Jerry Waxler

Bill: Welcome to the True You Podcast. Today we have special guest Jerry Waxler and Jerry is my writing coach, and I'll tell him to tell you a lot more about him, but in a moment. But first, I wanna get all the voices in the room of the folks that are here. We've got Jerry Waxler and we have Marty Ke hut. Marty, say hello

Marty: Hello everybody. Welcome back.

Bill: and Jerry, let's hear your voice.

Jerry: Hello. Happy to be here.

Bill: All right. I'm gonna take a moment here and we're glad to have you, Jerry J we had Jerry on previously on, and it might have been on the Leadership podcast before we switched over to the True You Podcast when we invited Jerry. But Jerry's ears, you may notice if you're watching this on YouTube or read because we've been talking about it a lot and we thought we better just get him on the show. And just hear from him as, as well. And the reason that we've been talking about him a lot is because. In a recent episode, I talked about, coming into my own as a writer and what Jerry has contributed to that. And of course, Marty's a writer. We're all authors here

Marty: but in addition, since Jerry was on with us last time, I shifted the structure. Of the book that I'm writing to memoir. I was, it got me thinking about the form of that. I wanted to say what I wanted, what I wanna say in this book that I'm writing about beauty. And I didn't want it to be a philosophical exposition. I didn't want it to have that usual essay form at all. I wanted it to be more of a narrative of how I came to see beauty the way I do and where I do. And so after speaking to you those many months ago, I thought, that would be a, it'd be more personable. It'd be more intimate. It would be, it would follow my thinking rather than, proving something like a dissertation would. So that's a big change in my writing since meeting you.

Jerry: Sweet.

Bill: that?

Jerry: Yeah. Stories are a happening thing. So that was very cool that you found that within yourself. Excellent. Looking forward to reading it.

Marty: That's great. I interrupted you, bill, you right in the middle of things.

Bill: No that's great. But let me get to the introduction. It feels like maybe we've already introduced him, but let's tell the folks what Jerry thought it would be good, important for them to our listeners to know. Today's guest is Jerry Waxler, a writer, memoir teacher, and lifelong explorer of personal growth. After finding sobriety in 1971, Jerry spent decades deepening his emotional healing through meditation, journaling, therapy. Counseling psychology eventually earning a Master's degree in the field. In 2002, he discovered the transformative power of memoir and has since written several books, helping others use personal storytelling as a path toward insight and change. More recently, Jerry has been studying Internal Family Systems, continuing his journey of understanding the many parts that shape who we are. Please join me in welcoming Jerry Wexler. There we go.

Jerry: Who.

Bill: Jerry, what's been keeping you busy since the last time we had you on the show?

Jerry: Counseling, writing reading lots of words.

Bill: You're a counselor.

Jerry: think about think about almost everything that we do for self-development, except maybe yoga, but most things involve coming up with a. A process or a goal and then finding the words for it. The intersection between self and words is really a rich interface, and I have landed in, in a really deep, interested way in that place. So keep myself busy that way.

Bill: Yeah you mentioned counseling. You are a counselor. You are a psych. Yeah. And you have a steady stream of clients that you see there in, in the, in new England, in Pennsylvania.

Jerry: Yeah.

Bill: Yeah. And you're also a writer and you're also a memoir mentor or trainer. How do you refer to yourself there?

Jerry: Coach.

Bill: A memoir coach,

Jerry: Yeah. Yeah. I'm

Bill: is what you are to me.

Jerry: Yeah. People. Coaches, which is, you've spent much of your life in that domain. But people who have a life, they have lots of thoughts about their lives. They understand stories because they've been reading stories since they were little or hearing. And and putting all that together sometimes takes a conversation with someone who's. Done it before. So I try to help people, in that way.

