Kim Howard 00:04
Welcome to the let’s talk EMDR podcast brought to you by the EMDR international association or EMDRIA. I am your host Kim Howard. In this episode, our guests lineup is slightly different than usual. Today we will have two guests who will discuss EMDR therapy and Big T and little t traumas. Today’s guests are the authors of the book, “Every Memory Deserves Respect.” The brainchild of EMDR client, Michael Baldwin, who co wrote with EMDR, therapist, trainer and consultant Dr. Deborah Korn. Together, they will talk about how EMDR therapy addresses any size trauma and how it changed Michael’s life. Please note that Dr. Korn is not Michael’s therapist. Let’s get started. Today we sit down with EMDR therapist, Dr. Deborah Korn who has spent the last three decades working with patients to overcome their trauma along with Dr. Korn we are talking with a co-author of the book, “Every Memory Deserves Respect,” Michael Baldwin, who credits EMDR with saving his life. This is the first time our podcast is interviewed at EMDR therapy client. Thank you, Deborah and Michael, for being here today on our let’s talking into your podcast. We are so happy that you said yes.

Deborah Korn 01:13
Thanks for having us, Kim.

Michael Baldwin 01:15
Thank you, Kim.

Kim Howard 01:15
So Deborah, can you tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming an EMDR therapist?

Deborah Korn 01:20
Sure. Well as a newbie therapist, I quickly discovered that nine times out of 10 no matter what issues brought people into treatment, there seemed to be a history of trauma just underneath the surface. You know, and I made a commitment early on to learn everything I could about treating trauma, but the field of trauma-informed treatment was still in its infancy at the time, we still had a lot to learn. I chose to work with combat veterans, rape survivors, families of murder victims, police officers, and men and women who had experienced significant childhood abuse and neglect as I tried desperately to get my head around how to treat trauma related problems. And then, in the summer of 1991, I traveled back to Denver, Colorado, where I had gone to graduate school to visit my graduate school mentor, Andy Sweet. And I was telling Andy, how frustrated I was feeling with the limitations of the treatment models available to me when treating chronic trauma survivors. You know, teaching patients have a raft of cognitive or behavioral coping skills like positive self talk or challenging distorted thinking and helping them to manage their symptoms seemed necessary but not sufficient. And more traditional talk therapy models lack the focus and the clear path to healing that I was looking for. I was really discouraged by the idea put forth in many of these models that treatment needed to be long term, sometimes very, very long term to be effective. And most of my clients had difficulty tolerating an approach called flooding a precursor to what is known today as prolonged exposure. So my mentor, and he said to me, ‘Debbie, listen up, there’s this new therapy called EMDR. And it’s something quite unique. It looks and sounds kind of strange, but I’m getting remarkable results with it. And he said, you must go and get trained in it. And you have to run, don’t walk run.’ So I ran and I got trained with Francine Shapiro, the developer of EMDR later that year, and at the time of my introductory EMDR training, I was the clinical director of an inpatient psychiatric unit specializing in the treatment of women recovering from both acute and chronic trauma and I was treating women struggling with severe suicidal ideation and self injury, eating disorders, addiction, some of them had made very serious suicide attempts. And I use the MDR every single day, starting the day after I completed my basic training on this inpatient unit, and from the get go, I was absolutely blown away by the results. I saw significant decreases in PTSD and other trauma related symptoms, depression, anxiety, phobias, self injury, even suicidality. And I watched as women on my unit moved from feeling hopeless to feeling hopeful. And through their EMDR work, I watched them shift from feeling powerless and not good enough to feeling powerful and more than worthy. And then I had the honor of becoming a faculty member at the EMDR Institute, Dr. Shapiro’s Training Institute in 1993. And I started teaching and consulting all over the world about buying EMDR with complex PTSD and dissociative disorders. And I guess the rest is history. But the bottom line though, was that I was drawn to EMDR and have stayed with the MDR because it was an is effective, efficient and well tolerated tolerable for my patients. And I love that it attended to emotions, the body and people’s belief systems to what was locked or frozen in people’s nervous systems and that it seemed to stimulate people’s innate healing capacities or resources. It was dependable and precise. And you know, I love that people didn’t have to recount the details of their traumatic experiences over and over again. And I quickly discovered that I could use EMDR with many different problems, not just PTSD for which it was originally developed. No matter what symptoms people presented with anxiety, depression, low self esteem problems with anger, we could trace the origin and the symptoms back to earlier traumatic or adverse experiences in their life, and we could get to work. So over the years, even though I’ve trained in many different trauma informed therapies, EMDR remains my first language, my primary modality, and in my experience, it works better and faster than other trauma focused approaches. And as a total bonus, I find the work to be deeply intimate, meaningful and rewarding. It’s a privilege truly, to accompany people on their healing journeys.

