The Shining: Domestic Violence, PTSD, & The Psychology of Kubrick

Welcome to Popcorn Psychology, the podcast where we watch blockbuster movies and psychoanalyze them.
My name is Brittany Brownfield and I'm a child therapist and I'm joined by
Ben Stover, individual therapist, Hannah Espinoza, marriage and family therapists. We're
all licensed clinical professional counselors also known as therapists, who practice out of Chicago.
Even though we are licensed mental health professionals, this podcast is purely for
entertainment purposes and to fulfill our love of dissecting pop culture and all forms.
Please remember that, even though we are all licensed therapists, we aren't your
therapist. If you are struggling with mental health symptoms, please find a local
mental health provider. Okay, so we're finally talking about the Shining. We've
got many requests. I feel like every time Halloween rolls around, people ask
us to do the Shining. We did have one person guest correctly, I
wish I would have out of their name, but they know who they are
on Instagram that we're going to talking about the Shining this season and we're finally
doing it. In joining us, we have a great podcaster, a great
commentator on all things I feel like within media, within fandom. So I'm
going to throw to you, Scott Jordan. Well, hello everyone, thank
you so much for the invitation. Delighted to be here. I'm doctor Scott
Jordan aka Zombie Scotti, cognitive psychologist, philosopher at Illinois State University. I
run a little thing on YouTube called Dark Loops Productions where I have conversations like
this talk about philosophy, science, pop culture, and all things lived life,
which is basically our centering point. I also do a thing at Illinois
State University called Regiicon where we celebrate the History Heritage Month being celebrated nationally with
a one and a half hour zoom conversation open to the world, focusing usually
on a graphic novel that is in the theme of what we're discussing. So
this Thursday night, we're discussing an amazing graphic novelization of the Great Gatsby.
It's called Gatsby and it's told through an LGBTQ plus lens. So very much
looking forward to that conversation, and you thank for of course, We're so
happy to have you. You were also part one of the guests on our
episode on Us, which was a few years back, believe it or not.
So The Shining there's a lot we could get into here. I also
told Hannah from the top that I'm going to try to be not super annoying
and bring up the book a bajillion times because I'm like a Stephen King super
fan. And there's, as I'm sure I'll talk about in final thoughts,
the book has a lot more going on than the movie in a lot of
ways, and a lot of more information that I'm going to try to keep
out of this discussion as much as I can, and it's probably going to
drip in here and there. Also, before I forget, if you listen
to our Adams Family episode, you already know, but we are missing Ben
because he had a new baby, so he is still on family leave from
us as he takes care of the new human being in his home. But
we miss you, Ben, and we will, you know, we wait
your return to us. It sounds like he's lost at sea, so as
people know, well if you probably know, but The Shining is about a
family of three, Jack, Wendy, and Danny who are keeping the hotel
if you will, during the off season, which is a long time.
It's October through May, So we are talking about a family that is isolated
within a gigantic structure for what is that six months seven months in the Shining,
we are dealing with the family that is in high isolation from not just
other people, but the world really because of the snow season. And so
as we observe them through this time, we see the patriarch, Jack slowly
crumble as he's being influenced by the hotel, if you will, and we
also watch his family, specifically Wendy, try to deal with that as well
as his son have a psychic ability called the Shining that is wearing on his
mentality within this hotel. So we will be talking about specifically Jack and Wendy
today and their dynamic including domestic violence and alcoholism. So if you have any
triggers around that subject, this might be a good one to take a break
from or to speed through to Danny, which we'll also be talking about and
how he presents with PTSD and kind of how if you were a kid at
his age, especially who was seeing the things that he's seeing, what would
the psychological impact of that be on you? And then finally we'll be talking
about we're kind of like gonna let it rip a little bit about like Kubrick
and psychology and the use of the space and all those kind of things,
and then as always, we're going to talk about treatment and final thoughts.
So Jack and Wendy they are the main sort of centerpiece in a lot of
ways. Why I shouldn't say that, because Danny is his own It's almost
like a two header Danny and then Jack and Wendy in their situation. So
why does it feel prevalent to talk about Jack and Wendy together? Because I
think a lot of the dynamic that we see and a lot of what the
movie is focused on is their relationship and also their relationship to their son and
so but I think that we often see Wendy and Jack connected to each other
and a separate from Danny. We see them in a lot of scenes where
it's just the two of them. So I think it makes a lot of
sense to talk about them also because I think their dynamic is a big plays
a big role in the way that we understand Wendy's character in the film.
Yeah, yeah, I would say that they're They're in a relationship for sure,
But I don't know that Wendy's best interests are a part of Jack's identity.
In other words, he doesn't value himself. I mean this is even
when they're calm together, he doesn't value himself in relation to her, which
is made pretty clear at the beginning. He uses typical words like babe and
hunt and then very quickly those fall off when he's frustrated with his identity.
So it's a challenge. I'm not going to say it's a challenged relationship.
People make those relationships work all the time, right where they're just different people
but come together for some reason. But everything works against them, you know,
staying together, including his ambition which is dangerous drugs. So well,
I think you're bringing up a good point we can recognize from the top,
which is we are introduced to this couple when a few things have happened.
One is it seems to be that Jack has quit drinking because of a situation
where their son. Where Wendy does in the beginning, when she's talking to
that doctor, she does a pretty stereotypical in an idotal experience of framing this
story as almost cutesy, yeah, as a way to dismissive, but it
clearly has an impact on them. So we're we're entering in on a couple
after they've gone through a significant issue between them and their family where he had
a problem with drinking. He while drunk like dislocated their kid's arm, tugging
it like, she says, like the way that you do a thousand times
with a kid, and this time he just dislocated it, like very dismissive
in her storytelling, and he stops drinking. Now, I was a little
confused because in the beginning she says, he that was five months ago,
but then he makes a reference later that that happened three years ago, the
arm thing. So I don't know if that was just a like a goof
in the movie or the script, or if I miss something in the timeline,
but I was connecting to the idea that he's only been quote unquote sober
for five months, and how that can't not be an element that you have
to take into considering all the things we're going to talk about with their dynamic.
Yeah, I also think that's a Kuberck thing in the sense that anything
you think is canon in the story is disrupted so that you, as a
viewer don't get to create an uber story that's coherent, and he keeps disrupting
any narrative that you're creating as a tactic to generate being ill at ease,
which ye, the show does very well in many different ways. But yeah,
that's a Kruber thing. Okay, okay. And I was wondering that
too, because when he said the three years at the bar scene later,
it stopped me in my tracks. I was like, hold up, that
changes the way I'm thinking about this part of it. So we're entering on
a couple that have gone through something pretty serious. He's made a big shift
in terms of his alcoholism, and we don't really know what that means in
terms of his social life or anything like that. He also doesn't seem to
be someone who's working a program of any kind, like he's not. They
don't mention anything like aa. They just kind of I inferred from them that
he just decided to stop quitting double to quit drinking, and then he just
quit drinking, and that it was no problem that way. That people like
to be very flippant about those kind of things and think that that will work.
Then I think what you were saying, Scott, which I also was
noticing this time watching it is, Yeah, they don't really personality wise from
just viewing them through the lens of like meeting a new couple, if you
will. Right, don't seem to make sense to me because he doesn't seem
to like her from almost immediately, like, I don't feel any like intimacy
between them or any like affection between them, except for what I wrote that
down to that he says, hey, Babe over the phone, because I
was like, Oh, I think that's one of the few times where they're
trying to create this sense of affection between them, but I'm not quite buying
it. Yeah, because of his energy throughout the whole movie towards her.
Yeah, his his energy is very stoic white writer, right, very individualistic,
And I'm not bound to be judging here. I'm trying to be descriptive
to the point where he when he's got problems, she's not even part of
how he tries to solve them. She's not even considered to be part of
his identity space. So because he's judging himself to be an unsuccessful writer,
his audience is people he's never even met, So his problems are coming from
a world that he's imagining. Where people are calling him a failure, and
that is kind of a stoic vibe, right, and so it's a kind
of violation of that individualism to go asking for help. So again, I'm
not trying to be judgy or yes or no, that's our way to be.
I'm just saying it's it and given when it was written, mm hmm,
and then the film is made in eighty I believe you get the sense
that he they got married because she got pregnant. It's just it's just the
vibe that I got off of their relationship, and I have no data to
prove it other than the fact that she doesn't really seem to be part of
his identity. Well, we love to speculate about backst this show as like
our attempts to do like case conceptualizations. So we will rip on that stuff
all day. So far already that because I was even speculating because they seem
to have a bit of an age difference, not a huge one, but
a little one. And he used to be a teacher, so part of
me was almost like, I wonder if she was one of his students and
they had a thing going on, and then she got pregnant. Because he
seems to just be dealing with her, ye and where he's found himself in
life. He definitely has that energy. And this is where I'm going to
be judgmental of one of those people who kind of like opens their eyes one
day and they're like, how did I get here? As if like they
didn't make active choices continuously to get to the point of the satisfaction that they're
at. I love what you're saying there, because people make choices all the
time that just ignore most of things. So yeah, he's made active choices,
but they haven't had to do with her happiness at all. So then
that makes him fully capable capable is again descriptive not judge, makes him fully
capable of being surprised by things. She says when he's been living with her
for years that his model is not us against the world, it's me against
the world, and you are with me when you're with me, and you're
with the world when you're not with me, And people live those kind of
lives all the time, and most of the choices we make exclude most things.
So yeah, he didn't choose to become that. It just became that
because he chose to judge himself against the world that he couldn't control. So
yeah, I love it. Yeah, he because, like I said,
off the jump, you get the feeling that he is Well, let me
say this, we don't see any of their relationship pre being in the hotel.
So this is also one of those movies where it's hard to get a
full idea of what's going on or how discrepant their presentation within the movie is
within the hotel setting. Is because we don't really see them pre hotel other
than the story that keeps haunting them about the drinking and the arm injury,
like that is a ghost that is haunting their relationship that they're not really acknowledging.
I think that I do think it's something that they are ignoring. I
also think some of his behavior also fits into the domestic violence cycle as well,
where they already seem like they're an isolated family. They don't seem like
they have a lot of connections, especially when we consider that Danny's not at
school and that they have agreed to stay at this place for a long time
with not being connected to anyone, it very much feels like they've already been
in isolation, and I think a part of that, again is in the
cycle of abuse with the person who is doing the abusing. They want you
to be disconnected from all your supports, They want you to be disconnected from
your family. They want you to be disconnected because that's the way that they
can really control what is what your existence is like, and what your reality
is. And also so that you feel dependent upon them. And I think
we get that feel from Wendy immediately, like kind of her not presentation,
but I don't know that. I'm trying not to get too viby in my
language, sort of like the energy she gives off as very dependent on him.
I mean, in the first twenty minute of the movie, Jack owns
the place by bouncing a ball against the wall and fills it with the effects
of his being there. I mean, the sound is an effect of us
being somewhere. So he shapes the sound space by throwing a ball in almost
a drum beat kind of way up against the indigenous tapestry. You know,
for me, it was like he was waking the dead, right, But
it's his space. And then Danny drives around on his little big wheel creating
these wonderful empty spaces. He's creating his space. She doesn't create a space.