Bill: Yeah. Yeah, so just before you signed on, we were looking at four different areas that you were interested in talking about today. And Marty became quite animated thinking about these different memoirs that are coming out, especially in this con, this political CL climate over the past 10 years of people who have. Maybe escaped the current administration and the one that we had between 2016 and 2020 and then wrote about their experiences there in a memoir style. So let me just hand it off to you, Marty, 'cause that, that, that seemed to get you pretty excited there. I,

Marty: I was looking at the, one of the topics that Jerry had said they're all related, but the redemptive arc as a unifying principle of memoirs and and I was thinking, oh my gosh, you know that, could be, the reason behind the political people writing to explain themselves and find, I guess in a way create for themselves through writing a memoir. Here's what it was really like for me, or, here's what I want you to think. It was like for me. So I was I hadn't thought about that. Reason for writing a memoir before, but when you said redemptive arc, I thought about those political ones and I thought maybe that's what they're looking for.

Jerry: Yeah, so I think I'm in, in a different different sort of category of my thinking. So redemptive arc is a literary term. What is the arc of a book or a story, and it's about someone going from a lower. Place in their lives to a kind of a place, a higher place. So redemptive is just a technical term that means elevation gain. That's the way I think of it. So people like a coming of age story is about a child who's very unformed and maybe going through a, like a family situation with whatever, alcoholism or poverty or something, and then grows up and. Learns to deal with life on their own. So the whole genre, and to your point about some people will use it in whatever way they choose it. It's just a tool. But for people who are trying to grow, who are trying to find themselves or trying to find hope in the world the form of a memoir is very. Uplifting, but by definition. 'cause when you sit down to write a memoir about some p period in your life you're, setting out to tell the story of how you grew through some difficulty and so taking advantage of this, what so 2026, it's already. Like a quarter of a century old. When I first came upon memoirs in 2002, it was a pretty recent phenomenon. So that's why I called it the memoir revolution. 'cause it gave people the opportunity to look at their lives through the journey of a story. So most of us get old and. Look back and say, oh, okay, I did that thing, I did that thing, I had this achievement. I started out in life, as a kid in that place. And so in memory alone, it's a kind of a scramble thing that you can't really shape it into a coherent narrative, but when you sit down with a, blank computer file and really spend some quality time for. A number of, frankly, years describing how you grew through difficulties. That's a pretty, that's a pretty exciting thing for people to find hope a about life, to find some kind of sense that life can get better. To believe that they're not stuck in a, in, in who they were. And so even it to, just to show you how I use a redemptive a as a kind of a concept, the 12 steps is like perfect redemptive arc. 'cause you're starting out helpless and. There's this thing in literature called agency where you're, you don't have agency, meaning you're a victim of circumstances. So the, the very beginning of the 12 steps is, I'm a victim of this disease. And so you're, you don't have the ability to exert your own sense of self and then through the 12 steps. Or any sort of recovery, you're gradually exerting effort, you're solving problems, you're growing, you're building a sense of who you are, and then by the end, you've grown to the point where you can share and past on what you've learned to others. So yeah, so redemptive arc is it's what I've fallen in love with about the genre and, something that. I really got excited about looking at life in that way, so I hope that helps.

Marty: no, that helps a lot. I'm picking out of that two things for myself. Whether, I don't know if that's legitimate to do or not, but I'm learning who I am by going through this process, this redemptive process

Jerry: Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

Marty: I'm like, it, like you said, it was a kind of a jumble and now, going, working through it, I'm learning oh, that, that's how that connects. And this is why I do this now be, and so I'm putting things that I'm learning and also. I'm, I am creating that redemption, if I didn't write this, it might just hang out in this unredeemed place, but by writing I'm, I am, I have agency to use your word in creating my own redemption.

Jerry: A Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, that kind of gets back to that intersection where you have an idea and then you find words for it. What if you have the idea of your life? Your whole life and you find words for it by crafting a memoir that now is, this is who I am. So it's a cynical person could say that's reductionist because it's just taking your whole life and putting into a book. But I, I see quite the opposite. I think that developing a story is really a noble mission. Stories are just such a powerful thing in human experience. yeah, I, I look. I love how you put that ma.

Bill: When I'm listening to a story or reading one, I imagine that I'm that character that I'm reading about and. I'm relating it to my own experiences, and if things are being described that I haven't experienced before, that's a, that's another very fulfilling and rewarding experience. Oh, so that's what that's huh? But often the books that are memoir style that really grab me, or even a fiction that, that, that really grabbed me. I'm becoming the character that I'm reading about in the book.

