About Face

When you think of the most important stories of your life, they are often about relationships. What stories you tell about yourself and your life often begin with family, parental bonds, siblings, and events that involved these important relationships. Whether you have strong bonds with your family or you have severed ties, you likely continue to have stories and narratives around your early life...

In 2017, my 18-month old daughter had to have brain scans for a suspected tumor. While in the hospital, she didn't wake up from the anesthetic. It turned out she had caught a superbug while being tested, but the doctors told me that she should also be tested for lung cancer, blood cancers, among other really scary diagnoses. All of this was something I had to navigate in a foreign country, in a fo...

Fear is so basic, primal, but also gets at the role of narrative in our lives is fear. Fear is an instinct of course, it drives us to make decisions, to do or not do things. It can get in the way of moving forward, but of course it also has this evolutionary advantage of keeping us safe from harm. Fear narratives can be based on societal messaging, family of origin stories, experiences, and even c...

This podcast is broadly looking at the way that stories and reimagined narratives can help us shut down negative thinking patterns, deconstruct damaging systemic narratives, and take the power back in reimagining our own lives. My guest today is Hannah Joy Graves a.k.a. Cult Mother a tarot card reader in Berlin who you also heard on an earlier episode of About Face. While the reading of tarot is b...

I started my work in activism at more of the macro level. I went to law school and studied international human rights at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. this where George Floyd was murdered and sort of the starting point of the protests against police brutality in the U.S. When I was there I was working for the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of prison inmates. One of my jobs...

Kate interviews Aisling Ní Chába about her internal experience with gender identity from childhood, growing up in an abusive family and repressive Catholic community in Glasgow. She talks about the challenges she faced in finding institutional support and how transitioning forced her to confront gender binary narratives on the personal level as well as in academia as an archaeologist. I did this i...

I'm a divorced, single mom, an alcoholic, I suffer from depression and anxiety, among some other things, and yes, all of this sounds really shitty, but it's not really the story of my life. The way we talk about ourselves and our experiences matters. This episode is about how we can learn to separate ourselves and our identity from our problems, how avoiding certain labels can inhibit our ability...

Stories tell us about where we come from, who we are. They give us meaning and purpose. And without some understanding of how they influence us, a story can keep us in bad habits. I want to use my own life as an example of how my own stories kept me from healing, and how learning new narratives gave me room to heal. I started drinking alcoholically when I was about 16, though I wouldn’t have admit...

In our first episode of Restorya, Kate talks about the evolution of About Face and why she’s changed the show and the content to introduce her work in narrative therapy. She shares the origin story of About Face, her own experience with getting sober and recovery through narrative and storytelling and how creating hope around narrative can be beneficial in moving beyond our pain and trauma. Kate d...

I met MISSA BLUE after one of her hypnotic burlesque shows, a political, challenging and riveting performance history of the Black Panthers. Missa Blue is a well known variety performer who has gained international recognition through her highly skilled sword swallowing shows and for being one of the very few woman in the world who are still actively practicing this ancient art form. In 2016 she s...

Today we are sharing a guest episode from Filter Stories by James Harper about Raymond, a former member of an Amish community who left his home and his country. Raymond's family want him to spend his life using a horse instead of a car, to live off the grid and have little contact with the outside world. But young Raymond is curious and explores the outside world. His father reacts by moving...

Christine McAlister has endured one of the most horrible and traumatic experiences that I can imagine, and yet, her retelling of the experience and how it changed her is admirable and profound. This is courage, strength, and power in the face of adversity and it’s what I love to learn about from people who have really been through some of life’s toughest lessons.  What happens when the worst...

Lisa was an ambitious 20-something working for the United Nations when a sudden and chronic illness became debilitating, leaving her unable to work. This the story of facing her illness, a shocking diagnosis, and her ability to let go of expectations of life and self. It's a story about losing loved ones, forgiveness, and self-compassion. It's about coming to terms with death and how she redefined...

Our guest Tim, shares semi-anonymously about his experiences with an unexpected pregnancy, as a new father, and a truth about his life that changed everything. It's a story that reminds us how to move forward through life's challenges, and how to face the most impossible decisions without regret.  No one’s life turns out perfect. Nothing works out exactly the way that we’ve planned or expecte...

The relationships we inhabit can shape and define us, and how we see ourselves. Who we choose to love and let love us matters, because in the wrong hands, we may suffer from neglect, abuse, oppression, and even, the total loss of self. One of the most difficult decisions is to know when someone we love is no longer serving us, or worse, actually causing us harm. What does it take to break away, an...

Naniso shares his experience growing up in the generation following Apartheid and describes the difference between institutionalized and systemic racism versus other forms of covert oppression. We talk about a particular instance where he was physically assaulted and detained at an airport and how the attack figures into his consciousness, as a thought leader and in how he interacts with the world...

Tania Lacy was a famous Australian television personality during the 80s and early 90s before she got fired for hijacking the station in protest. Losing her job led to a loss of identity and a reckoning with her own sense of self. This is a story about her height as a celebrity and the fall into obscurity and heroin addiction. This is a story about Tania's ballet accident that ruined her dance car...

Why are some of us capable of changing our lives and finding the right path while others get lost along the way? What influence does mental illness play in our ability to recover? How do we navigate our way out of broken homes, addiction, and family mental illness? This episode features Justin Evans from The Peripheral and The Generation Why, one of the top-ranking true crime podcasts. We talked a...

Tattoos, piercings, punk rock, rockabilly- the look and the subculture can have a hard-shell appearance, but what about those individuals underneath? What is the relationship between subculture and individual identity? Is there a correlation between mental health and extreme tattooing? How do subcultures give us strength and armor, and at what point are we lost to ideology? Is there a false securi...

I want to start at the beginning, with birth. This episode includes my own story about a traumatic birth and my interview with visual artist and writer, Carmen Winant, to talk about her work, My Birth, the powerful installation at the MoMA, the missing and misrepresentations of birth in cultural representations as well as the challenges in the transition into motherhood. In addition to birth,...

“I was looking at the world and it started to flatten out and I realized, this is what it’s like to die. Everything starts to lose meaning. . . it just becomes a flat image.” - Jason Snell. I interviewed Jason Snell while he was in Europe, in Berlin, on his trips between Paris and Warsaw and Italy, before he heads back to either Iowa or L.A., or somewhere in between, wherever he decides to la...

Songs used in the episode: "Leaving Naples" & "Just What I Want" from the EP "Seeing Naples" with Sick rat   "Cold Season" from the EP "INFP" with Undogmatic Link to INFP:  https://concretecee.bandcamp.com/album/infp Link to Seeing Naples:  https://sickrat.bandcamp.com/…/sick-rat-cedric-till-seeing-…