Kim Howard 06:06
I’ve interviewed some EMDR therapists since we started this podcast in June and what I always say to them somewhere along the podcast says thank you for the work that you do, and thank the heavens above that there are people out there, like you and our colleagues who do this kind of work to help mankind basically and help humans live their life that they want. So thank you for doing this work.

Deborah Korn 06:29
Of course. It is truly a privilege is truly a privilege.

Kim Howard 06:36
Could you define trauma for us? And then give us a couple of examples of big T, little T traumas? Because I think that’s where people think, Oh, well, I haven’t had anything traumatic happened my life.

Deborah Korn 06:44
Sure. Trauma is a part of life, right? 70 percent of adults, 70- 75 percent of adults have experienced at least one significant trauma across their lifetime. We define trauma very broadly. In our book, we define it as any experience that feels overwhelming triggers strong negative emotions, like shame or terror and involves a sense of powerlessness or intense vulnerability. Trauma is both objective and subjective. It’s both the event and the experience of that event. So no two people are going to experience the same event in the same way what might be traumatic for one person is not going to be traumatic for the other person and vice versa. So it’s not just what happened to you, but also what happens within you inside of you. What we know is that the greater the number of traumas, the greater the psychological, physical toll, trauma is cumulative, and it’s developmentally bound. And what I mean by that is that younger folks, children and adolescents are more vulnerable to the effects of trauma than adults, right? They have fewer skills, less capacity for coping with overwhelming experiences, and trauma involve both omission and commission by comission. We’re referring to the things that happened to you right, the more obvious traumas, assault, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, a car accident, a traumatic loss. When we talk about omission, we’re referring to situations where things were supposed to happen but didn’t situations where someone was not properly protected, or listened to, cared for or valued. So here we’re talking about experiences of neglect, deprivation, abandonment, alienation, discrimination, we often talk about big T traumas and little T traumas. As you said, big T traumas are the events that most anyone would consider traumatic, right shock traumas, where the person perceives potential threat to their survival or the survival of loved ones. So examples of big T traumas, childhood sexual, physical or emotional abuse, rape or physical assault, the traumatic death or murder of a loved one combat related trauma, devastation related to an environmental disaster, witnessing violence, traumatic medical procedures, or life threatening illnesses, little T trauma, are those experiences that people might not necessarily recognize as traumatic, or events that might not necessarily meet the DSM, the diagnostic manual criteria for so called trauma. So here we’re talking about experiences of criticism, covert bullying, experiences of betrayal, experiences involving humiliation or failure or profound aloneness exposure to subtle micro aggressions as well as blatant discrimination or how hostility related to race or ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or appearance. And then examples a little traumas in adulthood might be a divorce, losing a job, a difficult move, the discovery of a partner’s affair. But again, these might be big T traumas. For some people, they might be little T traumas for other people, but the effects can be devastating. Whatever the case, in childhood, little T traumas, feeling ignored, or abandoned, or unprotected in the face of scary things, feeling different, unable to measure up, or powerless to control the craziness or the chaos in your family.

Kim Howard 10:43
Michael, can you talk to us a little bit about how your book, ‘Every Memory Deserves Respect’ came about?