Jerry: For sure. Yeah.

Bill: and what you're saying, Jerry, about being able to put everything together in the years that it takes to do that in a book to, to describe what I experienced as I was writing, surviving myself. It put it together in such a way where it's far more meaningful to me now. I'm more compassionate toward myself now that I've. See the entire arc of the story and look at all the different pieces that put together that story. So interesting. I was falling asleep last night because I've been recording the audio book and that means that I'm going over and over the words that I wrote about my life and, a few things came up and I thought why didn't I write about that in the book and why didn't I write about that in the book? Of the 200 I think and 89 pages in the six by nine paperback that, that should be released here in about a month. There was all these stories that span from the age of five till I was 27 years old could have written at least another 300 pages about that same span of time, but some things you couldn't write. I couldn't write about everything.

Jerry: You are blessed with a lot of very vivid memories and as like working through that with you I just, it's remarkable how many great stories you have. Not everyone has that, and I don't think that, I think for to develop, a narrative arc. You're picking out the most, the meaningful pieces that will help the reader track what it is that you're growing through And and creating a sense of that person and that person becoming the, from the raw material at the beginning to the more. Mature, sophisticated person. At the end, there's a tracking that goes on in the reader's mind, and that's exactly to the point. Where you started, where you, when you as a reader, that's what I love about memoirs, it works. Exactly. It's like a mirror image. As a reader, you read a story and you go into that story. You allow yourself to identify with that character. And if you're good, if you're good at it, you almost can lose yourself into that story. And so the memoir. Writer's job is to do everything they can from a craft level to allow a reader to become them. So we have this amazing kind of social opportunity for social wisdom to, to be able to understand so much about each other that we would never just the number, the variety of people, the complexity of different situations that I've been able to understand. Through reading and studying memoirs is just phenomenal. So anyone who wants to understand the people around them or, if you're a helper of any sort, that you wanna understand the people that come to you for support. Reading memoirs is just an incredible way to get into put yourself in another person's shoes and to really feel what it's like to be them.

Marty: So it sounds like from what you said just now, that choosing of episodes to recount that the, a theme arises, that they, and I just wanted to, I wanted to ask you guys, do you find that. You that was true oh yeah. There's a theme to this that I didn't realize was running through or a thread, that all these pearls are strung on.

Jerry: The the thread of that the pearls are strung on. So there's two slightly different concepts, but they, that they weave together. So the thread that it's really hung on is the motivation of the character. So there's an issue with the beginning. That the character then has to grow through and however they're going to conclude the story. This is the success that I arrived at by the end of the story. Each step along the way shows how they proceeded along that path. So that's the dynamic tension, the elastic, propulsion of the story themes can be, really interwoven with that, like for color and texture. So for example, if it's about alcohol, if it's about recovering from being an alcoholic, then a theme might be the alcohol and the 12 steps and the, the going from inebriated to sober. Or it could be a theme about any sort of addiction I, there's all kinds of different. Themes, there's all kinds of different types of memoirs. So it could be you're divorced and now you've gotta refine yourself. Or you could be lost a child and now you have to come to terms with this gut wrenching grief that allows you to grow back to who you want to be. And so each one of those has this dynamic arc. Of the character trying to grow, but then the themes that come in around it are regarding like where you are. Like, bells is all, got a lot of Northwestern Mountains, got a lot of Northwestern scenery to it that is, or grocery stores or, whatever. So there's different, so we, each one of us has our own unique experience and we build that into the story so that people can have that experience with us, a unique experience that they might not have thought about or it helps people relate to who you are when you show them real stuff about you.