They don't give her, they don't let her own the space at all.
And I know that Krubrick hadn't done that intentionally because this attention to the
sound is so robust in the moment that it's not just how she looks and
how she acts, it's how she actually is able to be in the space.
And yeah, that you sound very well to make it clear that Danny
and Jack actually have a connection that she doesn't. Yeah, yeah, no,
no, it's cool because what's coming to mind even when you say that
is well, one, I think her space is the kitchen, which I
don't know if that's intentional, Like she's the like her and Jack aren't brought
into the kitchen, just her. When we do see scenes of her seeming
kind of peaceful is when like she's doing the fruit cocktail in the kitchen.
She also seems to be the only one that's trying to connect somewhat to the
outside world, like she's watching the news, she gets on the radio.
So when we do see Wendy in these scenes where she is with other people,
she does actually seem very extroverted, very social, very talkative, and
so it is interesting that when we meet her, she doesn't say anything about
friends or family. They're like you said, Hannah, there doesn't seem to
be any acknowledged sacrifice of like spending many months in isolation. You know,
there's never like, well, how am I going to get in touch with
my family? Like I'm going to try to call my sister like, or
I'm just going to try to like get in touch with my best friend.
Like. There's no discussion about what they're losing other than their sanity by being
in that space, which does note for me that she is already someone who
her whole world is Jack and Danny, which I think creates why she's such
a great mom in a lot of ways. I think she's like a fantastic
mother to Danny because it's probably her whole life. And she seems really lonesome,
Like I think that's something I wrote in my notes, is she seems
really lonely. Like when she's talking to the ranger over the radio, you
see her kind of light up in a way that she hasn't in a while,
And I was like, she should date this guy, but she seems
really nice. But I remember just thinking, God, she seems lonely because
she seems to be really eating up that conversation. And so if you think
of it also from that perspective, and also the way that she behaves when
they're getting the tour, She's constantly talking, she's so complimentary, she's trying
to make connections with people all the time, which you could if you view
it from the more domestic violence lens, you could argue is someone who is
appeasing as well. So I want to not ignore that, which you could
speak to more Hannah or Scott if you wanted to, but like in this
dynamic, when she's the one being victimized, you can it can create a
version of your personality where you are sort of like hyper hyper appeasing, hyper
complimentary, like not really leaving room for silence. Like I want to make
sure that I'm not overpathologizing her personality, but I think there are a lot
of elements to it that we would see as just someone who's like sweet and
friendly, that I also could see as someone who is in an active abusive
relationship dynamic. Yeah, all the sounds she make are domestic, right,
all the sounds, all the reverberations she puts in the space are traditional domestic
reverberations. So just by the sounds, she's different than Danny and Jack.
They're owning the space. I mean, they're putting their whatever you want to
call it into the space, and she's not doing it that way. I
think that's particularly brilliant, and it makes us feel her even more alienated.
I mean, I would unconsciously argue that those soundscapes isolate her more because she
doesn't fill them in a unique way like they do. And then she's constantly
walking through their soundscapes, and yeah, you're right. Like one of the
scenes that, like the one month later introduction scene, she's pushing that cart
through, like the service cart through. She's opening up the cana fruit cocktail,
she's making food, like you know what I mean, like all of
her stuff. You're right, the sounds that she's making, the space she's
taking up is in service too. Yep. Jack and Jack and Danny like
carrying the tray to try to feed him and then he screamed, he yells
at her, like everything she's doing is subservient in nature, and all the
sounds that she's making are subservient in nature. So I kind of wanted to
create space for you, Hannah, to talk specifically more about like the domestic
violence dynamic and sort of like the cycle of that, just to give some
general framework for people who are listening, who are interested absolutely so in domestic
violence. There is a specific cycle that happens, and it's something that we
don't talk about very much for some reason, even though it's something that's been
out for a billion years. So I'm just going to explain a little bit
of what the cycle looks like. So there's six distinct stages that make up
the cycle of violence. There's the setup, the abuse, the abuser's feelings
of guilt and their fear of reprisal, their rationalization, their shift to non
abusive and charming behavior also called the honeymoon period, and his fanta season plans
for the next time he will abuse. So the setup is kind of like
it's kind of like they make a comment about something being wrong. So they
make a comment about the drapes or the tablecloth hasn't isn't like fresh enough or
needs to be ironed or something like that. They'll set something up and then
they will terrorize the person while they're trying to do that task, and then
get and then proceed to yell at them for what they for, how they
messed up, whatever the task was that they asked. Does that make sense?
Trap? Like setting up? It's like it's a trap. Yeah,
that's what the setup is, setting a trap. Then the abuse. Then
they feel bad and they come to say, oh baby, it's never gonna
happen again. I'm never gonna do it again. We see this played over
and over in movies. His fear of getting in trouble, which is why
they had to make up that fancy, that fluffy story about what happened with
Danny, and then him rationalizing what happened, which we also see, and
then the shift to the charming, non abusive and charming behavior, which I
would say they're at the point where that's not happening anymore. Eventually, in
the cycle of abuse, you get to the point where there isn't a honeymoon
period anymore. It's just abuse all the time, and then his fantasies and
plans for the next time he will abuse, because it just goes in the
cycle, and cycle just keeps going and going and going until either he kills
her or she is able to leave somehow. On average, it takes somebody
up to seven times to leave a domestic balanced situation. And I like how
you point that out, because I think the most disperse respectful but commonly asked
questions people have two people that are in wendy situation is why didn't you leave?
As if that should be easy to do, as if there isn't this
cycle you're talking about, and as if it isn't commonly well a common experience
in that dynamic that it takes that long to leave if you are able to.
Yeah, I love this conversation. What I study in the lab is
choice, usually perceptual action choice, this phenomenon of the setup. What it
does is it's not something someone consciously does. In other words, they're irritated.
So their irritation comes out as complaining about dinner not being ready. Right.
They're not thinking I'm going to have a fight with this person, then
I'm going to hurt them. Rather, their system is such that they actually,
I'm going to use the word subconsciously unconsciously perturbate the environment in a way
that gets to to the point where they don't feel responsible for the violence because
they'll say, why do you make me do that to you? So it
is a setup. But the problem is when we then ask the person after
the sixth time, why haven't you left yet, we're asking that person to
make a conscious choice, and conscious choices are incredibly more difficult to make than
unconscious choices. Right, So the setup is something a system that has been
able to sustain itself because of who this person is, how their relationship is,
and the fact that the burden of ending the cycle is on the victim
because it's a conscious choice that will end the cycle. And I don't know
that the abuser really is in a conscious space to consciously say, which they
always do, I won't do it again, I love you baby, I'm
so sorry, that's their moment of consciousness. Yeah, and so there are
two different types of choices, and it doesn't surprise that seven is the number
because those choices usually as kids involved, it evolves divorce level thought that is
life changing thought. Most people are extremely embarrassed to make those kind of choices.
They feel very alone making those choices, and it's the worst kind of
choice to have to make. And you're the one who's in that space consciously,
and that's really really relational betrayal. Right, it's some one left to
make that choice by themselves. So I'm really glad you said all that,
because that all plays out c literally in this movie. Yeah, exactly,
well, And I was thinking too that, you know, it also can
take a really long time for it to get to the point where it's just
abuse all the time. I'm a domestic violence abuse survivor, and like I
was with my partner, I was with that partner for five years, and
we never got to the part where it was just abuse. It was just
getting to the part where he was about to hit me. He was doing
all of the threatening, like slamming his hand behind my head on the door,
like screaming in my face, punching the wall, like doing all those
different kinds of things, and so and so. Also, it takes a
really long time. That's something else I don't think people quite understand is that
this person is often very charming in the beginning, very charming, very giving,
very loving, and it doesn't take and it takes a while for them
to kind of have this impact on you so that you're really beaten down and
you're really emotionally confused. And there's all different kinds of abuse. We're not
just talking about physical there's emotional, physical, sexual, psychological, economic,
also known as financial abuse, and social abuse. So there is all different
kinds of ways that this person is having that Wendy is having her personhood kind
of attacked in all these different ways. So that's also why it's really hard
for people to leave a situation because sometimes the abuser is the one who controls
the money. Sometimes they're the one who has the car. Sometimes they're the
one who, like You're like, they're only allowed to get groceries and that's
the only time they're allowed to leave the house. M hm, well,
one, I really appreciate your vulnerability and sharing that, Hannah. And yeah,
I think in this situation, we see that Jack is capable of being
charming, right like when he goes to the inner when he's with other men.
M hm. You can make of that what you will. But when
he's with other men, he has that very like man's man energy of where
he probably is very charming. I'm sure when he's a teacher he's very charismatic.
I wouldn't be shocked if he's that professor or teacher that everybody likes,
right and maybe even that you know, the students fall in love with a
little bit or have crushes on, you know, and that probably fills up
his ego in a way that we've kind of been referencing here and there.
But like you said, Scott, he's a failed writer if you want to
use those terms, like he's not being able to be a writer the way
he wants. I'll put it that way. He is. I think he
feels like more of a dry drunk than someone's in recovery, and they don't
acknowledge that, I think enough in the movie. It's talked about way more
in the book, but someone who is not drinking. So he's given away
his coping skill, but he's not really tending to the fact that he has
a drinking problem, that he's really irritable that he's feeing, and so all
this stuff sets the stage for him not being able to be a good partner
to Wendy period. But then, like you're bringing up, Hannah, this
element to the relationship that I can't imagine is brand new, just on the
way that Wendy is behaving going into the hotel, and like you said,
the way that she's rationalizing, the way that they kind of have the same
story, a little bit about the arm thing like when he retells the story
to Lloyd later, it's very similar to how she tells the story to that
doctor. Almost like they've created a story together. Oh, absolutely, an
alibi if you will. I think they both have to believe. I think
he's created the story and he lets her tell it to make sure that she's
telling it the right way, or maybe even like just reinforces it. Yeah,
exactly subtly, and he doesn't even know that he's doing that. Yeah,
it's a pattern that's been able to He's been able to embody over the
course of his life. And I'd actually argue it's it's a pattern that he's
probably witnessed earlier in his life. And I think you can go a little
more meta in the fact that the Overlook Hotel built in nineteen oh seven,
I believe it was or something like that, where on an Indian burial ground.
So what a stereotype you can see. There are some who argue that
this novel is a can be seen as a critique of colonialism in the sense
that Jack is an individualist who sees violence as a way to solve his problems,
and you can look at colonialism as a as a cultural system that looks
as violence as a way to get its solve its problems, get what it
wants, usually by the dehumanization of whoever and whoever they're colonizing. And this
is exactly what goes on in abuse, you know, the the dehumanization of
the other. So, you know, I don't want to put too much
emphasis on it, and I know King didn't put a whole lot of emphasis
on the Indigenous graveyard. He does that in other books, but it kubric
uses it as one of those other realms that keep you destabilized as a as
a viewer. And so I think Jack is there's Jack, and then there's
the culture Jack was raised in familily really and then in the other culture.