Michael Baldwin 10:49
Just a little bit about my background: I had struggled with as an adult with symptoms, none of which I never related back to childhood trauma because I wasn’t aware of trauma in the first place. So I had gone through seven different therapists over about 22 years, until I met Dr. Jeffery Magnavita. And for your listeners benefit, Debbie was not my therapist. Debbie’s my co author. Dr. Magnavita was my therapist. And as I started to learn about trauma and EMDR, for the first time, when I walked into his office, I had never heard of it, none of the therapists had ever dealt with every talked about or even what meant the word trauma ever, not one time, and none of them were exposed to or fluent in EMDR therapy at all. So as I started with me the first six months to learn about those two concepts, trauma and EMDR as a visual thinker, because when I was a boy, I was so short circuited because of my own developmental issues. I couldn’t read and I was very much a, a right brained visual thinker and processor. So as I understood concepts, like for example, the concept of trauma being too big, for lack of a better word to be processed, like normal daily events, gets locked in your nervous system, and it stays there perfectly preserved, unless and until you have the benefit of processing that traumatic memory with the help of EMDR therapist. So that’s a concept of fundamental concept about trauma. So visually, in the book, there’s what I refer to as an anchor visual for anybody, any culture that works, no matter what language and culture or country you’re in, have a piece of a man holding a piece of amber with a little flower, and this happened to be 35 million years old, it’s perfectly preserved amber. So that’s an anchor visual for people to think about how trauma is perfectly preserved and locked. And if central nervous system, that’s where it stays and these images with old text opposite of what we now refer to as billboards. So I had about six of these, I showed them to Dr. Magnavita. And he said, ‘Michael, this could be a book. And all you have to do is find an EMDR therapist who’s willing to run a book with you, who will never have met you and won’t know you from Adam.’ Looking back, I said, ‘What on earth was I thinking? How on earth did I ever imagine I could I could pull this off?’ And I believe me, I reached out to everyone. Debbie was introduced to me by Dr. Magnavita. Debbie was the one who stuck with me, Debbie, who one was the one who, over time, was able to decide that she wanted to do it. And it was also able to commit to the time for because her schedule is so completely overbook with patients and son and a husband and a million other things that she’s involved with. So I took the same six sort of billboards to a publisher working on publishing. And I had no table of contents. I have no sample chapter, I had no co author, I only had this idea. And for the very first meeting, they said we’re interested.

Kim Howard 13:40
Fantastic. So you touched on this a little bit. So can you please share your trauma history as you feel comfortable?

Michael Baldwin 13:47
Sure. My trauma history: The foundation I think was as Debbie was talking about was a an omission foundation where severe neglect, and deprivation, which started at pre-verbal stages, but also involved in abuse. So there was sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse. And as I moved into adulthood, symptoms for me were anxiety, and depression and self-doubt and a core conviction that I was basically worthless. And I suffered from two nightmares that plagued me for over 30 years, never, ever diminished in terms of their intensity in the same exact nightmares as replaying, replaying, replaying also dealing with phobias, even though I didn’t know what a phobia was. I didn’t know if these were phobias, having to do with using public restrooms, and the most extreme was any suggestion of any kind of intimacy with a woman would be completely panic-inducing. And the weird thing about my history is I just thought this was the way I was like This is just my, my disposition in life. I had no idea. And as I said before, never did I connect my adult symptoms back to developmental childhood trauma issues, because I had no idea I was a survivor in the first place, had no concept of trauma in the first place. So I never was able to make that connection, until I started working with Dr. Magnavita. Yeah, the idea is amazing. And using, I guess, Debbie’s clinical reference all the time, attachment rupture, so unable to form that fundamental connection with, in my case, my two parents, either one of them. So I had no connection, no attachment, no one to turn to, and is every project your things that should have been happening. Support mirroring, celebration, none of that took place. So I was basically, you know, on my own.

Kim Howard 15:48
What a shame that some people should not have children. And unfortunately, you don’t you don’t have any control over that.

Deborah Korn 15:55
Yeah, Michael, you might want to share an example of when you talk about omission or neglect, like an example of….

16:03
Yeah, so one of the I’ll give you an example. So probably, age two, I was put in the backyard in Denver, Colorado, barefoot in a diaper. And just left there alone. Somehow, I would manage to find my way outside of the backyard, down the back alleyway, and down into the intersection where we lived in Denver, and someone would bring me home to the front door saying, ‘We found your son wandering around.’ And the grotesque thing about these these and many other stories is our mother used to talk and sort of laugh about them. You know, this funny story about Michael just wander around and wander into the intersection. So there was that. And also, I remember talking to him at the show, I showed him a picture about that same timeframe of me. And he’s never forget, he said, ‘Oh, my, he said, you look like you have the blank stare of a Syrian refugee whose entire family has been killed and yours wandering around in the rubble, just completely blank.’

Kim Howard 17:02
So tragic. Well, I’m I’m very glad that you found help and support with your therapist and found EMDR to help you process all of that trauma. So I’m grateful for that. So let’s talk a little bit more about your your career just briefly. You were a high-powered ad executive Ogilvy and Mather in New York City. Before that you run next for Steve Jobs. How were you able to achieve so much success while hiding your emotional pain and debilitating phobias?

