were being inauthentic? In a conversation with a patient. Mhm. How did you handle it. What did it teach you.

Gloria: [00:22:10] It taught me that I have to speak to that because it gets in my way of connecting, and I'm open enough to say, I don't know if it's with you, if it's with me or it's with the dynamic we're creating. So let's slow down and explore, because I'm having a real hard time connecting to you. So that says to me something's in the way.

Eileen: [00:22:40] Again, as you say that I'm imagining it. You're not refusing responsibility on your side, but you're not putting it all on the other person either. You're saying there's something that is or isn't happening between us. It's like saying that that's what you believe is the therapeutic agent really is. Being authentic and being present is the source of empathy.

Gloria: [00:23:03] It's the source of empathy. Because to me, empathy is like, you know, like I said earlier, taking in the lived experience. But when I think about being compassionate, I think of, uh, joining person so that we're in something together that I'm a traveler in the journey with the client.

Eileen: [00:23:30] That's so interesting. I hear that empathy is the way to connect. That gives you the chance to go to or to then join with the patient, the client, where they are and not mistaking what is the world within you from what is the world within them and learning.

Gloria: [00:23:51] As I've gotten to be an older therapist, learning that I don't always know what's happening and what's going on. And that's okay because we'll just journey in it together and discover together.

Eileen: [00:24:06] What do you know about the experience of working with someone you just really can't understand? How do you express authentic empathy, or experience your empathy with someone whose perspective or experience you just plain don't understand? Or does it ever happen?

Gloria: [00:24:21] I don't think it's ever happened, but if I came across it, I would just say to the person, I really don't understand, because if I don't speak it and put it out, it really does get in my way when I'm struggling to understand. Or I might think of it, if I don't understand, maybe that's their internal struggle too, that they don't understand. And is there a way in which we both can be in a feeling of being lost together?

Eileen: [00:25:03] To uncover what is emotionally real to us, we must release pretense. Admit our feelings with humility. Some truths are ready to burst and cannot be contained. Others fall out of reach. So when truth escapes you. When you're no longer sure what is real or isn't. Remember Gloria's words and give in. Speak this disorientation out loud for yourself with others, and trust that you can clear a new path. You know, you always use the phrase. And in our conversations over the years, we come back and back again to that simple phrase, trust the process. Tell me what you mean by that.

Gloria: [00:25:54] Believing that an event will unfold the way it's supposed to, and that ultimately we're going to be able to metabolize it and work it through and it's going to be okay.

Eileen: [00:26:10] And you're talking about in therapeutic conversation with someone.

Gloria: [00:26:14] Well, you know, in therapeutic conversations with someone. And also, I think in life, you know, recognizing the things you just can't control. So you just got to trust that it will evolve the way it's supposed to. I mean, and that doesn't mean that I don't struggle with my own anxiety around things and have to calm myself and get back to what I know, which I know I eventually will get there. But just believing that whatever something evolves in, I can deal with it. The patient and I can deal with it.

Eileen: [00:26:55] Do you feel a pressure of any kind to make something happen with people?

Gloria: [00:27:00] I used to, I don't so much anymore.

Eileen: [00:27:04] What made the difference?

Gloria: [00:27:05] I think age and experience. I don't have a magic wand. Hopefully the pain is lessened so that when something triggers it rather than totally collapsing, I think about maybe they'll experience just a little wince or jolt and then be able to move on because they kind of understand what that's about now. And it was a real experience that happened that no longer devastates me. Sometimes I think that's the best that it becomes.

Eileen: [00:27:45] And you think to yourself, over these years, since going on working full time, private practice, having made your way, when you think over all time, what have you learned from working this way on your own and with people one on one? You know, I know that you do groups as well, but thinking about that one on one therapeutic relationship and what you've learned that only working this way could have taught you, who are you now that you know you weren't 30 years ago?

Gloria: [00:28:18] I'm wiser. If I hear a tantalizing story, I don't need to know details. When I was younger, I was more curious about who was doing what, when. Now I really, that's really irrelevant. I want to know who the patient is inside of the story and where is the patient located. All of the externals I don't really care about, like, where are you in your own story? Because sometimes people will tell me about an event and I'll say, I can't find you in this. Where are you? Because I want to know their connection to the event, not necessarily the entire occasion itself.