Marty: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm trying to weave mine on the theme of beauty. And how I came to see beauty the way I do and where I do. But I also relate because of the, just because of this, the word redemption has, is so much meaning, significance is to me. I, one of the places that I, first, of course in the church. But then when I was in college, I fell in love with an opera by Wagner. It's his last one is called Parol, and it's always talked about as a redemption story. And so he, he doesn't realize it at the beginning of the opera, but he is to be the redeemer of this community. And because he's innocent, everybody else is sinned basically. And so at the beginning they are telling this. Prophecy, that's this innocent person is supposed to appear and save us all. And he comes in and he doesn't know the prophecy, of course. And he then he, so his ignorance is one of the themes, innocence. Then he gets tempted, which would make him not able to save the community. And the temptation is from a woman who reminds him of his mother. So mother. Becomes one of the, these pearls on the string of redemption. Anyway, so finally the story ends with him making his way back and, able to redeem the community. So that's another very strong redemption story that fits everything that you just said about the.

Jerry: So redemption could be all kinds of things. And I, I apologize for using an overloaded word, but it's liter, it just stole it from literary sources. But for example, in I internal family systems, when you know you'll you start talking about a part of you that's all caught up in. And upset about things today. So and so said something and it triggered me. And then you start going into the part and asking the part where it got this bad feeling from. And very often it's built, baked into the IFS system. Is it very often, and it's something that you're, your father said to you when you were six or something, so it's like trying to grow through the kind of the insecurities or the weaknesses or the. Or the temptations, you put pointing out about per of all. So Temptations is all about, what is an addiction, of just a giving into temptations. But the overcoming. Weakness. So a lot of coming of age stories are about overcoming the complexity of your family situation as a child, but later on in your life where you're, your life is amassed for other reasons, say addiction the redemption has to come through your own effort to keep growing and growing. So it's just a, it is just. I love the idea of Elevation game because it's because in our culture we don't really have a lot of good sort of moral compasses. Like I often repeated my sad tale that in college I used to read, anti redemption stories. So I got into very much into literature of despair and they called it existential but that's only one little branch of it. But there was the theater of the absurd. There was a lot of, there was a lot of fascination in the sixties for stories that ended on in chaos or confusion and I being a good reader. Feeling that these people, some of them had earned Nobel prizes for their literature. And I thought these guys must, have some pretty smart ideas. So I, I got pretty influenced by literature that ended up making me feel that life was meaningless. And I. I. don't read that anymore. I think that literature is very important for all of, for culture. So if you have a culture that glorifies confusion, then you're gonna have a lot of confused people. And I think that memoir glorifies climbing, self-development or self-improvement. So that's, that maybe is a better way to

Bill: Oh yeah. I

Marty: I love that. Yeah.

Bill: Let's move on to the second bullet point that you meant that you brought today, Jerry, the amazing tool of memoir, the Story of Self to link individuals together and break down barriers between people. And I think you touched on that a little bit. Would you like to say more about that?

Jerry: Yeah, I could say about me personally is that I. have always my whole life been frustrated by, not really. Knowing how to understand other people. I was very analytical and I loved math and I, went back to school to become a therapist 'cause I wanted to understand people. And then you sit in an office and people will tell you about themselves, which is a big step up. 'cause they're actually like telling you real things. But I never had a sense that I understood the narrative that people have to live through until I started like reading and studying memoirs. So I'd read, I read hundreds of memoirs and I'd studied them like my, like I, as if I was going to school. And that course was that person, I'd study for sometimes for weeks or even months trying to understand what did that person go through and how did they turn that into a story. And I'm just, just the whole aggregate of all the stories that I've read has just populated my world with so many richly three dimensional, multifaceted the, just the whole emotional journey of being a human being. And one of the things that's really quirky about this is that you would think. It's counterintuitive 'cause you'd think that if somebody's gonna be sitting there writing about themselves for, years, it's gonna be very self-involved. And it's like, why should I care about them? Or, when you're writing it, you say, why should they care about me? But it turns out that when you look at a person deeply, you understand so much more about human beings. Bill to quote you. One of the things about IFS and parts work is that it's like one of the things that you get when you do parts work is to go deeply into an understanding of one part at a time, and in a sense, memoir, memoirs or parts work for human culture. Because each one brings us into proximity or empathy or connection with that one person. And, so it could be so many different cultures and gender connections. I, just so expanded my understanding of. Every human situation, pregnancy and immigration and being the wrong, being an outsider and you name it, I've been there.