Michael Baldwin 17:33
So pretty early on, and I’m not sure exactly who would know. But when your core belief and conviction is that you are worthless, that’s not something you can, I mean sustain. I guess as a existential reality, so I switched to a strategy. In my case, it was a grandiosity strategy. So my defense against that core belief was to become a strata a status and achievement junkie, I like to say I wasn’t living I was just compelled. So I was go set goal achieve goals, that goal achieved goals, that goal achieved, it’s a non thinking, kind of existence. So for example, I got into advertising which of course, makes sense because look at it’s all about, you know, the life of an advertising executive, that sort of glamorous, you know, globe trotting expense account, you know, kind of lifestyle, which was, you know, seemed to fit my grandiosity strategy. And it was one successive thing at first. So getting myself into medical school, and then not going getting my advertising job after gotten medical school and 13 days, which is, you know, crazy running the Boston Marathon, but never walking one step, getting my surname registered as a domain name, I think, for the first time in the history of the internet, you know, like this, back in 1994, when I could have had anything, it was just a series, and I think in answer your question, how I was able to hide the reality, I wasn’t aware of the reality. I was completely unaware of my own trauma. And I was so involved in the strategy to cover it up and pave over it. I wasn’t aware of it at all. When I got to the point where I walked into Dr. Magnavita’s I was on the other hand, I was I was at an all time low. I mean, I think he took one look at me and said this person is in real real distress.

Kim Howard 19:26
And many people are familiar with talk therapy and CBT therapy. How is EMDR different? You touched on it a little bit earlier, but can you elaborate more?

Deborah Korn 19:36
You know, my my sense is that the term talk therapy means different things to different people and that there are in fact many different types of therapy including various forms of CBT that fall under the very large talk therapy umbrella. That said, just as the name implies, talking is typically at the core of traditional talk therapy. involves a top down process where the starting point is the client’s narrative. In talk therapy therapist invite clients to put words on their experiences and to reflect on those experiences directing attention to their emotions, their distorted thinking and beliefs. With the ultimate goal of increased insight, a better understanding of oneself and one’s life, more adaptive thinking, and a more effective approach to coping as insight increases, the hope is that one’s self narrative and relationship to past experiences will also change the therapy may focus on problem solving, or learning new skills to manage symptoms, or challenges in life as well. However, verbal exploration and learning coping skills even with a deeply compassionate and supportive therapists are often not enough to quell the involuntary, involuntary, biologically driven physiological responses of the body and brain associated with unprocessed trauma locked in the nervous system. Now, EMDR differs from more traditional talk therapy in that it is memory focused from the get go and oriented to all aspects of experience emotions, sensations and impulses, thoughts and beliefs, imagery, other sensory input like sounds or smells, the primary emphasis is not on words, or interpretation or insight. Instead, it’s on processing the traumatic memories that are responsible for symptoms and difficulties. EMDR tends to be much less cognitive, and much more oriented to tracking affective emotional and somatic body based shifts over the course of processing. Personally, I really think of EMDR as primarily a bottom up body-focused psychotherapy. Changes in thinking are a byproduct of focusing on and processing emotion, and somatic experience. And EMDR can be done with very few words, it’s not even necessary for clients to describe a traumatic experience or what is coming up as they bring their attention attention to it. Now, there is a type of therapy known as trauma focused CBT trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy that does specifically attend to traumatic memories like EMDR. However, this approach is quite different than EMDR. In both theory and practice with trauma focused CBT clients describe their traumatic experience in great detail in the treatment session, and then are required to listen to an audio tape of the session for at least an hour every day exposing themselves to their trauma script over and over again until there’s a reduction in their distress until that distress gets extinguished. They are also required to do in vivo exposure homework in which they engage in avoided activities related to their trauma. So for example, if they had a car accident, they would be expected to come closer and closer to having contact with driving and eventually driving. Now EMDR does not involve detailed descriptions of traumatic events. It does not involve extended exposure, and it doesn’t involve homework. All processing of traumatic material is done in session with the therapist present to help co regulate and intervene as needed. Exposure to traumatic material is is brief is imaginal. And it’s intermittent. It’s not prolonged, it’s not repeated. Clients are not required to repeatedly tell right, or listen to their trauma narrative within or outside of session. And they’re simply asked to self monitor and to record observations between sessions. And of course, last but not least, EMDR involves the use of bilateral stimulation, eye movements, taps tones, the butterfly hug, a unique and powerful treatment component component that is not found in these other therapies at this point in time in 2022. I think there’s been over 30 studies substantiating the powerful effects of fine movements and so we have significant empirical support for this component of our treatment.