And I think it all kind of fits because the violence, the violence never
comes as I'm thinking that I'm going to go in there and murder all these
people. I was thinking that for one God, one land, one King,
this is the right thing to do and own this the space to to
bring these people to God, right, And the setups happen right, and
then suddenly the violence happens and it wasn't your fault, right, or something
along those lines. So this is one of the beautiful things about brains is
that they do these kind of things all the time and we don't feel it
happening. And very much appreciated this whole conversation about domestic violence and the dynamics
of choice making and different type of choices, both individual culture, conscious and
unconscious. It's beentastic, yeah, because I think bringing it back to like
the cycle part too, I mean, just to give an example from the
movie to help concrete maybe some of this for people is the fact that there
seems to be an understanding that he may be appreciated at the beginning that she
brings him lunch or she brings him meals while he writes, and then there's
a specific scene in the movie where she brings them a meal, probably like
she's done a bajillion times already, because we're a few months into them,
staying at the overlook, and he's like, why would you fucking interrupt me?
Like now, all of a sudden, it's a problem and she's done
something wrong, and you can see her in that moment almost like glitch.
I don't know if you would call it like dissociating or maybe she's switching into
not a denial mode in her mind, but she, like, I think
she see a moment where her brain like goes offline a little bit by his
reaction because it's so off killed her and she sees him going into the realm
that led to him hurting Danny. I mean this this pattern they have of
her being domestic in relation to his work environment. Let's be honest, it's
a real thing when you're working, sure, especially suddenly someone interrupts you.
Oh yeah, you know what's going to cost you another twenty minutes to get
back to that space. So his reaction there is authentic. The extremity of
his reaction scares the hell out of her because it's a portal to this space
that she knows is extremely violent and dangerous. And so yeah, she glitches.
It's the first time we've seen it in the movie. Yeah, And
it's extremity and the quickness which it happens. It makes it clear she's not
much to him, at least when he's in that mold. But that's probably
also the mode where he ends up hurting people. Yeah, because he says
that I can't remember exactly what it says, but a very shocked like it's
very shocking, like he says, like, why the fuck would you come
in here? But he says in a calm tone, which is also confusing
for her. Yeah, and her brain kind of can't concept, like can't
contextualize what he said, like you can't fit into a schema in her brain.
So it's like it's almost her brain spits it out, and then she
goes right back into that uber friendly mode. I can't remember exactly what she
says, but she's like, oh, well, you know, if you
want some sandwiches or something. She says something very like sweet to him,
and then he continues to be verbally foul to her, but in that sort
of like more tone, if you will, He doesn't raise his voice.
I guess, is what I'm saying. And I think that's such a good
example too of when you're in this cycle with someone, you're not sure necessarily
when they're gonna switch on you, and so your brain can't always keep up
with when is the shoe gonna drop? Right, And so in that moment,
she's trying to make it work still and he won't relent, like he
continues to be horrific to her in that moment. Go ahead, Hannah,
and I would argue that she's going into fawn. M M, that's true.
I think her brain, I think she's experiencing going into survival mode,
and I think she's experiencing fawn, which would be really common. So fawn
is often when we can't when if the abuser attacks us, will like,
there's no way for us to fight back, there's no way for us to
win. So when there's no way for uh, because in general, men
have more muscle mass than women do, it's just the fucking truth. And
when and there's when you're in a position where you know that you're gonna lose.
Instead of fighting, we fawn. We go along, We do whatever
they ask because that's the only way we can survive that situation. Again,
something else that is done unconsciously exactly. She's not making that choice, no,
exactly and the same way. Well, and it makes me think too
of you know, when Jack sees her with the baseball bat, and you
can see on his face that when he walked into the room, he was
trying to be chill, and as soon as he saw her with the bat,
his brain went to, oh, she has the bat to protect herself
from me. I'll fucking show her what you like you can see him become
angry and triggered almost you can see it happening on his face, and he
begins to respond and fight. Yeah, and you see, I think that's
such an interesting that moment later in the movie when she has the famous right
where she's got the baseball bat and she's holding it too high, which drives
me nuts, Like she's holding in the middle and she's kind of making these
like little swipes at him, like defensive swipes, and he's coming towards her
right, which is such like a like animalistic alpha move. Like when I
used to work with little kids that would fight me like they were little so
they were never hurting me really other than like scratches and stuff. But I
remember I had this one kid who wouldn't stop coming at me no matter what
we did. And one of my colleagues who taught how to do safe holds,
and we would always try to like not do that, especially on the
little kids, because I'm not in threat, like they're not threatening my safety.
When a seven year old's coming at me, and I'd be like,
but I can't get this kid is beating me up every day, Like what
do I do? And he said, every time he comes towards you,
you go towards him, and every time he hits you, you take one
more step towards him until he has no space. And he said, it's
this very like animal instinct thing. And I did this in this kid.
I didn't make him feel unsafe. I just like wouldn't. I didn't back
down, and he hit the wall and he slid down, and he went
totally like submissive with me, in like a healthy way, because then we
could work together and he was no longer fighting me. But there is that
thing where when someone's taking that step forward, he is doing something unconsciously to
intimidate her, right, And you see her almost go through a rolodex if
kids still know what rolodexes are, but go through a rolodex in her brain
of how to react to him, like her almost like her trauma reactions are
filtering through like a like a like a menu, and she's trying to figure
out which one to do. That makes sense in that moment because you see
her try too fond and then she goes to fight, and then she goes
back to font and then she kind of freezes. And so when you watch
a horror movie, guys, and you're screaming at the screen, why aren't
they moving, Why aren't they running? Why aren't they It's because they're probably
stuck in freeze until their body can move them into fight or flee. So
you see her vacillate between all four of the main and trauma responses. She's
walking backwards, so she's trying to get out of there, also trying to
fight. She's also trying to appease him, and she also freezes at moments.
And I think that's a great example of how people like to pretend you
have one, almost like your personality type is fight or your personality type is
freeze, but it actually you're though all those responses are available to you.
You might, yes, you might lean towards one more often habitually right,
but often enough, you're trying to match the situation you're in, like you
were saying Hannah, based on like risk and availability of resources, your physical
strength too, And she's trying to do all those things simultaneously, which is
also why if you're watching it, she can seem kind of confusing or even
like funny, you know, and you can belive her a little bit.
I think, like I'm a Wendy Champion with us talking about this, because
she is doing everything that probably most of us would do in her situation if
you were, like if you were in her body, with her resources,
with her isolation, and we want her to be stronger because we hate Jack
in that moment, right, He's the villain of the story by this point,
and unfortunately she is more of like the realistic version of what most people
would be like in her spot, which is, I don't really know what
to do. I'm trying to figure out what to do while I'm doing it.
When you're an act of trauma, your rational brain is not online.
So all of us that have the safety of being in our homes watching it
can judge her with our rational minds, project our rational minds onto her.
But she's not in a moment where she can think rationally. She's just trying
to like live, and she's trying to help her son live. And so
I think that was such a great scene that encapsulates trauma reactions once it gets
to this level of abuse where you are genuinely unsafe and you know you're on
like it's on, your life's on the line. Now you're in a life
and death situation, which is a lot of times when people will finally leave
is when they realize what you see her have that moment of like, if
we don't get out of here, we're gonna die. But even when the
thing happens with Danny with the two three seven, she's still trying to figure
out a scenario where Jack comes with them. Like when she's pacing and planning
their escape, she's like, well, if Jack won't come with, if
I can't chalk Jack into coming on the SnowCat, like, we'll just go
without him. But she's still in a mindset where she wants to him to
be part of their family still, and she doesn't want him to be the
quote unquote villain of this story. Yeah, she's the only one in the
story that stays in one realm. Yeah, she's not affected by the hotel.
We tend to call that realm reality. And that's fine. And it's
not until the very end of the movie where she suddenly starts to see everything
that they've seen. And that's for me, that's kind of like a moment
of her becoming woke in terms of suddenly experiencing herself in this history of violence
and seeing all the remnants of that history of violence in ways that she wasn't
before. And I'm not being judgy as to why. It's just the way
she was living and it's experienced most of the movie through her, I think,
and we do with Danny to some extent, but his shine keeps him
distant from us in ways that she doesn't. And I'll admit it's in the
last third, last half of the movie where Duval's acting really sort of takes
over because her her terror is so palatable, it's it's insane, and I
will admit I don't really feel the acting authentically when she's trying to be nice,
And maybe that was the point. Is it is an act. And
the horror you feel when Jack's coming through the door with an axe that's not
supernatural or that straight up domestic abuse, and it's like, damn, I'm
watching this man trying to kill a woman with an axe. There's no supernatural
distance between me. Well, there might be because he's posessed by a hotel.
No, that's a guy trying to kill a woman, and it's it
feels that way. Her reactions are authentic, they're not supernaturally infused, like
she's in a ghost story. I just think that her acting kept up with
his. Her acting was probably equal to his the whole time, except that
she just felt performative in the first half. And man, and we'll talk
about him later perhaps, but amazing, just amazing work, amazing direction to
get those things out of his face. His face is one of the best
acting faces we've ever seen, to the point where his mouth looks upside down
half the time. It's really free, it's d and he just the facial
control is off the hook and very very, very very well done. And
we'll talk about that more later. And yeah, because I wonder too,
like thinking about I think where this movie does a disservice to the story that
King told and to the story we're kind of telling with like Wendy and being
caught in this relationship with him, is that Jack Nicholson feels like a creep
from like scene one, like there's something about him that's so off putting,
like edgy, irritable, like tense. Like I said, he never to
me, he never seems like he likes her like he I think when I
actually I was selling Hannah when I used to watch this movie when I was
younger, I used to think that maybe Danny wasn't even his kid. I
don't think I realized till i'd seen it later in life that he was actually
Danny's father. Like that's how disconnected he felt to me emotionally from them.
