 Spectrum Theater Ensemble. So we have our third program for today, which is a panel discussion on Autism, Army and the Arts and is about how theater can fill an essential need for disabled populations. So without further ado, I'm going to turn this over to Dr. Tara Devine, who's the moderator for this discussion and she'll introduce the panel and take it away. Great, thanks, Chloe. We're delighted to share the space with the listeners and viewers. We've been looking forward to having this dialogue. And so I'll quickly say, I'm a developmental psychologist and a clinical therapist and across my 30 years, the two primary populations I've worked with are post trauma and what we often called neurological differences or neurodiversity. And really early in my career of those 30 years, it was clear to me that just talk therapy wasn't exactly gonna bring us all that far. So since I am have all of my life been part of, for me, in terms of the arts, the music part of arts, I quickly begin to turn to that and as another medium for my clients and their families. And so across the years, I just have these flood of faces that have benefited and I can remember for so many of them the moment when that I began to change because of their engagement in the arts. So anyway, I'll let Michael, you would like to introduce yourself and your background to our viewers. Thank you, Tara. My name is Michael John Carly for, I guess the particulars just because I wanna get to the meat of this, I would say that like most of us who work in the autism Asperger field, I of course have one of those shamelessly self-promotional author websites. It's michaeljohncarly.com. If you need the finer details, feel free to go there. But I have worked in the autism Asperger field as an executive director and a school consultant and a writer for almost 20 years. But the interesting thing, and I think the reason why, it's so much of great value to me to return back to a couple of subjects on this panel is that my existence prior to my and my elder son's diagnosis of being in the autism spectrum, my careers beforehand was, I was not only a starving playwright by night, but my stupid day job as we called them then was actually kind of cool. And it was working for a veterans organization called Veterans for Peace as their United Nations NGO representative. And for whom I did projects in Bosnia, Cuba, large one repairing water treatment facilities in Iraq. But being shaped by vets for 10 years and this particular organization had a very high percentage of combat veterans when compared to other veterans organizations. And it taught me an enormous amount about just conflict in general, both internal and external as well as giving me a really great start in learning about trauma and the machinations and how it works. And especially some insight into how our country can seem kind of spoiled in terms of what we sometimes tell our young men and young women that they're going to experience in a combat situation. And then we don't honor our promises of taking care of them when they come back. And that's always been of great disturbance to me. I'm also my loophole for them. I should mention too, because it's an issue that I've grown up with is due to having a father who was a Marine Corps helicopter pilot who was killed in Vietnam. And back then the kids of today may not remember it was a very unpopular war. And even as a small child, you grew up with the iconography of how messy it was from both the left and the right. And with that, I'll turn it over to Adam. All right, thank you. So good morning, my name's Adam Martin. I'm a special forces and civil affairs officer in the U.S. Army. I've done six overseas deployments and I've been in the Army for nearly 20 years. I have been diagnosed with PTSD during my time in the Army and often turned to the arts to help assuage my symptoms including performing and visual arts. My favorite visual art is actually a childhood throwback of building with my Legos, which mostly occurs in the middle of the night when I need to calm my nightmares. But I've also enjoyed performing arts, mostly short format live theater which unfortunately these days I can only go to YouTube for that. I have been a long supporter of the arts even if my last performance was actually a five minute lip sync montage combining the Beastie Boys and Cindy Loper in high school 20 years ago. So I'm very happy to be included in this panel because I recently saw STEs one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and I was actually very surprised in the way that it affected me. So this powerful performance made me feel like I was actually reliving some of the abuse that I had experienced from my previous commander, not actually combat trauma, but from other members of the U.S. Army that were supposed to be my leaders. And that commander was embodied by Nurse Ratchet for anyone who wants to know I would that show. You know, having these feelings come up again during the show was actually quite surprising but afterwards it kind of allowed me to deal with this trauma in a more constructive manner and talk through things that I experienced and felt with my friends and family. You know, even if they hadn't been in the performance it kept me from being super angry when I talked about it because I could reference characters in the show and not necessarily have to talk about my own personal experiences. So knowing the important role that the arts can play in helping soldiers and others because anyone can really be affected by PTSD, my own reaction to the show emphasized the commonality between those on the neurodiversity spectrum