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. 

The Church & Mental Health: Interview with a Therapist

Photo: "Memorial Church" Don McCullough

Today begins 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. 

Bryan is a therapist who specializes in the entertainment industry. We talked about family systems theory, spiritual hypocrisy, addiction, how to deal with your issues, religious abuse, what the good little Christian mom has in common with the drug addict, and much, much more, which is why I'm breaking this interview into several parts. This interview has been edited for clarity.

We jumped right in talking about how the church often ignores psychology.

BH: Here's how I usually explain it: It seems to me that if we examine what the Bible says about a person that they have three components: there's the physical, we have a physical body; we have a spiritual component, but we also have a psyche—psyche is the Greek word where we get “soul.”

In church, most people (unless you're kind of fringe) [will say],

“Oh, you broke your leg, go see a doctor."
“Oh you've got a cough, go get some antibiotics”

Most people aren't going to have a problem with [the physical component].

And of course, in church, they're going to talk about Jesus and how he'll save you […] we've got the whole unseen spiritual realm. But they seem to neglect the whole psychological component. They seem to neglect a person's experiences, emotions, will, what happened to them, traumatic events.

And that's a problem because if you think of these three components as three spokes in a wheel and one or more of those components are broken or damaged--how well is that wheel gonna work?

Q: Can you talk about the difference between the spiritual and the psyche because I feel like those two things are often conflated.

BH: Well, what you find is that all this stuff is very intertwined. And you can find psychosomatic instances which are physical manifestations of psychological trauma that hasn't been addressed. You can see how if a person's serotonin levels or dopamine levels are altered, not present, damaged by drug use, it's going to affect their psychological condition.

You also see—less easily of course—but there can be demonic influences, spiritual connections between that and a person's physical body or their psychological state. So, the spiritual side involves what is God saying to you, what is his plan...

The psychological part is things like: A person has the desire to use drugs.

Well, but the reason that people do drugs is because it numbs out their feelings. It numbs the feelings that are usually unknown to them in the first place, but that manifest themselves very predominantly in a multitude of ways prior to the actual drug use.

So, somebody comes along and has these feelings, and somebody says, "Smoke this, shoot that." Well, they feel better for a brief time. I work with a lot of addicts. And what I've said for years is, “The drugs are not the problem”

I work with drug addicts straight out of prison--teardrop tattoos and the whole bit--and the drugs are not the problem. The drugs are like gasoline on a fire: They make everything worse, but they're not the actual core problem. Because the core problem is the feelings that the person is trying to avoid feeling.

Q. What would be the Christian equivalent? I'm sure a lot of Christians are tempted to do drugs or do drugs, but I feel like it's more than that...

BH: But that's an important point because a lot of people think, “Oh, I don't do any illegal drugs, I'm not some alcoholic on skid row, I'm not a homeless person. Therefore, I don't have any problems.

The thing is, people can be addicted to shopping. People can be addicted to the gym. People can be addicted to TV. You've gotta define addiction as anything that's done to avoid the real pain and issues.

And if you don't look at it from that perspective, you've missed everything.

Because there are plenty of people in AA meetings for 30 years that haven't had a drink that are still a complete mess.

Q: I mean, could someone be addicted to church?

BH: Oh sure, people can be addicted to 12 step meetings. And it comes back to what are you doing to avoid bigger issues? And it makes it much easier to see the gang banger with the tattoos and the needle in his arm that got busted by the cops, then it is the good little Christian mom that never says “No,” and does Bible study Tuesday, and picks the kids up Wednesday, and does the church cooking Thursday.

Because she's not doing anything illegal, but she's avoiding her real deal by doing Christian-type works.

Q: So what would you say about avoiding the real issue—which is really easy to do—How do you not do that? It's easy to say “Face your issues” but what does that mean, what does that look like?

BH: Well, there's a multitude of ways to address it because it's a multifaceted problem. If it was just, “I'm gonna wave this magic wand, or I'm going to give you this pill, or tell you to go read your Bible five times and then everything will be fine,” then great.

Q: Well, I think that's the thing--being a Christian and going to church, you expect that the emotional health and mental health thing will take care of itself: “I'm going to church, I'm listening to sermons, I'm going to Bible study, so I'm going to be an emotionally healthy person.”

BH: It's not accurate, but I understand what you're saying. And what you find is that there's a few potential things underneath that as well.

This is the oldest one and the most hideous one: simple control. And we can look back at the middle ages or we can look at the church in the Palisades right now, where the person on top does not want to deal with their own issues, but you know what, they're on top. They're the pastor, and nobody can mess with them.

So they can continue to rage and have anger issues, they can continue to be very unhealthy in a multitude of ways, but these ways will not necessarily get them in jail.

They can look down on people, they can be narcissistic, they can have people cover up their drug use, they can do things, some more overt and some more covert in nature...

So that's one reason that that happens, because what's the best way to make sure nobody's looking at me and my issues which I can't deal with? It's to look at you and yours. So I'm going to sit here and scream:

“You better not look at porn!” But you better not look at my browser.

“You better treat your wife right!” You better not find out what I did to mine last night.

Q. Are you relating this to pastors?

BH: Oh yeah, pastors do this. It's so funny where you can go to church and most people will say the spiritual component is necessary and like I said, if you have a physical ailment, go see your doctor, but if you bring up the whole psychological thing, it's like, “Pray more you sinner!”

Well, the converse to that is if you go to most 12 step meetings [you can talk about the physical and the psychological] But then you bring up Jesus and it's like, “Aw, man, we don't do that here.” But they'll stand up there and say every kind of, “The universe told me this. and the rocks told me that, and the sun told me this.”

Well, how many people are that way because they actually met God and said, “No, no, I'm not going to have it.” Or are they that way because they were religiously abused in some way? It's usually the latter.

They grew up going--let's face it, what are the two requirements to be a Christian, which really means get into heaven. Number one, don't screw your girlfriend, number two, don't drink. If you do, God really hates you, but he might let you into heaven if he's having a really good day and he doesn't see you and you sneak in the back door. But everything else is not okay.

So we can sit here and rage, “You got to do this, or you haven't gone to church six times this week,” but we'll forget about the pride and arrogance. We'll forget about the fact that, “You can't do drugs,” but let's go to Bible study and have twelve plates of brownies. Food's an addiction, easily. And it's a very prevalent one.

So these are the okayed versions of “We're gonna not deal with our issues, but let it out in this way.

Q. Sort of the double standard.

BH: Yeah.

Go to Part 2

You can find Bryan at his website.