Kim Howard 24:44
Thank you. That’s a great explanation for our listeners. Deb, can you tell us in the simplest sense, can you explain how memories get frozen or locked in the nervous system?

Deborah Korn 24:53
Yes, Michael used this terminology earlier frozen or locked in the nervous system. In a day-to-day basis, for the most part, we process experiences without difficulty. For example, we go to a party, we see our friends, we eat good food, or at least we used to do this before COVID. We make conversation, maybe we dance, we have fun. This is a normal, everyday experience, right? normal everyday circumstances, we come home from the party, we perhaps talk to our partner or spouse, about the party, we reflect on who we talk to, maybe we go to sleep that night, we have a dream about the party, maybe we write in our journal about the party. But basically, the experience gets processed and put up up on the shelf to rest right, the past gets moved in the past into the past. However, under traumatic circumstances, something very different seems to happen. traumatic memories seem to somehow get frozen or locked in the brain in the nervous system. With all of the components of the original adverse experience, the images, the feelings, the sensations, the thoughts associated with that original traumatic event, and the brain’s information processing system is unable to digest the experience and other information held elsewhere and memory doesn’t get connected in doesn’t get integrated to help a person make sense of the event. It doesn’t get mytab The event doesn’t get metabolized or resolved. And then it gets stored in this unprocessed form. Then along comes the trigger and experience that somehow reminiscent of the original traumatic event days later, weeks later, maybe even years later, decades later, for some people, when you get triggered, that traumatic memory gets activated, the past becomes the present. People lose their adult present day grounding and perspective. Suddenly, you’re feeling like you’re five years old again, growing up in a chaotic, alcoholic family feeling scared and powerless. Suddenly, you’re feeling frozen, and unable to think clearly or make decisions. Sometimes, all of the components of the memory get activated, sometimes simultaneously. And the result is full-blown PTSD, intrusive symptoms like nightmares or flashbacks, body memories that involve pain, or panic or overwhelming anxiety, avoidance of people, places and things sleeplessness and startle responses. Sometimes, simply a single component of that frozen memory gets activated a thought like, I’m not good enough, or a feeling like profound grief. And that may look much more like depression. And then, of course, sometimes when the distress associated with these activated memories becomes unbearable, people turn to drinking drugs, self injury, or other behaviors to suit themselves to avoid or to numb out. Often they don’t even know why they’re feeling the way that they’re feeling. And Michael just made mention of that in response to one of your questions. They don’t people don’t connect their current state to past traumatic experiences. They just know that it’s unbearable. And Michael does talk a lot about this in our book.

Kim Howard 28:37
aA great explanation. Thank you. Michael, you touched on this a little bit earlier. But I’m going to ask a little bit of a different question. You say that after 22 years of other therapies, you were treading water? Why were traditional talk therapy, CP T and others only of marginal help?

Michael Baldwin 28:54
I think because they don’t have the facility to target back to the original source of the traumatic memory, the trauma itself for me, and I want to make sure I don’t try to suggest that a blanket statement for me, those therapies tended to be intellectual exercises, or, you know, talking or talk therapy is by definition, talking kind of a thing. Whereas, for the very first time I met with Dr. Magnavita, it felt like we were, well, I shouldn’t say I felt like for me, experientially, I was connecting directly back to the trauma itself, experiencing it through my body, through my emotions, in the most visceral and authentic and complete way possible. And that never happened before. But not only that, the other gigantic dividend for me for EMDR was when you complete this or as you complete the work you get a what we refer to in the book as a sitemap. So you can see kind of bird’s eye view. That was my situation, that was my father’s role as my mother’s role. This is the role my siblings played. And this is where where my grandmother came in. And you have kind of a sitemap developmentally of how things happened, how they unfolded, and why things, why you sort of want me in one way versus the other. And I think the bottom line, at least in my family was, because it was dysfunctional crucible, we were all in, it was survival of the fittest, you know, every man for himself. So myself, my three siblings had to figure out how we were going to survive until I guess we became adults, you know. And, you know, we all had different my brother and I had different approaches, my two sisters have different approaches. But in answer to your question, is I use this example, I’ve used it before where it’s like, you’re grabbing right onto that third rail, where you’re you’re you are reimagining re, you’re not reliving, but putting yourself back in touch with that original traumatic memory, the original traumatic experience. And as Debbie said earlier, all the thoughts and beliefs and emotions and somatic, there are so much somatic components to mark with Dr. Magnavita, where, for example, I mean, I remember being having severe cramps in his in his office. Why? You know, going back to being pre-verbal in a crib, where no one’s feeding me, no one’s coming to pay any attention to me, you know, and forever, just, as he said, you go to a point where there’s the crying, and then there’s the collapse, where you basically you’re, it’s hopeless, you’ve given up. So the somatic part is Debbie was referring to earlier. That’s what that’s also a huge, huge part of it.