and those suffering PTSD. Because of the strong commonality between the two communities, I feel that many of the accommodations that we can make in theaters for both those communities are very much the same. And I've been proud to be working with Spectrum Theater Ensemble to improve the accessibility to the arts for both of these diffreserving communities. Great, thanks Adam. Thanks for that rich and personal, vulnerable, authentic description of your experience and how the arts have been important in your recovery work. I wanted to quickly say to the viewers and listeners, we're gonna, Mike and I have engaged Adam's story with some questions as a way to elicit his experience and help you understand further how to help engage those that might be in these two categories of neurodiversity and or trauma, actually a number of clients who are both, with both and so, but we'd like to invite you to put your comments and questions in the chat box here. And at the last 10 or 15 minutes of this 45 minute dialogue, we think it would be richer, even more rich if you all engaged as an audience and then asking Adam or any of us questions or making comments. So thanks again, Adam. Let's see. Actually, I'd love to start. If you wouldn't mind, I'd love to start by asking Adam a question right off the bat that is not scripted. And that is, I mean, Adam, one of the things, I sometimes use my theater career as a throwaway line only because it's been so long ago, but for somebody with an autism diagnosis, I know in retrospect how enormously helpful it was to me in terms of not only motor skills issues, which if you're in the autism spectrum you have, you're just more conscious of what your body is doing, but also an element which I'm wondering if is also shared through the trauma experience, which is theory of mind. Like theory of mind is basically the idea that you can't understand what another person might be thinking because you just, if you're on the spectrum, you think that everybody is thinking the same thing as you are. And I was no exception. I had great asking devices, but when I first started in theater and the director was like, no, Michael, the character is thinking something different than you are. And I was like, excuse me? What are you, nuts? You know? How offensive, yeah. Yeah, it was a big lesson. It was a big lesson that other people could think differently. With the trauma experience, especially in the context of things like, the masking devices that trauma sometimes forces us to put on, do you find that you share some of those theory of mind issues when you think about embracing a character? Is it something that could, because I could theoretically see it as being something that's more difficult, but also as something that's really welcoming and accommodating. Well, since I don't try to act or actually participate in the theater. But I think having, being able to see other characters in the shows and really helping see that, oh, if this is in a play, then I'm not the only one dealing with this. And I think that, like with the one floor of the cuckoo's nest, that might have been one of the biggest examples is that, wow, this nurse ratchet and all her abuse and her not caring or understanding about the patients in her ward, I felt like several of the different patients. And it really helped to let me feel more comfortable sharing and not having to mask that kind of thing. And any of the problems or issues that I felt and any of the uncomfortableness. Plus, it also offers a really, a much easier way to explain to other people if you can use the example, well, I saw this in a play and people have been able to see the play and digest it and then saying, and that's how I feel right now too. So I think that kind of character emulation and use of the characters helps with the trauma I've felt. Yeah, you refer to one of the most common challenges in the suffering of PTSD and that's the isolation, like nobody could possibly understand and maybe I'm the only person feeling like this. And so to begin to see that actually, hey, there is someone in stories have been written about these people. So sort of begins to open up that isolated entrapment that keeps us stuck. And it reminds me of a common technique that I've used is to have people write a story about someone else who has experienced what they have. And so putting it into someone else. So, yeah, it's very, very powerful, yeah. Yeah, and so I think that is very important. And we've actually in the past tried to develop programs that we can use when we go on deployments and when we're talking to at-risk populations in different countries around the world, if they need to be able to attempt to share what they're feeling, being able to write it down as a play and then it's just art and it's not real. But if somebody who's watching the play identifies and to use my example, if someone identifies and goes, huh, I think I am a lot like that nurse ratchet character. And she's the bad guy. Maybe I should stop being like that. Yeah, it sort of works for everybody involved, doesn't it? Right. So multiple recovery opportunities going on, yeah. Yeah. I'm also wondering if there's a little bit of a, I mean, you touched on I think what is probably the larger focus of this conference that we're not privy to, which is that you are able to express things through art, obviously, that you wouldn't feel as comfortable. And it's really all about the context. You've been taught that art is the place to be eloquent and to be expressed yourself whereas in other aspects of life where culturally taught to suck it up or what have you. Would you also maybe