Eileen: [00:29:10] Their connection, what's meaningful for them.

Gloria: [00:29:13] What's meaningful for them. And not just I think when I was younger, I had a more of a curiosity about events and circumstances that were interesting, but I don't think it necessarily that significant in the treatment itself.

Eileen: [00:29:38] Throughout her career, Gloria has seen what the privilege of meeting patients entails to listen and only listen. As therapists, our role is not to select or embellish. Instead, we try to take things as they are. Nothing more, nothing less. We let individuals speak and work meaningfully through their experiences. We hold a mirror to give them a better look at themselves and their relationships. We can make space to let people reframe their sense of self until they find peace with their reality. For Gloria, this has been the work of every day for decades past, and it will go on and on. Being her way of working? Yes, but of living as well. Corey, where do you see yourself, you know, going from here, given your extremely extensive career and going on practicing full time, I don't hear you thinking about retiring or discontinuing working soon. What keeps you interested in and really excited about practice?

Gloria: [00:30:57] Well, what I often say to people, uh, they'll probably find me nodded off in my chair, my therapist chair, and that will be it. But it's, uh, it has to do with my sense of feeling relevant. My identification lies greatly in what I do, how I think about who I am. Because I think, well, if I'm not a therapist, who am I? I don't know the answer to that question. The freedom and luxury now of working with people I only want to work with and still contributing in the world. It feels wonderful and I feel like I've earned that.

Eileen: [00:31:41] So that's a whole way of being, not just a way of working.

Gloria: [00:31:45] It's a whole way of being.

Eileen: [00:31:47] And being in the world.

Gloria: [00:31:49] Mhm. And I think we are that way in the world. I think we observe, I think we listen to people. I think at least in my experience, people are really drawn to me and telling me, strangers telling me their stories. So I don't think it's just what I do. I think it's also who I am. I think I'm in flow, taking what comes to me, contributing what I want to, not contributing when I don't want to. I think I'm in a place of freedom and choice that I don't think I ever had before. So it feels like I'm entering sort of a new discovery where I'm having just to continue to trust the process and let's just see what evolves.

Eileen: [00:32:44] More than a professional discipline. Listening is now part of who Gloria is, and something here speaks to our earlier questions. When we ask what is real to us and what is mere perception, I am tempted to say reality is nature. What is true to us was once a perception of the world. And unlike other fleeting impressions, this something has stuck with us. It's a lens on the world that fit time and time again, until it became our way of seeing, of sense making, of being. Layering over time, like tree rings. What is real for us becomes visible as years go by. Reality shows us the deep and personal places we've been retracing a journey that is uniquely ours. It gives us foundations, stability and direction to build further. Gloria's own journey started in the segregated South and brought her to psychotherapy and social work across multiple mental health institutions. She encountered people from all walks of life with their own social realities. Connecting the dots between her truths and theirs. Gloria identified pain as a common thread. This crack in me, which is also in you. It transcends differences of race, ethnicity, religion, language. We all come from unique cultures as individuals, couples, families. We are not the same, but pain reconciles us. It holds power in allowing it. In feeling it.

Eileen: [00:34:32] We come together, you and me, the entirety of who we are, undiminished and finally united as we listen to each other. From four years ago to today. The launch of 2024. A truth that I have come to see is that listening is universal wisdom. And while each approach is bespoke, I am moved by our ability to find each other on this podcast and share what listening means to us. Something that once lived only in the absolute privacy of our practice has been unveiled. I feel so grateful to Gloria for her contribution originally and now, and for trusting the process of this podcast. If you keep one thing from our conversation, let it be her mantra trust the process. Your process. No matter how hidden or mysterious your truth will surface eventually, what needs to stay will stay. All else will go. This has been the art of listening. Again, my name is Eileen Dunn. Please join us for our next episode as we continue to dive into the space between speaker and listener. You can follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, if you've enjoyed the show, please leave a review and a five star rating. It helps us to grow so that we can keep bringing you new conversations. And we'll see you next time.