Bill: What's the name of the book? I think it has the word kite in it. It's about Afghanistan.

Marty: Oh.

Bill: do you know what I'm talking about? I believe it's memoir style as well.

Jerry: It is, and I don't, and I didn't read it. I don't remember exactly

Bill: It was amazing,

Jerry: Kite Runner.

Bill: The Kite Run.

Jerry: yeah. Yeah.

Bill: Yep. That was an amazing book. And I had that experience. Reading that book was, wow I've never been to Afghanistan and now I began to understand the culture and the values and the beliefs and things like, there's a lot of really horrible things happening in the world right now. People are being murdered in, in under the guise of war. And and I have a lot of strong feelings about all of that, but these are people just if I look across the street and I see this house over the, I know there's a family living in there and I know some of those people and I have feelings about them. And to imagine that, if I lived 5,000 miles from there and I heard on the news that their house had been bombed and they'd all been killed, it wouldn't mean much to me. 'Cause I don't live there. I don't know them. But reading a book like the Kite Runner had me, wow. These are just human beings raised in a different culture, but they still have a lot of the basic same core. They have heart, they have love, they have loss, they have dr. They have. Struggles and challenges different than mine, but it made them real to me. It made Afghani, the

Jerry: Yeah.

Bill: from Afghanistan real.

Jerry: I don't know if it's politically, I don't know if it's appropriate, but since we're all like men actually the expansion of understanding women has just been like phenomenal in my reading experience. I, I just, emotion was always something very foreign to me. And, I just, just so many different layers of being a woman that have been opened up to me through reading their stories. So

Bill: What are a couple of examples of that? Jerry? I'm thinking of Elizabeth Gilbert. I think that's her name.

Jerry: Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, she was very famous. Yeah. Jeanette Walls is glass Castle is a big one. Big. Popular one. And that's she grew up in poverty and and that's actually a good story. I was thinking about that story in terms of shame. She grew up poor and in very chaotic experience her parents. Were disorganized personalities and didn't really know what they were doing, and they were horrible parents. And so when she got to New York City and started to make it as a new newscaster, she was initially very ashamed of her childhood. And didn't want to mention it to anyone. And every once in a while it leaked out and people would say, that's really interesting. And she decided that instead of being ashamed of it she would write a story about it. And it's a kind of a perfect, beautiful example of how turning what could potentially be a shameful experience into a good story completely changes the. The relationship to that person's life, it's no longer, the shame is just completely gone. It's now I want to turn the page and find out what happened next. Yeah, but the fact that she happened to be female was very might have been a side note, except after reading hundreds of memoirs and probably more than half. Probably well over half were by women authors. I've gotten really accustomed to, kind of code switching, if you're familiar with that phrase, just switching into what it's like to be that other person. Yeah.

Marty: We're reading I'm co-leading a book club. For the Pro Human Foundation and this month we're reading James Baldwin's notes of a native son. And I, till this conversation, I wasn't thinking like that. It's very much a memoir. Every it's a it set of nine essays, but they start at the beginning and they work their way and he is telling, through them he is. Dealing with shame and the stuckness of the, of his life at times and his relationship to his dad and all this. And I, and now I'm like, wow, this is really, this is actually an example of a memoir.

Jerry: It

Marty: And the reason I brought it up just now is because I have been having this experience, like I feel like the last couple of weeks I've been in Harlem in 1950, feeling and smelling what it was like.