Is I thought, well, maybe he's the stepdad. Maybe he like married
this woman who already had a kid, and that's why he has this like
weird energy with them both. But knowing now that like that is his biological
child, it is interesting that I picked up on that when I was younger
and didn't have all the nuance that there is that separation. But in the
book, and I told I was telling Handa, this is like when he
finally flips and he's really aggressive towards her, like swearing at her and things
like that. It's startling, Like I remember reading it and feeling startled because
it was such a personality shift of that character that he was treating her that
way, and she has more of a react well, and she has more
of a reaction to that too of like what the fuck like when he's doing
that, So there's more of a definitive flip from what I remember of the
book, and I could be misremembering, and in the movie, you don't
really have that. So I think we want to pretend that Wendy should have
known, like there should have been more red flags, like why would you
stay with a guy who acts like this all the time, when in reality
and in the book, it is more of a slow process where he's very
friendly and affable and like genuinely kind seeming in like the first half of the
book, and so when that flip happens, it's it's it is like traumatic
and and it lends more to this idea in the book that he's recovering alcoholic,
and so it becomes more of a narrative of like is he using again,
and how that infiltrates their relationship, like her distrust of his sobriety and
then his frustration and anger that she's not trusting him about that because he is
being sober, and so we don't see that in the movie, And so
I think it unfortunately continues that narrative that we have in the mainstream culture of
you should have known better, you should have picked a better guy, why
did you stay as long as you did? When in reality, if Jack
Nicholson could have toned it the fuck down or had a different face the first
like thirty minutes of the movie. Even I think that felt different. Oh,
I don't think that Kubrick. So you know, Stephen King says he
doesn't like the movie, and what he's not giving Kruber credit credit for is
that Kubrick couldn't do the book. We weren't making ten hour miniseries at that
time, right, And that's the kind of time it takes to tell that
long, slow burn story. Cooprick took the characters in the setting and told
a different type of story with the characters. And I don't know if it's
okay to talk about the book. I honestly think that the use of the
axe in the movie is a mistake because in the book it's a croquet mallet,
so it's it's not something and there are so to try to harm someone
with a croquet mallet is a different type of violence than harming someone with an
axe. And I remember the scene in the book where he's about to bash
Danny's head in with a croquet mallet and suddenly comes back to himself. Yeah,
that was intense. I have a picture of him drooling blahlahlah. The
closeness you have to be with all that stuff. I thought, yea King
just did masterfully. And the axe. It gave us cool moments of violence
with the axe swinging into the door and the camera following it, and all
of a sudden, this whole space just collapses into this little space between him,
her and a axe at the scene, and he would have never been
able to take down the door with a croquet mallet. And I think they
wanted that. Here's Johnny shot right. Yeah, But the club was more
terrifying, to be honest to me, of course, I was also a
lot younger. I read the book when it came out in seventy seven the
mail. It was so terrifine, and then I watched it in the Theory
when it came out eighty. It didn't do the same thing. It's a
very cerebral movie. The book is much more visceral as far as I'm concerned.
The book's much more grounded. It feels like you're genuinely seeing a nice,
loving family fall apart, yes, and be victimized by the hotel and
by each other. Well buy the hotel's influence on each other. And one
thing I just want to point out, just a little redundant, but just
in case people were curious, Like, this movie does a good job of
the escalation of violence as well, kind of what we've touched on here and
there where we see first Jack be very like say the babe stuff. You
know, they have these moments of connection where he's laying in bed and she's
bringing him like coffee or tea and they're chatting about the hotel. You know,
he's still already like creepy with the whole like I love it here,
but they're bonding, right, Like you can see where maybe they do spend
time together and it's positive. Yeah, And then we get in two months
later. He's starting to not use that language anymore. He's starting to introduce
aggressive language, but in a calmer tone, like why the fuck would you
come in here? Like really off putting, heinous stuff. It's all testing,
right. She doesn't do anything to that, she doesn't fight back on
that, she doesn't leave him for that. So then we can get up
a notch where now he's yelling, he's raising his voice, he's yelling abusive
language at her, and she still puts up with that, if you will,
if you want to think of it like that, And so then we
take it up a notch where she does push back on that, he gets
pissed, and then he starts kicking stuff right now, Like he goes to
the kitchen area, which is her space, which is interesting now we've talked
about that. He goes into her space specifically, which he's never in,
and he starts kicking all the food and the pans and making yeah plays and
I bet you has asked it and go back and clean that up. So
he's leaving that for her to clean up. So it's that's also aggressively passive
aggressive, right, He's being what she'll do with the thread of that,
And then we get to the final thing, which is that he's aggressive towards
her. Right. I know we have the influence of the supernatural in this
story, but I think that part's important also to to note for people that
that is real. Like, that's how also people will try out quote unquote
abuse on you to see if you'll stay, to see if you'll back down,
to see if you will fight them, and then they'll take it up
a notch. Because kind of what you were saying earlier, Scott is do
I think that he's consciously being insightful about why he's treating her this way.
No, not at all, right, really, he really makes me think
of somebody who's white knuckling it. Oh for sure. He's just like holding
onto the steering wheel so fucking tight, and it's like and also, you
know, when I talk to clients about the scale, right, I talk
about how ten is crisis. One is everything is lovely and fine. I
don't think anybody's ever at a one in this country, but that's where one
starts. And that as we go up the ladder, when we're at an
eight, we only have one space to go before we're at crisis. So
old boy is at a fucking nine probably all the time because he is not
doing anything to manage the reason why he drank. Mm hmm. He's not
even acknowledging that he had a problem, Like even the way he talked to
I don't know exactly what he said, but I remember in the interview clocking
something he said about like, oh, he doesn't really he isn't really being
insightful at all about anything that's bothering him. Like he's very like, oh,
that's fine, I won't do that. When he tells him about the
story about the previous you know, Guy Grady killing his family. He's like,
couldn't be me, Like he is this very like Blase I can handle
everything super in denial. Well, it's also the stoic vibe. I mean,
the postoicism came around after the horrors of World War One when returning vets
just couldn't talk about it. And this is the carry grant, this is
the Humphrey Bogart archetype. And you know stoicism gets a rap by people who
haven't been through the trauma that leads to so as stoicism, right, Yeah,
and then when you have that and you have you have it in a
clulture that's hyper individualistic, particularly where we see the type of people that have
power and how ruthlessly they yield it seemingly legally. You don't have to think
consciously for that to become what you are. Yeah, right, Most of
what we become has nothing to do with our choice. Well, it does
have to do with our choices in terms of where we put ourselves. At
the same time, we're going to embody where we are. That's just how
brains and bodies work. So being raised in a fairly I would argue sociopathically
individualist culture, probably a father who modeled that same thing, I can't imagine
not Yeah, by the way, coupled with I'm assume a mom who played
her role in that system. This is a very dangerous thing for me to
say. Yet at the same time, the things you're talking about about,
you know, people listening to this hearing seven times, they can start to
comfort themselves and make choices they couldn't hear before if they hadn't hurt seven Right,
So, as these things become more consciously part of how the culture carries
itself, that's how the change happens. But you have to consciously create the
space for your unconscious dynamics to do their work and become different. So so
when I say she was in a system that sustains stoicism, I'm not victim
blaming. I'm being a systems theorist. And she's challenged to be woke just
as much as he's challenged to be woke from the space that they're in.
But this is why I would go back to you had Jack, the individual
probably part of a family doing the same thing, part of a culture that's
doing the same thing and historically did the same thing. Oh, absolutely,
just multiple scales of I just call it hyper individualism and you know, sort
of abuse. Ye Is there anything more we want to talk about, specifically
with Jack and Wendy in their dynamic before we go to break? All right,
so we're back. We're now we're going to touch upon Danny, which
he the other. If you think of this as like a two header this
movie, Danny is the other part of that. Right. He's also the
only one that we see a lot of extended alone time, and he's kind
of his own infamous character coming out of this movie. Right of this kid
with his little finger and this other tony that lives in his mouth. That's
such a little kid way to conceptualize hearing someone else in your mind. Yep,
Like saying that move in your mouth is such a real like with I
worked with little little kids and you have to really learn how they conceptualize things
from their age. And I loved that because that's so real. Like I
remember when I teached, when I used to teach kids primarily that age or
work with them. I remember I had this little girl who would say looking
contact when she meant eye contact, and I would feel like, that makes
sense, you're looking at me months so then I would say looking contact when
I talked to her. But we're getting the same concept. But I think
the question we were starting to ask each other, you and I, Hannah,
and we were watching this is if we're gonna I believe in the conceit
of this movie, which is that Danny is a psychic or has the Shining,
whatever you want to think. He's so little. He's five years old,
I think five or six, and the actor was six, I believe
when he filmed. And so to be that little and to see the things
he's seeing and to hear the things he's hearing, which is adult business.
How I used to say it to little kids and their parents, like he's
a little kid that's getting really into adult business, both like what he's seeing
from like a psychic level, and then also what he's seeing from a domestic
violence level, like we're talking about, right, and so how could he
not develop PTSD that is presenting in the way that he engages in the world.
I think people when I was little or younger and would watch The Shining,
I would be like, he's so weird. Why does he act like
that? You know what I mean? Like, is he just a bad
actor? The kid. I did hear that they cast him because he was
the best at maintaining concentration, which does feel like a very Kubrick way to
Kenny kid is he's a kid that can do the Kubrick' stare basically, but
like a little kid that can pull that off. But now watching it through
the eyes of a therapist, he just feels like a kid who is going
through wild trauma constantly. And how if you were really psychic, even if
you have like a steady, stable home life, that would cause I don't
know how it could not cause trauma. So I'm interested in what you guys
think about that now that hearing you talk about it. It's interesting that both
in the book and the movie, the Shine never shows anything nice. Yeah,
that's true, So why is it? The Shine is always about negativity?
And what I have to believe is the undercurrent then is waking up to
the violence in the world you live in. And that's what happens to Wendy
at the very end, right, she wakes up to the violence that sustains
the context she's so so yeah, So that's the only way it works for
me. Otherwise I get a little pissed off. That, well, why
is the shine only showing me negative stuff? Why doesn't the shine show me
love? Why doesn't the shine show me people having fun? And that must
mean because it's people becoming aware of the violence that sustains the reality they're in
and what that does to them. So that, yeah, I appreciate your
comments there because I've never thought about why is the shine only showing me the
bad? But yeah, we never even see Hollerin have a moment of positive
shine. Now he does. My mom used to sit there and have conversations.
I know that seems to be the only positive benefit is that you can,
like the telepathic part of it, that you can have like conversations inside
your minds with other people, that you can connect with other people that share
your story. But it's it's sort of more like when people find a support
group that resonates with them, of like, oh, I found other people
who are suffering the way that I'm suffering, not that like we have this
cool ability that we can kind of chit chat about and that benefits our lives.
Like and also I think the fact that maybe Dick has gotten there because
he's much much older. But this idea that it's also happening to Danny.
Yep, you know that he's very helpless, like he can't turn it off.
It's not like a like a like I said, like a skill or
a talent where you can choose or not choose to engage in it. This
story is a victory for the victim, by the way, in other words,
the hyperindividualism dies, it freezes in the midst of whiteness, and they
escape. So and they escape by running away from him. So we don't
know what that next world looks like. But you know you mentioned your seven
times. At some point you leave and then what's next is not what we
see in the story. What we see is the leaving, and what's left
is let's left behind is hyper individualism. So I's there's very little. I
mean, it's hard to say the movie he's got hope. I think he
feels hopeful Danny, and that he figures out how to survive. Like the
May scene that he outsmarts him at such a little age. I think is
the movie trying to give him agency for maybe the first time, that he's
finally in a place where he feels like he can opt out or he can
or he can take himself out. Yeah, of the situation he's in that
he doesn't have to just deal with it. Yeah, because I think that's
what he's trying to well, he's trying to deal with in the movie by
in my opinion, like dissociating. He's dissociating all the time. You could
argue that is another entity taking over his body, but also you could argue
that's dissociating. Right, Like we now know more about parts work, and
we now know more and Ben's been talking about in a lot of recent episodes.
I'm not going to get into that. You can listen to old like
some of the episodes from the season if you really want to hear a lot
about it. But it makes me curious, like the Tony part of it
with Doctor Sleep, they sort of reckon it a little bit in that or
maybe in the book I'm thinking of because I've read that too, where Danny
as an adult references how Tony is to him was to him as a kid
what he then becomes to the little girl in Doctor Sleep that's like him.
