Allison Pugh
speaker
77 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Allison Pugh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yes. I realized that the in-depth interviewing that I do that involves this kind of seeing is a clinical practice. And it's a clinical practice like nursing and like teaching and like... And what do all of those professions have in common is they have an apprentice model of teaching in which someone does something in front of other people and then gets immediate feedback.
One of the first things that they have to do is kind of get out of the way. And I often like to think about airspace as like a soccer ball and who is controlling the soccer ball. And you want to pass the soccer ball, you know. If you're too present, then the other person just doesn't have the space to put themselves in there. Right.
And that can preclude, that can impede seeing of the other for sure.
Yeah. So if you're like completely sure that the other person is really passionate about such and such and you say that to them and they're like, no, actually, it's more like this. This is what I actually care about. You have to hear that. And actually, the correcting process. can help people feel even more seen. If they are able to correct you and you say, oh yes, now I get it.
The other thing I would say is in our quickness to leap into a conversation with somebody with our own views or assumptions, what I think is really important is actually hearing what the other person is not saying, hearing the emotion that they're not naming. If you can hear an emotion behind what someone's saying and say, wow, it sounds like you're feeling nervous about that.
Or it sounds like you're feeling, it sounds like that gives you a lot of pride. It doesn't have to be a negative emotion. It's like, if you can kind of hear whatever emotion is behind, that's very powerful for people. If they didn't say it and you name it, they feel very seen. And kind of in the naming, when you're doing that kind of naming, you're making it safe for them.
Exactly. That's why it's a boost, a huge boost. Now, I would also say it's a little more challenging, maybe. But it is true that if you can bump it up a level and go to what's not being said out loud, but that you really perceive, that is very powerful. Yeah.
Yeah. So Sarah was a therapist at the VA hospital. And so she was seeing veterans. And she said she had she told me about a woman she had been seeing who had experienced sexual trauma in the military. And at the end of like the third or fourth week. The woman leaves the session with a comment saying that she might not be able to come back.
You know, how she might get busy is what she said to Sarah. And Sarah said to me, you know, something was just kind of off. Like it didn't feel the same. It just didn't feel right. So she calls her before the next week. And she says to her, you know, I think I said something. You know, I'm wondering if I maybe missed something or didn't hear something right. The session felt different today.
And I think it could be helpful to talk about that if you're able to come in again. So the woman comes in. She comes back. And they were able to talk. And Sarah said at that point, the relationship really shifted. And she ended up making tons of progress there. And so at the end of the treatment, Sarah asks the woman, you know, what worked for you?
And the woman said, there was this point where you noticed that I wasn't happy with whatever you did. And the fact that you even noticed that was a big deal. And so Sarah took away from that this notion of actually therapists have written about this. They call it therapeutic rupture. And that if you can redeem yourself there, if you manage a reconciliation, it can be very powerful.
So Bertie was a nurse practitioner in California. She had this bright smile, you know, a high beam smile. And she was quite kind of bustling and friendly and very warm. And she told me that she had always assumed she would be a doctor like her father until she failed organic chemistry. And she then kind of was like, what am I going to do next?
So she actually decides to become a nurse practitioner. But even as a nurse practitioner, she said she struggled with ego issues. This is what she said. But the good thing about being a nurse, she said, is that she could focus on the human element. And she told me an example of what she considered really to epitomize what nursing meant to her. And that was the example of this homeless man.
He came into her clinic. He had been on the streets for years. She said he had probably walked cross-country homeless back and forth. He had never really been in a shelter. She said he had some wounds on his feet. They were, she said, just gnarly, calloused. And she said he was so hunched over from years of osteoporosis and walking.
And so few people would be able to even have eye contact with him because he physiologically couldn't even really look up. And I just sat and did wound care for his feet. So she just sat and washed and cleaned his wounds. And she said it wasn't going to do much. He was still going to be on his feet all the time. He was so resistant to going into any shelter.
It was just a band-aid over a really big problem. But for her, it captured what nursing was about, like this humility, this service, and the witnessing. So she said, she tells me just to give him that moment of I'm seeing you. I'm acknowledging you. This is me caring for you. She said it was powerful for both of us.
The power of just connecting to another human being. And by doing that connecting, you're saying to the other person, you are a person of value. You have... Humanity, just like I do, and together we are sharing this moment, it confers dignity and humanity to both participants.
Showing 61–77 of 77 · page 4 of 4
← Previous