The Church & Mental Health: Interview with a Therapist: Bryan Hall, Part 2

Photo: "Memorial Church" Don McCullough

Yesterday, I began a new series on "The Church & Mental Health." I'm interviewing Christian therapists to talk about the intersection of spirituality and psychology. 

My first interview is with Bryan Hall. Here is Part 2 of the interview. 

Bryan is a therapist who specializes in the entertainment industry. In this section, we talked more about family systems theory, domestic violence,  putting a smiley Jesus face on everything, and why the hot girl in AA is always the last to get sober. This interview has been edited for clarity.

BH: I get parents dropping their kids [teenagers] off, [saying], “Fix my kid. Tell them to stop doing drugs. Tell them to stop being angry." They think I'm just going to get out a bat and beat someone's head in so they stop doing this stuff.

...I know what's going on but I do therapy with the kid. What you find then is that it's not a “this kid” problem, it's a bigger problem.

"We need family therapy," so I bring in the whole family. And then what you find there is, this isn't a family situation, it's a couple's thing.

Because the kid is doing nothing more than acting out the unaddressed psychological issues of the parents. And sometimes these guys are preachers and sometimes they're cops. And sometimes they're like, “I'm not the angry one, you're the angry one.”

I've literally had parents right in front of their kids in the middle of a session call them “a piece of shit,” say, “If he would get his act together, this whole family would be fine. He's 95% of the problem," and sit there looking at me.

And I'm sitting there thinking, are you listening to what you're saying? No wonder the kid—I'd want to get high too, if I had you [as a parent].

And there few things that really—I'm not at all a violent person, but I hear that stuff, and it's like, we're on the 12^th floor right now, I bet I could throw you through this window and see what happens.

But I just have to sit there and be like, “Okay, okay.”

And then what you find is--I'll ask the parents, “Okay, I talked to little Johnny here for a while, and yeah he's doing some things that are not in his best interest. No one's going to argue with that. Never gonna say drugs are okay, anger—I get it. What about you? He told me about how you grew up, and his grandma and grandpa, your parents, and, wow, your dad was a really violent, abusive guy, he was drinking a lot too, huh. So what are you doing to take care of yourself?"

“Oh no no, I don't have time for that. It's all his fault--he needs to stop—I'm not gonna--”

So you get the parents--because by definition there's a power differential between the parents and kids--saying, “No no, we're not looking at our issues, we're looking at the kid's.”

And so you find that when you do couple's therapy, it's not a couple's problem, it's two individual problems. Because what happened was these two people never dealt with the issues of how they grew up.

And the mindset is, “Well, I've got 10 problems. You're hot. Let's get together—you've got 10 problems—and so we'll get together and cancel those problems out.”

Last time I checked, 10 plus 10 equals 20, and not zero.

So now, what really happens is—I've got my problems, you've got your problems, let's get together—oh, well now we're actually really connected, so I kind of have your problems and you sort of have my problems.

So now we're going to have this fire going on and this problem back and forth, but we can't say anything to the church because everybody's gotta put a smiley Jesus face on everything, right? We wouldn't ever want to be honest. Because God knows Jesus was never honest, he just went around lying about things.

And I get this all the time:

“Well, if my husband would do this and get his act together”

“Well if my wife would stop doing this--”

“My girlfriend that--”

So where I spend most of my time is trying to get people to look into the mirror:

"Well dude, hate to tell you this but the only person on earth you can control is yourself. The only person that she can control is herself. So you are 100% in control of your 50%. But no more no less. So you can't control her. You can't force her. At the very most you can scare the crap out of her."

I was magnetic north for domestic violence situations about a year ago. I don't know why, I just got a lot of them at once.

If you're some huge weight lifter dude--or maybe if you're not—you can scare the crap out of your girlfriend or your wife, beat the shit out of her, whatever, okay—she might do what you say in that moment—but in the long run, she's not going to like you, your kids aren't going to like you.

But she's too scared, she's too codependent, maybe there are economic factors, maybe there are kids involved. Maybe there are reasons that she doesn't leave.

In an average DV [domestic violence] case, it takes the abusee—and one out of five times it's the female that's abusing the male—an average of thirteen times leaving and coming back, before they leave for good.

So you would sit there and say, “What is your problem? This guy's beating you up. You had to go to the hospital. Why don't you just leave?”

Which is kind of the equivalent of talking to an alcoholic and saying, “Why don't you just put down the alcohol? Why don't you just stop doing it?" Oh no crap! I had never thought of that before I lost my house, my kids, and everything else.

So there's a lot more to it, but you can see how in that situation, the obvious person is the violent perpetrator. If you're the guy and you're beating up your girlfriend where she has to go to the hospital, that's easily seen.

What's not so easily seen is why does that girl feel so poorly about herself that she would be with this guy? Is she trying to fix him? And what you find is there's a lot of issues from the way [she] grew up.

So, back to your question, if everyone looked at themselves, then all of a sudden, people's level of overall health would change--it would go up. Then you would find much healthier relationships. Because if a person is unhealthy, by definition they cannot have a healthy relationship.

Again, they can be the pastor, they can be the worship leader, they can do all this fancy crap and look really good, and go home and beat the crap out of their kids. And that stuff goes on. Big name preacher, "oh praise Jesus" and all that, and their kids need to go to the hospital.

But, “Oh no, we're not going to tell anyone about this stuff, we're going to keep secrets. We're going to keep feelings buried."

There's an old saying one of my bosses likes, it goes: “Feelings buried alive never die.” And what happens is they come out in other very nasty ways. 

There are people that come in and say, “I want this guy to be like this and I want him to have that and I want him to be like this and have this list--” And that's fine.

I just say, okay, so if this guy came by right now, would you be his dream girl that had this and this and this together? They don't really like to think about that.

But there's an old Al-Anon saying that says, “2s don't attract 10s.” And there's a bunch of 2s walking around going,

“Well, I want this 10 as a girlfriend or a boyfriend.”
“Dude, you're a 2.”

And we're not talking supermodel girl with less attractive guy, we're talking about psychological-level functioning. So, okay, you want a 10, I get it. But right now you're a 2.

Go work on yourself. 'Cause all you're gonna get at this point are 2s. You can't figure out why your last 25 boyfriends have been such jerks? What's the common denominator there? I try not to be that blunt, but at the end of the day, that's the question. Because it comes back to: I gotta look at myself.

And if you're young, if you're hot, if you have money, if you're successful—you don't need to do that. Because there's always going to be somebody else to pick up the slack. There's always some other drug to do. There's always some other credit to get.

So when they say that the hot girls are the last girls in AA to get sober, that's true. Because it's only when they get old enough to where, “Oh, every last guy isn't throwing themselves at me to get me this or do that, well I guess something ought to happen here.”

...to be continued.

You can find Bryan at his website.