Kim Howard 31:44
Thank you. How has your life changed after EMDR therapy?

Michael Baldwin 31:48
Wow. I would say in many, many, many small ways, in many gigantic ways, I would say, here’s the broad stroke, my for lack of a better way of referring to it my operating system leading up to my work with Dr. Magnavita that was fraught with anxiety and depression and fear and dread dread was a big part of it uncertainty, feeling like the smallest criticism would send me over the edge into, into like this, this waterfall of I’m no good, I’m gonna be I’m gonna, I’m gonna fail, I’m gonna run out of money, I’m gonna end up with a guy outside of the, you know, on the in the snow in New York, with a blanket over me penniless. That was my day to day existence, I got to trade that in for a different operating system with Dr. Magnavita, where I just wake up, and I just am. And all those things that I used to live with on a daily basis. Gone, the nightmares that plagued me for over 30 years gone, the phobias that I live with, and I just assumed that way it was gone. But I’ll give you one huge example of something that I never would have expected growing up, you know, I was bullied at home, I was bullied at school and my brother was my bully. And he was a particularly diabolical, physical bully, and psychologic. It was, he was horrible. And I’ve never had a relationship with him my whole life, never thought I ever would. And when the book came out, Dr. Magnativa said I had to let him know the book was coming out because you know, there could be legal issues, whatever. And it was remarkably said, I don’t care. You can say whatever you want about me in the book. If I mean, I’m just delighted if it means that we finally maybe have a chance to have relationship as brothers he had asked me, in our very first call, if Debbie could recommend EMDR therapist for him. This is about a year and a half ago. So he started his own EMDR journey. And this last year, we’ve had a call every single Friday, haven’t missed, maybe maybe one we’ve missed, without fail. And we had our very first week together as brothers, we’re going up to Vermont, the Monday of the week we spent together was his 70th birthday. So this is how long it took this long, we waited. And I could tell you to say he’s the most intimate relationship that I have in my life. I couldn’t I couldn’t I can’t imagine him not in my life. And I can’t imagine any more unexpected. We just spent a week on a trip with his two daughters. And add them up most fantastic trip. And it’s just, it’s just amazing that something I live without my whole life but secretly yearn for. I’m now enjoying, to to an incredible extent.

Kim Howard 34:25
Yeah, that’s beautiful, so beautiful. I mean, it was it’s horrible that you had to go through all of that trauma, but it’s beautiful that your journey has now impacted his journey and it basically, sort of you’re on your way to healing your relationship with this. Basically, your childhood tormentor who was your brother.

Michael Baldwin 34:44
Absolutely.

Kim Howard 34:45
So what what a wonderful, wonderful healing journey that’s just beautiful. I’m so happy for you. Oh, yeah. Thank you. I have a couple of questions that are aren’t on the list. Deb, if you were not an EMDR therapist, what would you be?

Deborah Korn 35:01
I, in my fantasy life, I would be a cruise director, or

Kim Howard 35:08
Like Julie from ‘The Love Boat?’

Deborah Korn 35:12
Exactly.

Kim Howard 35:13
I wanted to be one too, when I watched that show.

Deborah Korn 35:14
Exactly, or I would be an event planner, I love bringing people together. I love inspiring people to let go and have fun and, and do things they’ve never done before. So I think I think that would be my pursuit.

Kim Howard 35:35
That’s great. I have worked with some amazing meeting and event planners, and they are truly a unique breed of people who know how to wrangle all of