So that kind of insinuates retroactively that Tony may have been another adult with the
shining that was had a bridge with him psychically and maybe because you do see
that Tony is protective, and I don't know if you want to speak to
that, but like how Tony shows up in Danny's life in the movie,
Yeah, so Tony shows up after the event with his dad when he had
his arm dislocated. Yeah, I think the piece with doctor was great at
asking that question. But go ahead, sorry to interrupt, No, no,
that's okay. Yeah, yeah, I think the doctor at asks a
lot of really great questions. But he I really think that he split.
I think that so, so I think we can see it from either way,
but I think in the context of thinking about him with his psychic abilities
and that he's being traumatized constantly, that like, I think what comes to
mind is him splitting and having to split in order to survive, and that
Tony is a protector and Tony comes in. And it would also make sense
because in Doctor Sleep we see where Dan takes over Alba's body in the same
way that Tony takes over Danny's body. So if it really is another person
in the shining, that would make a lot of sense because they show that
in both ways. So I don't so, like, I don't know,
but I think if we just talk about it in terms of trauma, that
it would make a lot of sense that Danny would have split, his personality
would have split in order to protect him from the violence that he's experiencing and
from the threat of more violence. Yeah, there's also King was of a
generation the Baby Boomers, and the Baby Boomers saw their three heroes murdered in
public. We don't talk about this enough, you know, JFK, RFK
and MLK. We're all murdered in public. And this is when this generation
was eighteen nineteen, right, And so this idea of being sensitive, seeing
things at a young age, and then how you deal with that, how
you disconnect. Probably the best disconnect movie ever made was The Big Chill,
where you saw how they all disconnected from the trauma of the sixties and in
their own ways, right, and they kept trying to live their life,
not talking about those traumas. Right. So this idea of waking up to
the trauma that you've lived in it's a horror trope, true, and it's
really really prominent in Stephen King. And so you can almost see in Doctor
Sleep this sort of historical psychic mentor vibe. King writes it later in his
life. For now, he's responsible for other people, and he's trying to
create us narrative about mentoring people in that space. So the whole taking the
body over, that's all part of dare I say mentoring with you guys therapy?
You know, absolutely? And that's so for me as an author,
that's King taking care of himself and then trying to take care of other people
by putting them through all of this, to get putting them through all of
this and then showing how it works. Because in the end of the shining
they just leave. We don't know what happened next, and it's like,
who that's a good story that they escape, but we're not smiling. Oh
yeah. You don't feel relieved, necessarily feel relieved in the sense that there's
an app sense of tension, but you don't feel relieved like, oh great,
because I think they're going to be live happily over well, I think
that you have any sort of emotional intelligence, you know that there's a long
story ahead of them still in terms of recovering from this, because if nothing
else, especially from a kid's mind, your dad tried to kill you,
Like that's the long and the short of it and what does that mean?
And it's in you don't have even a kid that's as smart and hooked into
different things like Danny is. I think we always have to remember that he's
putting it through a kid perspective and that he doesn't have the language the context
to understand things that we as adults do, and he might never because,
like when you need something, didn't have that in the seventies. I mean
they were raised in the fifties in the suburbs of the big cities and it
was all hunky dory, and you know what they realized in the late sixties,
it was hunky dorry because of redlining and the way that underrepresented people were
treated. But you didn't experience it in in what's the what's the in the
do Loch? Right? You didn't. That's a Shrek reference, right,
doesn't let you see the cracks? Yeah, just see the beautiful space and
then the cracks come through. If you buddhistory, right, if you go
out and you look behind the veil, then you see what made your happiness
and your blissfulness possible. And then that's traumatizing. What the hell am I
going to do now? Particularly if people take on then start to feel complicit.
Then there's all kinds of identity stuff that goes on. Oh yeah,
so Danny maybe six, but I would argue that there was a whole generation
that was six in terms of the idea of culpability because that was not part
of the fifties vibe at all. And so yeah, he's six, but
so were we. Yeah, I guess what I more I mean is I
think now we're talking about this more than I thought I would. But like
in Doctor Sleep, you do see that he is able to find that eventually
Danny is an adult because of the common link between him and his dad of
alcoholism, and how because now that he's recovering from that, he can find
common ground and forgiveness it seems, and connectedness with his dad in a way
that's very You have to be grown up to get there, and you have
to also go through the deep work that you have to do to actually be
in recovery that Jack Torrence doesn't do to have that insight and empathy for his
dad, Like he reaches that point of empathy for his dad because now he
knows what it's like to be an alcoholic, he knows what it's like to
actually do or do not do the work of recovery, and he can put
that into context for why his dad made the choices that he made as a
kid that had nothing to do with him, which is very healing work.
And sometimes that's the word I do with people way after the fact, when
their adults trying to conceptualize their childhood and the abuse that they suffered at the
hands of the system or their family or their parent or whatever, that it's
not because they're bad or they were bad, or they're unlovable or something like
that, right that it is, there's more going on, And if you
can understand what's more going on with that, like the bigness of it,
if you will the complexities of it, it can help bring you less,
internalize it less as much as it's still always going to have an impact on
you. But I think the Danny we see in the story though, as
a kid that's just trying to understand why his dad is this way, because
I think a great scene is when he goes to get his truck from the
apartment and Dan and Jack is still awake, which that's also something to note,
like he's starting to keep weird hours. He's sleeping he's staying up seems
like into the middle of the night and then going to bed late, and
that would make sense. Why alcohol? Why when do you also thinks he's
drinking again? But you know secret behavior stuff and that Danny doesn't want to
be near him. When he says come here, he hesitates, and then
he kind of has to like make a conscious decision of like is it safe
to go near him? And then you were noting, Hannah. When he's
sitting on his lap, he doesn't move at all. He is when he
I think that he I think he is in freeze. I think his little
body is in freeze. You see. I don't know how that little kid
did it, but his little body does not move. When his dad puts
his arm around him and tries to pull him in close, like you can
tell that, Like the dad is like pulling against the resistance of Danny pulling
away from him. Yeah, Like he can't make him closer to him,
No he can't. So he really grabs him and really swishes him up against
his body the best that he can. But Danny is still like in freeze.
He's not lack like he's in dissociation. Yeah, he is staring off,
I'm not in this moment. I'm not there and I'm not here,
and I thought, yeah, it was acting incredibly well. And then when
he says like, do you like this hotel, daddy? It made my
heart hurt because I was like, this is him like a last ditch effort
to see if his dad has gone over to the other side, basically like
it's still with him somehow. And when he's like, no, I love
it here, I think that's when Danny is fully like, this is it.
And I think that's also when well, I mean we have to talk
about we don't see the scene where he goes into two three seven and obviously
gets physically harmed because he's got the marks on his neck and the rip sweater.
If we could just quickly go back to what you're saying about him sitting
in his lap and asking him if he likes the place he can do that.
This fact that they share the sign the shine, I think at a
certain level, Danny knows that Jack sne I think they're in there's a reason
they both have shine, right, And I think there they Danny's not consciously
aware that they're in the space together. Oh yeah, and that mom's not
in that space with them. So it's Danny who can ask his dad,
and he's asking it from a very young you know daddy. Later he says,
Daddy, would you ever hurt me a mommy? But that's what he's
asking from the very beginning, and and he can because he is potentially his
father, and he's doing all that at a much more childish scale. So
I think in that moment, you know, they really make Wendy alone in
this movie, completely alone. She can't even make the same kind of sounds
they make, right, she can't have that conversation with Jack that that he
just had, you know, Danny just had. So I know that scene
is actually more powerful than I realized. Right, it's just not the body,
it's dad. We're here together, man, Are you going to lose
it? That's basically what it is. Checking in? Yeah, he is
doing his final check in. Yeah, because I think that's great that you
pointed out, and I appreciate that because he's really asking in that moment,
are you on my side? Are you on their side? Like he's doing
a check in of like are you I know you're picking up on the vibe.
Are you getting what I'm getting? Which is that the vibe is horrible
and that this place is bad and it's scary, and the fact that you
like it, you love it? Yeah, Kila too, like that is
terrifying to in terms of his last thread of can I trust my dad and
you're coming about our side? On my side or their side? Who the
hell is there? Right? That's true. We watched the movie and we
think it's spirits, but it's the whole damn history of toxic individuality, right,
It's is that are you going to go the way of history, Dad,
or are we going to try to make something different happen here? And
you know, well, the movie doesn't answer that because Danny goes off,
well we don't know, you know, well, we know what happens to
Jack, but you know, doctor Sleep addresses all that later. But yeah,
that's why it can We'll talk more about it later, but can be
a movie about the supernatural. In this show is not a traditional supernatural vibe
at all. That's why people people who love it love it. People who
hate it hate it because it doesn't give them space to rest in the story.
And that's precisely why he did it that way, you know. Yeah,
And so the only real thing with other with Danny that I specifically wanted
to note was after the two three seven incident Room two three seven, when
he is most when the I think that's kind of in a lot of ways,
that's the climax of the movie, and that that's what pushes Wendy into
action that we have to get out of here, regardless of if it's Jack
or not, like, we have to get out of here. And it's
also for Danny when he when Tony fully takes the front seat for him,
he is it seems like Tony is in the front of him or fronting,
if you want to think of it in like more like dissociated in any disorder
terms, like fronting for forty eight hours, maybe more where Mom is trying
to find Danny, like when he's eating lunch or try and eat lunch later,
and Tony keeps saying, Danny's not here, Danny's gone away. And
you see that after the attack when he comes into the big room, like
the big lobby room where Jack's writing and he's sucking his thumb. So you
could also even argue that he's regressing into like a younger version of himself too
with the thumb sucking and the no language and the no capacity for language,
and then that switches into Tony, who is if we think of him like
a protective altar, is like I've got it from here, which is what
protective alters do. They're like, I'm gonna take it from here and you
go rest in the back and you don't have to worry about this. I'm
handling it. Except for it happens, our brain and our body just take
over. Yeah, Like, none of that, none of that is conscious.
And I think some of the other things I wrote down as trauma responses
are him sucking his thumb. He has a seizure, which is also something
that happens to people who experience extreme trauma, and he experiences being frozen and
a part of and kind of one thing that I wanted to talk about about
Danny is that because his traumas are one on top of another, where he's
going from one traumatic experience to the next traumatic experience, where his existence and
his body is being threatened by violence or death, and where he's being hurt
by someone, he's kind of just going in and out of these and that
he would he would have the possibility of having what we call complex PTSD,
which is where there was nowhere that was safe, There was nowhere that you
weren't being hurt or where you didn't have to be alert in some way.
There is no place for your body and your brain to learn how to stabilize
and learn how to calm down. So this is somebody who it would make
a lot of sense that Danny would become an alcoholic as a response to all
of the trauma that he has experienced. I'm not saying that every person who
is an alcoholic has experienced extreme trauma. I'm just giving the example in the
film that he is. He would most likely qualify for a complex PTSD diagnosis.
Score would be off the chart his ace's score. The only thing he
has is his dad hasn't been in jail, and actually they probably put him
in jail when he dislocated that his arm, so he has been in jail.
