www.safesex.bg

Sofia, December 2018 

It is through stories that people can relate to one another as fellow human beings
                                                                    Paul Browde, MD, psychiatrist and storyteller

Listening shapes telling. We have to want to understand people and listen openly without prejudgments and assumptions
                                                                                                                                   Murray Nossel, PhD, psychologist and story teller

Recently by invitation of BFPA in the frame of our project “Changing the narrative. The story tellers” Paul and Murray were in Bulgaria and conducted training on listening and storytelling. For all participants meeting them both was extremely useful not only from professional point of view, but also in personal perspective. These three days were a life changing experience that unlocked new senses and changed our sensibility and worldview. Via this interview we want to give you an opportunity to have a glimpse at their way of thinking and to feel them as people.

Murray Nossel, PhD, is the founder and director of Narativ, a company with offices in New York and London that specializes in storytelling training. Originally a clinical psychologist, Murray is an Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, trainer, and motivational speaker. Murray is on the teaching faculty of the Program of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. He is the founder of the World Mother Storytelling Project.

Paul Browde, MD is a psychiatrist, storyteller and couples’guide, trained as an actor at the Drama Studio London. He has led several projects, teaching listening and storytelling for advocacy purposes in Africa and Eastern Europe. He has taught in the Columbia University Narrative Medicine Masters' Program.
 

If you have to present yourself in one sentence or in 3 words, by choice, how would it sound?
Paul: A spirit, a human being, with a story.
Murray: I am a listener and storyteller.

You are conducting trainings and work in different parts of the world, touching different cultures. Are there differences in the way people are telling stories and communicating and to what degree they understand each other?
Paul: People have very different ideas and beliefs about the world. People also have many different opinions about the way things should be. However, once people are able to tell a story, without commentary or adding their opinion, then stories are stories, and people connect to one another. It is through stories that people can relate to one another as fellow human beings.
Murray: Only on the most superficial level, people’s stories have different content. Some live in hot places, others cold, some are rich, others are poor, some are educated, others are not. People have different positions on the axes of power, education, wealth, health etc. In my work I encounter people who have lives of comfort and apparent ease. Others are subjected to wars, natural disasters, epidemics, extreme poverty   and serious illness. 
I am not minimizing these differences, but underneath it all, we are all the same. We all want the same thing – to be happy – and our lives are governed by the same themes: Love, rage, valor, compassion …. We all have the same destiny – we are born and we are going to die. No being can escape this inevitable fate.
I define story as an account of what happened.  When people simply give a sensory account of their experience, i.e. what they have seen, smelled, tasted, touched, they are able to cut across divides. We have even been able to teach our method to people across the world, in multiple languages, even those with intellectual disabilities.