Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall, B.A., M.A. is known for her work in comedy and writing. Here we discuss a wide range of issues in an extensive talk on comedy and life. Here is session 3.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Looking back, would you have preferred it to have been a different way in terms of how the bonding happened rather than in a survival mode?
Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall: Of course! [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Carlin-McCall: Who wouldn’t? There’s a time in healing your personal story. Yes, you want it to be different. You wish it had been different. You’re mad that it wasn’t different.
You’d do anything to have it be different. You cross your arms and don’t get on with life because you’re almost demanding it to be different, but it can’t be.
That’s not the way life works. Things are what they are. The past is the past. People did the best they could in that moment. So, you can’t live in regret. Otherwise, you’re not living your life. You’re stuck in the past. That’ll never change. You are kind of a zombie if you’re living in the past.
That’s why in writing my book I knew telling one’s personal story, whether to a therapist over a certain amount of years, through art, through memoir, or whatever it is, is really healing. It is important to tell your stories to be able to put them down and walk away from them at some point.
Jacobsen: Did your graduate training allow you put that narrative into an actual structure and then be able to put it down?
Carlin-McCall: Yes, it was a couple of things. I had been doing deep work. I was in therapy for some time. I had perspective on it before I went to grad school.
I began to get my hands around the narrative of my life with that. Grad school was a place to help me start from the beginning and walk through all of the developmental stages of my life as a psychologist, but then apply them to my own life – which is the thing you do in your first year of grad school.
You go through all of your baggage, work through the theories, and do the work around them. So, when you enter a room with a client, you are not bringing your baggage with you. If you do bring your baggage with you, you can see it. You can see how to separate from it. There was a deep healing for me in grad school around all of this stuff. A lot of my confusion and pain around the chaos part of my life was validated.
It was held up as, “Yes, this is what happens to little kids when their parents aren’t present emotionally or physically.” These are the ways in which that can manifest in your adulthood, the choices you can make, in your worldview, and how you see yourself. Your sense of power. Your sense of autonomy. Your sense of self-responsibility. It was very illuminating for me. I highly recommend it! [Laughing].
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Carlin-McCall: I think everyone should spend a year of their life learning this stuff, going through their life story. It would be incredibly healing for the world. There would probably be a lot less crazy people running things if we all did this. [Laughing]
—
Original publication (1, 2, 3, and 4) on www.in-sightjournal.com.
—
Part 1 can be read here.
—
Get the best stories from The Good Men Project delivered straight to your inbox, here.
—
Photo Credit: Getty Images