That's he probably does hit all of the markers of the ACE survey,
which if you've had a lot of trauma, don't do it because it's just
a huge bummer. As somebody who has a very high number. I hate
everything about the ACES, but I also recognize that it helps a lot of
things anyway, But I just wanted to point out that in a part of
complex PTSD that's wrapped up in that diagnosis is dissociative identity disorder. And so
again, like we come back to this where like it would make a lot
of sense that Danny would be somebody who had did because he had to dissociate
in order to be safe, in order to survive the trauma of his And
that's he and I'm just talking about this part of the movie. I'm just
talking about he's been traumatized that much in this film that it will affect him
for a lifetime. Yeah, and we know that it's been going on before,
and that because of the domestic situation at home, he's been taken out
of school to avoid public exposure. Like part of how that system affects him
trauma wise is that they removed him from school to avoid I'm assuming being reported,
to avoid the scalle of like why is his arm dislocated? Right?
And also so he has no friends. He has no friends, He's not
socializing at an age where it's very important. At every age it's important socialized,
but at his age, he has no outside resources to even ask for
help. And when he finally has one dick he does, and he as
soon as it gets to that point, he reaches out, whether it's consciously
or not. But I guess you could also argue is Tony the one that
reaches out, because it's kind of once Tony starts taking over that he finally
gets help. And that's the defying of stoicism, right, that's the moment
where he breaks the stoic mold and actually calls out for help, which is
kind of fantastic because it doesn't come from a conscious decision, right, it
just comes from who he is at that moment. I do want to quickly
say this conversation the King novel, I love how we're going here because I
think Koprick's story is just a different story. Because in the King Novel,
our conversation reminds me that he was a teacher and he graded a piece of
fiction I believe written by one of his students that he purposely gave a really
bad grade, and the student then knifed his tires on his car. And
I don't know if they got in a fight or what, but that would
lead to this idea of Jack's identity being perturbated by a younger person, and
instead of him becoming a mentor to that younger person, he was intimidated by
that younger person and basically went knee deep into the stoicism and individuality and all
the stuff that comes from, you know, feeling like you're a victim.
So Kuber takes that psychology and puts it in the story without the backstory.
The King did a lot more work to show that he really was not an
embittered failed writer what one might call kind of a smaller scale identity PTSD,
because you didn't grow, you know, he essentials. He refused to help
someone else. And the irony is, you guys talking about doctor sleep.
Part of the healing is to become a mentor, right, part of the
healing is to become more other regarding, and that's it creates the possibility of
growth. And it's inherently anti stoic, right, So that's the trap that
the stoic identity gets trapped in. And just as long as just just so
it doesn't sound like I'm beating up on stoicism, there are deity indicate that
seventy percent of men who chronically complain about their trauma to their partner are left.
So it's not simply the case that it's guys who can't deal with stuff.
It's it's also a system that can't deal with stuff, and because the
system then forces them to harbor it in on a alone, what we see
is actually somewhat expected, well, especially in this time period when yeah,
like I said, part of that stoicism individualism is like man up tough enough,
like we don't like you, get your shit together kind of mentality,
and also too, which I'm being mindful of, like not getting too long
winded about this, but you know, in this dynamic as well, we're
talking a lot about Danny and Jack almost as competitors too, and like within
the they're almost on two separate teams, if you want to think of it
that binary within the hotel, but also in those kind of dynamics that Jack
and Wendy's in, like when the kid comes along, the husband can feel
left out, especially says since Wendy and Danny seem so bonded and they spend
so much time together and she lights up with him. He's very much her
baby. She's very good with him. She rolls with the tony stuff in
a way that I found very good as like someone who's a lot of par
to coaching, Like she doesn't like say, Tony's not real, like stop
it even when he can't talk. She even says, what does Tony have
to say? Which is such a great approach. I loved it, and
I wonder too. Then with the Danny thing, as you're bringing it into
this bigger idea of like hyperindividualism, is also how sometimes when men who struggle
with that have a kid, they can get jealous of the attention that shifts
from them to the kid, which is supposed to happen, because that's how
we survive as a species, is you have to covet the child and prioritize
the kid, and the energy is supposed to go to the kid a lot
of ways, right, And if you are feeling left out, if you're
feeling disenfranchised, if you're feeling like your ego has gotten too many hits now
even at home, you're not number one, Your kid's number one. And
then especially if your kid has something going on like Danny clearly does. I
wouldn't be shocked if part of that coming home and ripping his arm out of
the socket is also so this fucking kid who's in my space and taking my
maybe even like the bedspace and my wife's time, and now he's fucking with
my writing. And even though he's probably like a toddler or for or whatever,
like, I'm sure in that moment there was a lot of genuine fuck
uness coming out of him that he's not cognizant of all the layers of why
do I want to rip this kid's arm off? You know? And so
that's all, why do we get to share my comfort blanket? Yeah?
Right? Why she idolizing you? He's supposed to be. We are together
by the way they stayed together because of what she gave him. Mm hmm.
Now I'm not trying to blame. I'm not victim blaeving, but I'm
saying she loved him, she was kind to him. I'm sure he'd been
a jerk before, and that kindness, this kind of bizarre unconditional kindness,
keeps him there and wanting her to be there. And then when he recognizes
someone else's got it, it was only because it was his, you know.
So no, I can see jealousy creeping in quite quickly. Oh yeah,
And the other thing I was thinking of, too, is that you're
definitely right about it being a system. It's set up where because also we
have women who don't want a man who has emotions, women who will not
who will say be a man who will say men don't cry, don't Yeah,
exactly, like, and women can really reinforce that as well. So
not only are we getting it from the general culture of how men are allowed
to be, but we're also getting it from a woman's expectation of what a
man should be and how certainly back then when you were talking about in the
fifties and growing up, the patriarchy was, you know, the strongest it's
ever been. I don't know, but I also just start it, but
yeah, it was pretty intense. So yeah, So just wanting to kind
of point out too that it definitely is a system. This is not just
oh, this is just how they are because they're married. This is like,
this has to do with all of the different pieces of being in a
culture and how they're socialized, and how they're socialized, and what their expectations
are from a partner, and then what happens to your culture when sociopathy is
the trait that leads to select made selection, you know, in other words,
you see it modeled in the corporate world. Who gets who gets hired
as a CEO, the person is capable of the most ruthlessness, right,
and so you see that being rewarded trickled down in the entire economy. The
concept trickled down used on purpose, and you find you end up selecting sociopathy
as a cultural dynamic. So we'll take one more break here and then we'll
come back. So we wanted to leave some space if we have any sort
of miscellaneous thoughts about Stanley Kubrick, because he's such a renowned director in terms
of how he uses filmmaking psychologically, and then also the concept of the hotel,
and I wanted to give you space to Scott, for you, Scott,
to say some of the interesting thoughts you were having even before we started
recording about how he uses the space in the movie, because you're right in
that the book and the film are like two different beasts. Like this is
sort of my final thoughts a little bit. But The Shining is a poor
adaptation of the book, and when you think of it purely from like an
adaptive lens, and it's a good movie, it's just a poor adaptation of
the book. And so I'm interested in other things we picked up on in
this movie specifically that feels interesting to highlight in terms of psychology. What I
appreciate about it being an adaptation that's not good is that if you're going to
adapt the work to a different medium, you got to make sure that you
don't try to do one medium in the other because it doesn't work. And
so I give Krubrick a lot of credit for reimagining the Shining in a way
that worked auditorily, that worked visually, that worked in the way movies work.
There's some just great. I think Kubrick fills the space with so many
contradictions on purpose. So, for example, the very beginning scene is this
gorgeous shot of driving through the mountains. It's not snow yet. You've got
a VW bug driving all by itself through the mountains, and it all sort
of looks like blissful nature. It's just a glorious day drive, except the
music is nothing but menacing. It immediately puts you in a tense state,
and those are contradictory vibes that don't let you resolve the situation, and it
keeps you on edge. And he keeps doing that all throughout the movie.
So I like, for example, the difference between inside the house versus outside
when it's snowing and the people are walking through mist. Quite often it almost
a literal moving into another realm. And I think what Kubrick does here,
I think, and I had no idea if he ever had a conscious thought.
But you know, in more indigenous worldviews, they don't talk about a
binary having hell, they talk about realms. And I think Kubrick tamped into
this idea of the hotel is a realm, right, And Jack creates his
realm with the ball, Danny creates his realm with the with the hot wheel,
and then she doesn't really force herself to create a new realm. She
tries to sustain the old realms she brought in with her. And the movie
only is coherent for me is if I just looking at it as all these
different realms, none of which is dominant, and just living in multiple realms
to the point where Jack collapses into the old realm. And that's why we
see the picture of him at the end. You know, you've been here
forever where what we see is you've always exactly yeah and yeah, so he
he falls in the worlm of stoicism, the way so many have Wendy and
Danny escape, but all we ever see of them is going very slowly up
a hill of snow. I mean, they're still in that room, slowly
trying to get out, And I think all of that tugs at us in
those in those ways of tension. So it's not it's just not a traditional
horror movie. And I'm almost loath to call it horror because the domestic violence
that's just beyond horror. The I mean in that scene is so good because
it's so real when he's walking up the stairs at her slowly and she's waving
the bat at him. There are people who have been in those spaces in
life, and there's no supernatural element needed to call that horror. That's true
crime right there. So I think taking those real moments, taking her real
moments, putting him in these different realms is for me now that I feel
it that way, you know, I felt it that way last night when
I watched it. I didn't feel it that way years ago when I watched
it, because I just wasn't thinking the way I am now, right,
But now I see why it's a masterpiece and I'm still not sure i'd call
it horror just because the supernatural isn't the point so anyway, blah blah blah
blah blah. But I do appreciate the movie much more than I did when
it came out, particularly because I was looking for the book and it didn't
happen. There is, by the way, another remake made for television with
Rebecca de Marnet playing Wendy, and I don't remember the name of the guy
playing Jack. I remember the show win It, and I remember that feeling
the goofy one of the two. I haven't really like the made for TV
Stephen King adaptations. I love the TV made for TV version of it.
I love the made for TV version of The Stand. But yeah, I
so, I think I said what I said. I'll say this find by
making it a story about realms because it becomes a more indigenous tale and what
happens to indigenous what happens to individualism in an indigenous realm? And you see
that ultimately it fails, and that is that's a cool story. Let's no
I think what I And you're right, And a lot of Stephen King books
funny enough to talk about how places have energies, or how places have like
like their own personality, and how it can make a community feel more violent.
Like a lot of talks about with like it with like dairy main and
stuff like that. When he wrote eleven twenty two sixty three, he talks
about it's not on the show, but going to dairy and feeling that right,
that some places are dark places. And I think, I don't know
if you want to get into the spiritualism of it all too. When I
do work with people, I will allow that to be part of the story
when we talk about their experiences of trauma or the experience of their life,
of places that feel difficult, and that I think it's also such a good
idea of using the hotel talking about the bookcase. We haven't really talked about
this too much, but the individual experience of isolation. You know, cabin
fever is a psychological concept. It's not a diagnosis. I make sure I
looked it up before we recorded to make sure I didn't think it was.