consider that the arts in general even if veterans don't really have the initiative either because of trauma or just feeling outside of things, would you feel as though the arts is attractive because it might be a more behaviorally permissive community to enter into? I mean, for my autism diagnosis, I think that was probably one of the reasons why I gravitated towards it was because it was okay to be weird there. Right, yes. And there's a lot to that. And but at the same point, I know that in past outreach programs where arts companies of any kind have tried to become inclusive to veterans' needs and veterans in their local areas, the programs have kind of fallen through because they just haven't really succeeded in the salesmanship of that. And I wonder if you have any ideas as to what people are doing wrong. Well, I think especially with the active duty community, people move around a lot and so they aren't necessarily there to participate except a couple of weeks or and then they get sent away to a training exercise or a deployment or even another base and not able to fully get the full effect of the theater event and the art event or even with like reservists. If reservists are coming from a state or two away, then they can show up for one weekend and have an afternoon or an evening to express themselves, but then they go back to their hometown and they don't have that avenue. So I think that's probably one of the bigger challenges is that it's a fairly transient population that we have in the military. Well, how about unactive? So it's not a logistics issue. It's really just a, do I feel comfortable? Well, I think they're like at the base in Italy where I was just stationed, the arts director there had a degree in art therapy and she was trying to help get all styles of arts from performing arts to visual arts to be able to help the soldiers. But it's also competing with drinking beer and partying and video games which have many of the same stimulus to mask the feelings and kind of hide the feelings and then you don't have to talk about it at all, right? So just getting people to want to talk about it and fighting through all the other noise and activities is probably a bigger challenge if assuming the population is stable in one location. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, so Adam, one of the things you mentioned in your first sort of descriptive story and your experience of the arts and in particular your involvement with ST is the commonality between neurodiversity and PTSD. So what do you see? Can you say a little more specifically about those commonalities? Oh, yeah. So I think I've thought about this a lot especially in preparation for the panel. And then listening to the previous group, one of the things they talked about was maintaining relationships. And I actually wrote that down in my notes because I think if people don't understand where you're coming from and sometimes it can be very difficult to actually articulate your feelings especially if you get kind of overcome by emotions. People stop listening when you just start kind of yelling and oh my God, I'm tired of this. I can't deal with you people. And then I'm like, well, we're not gonna deal with you either. So I think that is a commonality between the two communities that I think the arts can help overcome because like you said, you can be dramatic and angry and people are like, wow, that was very realistic. Way to go. Yeah, it gets applause in that arena, yeah, yeah. I wasn't actually acting, that was totally real. Yeah, so it's a place to sort of moderate that self-regulation challenge that comes both from common neurological differences as well as PTSD. Adam, can I ask you a question actually too? I mean, because in my travels, I find that there can be wildly differentiating opinions on what neurodiversity constitutes, especially in terms of what diagnoses are allowed into the club of that which constitutes neurodiversity. And I would say that we're sort of coming out of a period where you had a certain element of folks that kind of were preferring to cherry pick a little bit so that it was just the brilliant aspies as opposed to people who might be diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, conditions that really could use a good PR affirm behind them to combat stigma that, I mean, I remember what it was like 20 years ago to have autism or Asperger's in the stigma about that. And that was awful compared to today, but in those diagnoses, it's almost 10 times worse. And they're starting to take ownership of these words that they themselves, these communities. And I think that the broader, the majority of us now understand that of course they have to be a part of the neurodiversity angle, but do you still feel or do you get a sense that, is PTSD to, even if it's just 2% of the neurodiversity population, do you feel as though PTSD is still maybe an unwelcome member of the club of neurodiversity in certain circles? I've never experienced that in the neurodiversity community, but what you made me think about was that, like whenever I tell people I have PTSD, they assume, oh man, special forces, God, that must have been rough. Oh, I can't imagine what you experienced. Like, well, yes, I did experience what you see in movies, but for me, that was a very positive experience because I had a great team. We worked well together. We were able to accomplish our mission. You know, despite, yeah, there was some nasty stuff, but we trained and we were ready for that. But like the majority of, well, all of my PTSD comes from things that have happened back home, away from the