Jerry: Yeah. Oh yeah. Black experience. I read like probably eight or 10 books by black authors and yeah, it's just a different just an opportunity to understand. A different slice of life. Could say that about any slice of mid the Midwest, the south, regional country, different countries, different, whatever. It's all just, it's all there. It's all people who write these are really pouring their hearts out. They, because it's a lot of work to put a book together. And like Bill was just saying he's already published it and now he's rereading and rereading as he's trying to narrate it. It's as you're putting this book together, you're doing everything in your mortal capability to try to help another person understand what it's like to be me. And we've got, all this whole armada of people who are trying to do this. And it's, I think it has the potential for changing. Attitudes in society. We go from the news media, which loves to stereotype because that's what they do for a living. And then you go to actually reading a whole bunch of memoirs that go right, blast right through the stereotype and take you into an individual's life. A very cool

Marty: Yeah. What if American History class was taught through memoirs? How much more we'd learn that way, or this, I love the term you use social wisdom. The. There ought to at least be one class in high school where everybody gets to read a bunch of memoirs so that we, we get to feel what it's like to be in all these different lives 'cause of that social wisdom that could be gained.

Jerry: Totally. Totally. Yeah.

Bill: Here's the next thing that you brought as a talking point today, Jerry and lemme just read it. The amazing release and insight that comes from sharing one's inner first person point of view to ease, shame, and lead toward personal recovery and self-development. Jerry, when you were coaching me on this, surviving myself, I came to you, you won't remember at one point I, and I said, oh man, Jerry, I'm. I'm having a hard time writing this part of the book. I'm really ashamed of it. I'm ashamed of the things that I did. I'm not sure what to write and what to leave out and do I dare do, I dare write about this stuff. And and who's gonna be offended? And at one point I was using people's real names in the book. And decided that other than myself and my two oldest children, I would refer to everyone by different names and different locations and change some of the facts to protect them. And that eased the way for me a little bit. But your advice was very helpful. Do you remember what it was?

Jerry: I know in general what I would say I don't remember that specific, but yeah, just write it and as you share it, it becomes less less shameful. A lot of the sting is reduced just by sharing so there's this weird thing in human experience where we hide the things that we don't like about ourselves, but in hiding them, we normalize the hiding and we all, and we've created a culture where. The things that aren't great are hidden, and so we have a whole protocol of hiding the less glorious parts of ourselves, which reinforces the shame. So it's like we're all walking around with all these things that we wouldn't wanna share because we're ashamed of them. And so we're all, ha have this little pocket of crap that we've got contained within privacy and in the end it's like people. It cuts people off from each other and, if you're the whole IFS thing is that then, because you don't want anybody to know about your shame, you just end up blaming everybody else. 'cause it's it's a lot easier to just blame other people for being less than in order to hide your own. But I re I remember the first time I came across this weird, this lesson. One of the earliest memoirs that I read and very famous, one of the kind of pioneers in the whole movement is Tobias Wolf's this Boy's Life. I guess it was made into movies, which of course, escalates, just amplifies it as a seller. But he is just a, he's a kid, he's a teenager and he's doing teenage things and pranking, and he did. He was a friend of his, a friend and him went to the a roof of the house and were throwing. Eggs down at the cars. And they got one, one guy who was in a convert convertible and they threw a, an egg on top of him. And then, and he was like, don't how dare you do that? And it was like, wow, what a sleazy, cheesy, jerky thing to do and how, what are, how rude and what kind of stupid thing. And then I was thinking. He admitted it, it's in print. Why? How could he do that? I just remember thinking, how could he stand admitting that he had done that thing? And there it is in black and white and it's a probably practically, part of the memoir cannon is just, a lot of people know about the book and it's just being willing to share the embarrassing stuff. Develops the storyline like a thousand times more than if you tried to hide it. Because, one of the worst things about, reading a book that's all bland and you you can imagine reading like a puff piece, like of a, like a celebrity or somebody who paid to have their.

Marty: Right.

Jerry: written, and it's all about all the good stuff and it's just boring and, you just want to throw it away. And the thing that makes a story is the difficulties. It's okay, so he was human and then he grew and how he's a writer and he turned his miserable act, act of, of destruction into a good story. Being open to our flaws, it's one of the basic premises of 12 steps, right? You you go through all of these things that you did wrong as a way to not expunge, I don't know. I don't know exactly if it's exactly parallel, but you know when you do that in a memoir, you start to understand that the difficult things were exactly what you needed to grow from. So they completely changes the weight of the thing from, that was a horrible thing that I did to, that was a really beautiful thing that I outgrew. so it's, it is just, it just it's the same life. It's that whole thing about the half empty glass and the half full glass. It's the same life, but you understand it more from the point of view of how you found that elevation gain to, to become the better person that you know, that you are. Yeah, back to your point about Bill, about the things that you were ashamed of. It's like those are also things that make it really fabulous and fascinating that you continue to grow and that you wanted to become a better person and you wanted to pass that along and help other people grow. So it's a wonderful part of the story.