But yah, But people argue that is that just like a version of seasonal
effective dis is that just how like being that isolated can really make you go
mad if you want to think of it like that, and I think he
does the Kubrick part. He does a great job of making the space feel
so big, but how that bigness is also lastrophobic, HM or maddening if
you want to think about it triggering. And I think he also does a
great job of showing that Danny's always by himself, even though he's teeny tiny.
Like I was telling Hannah, this might be the one instance where I
would encourage putting a GPS tracker on your kid, because hotel is so huge,
He's wandering around, he could easily get lost, and then you take
you forever to find him, if you even did find him that It's also
interesting how he shows through these scenes how alone they all are individually, how
they're never really in a space together. They have that apartment, but you
rarely see them in it. You rarely see them together in it, in
a cozy space together, and how he really uses that to make you feel
alone watching it, like the loneliness that they all three experience is so pervasive,
and I really liked that the psychology of that and watching it in the
use of that space that it feels ominous, and hotels are places that are
supposed to be full, right, So if you think of it also from
a eerie liminal space perspective, exactly to be in a hotel that is empty,
that's that's not being used the way it's meant to be used is so
eerie, and you're almost always conscious of the space that's supposed to be taken
up that's not. And you could pull that into the emotional part of their
stuff too. The loneliest experience I ever had, I was able to live
with my daughter in Germany for six months and we lived in a little apartment
that was part of research center. We live in an extremely vibrant life.
She became the little princess of the institute. And then a year later they
had a conference there and I went back and I slept in one of those
rooms by myself, and I couldn't sleep. And it's because my entire because
you know, the behaviors are right in the sense that the environment cues experience
of what we call memories, right, and those adults actually come fleshed out
in the brain as expectations, and you don't know their expectations, but you're
expecting things out of an event as a function of what you've done there before,
and none of that. It's you can't resolve it. There's no way
to resolve it. You are alone. And uh so I would have never
felt as a loan there if I hadn't lived there before. Right, And
this, this completely is consistent with the idea of a haunted house, right
because you lived there. So you go there and you have this worldview that's
just brimming out of your brain. But it can't be said, can't be
satisfied. And I think they think I think they did that really well in
the movie. And I think Kuber used that dynamic two to talk about what
one might want to call the supernatural in a way that's not Western. In
other words, in a in an indigenous worldview, these realms are not spiritual.
That's an interpretation we give you, know. So King writes the story
the myst right, and those creatures in the mist come from a different dimension.
Well, Indigenous ontologies have just called those realms, right, And the
things that go on in indigenous world views are consistent with the quantum views of
reality, right, and or live in a dimensional string theory. We're the
ones that are catching up, right, We're the ones that have had not
a binary view of reality as heaven and Earth and other cultures eighty per of
the world's cultures don't live that way. So they're already for quantum reality,
right India, Hinduism, Buddhism, they're all consistent with the idea of realms
and dimensions. And so I think I think a lot of King taps into
that, and it's told through a Western narrative, and he just rides all
of our contradictions in ways that you know, we get stuck. Is that
horror? Is that sci fi? You know? Is this? Is it
that? And he's having a lot of fun with us, just pulling our
assumptions, pulling us by our nose, you know, of our own assumptions,
and it's fantastic. And I think that's what Kruber took from King put
in that hotel to good effect. Yeah, yeah, is there anything more?
Like? Is there anything you want to add, Hannah before we shift
into treatment, Well, just one quick thing. So the psychologist or counselor
or doctor her, whoever the person was that talks to Wendy about Danny and
then talks to Danny. At the same time. She asks a lot of
really insightful questions that I think are very good and very clinically appropriate for the
situation, which I want to point out is really great. And then she
talks about auto hypnosis and how it was auto hypnosis and that this kind of
stuff happens to kids all the time and it's no big deal, and that
part feels bonkers. That part feels like the assumption making that comes across in
that scene is so odd, because she does such a good job of kind
of meeting the parent where they are meeting the kid, where they are asking
them insightful questions, and then she says this kind of bonkers thing like,
yeah, he's just some hypnotizing himself and that's where he's seeing these that's where
Tony is like. It just is such a mismatch of what we get from
her, and then we get this kind of weird outcome or diagnosis at the
end. So I just want to point out that that is weird and not
accurate, but that the questions were great, even her demeanor was great,
like there was a lot of things she was doing right, and then she
just kind of blurts out this garbage diagnosis or reason that I just don't know
where the fuck it came from, So I just want to point that out.
So the question I have is if she could have just used the phrase
he's dissociating, Maybe they didn't have it. Maybe that's what. Yeah,
I know Ben has talked about I believe aquologies misrepresenting if I am, but
in like they get out episode that you are able to hypnotize yourself and people
probably do it more than they think they do, or you know, maybe
they do it they don't realize what it is. So I know that's not
wrong, like off the bat like, but I'm with you in that the
way that it's supposed to make sense of Danny feels very filmy, like like
I know what you feel me. And also that it's you could argue that
it's just perpetuating an abuse of system where it's like, we're just going to
make something up that makes this whole story make sense to us, and we're
not going to actually touch upon what might be really going on, which is
the kid that's like going into literal fits. Yeah, and how now we
know in the world of therapy, especially child therapy, that that is indicative
that something is a mess and you have to be able to feel find a
way to probe deeper into that if you can, And maybe she didn't know
to do that, maybe she didn't want to do that, you know,
YadA YadA, but whatever. Well, what I guess more of what I
want to say is that I don't think her answer is a wrong answer in
general terms of what she's saying. I think we do do auto hypnosis.
I think that does make sense, but it doesn't make sense for the explanation
of what's going on with Danny. I agree, Do you know it feels
like a happens all the time? Is just kind of blowing it off right
and not using it diagnostically. You're on target and just quickly. The idea
that I woul hypnotize myself is kind of a dangerous use of the word I
because I tell you a very conscious phenomenon and when I'm sleeping, my sense
of eye is much different. So when people meditate, and they're expert meditators,
part of what they're doing is getting rid of the eye, right,
They're getting themselves in the conscious state where they actually remove the barriers of eye
and feel much more connected to everything that they're in the midst of. So
it's actually a dissolution of the eye. But you don't consciously say I'm going
away. What you do is you put yourself in a steady state that allows
that to slip away, so you don't have to change your mind. Changing
mine usually means like I was doing this, and now I gotta do this,
And that's a conscious act, right, I got to stop looking at
my phone and now I got to look at the road. That's what consciousness
does. So the conscious aspect of getting into those conscious states is putting yourself
in a space where you don't have to make choices. So you sit there
and then get into a non choice space and then I just goes away.
All right. So we'll take a break here and then talk about treatment.
All right, so I can go first. I'll go really quickly because I
don't have a ton to say other than I would probably work with Dannykid that
I would do play therapy with, which I haven't really talked about on this
show that much. I'm not a certified play therapist, but I took my
advisor and graduate school was a play therapist. Because of his age, play
therapy would be good. So what play therapy is is kind of how it
sounds where you use elements of play to work with kids therapeutically. A very
common one is the sand tray, which is just like a literal like tray
that you put sand in, but you also have of elements that you can
introduce in it, like animals, people. You can even introduce other like
water, like other sensory stuff in there. And there's also a lot of
rules around sandtres, like how big they can be, what you can include,
what things mean when you use different things. But a lot of play
therapy is exploratory where you kind of introduce kids to things, to things that
they can interact with, and then you let them lead. So it's good
about that with kids like Danny well one because he's little, so he can't
really do talk therapy yet to that extent, and he allows kids to use
their imagination and to process right. Kids pop process through play. So when
I've done these things with kids, and I've had like doll houses stuff like
that, is you you figure out a lot from them by just watching the
story they create through their play. You know, what's mommy doing, what's
daddy? Is there a mom and a dad in the story, Like are
they using animals? And that can give them somewhat removal from it. Like
I've worked with kids with a pass where they don't use people, but they'll
be like mommy pig and daddy pig, and then how do they treat baby
pig and that kind of stuff. Right, So it allows kids to use
the language they know, which is play and their imagination to sort through what's
happened to them. And sometimes as the play therapist, you don't really have
to do anything but be with them right and not get don't interrupt what they're
doing. You can ask questions, or you can engage in the play with
them if they want you to, which is like do you want me to
play a part in it? Do you know? You can just watch them
while they play and observe and ask questions about it. But you have to
be careful that you're not as adults, we really struggle to not project our
adult brains onto kids. So also when you do play therapy, you have
to be very careful that you're not leading, you're not insinuating anything like why
is mommy ling over there? Is she sick? Like? Don't say stuff
like that, just say, oh, I see that mommy's over there.
What's going on with that and then let them tell you if they can.
It's it's loose, it's tight, and the like. There's sometimes there are
like tight rules, like the sand tree example, but there also can be
a lot of looseness in that you can let a kid just explore your space
and then learn from it and then sometimes just that processing through play is somewhat
similar to narrative therapy, where a kid's getting to tell their story of their
trauma and that can be very helpful for them. But on the outside looking
in, it can look like you're just letting a kid play in your office,
But there is a lot of merit to it. And also another thing
that's that I sometimes worked with kids, when I work with very little kids,
is it's called the house exercise. It's got a different word, I
think, but basically how I would do it with kids is I would take
a Manila folder if they still have those, I think they do, and
I would create a very rudimentary house shape basically cut the corners off of the
top part to make that very like square triangle house shape, and it's a
hinge house, that's what's called. And make sure that you don't cut the
hinge off of the folder, And what I would tell kids is, hey,
can you draw me a house on the front, And I don't tell
them their house. I don't tell them what house. I just say a
house. And then when they do that, you say, okay, can
you open it up? And then you say can you draw me inside the
house? What's going on inside the house? And then that's all the instruction
you give. And then on the back you say, can tell can you
draw any secrets from the house. This is an exercise you might do over
several sessions as well, like it might take a whole session to do one
part. And that's very interesting in terms of what house do the kids draw.
I would be curious with Danny if you would draw a hotel, or
if he would draw the apartment before the hotel or the apartment he lives in
now. Sometimes kids will draw the house before they were born. That's very
interesting. But that's an exercise that you can also apply when you work with
kids that are a bit more skittish or that you need to incorporate more play
elements because they're so little. So that's kind of what I would do with
Danny. Probably a few of those things. So I don't know Scott or
Hannah who would like to go next. All I'll do is compliment what you've
said. With neuroscience, the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain we
talk about the most. In the last twenty years, we've discovered that practically
the entire cerebral cortex is infiltrated by the cerebellum, which is an older part
of the brain that we used to think was just for fast movement. But
now we know that, for example, people that are experiencing hallucinations and delusions,
part of what's going on is that their brain's creating states, but they're
not They're not tracking the fact that their brain's creating it. What this means
that every moment of our life, whatever context are in, whatever thoughts we're
having, are priming our memories of what we've done there before. That's why
I can talk to you guys, and I don't even think about moving my
mouth. It's all being run by memory. My hands are being run by
memory. Those memories are the things that are going to come out in that
play environment, right, and you're going to put them in a space and
then suddenly what they've got in them is what's going to guide them. So
I think these are the same thing goes on when you put someone on the
couch and you have and free associate what's in them comes out, and what's
coming out is what they unconsciously expect of the world. Right, And for
me, that creates the frame, the continuously generate framework against which any event
in the environment can get the name stimulus. So one of the problems with
my field in psychology. We look at conscious experience with a stimulus, and
then I have a conscious response and I press buttons. But ninety nine percent
of what's going on has nothing to do with that. Right. For example,
you put a participant in front of a computer and you say, okay,
these are the conscious instructions of how you manage yourself in this space.