battlefield. You know, the main part being, the way my previous commander treated me and part of that was just believing that I couldn't have some other trauma that didn't occur on the battlefield. And so it's also really strange and even I fall, I myself fall into my own, that own stereotype is like, hey, look, I didn't have these combat traumas. Like you guys don't have to do all this stuff for me, but it's still the effects are the same on my life and it's really taken a toll on my well-being even though it wasn't combat-related trauma. Yeah, if we can, connecting these, circling back a little bit in connection to this, we were speaking earlier about just the arena for expression was actually just a medium for healing. You know, like, whereas some of the expressions would not be so welcome in some, you know, social, regular social interchanges, but on stage or in theater, it could be welcome and an outlet to do that. And then additionally, what could you say, Adam, and maybe you too, Michael, because, you know, when you entered theater, you know, as the person who was experiencing, you know, on the spectrum that this sense of belonging and the reason I bring up this idea about belonging, I know from as director of therapeutic services, director of clinical services, a person who's, most of my career been developing programs that fundamentally the basis of everything we did people had to feel like they could belong. Whatever program, whatever arena, whatever art medium, there had to be a sense of belonging that was offered, a sense of community. And so I wonder if actually both of you could comment on that piece. I guess I'd like to tie in your question with maybe, you know, another question for Adam. I mean, for me, it was two parts, you know, of the theater. You know, there was one part which was obviously the acceptance being in a community that didn't mind if I was a little weird. But the other part was performing. And, you know, the performing part is just kind of a separate piece that is something that if you have even moderate success at, it's going to make you feel better about who you are as a person, no matter who you are. And, you know, it's a great, great thrill. But I also remember I'm a sucker for oral history. I'm a sponge for stories. I always have been and one of the great things about working for a veterans organization for 10 years was just, you know, every week, I'd hear a fantastic story that somebody told. And it was an organization of people from, you know, World War II in Vietnam mostly, but you had some very interesting guys actually from the Spanish Civil War. They told the best stories, but I won't get distracted on that. I'd bring this up, though, because one, you know, this was a while ago when I worked for them. And, you know, one thing that you realized very quickly about the Vietnam generation was that part of their struggles had to do with the fact that they were coming home to, again, a population that really did not understand what they had gone through. And so not only did they need, you know, the healing capacity, they needed an understanding audience which they did not have in this country. And you started to really quickly learn that, let's say if you were French at around the same time of the Vietnam War and the French army had sent you, you know, whether it was Algeria or whatever, you know, might've been going on that the French army might've sent you to. And then you came home to your World War II era parents who had lived through World War II under occupation had seen things themselves. You had a much more understanding, you know, atmosphere with which to come home to than we had. And, you know, Adam, I guess to steer it to the question, you know, when you say the words, you know, nasty stuff, I think in my mind, when are we going to become a society in which you can feel comfortable, you know, relaying that nasty stuff no matter how much of a secure environment one in which you can be allowed to trust will be maybe more understanding than it is currently. Well, I think through all the movies and other things, I think you can see a whole lot worse in some movies than most of us ever see in combat, especially it gets up close and the CGI and makeup artists are really good these days. But the, what you made me think about was when I first came back, I guess in 2007 from one of my tours, I went out to a bar and was telling stories about, oh, we did this and this. And I was kind of proud of the things that we had accomplished. But then I realized after a few minutes, everyone else at the table was just staring at me. Yeah, see, that's what I'm thinking, yeah. That's where I was going with this, yeah, exactly. But I think that's one thing our community, the United States has done well is trying to articulate that. And it might just be the circles that I run in that are very veteran friendly and most people have been in the service of in some kind or another, even if they hadn't didn't do any combat deployments, they still understand a little better. So I remember going out in New York City several years ago and people saying, wow, you're the first soldier I've ever met. I was like, what? I've already been, yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, especially like in 2004, but that was amazing. Everyone's like, wow, you're a soldier only. Yes. Yeah, I look so real. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But. I think there's an employment statistic that can explain a little bit about that. Right. But yeah, I can totally see that that would seem a little weird. Yeah. Yeah. What would you say, Adam, to individuals that are either in leadership of the arts right now or considering hosting some opportunities that are intentionally inclusive of individuals in neurodiversity and or PTSD? What would you say to them about considerations as they're beginning to try to host such an inclusive medium? I would think that people would need to be ready for a little stronger language and stronger reactions than they might get from other portions of the population. I'll share another story. I went to a therapist back in, I don't know, 2010 and I was expressing my frustration as I felt that I needed to at that time and I scared that lady a lot and she told me never come back. Oh, dude, I'm so sorry. I am so sorry. Oh my God. It was tragic. Right. But if she hadn't been trained or prepared because her normal population was not the veteran population but if people are gonna want to work with that veteran population, then they gotta be ready that people are gonna get upset about things and it's not personal and we're not dangerous. Yeah, it's just a different rhythm and the cognitive regulation, emotional regulation, behavioral regulations, just like it's the wiring is what it is because of what it's lived through. And you were showing up at the therapy for like, okay, well, I'm available to do something different with this wiring but you didn't meet someone who could host that. So I guess what you're saying is like, for people to be versed in the needs and experiences if they're going to host these areas so that indeed is inclusive and continues to be inviting rather than another place of loss or disconnect which can be re-traumatizing actually. Yes, yeah, I mean, I think that same can be said for any population or any situation that especially if you're inviting people to come into it like you wouldn't have a party and invite people from AA and just have a full open bar you would be considerate of those people if you're gonna invite them in and just have a nice time talking. Maybe some nice news sparkling water or food, interesting food that people can have and use as the social lubricant and talk about, oh, where did this come from? So I don't think that is exclusive to the PTSD community. Yeah, right, right. Hey, you guys, if this is an okay place to interject this, there's a great question in the chat box and we have just a little over 10 minutes. So does it look okay with you guys for me to? Yeah, of course. And Tara, I think you should answer it too. This is more a ballpark than ours, you know. I think, you know, we're a village here and yeah, we each have something, interactive value creation as I call it. So question for the group, is it known what happens to the human body and brain when they are experiencing art? And does something happen when experiencing that surge of recognizing your own life being reflected back to you that Adam talked about? Do we know why this helps? So this is a question from Beth Blickers, her name. Thank you, Beth, it's a fantastic question. I would even just say why it's a fantastic question because we're always asking about how trauma works. And here we are, we're being asked about artworks and kind of, you know, a really cool, you know, addition to the conversation that I didn't expect. So Beth, thank you, but Tara's gonna answer it and I'm not, you know, yes. Well, we actually, you'd be surprised how we could collectively answer this, but there's actually a name for it in the field. It's called NeuroAesthetics. Oh yeah, I knew that. Yeah, it was so funny. Yeah, there's, Washington posted a great sequence and you can pull it up. I think it's a couple of years old. It's called, This Is Your Brain on Art. And I recommend, you know, taking a look at it, but actually art engages multiple parts of your brain that oftentimes in, whether it's neurodiversity or in post-trauma, they're sort of frozen or they're flattened out or interrupted and trapped, if you will. Doesn't mean that it's a forever broken thing. It just means our brains are wired to, I think it's a fantastic design. It has a natural wiring to protect itself. You know, as a lot of people know about, you know, the limbic system, you know, fight or fight and it tends to contract us in a lot of the ways we engage both in our expression, you know, our relational interaction and even our physical movement. We get sort of contracted with trauma and because it just keeps coming to mind for me. One of the reasons I was hired at the Monarch Institute for Neurological Differences as Director of Therapeutic Services is because my research in publishing was on fostering resilience despite cumulative adversity. And so when I went to interview there, so I'm not sure why my recruiter sent me here because I'm not an expert at the time. I was not an expert on neurodiversity. I was an expert on fostering resilience despite adversity and especially with regard to trauma. And so the hirer said to me, we think neurodiversity can be very traumatic because it's a world that says, you're living in a world that's not map or express, you know, information in the same way that you do and you get up every day and sort of with the same intentions to connect or be and you keep running into a wall and bouncing off and running into a wall and bouncing off. So in neuro-aesthetics, you find an arena like art, visual art, musical art, theater art. It begins to invite you and this is why like back to the topic that Adam was addressing earlier about, people who are hosting this, someone in the group has to be prepared for what this is about. Because you've got to live in the holding of those things. So because you intentionally are trying to