Bill: We're down to about five minutes now, Jerry what else would you like to say or maybe spend a few minutes at least exploring before we begin to wrap up here?

Jerry: I can, I sure I can come up with some things in memory. So there's a big difference between memory and narrative. It's almost like still photograph and movie. In memory, the especially painful things, will pop into our heads, like snapshots or in, in trauma therapy and all the IFS work and so on, there's the. the. felt memory. It's like you feel, oh, I feel horrible. It's somebody says something mean that you interpret as mean, and then you just feel, ugh, I feel horrible. That's like kind of a snapshot of something that happened decades earlier that was like frozen in time. Our brains love to hold onto those snapshots because it's part of our sort of survival method. But, in memory alone without processing and without going through some kind of a developmental effort. The memory just will stay frozen like forever. You can be, 70 and it's still just there as if it was yesterday. Whereas when you write stories about yourself, the difficult things are part of what happened. And then the things that allowed you to grow through that also happened. The people that came to help you or to offer you a a hand, a helping hand. And one of the really amazing things about time when you write in a memoir is if you're in a memoir group and you write about something that happened to you that maybe was painful 50 years ago. You think about it, it happened. You had those feelings alone. You had that misery alone. You felt that it was only you and this was a terrible thing that happened to you. But here you are 50 years later sharing it with a group of people who now know this. And now have this sense as intimate as you can make it. 'cause some of it is about craft you express it in sentences and scenes that can be, that they can relate to. And now that they're there with you and they're able to experi now you're not alone in that thing anymore. In IFS there's that, witness and redo and very similar to that, where you're going back to that younger part and being with it. Now you've got this actual social situation. You're in this group of people who are writing their stories and you are with each other in those earlier times. So it's just a fabulous way to. Reconstruct the humans were very proud of the fact that they invented writing. What is it like, I don't know, the earliest writing was like 6,000 years ago or something. And before that, people would just tell stories and then you remember them, and then they had storytelling craft where people would memorize stories, but. With our writing and now with computers. 'cause now you can sit now, we all have these gadgets that you can sit and type and move things around and then hit a button and now it's available to somebody for somebody to buy and we have this new opportunity to develop our relationship with each other and with the past through the written word. So it's just a modern. Extension of what we've been trying to do for 6,000 years is building civilization towards, in a direction that can allow us to grow more with each other, towards each other, within ourselves. And, find that moral compass that that can help us be kinder to each other.

Bill: Yeah. That's a great place to end I think.

Marty: Beautiful. I always learn so much from you. Thanks.

Jerry: Call.

Bill: thanks for joining us today. Yeah, really great to have you on the show.

Jerry: Oh, my pleasure.

Bill: Before we say goodbye, if someone were to be interested in talking to you about the services that you provide. Obviously you're a therapist there in Pennsylvania, but I understand that you're really interested in. Maybe teaching some memoir classes, is that correct?

Jerry: Oh, I love teaching. Yeah. Yeah. I have a couple. So I'm opportunistic. I find places to teach and love to teach memoir writing and bring people together and help

Bill: Do you do that only face-to-face or do you do it virtually online as well?

Jerry: Thanks to zoom. I do it all. I do it all virtually, really. I have one face-to-face group, but mostly it's

Bill: I see. Okay. So if somebody wanted to be in one of those groups or learn more about it, where would they go? How would they learn about that?

Jerry: So I have my contact information at my website www.jerrywexler.com spelling. J-E-R-R-Y-W-A-X-L-E r.com and getting, contact me or I have a mailing list where I let people know stuff.

Bill: Super. Thanks for joining us again, Jerry.

Jerry: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.