Okay, that's fine, and that's not how life works. Right. You're
out in the open world, and the open world is priming your memories all
the time, and you're managing your unconscious expectations all the time. So yeah,
this thing you talk play therapy is a first of all, it generates
approach responses, right, you get them in a delightful open space. The
minute feel safer. It doesn't work right, because fear makes us pucker up,
whereas joy makes us open up and so more able to see what the
memories are. Yeah, And it gives kids the option of like, do
I just want to relax and play yeah because I'm in a heightened state,
or do I want to actually like work through something, you know what I
mean? Like it. It also makes kids feel like it's more their space,
feel more empowered in the therapeutic process, which I've talked about many times
before. Kids very rarely choose to go to therapy. It's happening to them.
So you have to do sometimes play therapy esque things no matter what when
you work with kids to get them to warm up. So I think that's
great you pointing that out as well. So Yana, what would you do
for treatment? So I would work with Wendy Okay, And I want to
And first what I want to say is to all of the people who are
learning how to be therapists right now, clinicians in the making. When you
have domestic violence is something that permeates every socioeconomic status, every every gender,
every everything. It permeates literally everything. There are no there's no person in
society that doesn't isn't affected by domestic violence. Therefore, a part of how
you do a couple assessment is that you see them first together so you can
witness their dynamic. Then you see them individually. And this is why you
have to see them individually, because you can't ask a partner about domestic violence
in front of the person who is abusing them. So in order to create
safety and session and also to make sure that you're not working with somebody who's
being abusive and trying, because a part of being a couple's therapist is that
we have to be neutral, right, We have to side with both,
but mostly with the relationship right. And so a part of that really is
that you have to that if you are giving both people an equal chance.
You can't do that when somebody's being abused, because it's not an equal chance.
So make sure that you're seeing your couples individually and you're asking about domestic
violence, even if they've never mentioned it, even if it doesn't seem like
something that's going on. You have to ask, is anyone hurting you?
Are you hurting yourself? Is there anything do you feel safe at your home?
You have to ask those questions. Therefore, by me doing the assessment,
I would see because I would imagine that Wendy, you wouldn't be able
to not tell me about more about what's going on. They would not qualify
for couple's therapy, and I would tell them, and I've had to tell
a couple of this before, I can't do work with you until this domestic
violence situation is handled. And this is what that means, And this is
what that looks like. He needs to get help. He needs to get
help for a while. And that's the only way that we can look at
this relationship. And that's just the truth of the matter. So just know
that it's really important to do those individual sessions with each partner before. And
this is what I tell people. I'm doing an assessment of your relationship that
includes the couple together, each couple individually, and then in the third session,
I come to them and say, this is what I'm seeing, this
is what I think we can do, this is my suggestion, this is
a goal that I think we should work now, and and that's kind of
the third session, and then after that I start teaching them skills right away.
So I just wanted to make that really clear. And you know what
I would do with Wendy Is. I would work with her. I would
give her a lot of psycho education I work with currently. I'm working with
several people who have been in or are currently in an abusive relationship. So
this is something that I see all the time, and so one of the
biggest pieces, one of the most I don't really like this term at all,
but like the aha moments that people need, happens with psycho education.
Once I start describing the cycle, a lot of times, a lot of
lights go off in somebody's head of like, this is literally what I've been
experiencing the whole time we've been together. Also giving them an indication and a
better understanding that they are not deciding to stay with this person. Their system
is overwhelmed and confused and in tear. Most likely that you are not your
body and your brain is having a reaction to you being able to survive.
There's not a lot of choice there. I would also talk to her about
emotional rights. I have this old sheet from nineteen eighty three that I had
to retype because the copy was so old it wouldn't make any copies anymore.
That's called the emotional rights, and I will put those up on our social
media and make sure that everybody can see them. I don't want to take
up a lot more time talking about them, but essentially it's really it's an
emotional bill of rights, is what it is. Would also want to work
with Wendy about assertive language and also using eye statements, really being able to
focus on what she wants to communicate and how she wants to communicate it.
And then one of the one of the other things that we would have to
do is process her anger, process, her helpless business process, maybe her
guilt and shame about Danny being also being hurt by the same person who is
hurting her. So there's a lot of work. Like I like Wendy would
be somebody that I would work with for a while. Oh yeah, there'd
be stages to the work you would do. Yeah, in terms of like
you would say, first even just acknowledging processing what happened to the hotel working
on. You know, I can't believe I hurt Danny by staying with someone.
This would be her narrative, probably by staying with someone who hurt him
already, you know, especially too, I think when I work with people
who are in or have gotten out of an abusive dynamic. What can feel
so confusing is like that's not my personality, Like I'm a feminist or I'm
progressive, or I'm like I identify as an autonomous woman or person like,
so how could I have allowed this to happen? What does that mean about
me? Exactly? So I think some of that I'm learning and psycho education
is that, like you were saying, nobody's safe from abuse potentially happening in
their life. Yeah, and that it's a lot of like we've talked about
already. It can be that frog boiling and water thing, yeah, and
it's all those elements, Like we haven't even talked about gaslighting. Like,
there's so many things that happen that can brainwash you if you want to think
it like that to be in this dynamic, no matter who you were coming
into it or who you still are while that happened, and that can be
a lot of the shame and existential fuckery that happens for you, like when
you get out of a relationship like that. Yeah. Yeah. And as
a domestic violence abuse survivor, like I remember her giving me the psycho education
of what a domestic violence relationship looks like and I remember being like, oh
my god, Oh my god, this is what's happening to me. This
is a thing, Like I didn't think that this was such a thing.
And so even having that own my own experience with that, I think it's
so important to do psycho education with people who are in or have experienced an
abusive relationship and really helping them under better understand their responses to what has happened
and why and why that's connected more to survival than it is to what kind
of person you are. That's great, all right, So we'll take a
final break here and then come back for final thoughts, Hannah, if you
want to just keep going. So my final thoughts about the movie are that
it's really intense. It's a really intense film, and at the same time,
I think it really does a good job. I know that it deviates
from the book quite a bit, but I think it does a really good
job of still being a really good movie kind of which is kind of what
we already said, right. The acting is really good. Even the Little
Boy did just a magical job in terms of how a kid that young can
even get into those spaces, the way that he did, and I think
it's a great I think it's a really good film, and I definitely would
watch it again. Even though it has the domestic violence piece in it,
it is something that I think really highlights the true terror of being in a
domestic violence relationship in an abusive situation. And so for that reason, and
also just because I like the music and I like all of the picturesque piece,
I'm really excited to talk about Doctor Sleep next season. Yeah, you
love Doctor Sleep. I do love Doctor Sleep. Oh, The Shining.
I watched the movie, I'm sure a few times before I read the book.
I didn't read the book till I was in my twenties. I don't
know why, but I just didn't because, like I said, I've been
reading Stephen King since I was too little, probably like I think I was
in sixth grade when I read Carrie. I didn't read The Shining till I
was in my twenties. But I think what I repeat what I've already said,
which is that The Shining is a good movie. It's a bad adaptation,
and I can get why King hated it. To see maybe another version
of The Shining the book come out like like a miniseries. Maybe I like
HBO or whatever, But The Shining is a movie I think is good.
I think from a cinematic perspective, I get why film bros can't help themselves
dis gushing over Kubrick. It's like a diary of the mouth because it is
like his visuals, like even just Danny playing with the cars on the carpet.
I would love to know. So, if you are a film bro
that I just insulted, email me this because I'd like to know how he
did the shot shooting down from the maze where then you see Danny and Wendy
in the maze. Yeah, like it looked like a moving So I'm sure
that blew everyone's gourds when that happened. Oh yeah, eighty nineteen eighty when
it came out. But I think stylistically it's very up upsetting in a purposeful
way. The music's very emotive. It does the job, and I think
it does a disservice to the complexity of the story in the book. And
I think Doctor Sleep, how Mike Flanagan was able to get King on board
for Doctor Sleep and the way he wanted to do Doctor Sleep with like the
references to the Kubrick film was promising Stephen King that he would he'd have more
of the flavor of the book. And I get why people don't like the
movie Doctor Sleep or the concept because it's it is really different than the Shining
movie from the Kubrick just vibe wise, and I think that is the compromise
that that movie is trying to make between the book and the original movie.
And how like Jack Torrance was probably more like Ewan McGregor's portrayal of Danny in
terms of personality and charm and being like a warm person. So Danny's kind
of like an alternate dimension version of Jack as an adult in that movie.
But yeah, so I like The Shining. I'm sure I'll watch it a
bunch more times. I've seen it like at the Music Box in Chicago and
that was really cool, and I've seen it in like Park on big screens,
and so it's a movie that I'm always excited to see again in like
different contexts. And do I think it's like a shitty adaptation of the book,
one thousand percent, But I didn't know that until I read the book
and I was like, whoa, this is very different. Also, if
you're interested in that. In the book, you get a lot more of
the internal dialogue of Danny, So he also feels like more of a lived
in, actual little kid than this than this like sort of ethereal spacey,
like like a kid being inhabited by other things. Like in the book,
he actually feels like a little kid, which is why when he has things
happened to him like the Twins, you feel genuinely fucked up as an adult
reading it, because he feels like a genuine child in distress. So I
would encourage people to read the book if they're interested in all of that.
Of me saying that and to like kind of let that flavor the experience of
these characters. Well, I want to thank both of you for inviting me
to this excellent conversation. It prompted me to rewatch a movie that I had
a rather flat reaction to when it came out. I still think it's a
very cognitive flick and playing with genre, playing with our expectations of horror in
ways that work effectively, and I can appreciate them more now than I could
when I watched it back in nineteen eighty. Again, thank you so much.
You can find stuff I do. All you get to do is type
Dark Loop Productions into the Google machine and you'll see what I do. If
you also want to read some of the work that I do, just type
the word wild systems theory into the Google machine and it will bring up a
lot of my papers. I make sure that they all have keyword wild systems
theory in there. So again, thank you for the opportunity and appreciate your
patience with my worldview. So with that, thanks again Scott for joining us.
We really appreciated your very different insight than we have. That's why we
like having guestways that aren't necessarily doing the same thing we're doing. As always,
you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok at Popcorn Psychology
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do to support us, and we really appreciate that as well as always,
Ben, we miss you, we love you Batman, because we haven't said
Batman. Oh what is that man? Yeah? What would Batman do in
the Stanley Hotel? Who knows'd slay all the ghosts? Maybe on on,
YadA YadA, But anyway, we're thinking of you, Ben, We're excited
to have you back soon. And yeah, everybody Happy Halloween.