unlock expression, you're intentionally trying to unlock this frozen part and you don't know what's coming. You know, it's coming out of it in the beginning but it's like any old faucet or whatever it's been locked up for a long time. What comes out at the beginning can be a little funky or whatever you call it. So it is called neuro-aesthetics and it's an intention of unlocking multiple parts of the brain, your frontal lobes, which is, you know, behavioral, emotional and then connected to your limbic system which is your fight or flight and then the movement parts of your body and all of those together as we know, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And so whichever medium of the arts, you know, visual music or theater, it all has a part of unlocking those. So but I recommend that reading. This is your brain on art to bear. Thank you, thank you. I would love to add to that also that, you know, we use art as a means of expression where we don't feel comfortable expressing in other particular mediums or in more socially less unique situations. And it's especially, you know, it's tied in to the trauma angle not just because it's direct opposite also, but because it's such a solve for trauma and why it's such an important topic in this realm of neurodiversity is because people with multiple or whatever, you know, not apparent disabilities are always going to be more cognizant of trauma in their lives than people who are neurotypical. We're the population of people that will have more unreported incidents of traumatic abuse. We're the population of people that are gonna have more incidents, not just of unreported, but of unrecognized traumatic incidents because we just don't have the wherewithal or the social confidence to, you know, even sometimes even own up to the fact that something really horrible happened to us. And the difficulty, you know, here is you really can't get a handle on identifying and therefore managing or avoiding, you know, potential triggers, which is one of the, you know, the biggest steps in, you know, in coming to terms with trauma. So when that tape recorder, you know, that goes off in your brain that, you know, keeps hitting rewind play, rewind play and you're looking for the stop button, especially, you know, for folks that don't have those tools, that's an even bigger nightmare than those who experience it on a normal basis, if you could call it normal. Yeah, thanks, Michael. That's very helpful to think about. We have our official five minute warning here, audience and team. And so I think we were given that about one minute ago. So how about just a quick sort of, you know, wrap up from each of you, like what's your sort of last sort of message you want to cast out, whether it's tying in what we talked about or last emphasis you'd like to place out there, Adam and Michael. I'll go first and I'll just say, Adam, you know, I apologize because I thought you had acted in a couple of things in your past. It's in his future. It's in his future. There we go, because I really would love to see, not even so much as a therapeutic device, but because I also believe that veterans suffering from any kind of trauma or just veterans in general, would make fantastic performers because of that need to express and because of that need to be eloquent. I remember from my theater days, we used to cast people that were so used to being comedians in really dramatic roles because somewhere inside we just knew there was a lot of pent up stuff that could come exploding out. I think of Chloris Leachman's performance in the last picture show as a perfect example, this woman who'd been a comedian all her life and then gets one dramatic role and then just blows up the screen. And any ideas that you have about, whether you're superiors in the army are more open to integrating theater programs for people that are already in the service as well as out of the service, but also just in getting veterans more involved in their theater communities, not only for the therapeutic value of it because I think audiences will appreciate them as well. I mean, there's all kinds of different ways. The easy start is to go with the VA. They usually have a pretty good tap on the veterans in the area, but also other veterans organizations like the VFW or Team RWB. There's so many out there and there's probably even more that are just in every local community that aren't nationwide. That would be more than happy to, I think if they discover that theater is a good venue to help their population and most people are willing to give it a shot if they know it's there. Thank you. Yeah, great. Let's see, I think that Clay has asked me to turn things back over to him. I just want to say to Adam and Michael, it's been my pleasure to share this space with you and I look for more opportunity to do it in other places and spaces. So thanks, Clay, for the opportunity. Thank you so much, Tara. And thank you, Adam and Michael, so much. This was an incredible conversation. Yeah, so it is 2.43 right now. At 2.50, we're gonna have a special segment called Meet an STE Member where we're going to play a video that one of our founding members, Dan Boyle, has prepared and then we would love, if you have any questions for Dan about being a member of STE or anything you want to know about STE or being an artist on the spectrum, we would love for you to put it on our Facebook feed and Dan will be here to answer any questions you have after the video. But thank you guys again so much, Tara, Adam and Michael. So we'll take a five minute break and then come back with a video at 2.50. Thank you, Clay. Thanks, Clay.